Advice from 40 year old me to 20 year old me

When I was turning 30 years old I wrote down some advice from 30 year old me to 20 year old me.

I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since that article was published and took on a life of its own.

I’m turning 40 soon and have spent time reflecting on the last decade that I’ve lived and the combined 20 years since I was 20. If I met that same 20 year old me today and had a conversation with him, this is what I would tell him in no particular order:

On life 

• The only real job of your life is to know yourself.

• Start acting as if everything that happens in your life is for the good.

• It’s OK to lie sometimes.

• The question is usually more important than the answer. Ask better questions.

• Love really does matter but you don’t know that yet. Saying the words “I love you” out loud, knowing that someone loves you, feeling true love or chemically induced love, it all matters deeply.

• Hurt people hurt people but that’s not an excuse. Hurt people can choose to stop hurting people.

• Go. To. Therapy.

On your actions

• You are allowed to say no to anything without giving a reason.

• Uncouple your self worth from your work.

• You are not an exception because you want to be.

• You don’t have to prove you are right. Sometimes just knowing it is enough.

• Nobody cares about the shape or size of your stomach.

• Eat the food that makes you happy and eat it without guilt.

• Exercise as often as you can bring yourself to exercise. Ten minutes is all it takes.

• Stop feeling embarrassed when you speak other languages, nobody thinks you’re dumb.

• Nobody is thinking about you at all, almost ever. They’re too busy thinking about themselves. 

• Making other people look and feel stupid won’t make you feel better about yourself.

• It’s OK to not have an opinion about something.

• Your opinion isn’t worth more because it is the loudest.

• Trust me, buy the best sleeping pillow money can buy.

• You are not a tree. You can move. Use your agency.

• It’s better to be a hypocrite than the same person forever.

On being patient

• Waiting is an action.

• Learn to enjoy the passage of time.

• Wait five minutes before you react to anything big. Five minutes is all you need to gain perspective.

On business and entrepreneurship

• Choose better ideas.

• A profitable businesses is better than a venture-backed hole where cash disappears like magic.

• Quitting is a viable option.

• Sometimes what matters doesn’t pay and what pays doesn’t matter.

• There’s more to life than being an entrepreneur.

On success

• Your most recent success will never be enough, it just lays the floor for your next ambitious goal.

• Do not blindly inherit your definition of success.

• Success is not a shared experience. You succeed or fail within your own experience of life, not anybody else’s.

• Success is not one dimensional. You think it’s only about money but it isn’t. Money facilitates things that make you happy.

• Happiness is success.

On failure

• Failure is the likely outcome to most things you will try. That’s OK.

• Care enough about something to fail at it.

• The only real failure is not trying.

On being wrong

• Being wrong is a superpower. Every time you’re wrong, you learn something new.

• Learn to apologise quickly and mean it.

• The longer an apology takes the more difficult it will be.

• You don’t lose control when you apologise, you gain control.

• Sometimes people make you feel wrong even though you’re right.

On drugs

• Not all drugs are made equal. Some are bad, some are good. Some are legal and some are not. Some will fuck you up and some will set your mind on a path that will change you forever and for the better.

• Alcohol is a bad drug and it hates you, stop using it.

• Drugs don’t feel the same to everyone.

• Drugs are only scary if you let them control you. As my grandfather liked to say: “Drink the drink, don’t let the drink drink you.

• If you’re buying drugs (I am not, in any way, suggesting that anyone should ever buy drugs) don’t be cheap. Expensive drugs are expensive for a very, very good reason.

On family

• You do, in fact, get to choose your family.

• DNA does not grant your relatives indefinite access to you and endless forgiveness.

• You + her is a family.

On friends

• Most of the friends you have are assholes. That’s ok for now because you’re a bit of an asshole too.

• Break up with the assholes sooner.

• Develop hobbies that help you make friends. It’s hard to make friends when you’re older.

• It’s important to have a best friend and to be a best friend.

• You might not be your best friend’s best friend and that’s OK.

On money

• The tighter you hold on to your money the more difficult it is to make more.

• For the love of all things intelligent, save 10% of your salary every month.

• Spend money on experiences, not things.

• If you believe in an idea invest in it heavily or not at all.

On travelling and moving

• Move to a new country sooner. Your home is not where you were born.

• Moving house often is good for you. You’ll learn to love having fewer things.

• Travel more for fun, it’s your happy place.

• Snowboard more, it’s the only place you feel at peace.

• Travel alone more.

• Travel with her more.

On life partners

• Finding her was the best thing that ever happened to you but you don’t know it yet.

• She is undoubtedly the most important person in your life. Don’t fuck this up. 

• A healthy relationship needs bad days, but not too many. 

• Be kind to her more than you criticise her.

• Always choose her first.

• If you won’t choose her first, leave her. But don’t leave her.

The last ones

• Plan in decades. Think in years. Work in months. Live in days.

