University of Bedfordshire, 1994
It’s my first semester at University when I stumble across a noticeboard advert for a charity parachute jump.
Signing up for it would have meant eating into about a month’s worth of my meagre living allowance. So I had to find a way to scrape the money together.
May 2021, Swindon, Dent Zoom Call
I’m on a zoom call with fifty-odd other entrepreneurs enjoying a business accelerator.
It’s an excellent experience, but something isn’t sitting right.
Winter 1993, Basingstoke, UK.
I did ok at secondary school but generally didn’t pay enough attention and drifted along.
I ended up with mediocre grades, just enough to scrape into A’ Levels.
Easter 2005. Tignes, France.
It’s April 2005 and I’m skiing with friends in the French Alps. I’ve just left my steady job at a software company to stumble into entrepreneurship. There wasn’t any great plan or well thought out strategy, I had a few irons in fires here and there, but mostly I was just bursting with desire to do it.
I had two ambitions when I was younger. The first was to go to University, and the second was to run my own business. I didn’t care what the business was, it could be making lampposts or bottle tops, I just wanted to run it.
I’m 8 years old walking home from school with my friend Jamie.
We’re walking along a pathway that cuts through our housing estate. The sort of path that passes by everyone’s back fence.
There is an open bit of scrubland along the path and I find a Tesco bag in the long grass.
I couldn’t tell you why I was looking, just the curious mind of a young boy idly walking home from school I guess – but inside the Tesco bag is something wrapped in a blood stained sheet.
I’m now in my third week of taking time out. I’ve carved out two and a half days of my working week to do other stuff.
There has been the odd small encroachment when “work” has bled into my “discovery” time, but overall, I’ve stuck to it and I’m loving it. Thanks to my amazing team for giving me the freedom to do it.
Firstly, thank you to everyone who provided feedback to my first blog post.
As a brand new blog, I was expecting to be blogging into a black hole for a while, so I was pleasantly surprised that finding an itch to scratch resonated with your own experiences.
I can see it in my mind’s eye as though it was yesterday. I’m sitting alone in the dunes overlooking the sea in a small town called Avalon in the northern beaches of Sydney, Australia.