• Don’t be too precious with new things. Wear that jacket in the rain. Drop your phone. Scratch your sunglasses. It’s only stuff.

• Don’t listen to advice or rules that other people force on you. What works for them won’t work for you (even 40 year old Nic).

Stop BEING SO HUMBLE

Your inability to acknowledge your achievements is holding you back. Let’s deal with your Achievement Dysmorphia right now.

---

I have spent years reading about, talking about and experiencing Imposter Syndrome. I’m not alone in this, nor am I special when it comes to feelings of insecurity, inadequacy and fear of being found out to be a fraud.

Almost every high-achieving person I’ve ever met has verbalised the fear that if someone scratches a little bit below the surface, they’ll find a fraud.

I have spent hundreds of hours struggling to figure out where these feelings come from and why I can’t shake them. Do I need to work harder, learn more and execute better than I do already? Should I study more? Seek a mentor? Find a therapist and work through my daddy issues (we all have daddy issues)?

I did all of the above, but the syndrome persists.

Then a few years ago, I started coaching entrepreneurs in high-performing businesses and noticed a trend in their approach to their own achievements.

When many of the people I coach see colleagues or competitors achieve something amazing, they can immediately acknowledge how smart, gifted, talented and exceptional that person is and are happy to verbalise this and praise these people publicly. However, when we try to talk about what they have accomplished (even in a private coaching session), they dismiss their own achievements and chalk them up to luck, timing, their team, a good investor, a great client, a partner who helped them or a tiny bit of advice they read online. Any reason not to own their achievements.

For some reason, high-achievers just can’t see their own achievements for what they are. We blur them, we distort them, and we twist them around so that they no longer look or feel like achievements that belong to us.

Sure, there is no “I” in team, but there sure as hell is an “I” in “win” and sometimes I win.

Sometimes I did something amazing without help.

Sometimes I orchestrated a calculated strategic move that generated millions of dollars in revenue and changed the shape of my company.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I win without help or at the very least, I lead a team of people who follow my instructions, and we win because I was at the helm.

I call this Achievement Dysmorphia - an inability to recognise and own your accomplishments.

Think about someone in your life who impresses you. Everything they do seems to work out. They always look incredible, they beam confidence when they smile, and they make everyone around them feel like the superhero version of themselves. Every move they make is brilliant and people shower them with the spoils of victory.

You look at what they have achieved and credit them for their hard work, strategic skill and ability to execute better than anyone else. You give them direct and immediate credit in your mind for what they have achieved. Whether you like it or not, you credit them; even if you begrudge them for their success, you attribute it to them.

Now, think about your own achievements.

What was the last thing you accomplished? Hit a deadline at work? Received a raise? Wrote a book? Ran a faster mile than you ever have? Lifted more at the gym than you ever have? Raised a kid who isn’t an asshole?

When you look at this achievement, how do you explain it? Do you call it luck or attribute it partially to someone else, or maybe you credit your team and dismiss your involvement?

This is Achievement Dysmorphia in action; Our inability to recognise our achievements for what they actually are is crippling us and we don’t even know it.

We dismiss our achievements, our success, our ability to do something remarkable without help from others. We push aside our ability to put in the hard work, grind through tough times, and make carefully calculated strategic decisions.

In effect, we give away our achievements and our track record because we can’t fathom owning our achievements.

I’m sick and tired of people receiving an award and thanking everything in their lives until the award show producers have to usher them off with music. I want to see someone receive an Oscar and thank themselves. I want to see someone win a Grammy and stand up and say: “I did this. I worked hard. I toiled. I struggled. I grinded it out, with the help of my team, of course. But I am proud of myself for winning this award. I did it!”

We live in a world where it’s bad to admit to being good.

We live in a world where we marvel at the greats but demand they never take credit for their success, or we brand them arrogant and try to tear them down. We put people on a pedestal and then ask them to ignore how they got there in the first place. We live in a world where success is knocked down because you are too young, too old, too rich, too poor, too black, too white, too male, too female or too much of anything.

It is not arrogant to acknowledge that you have done something difficult and done it better than anyone else. It’s honest. Being humble doesn’t mean dismissing your own achievements or involvement in the success of something great.

Being honest with ourselves about our abilities and achievements will help us manage Imposter Syndrome (it never goes away, trust me) and helps us understand where we can do better next time.

Constantly attributing our achievements to others might feel like the appropriate thing to do, but it is damaging our egos negatively and influences our self-talk, sense of self and ability to be honest with ourselves.

Own your success. Own your failure. Drop your ego and be honest with yourself.

If you have the self-awareness to recognise your own shortcomings, and you can combine this with an ability to acknowledge your own achievements as yours, then you will be able to realistically assess your feelings of Imposter Syndrome and overcome them in the moment.

If, however, you never give yourself credit for doing something amazing, difficult or complex, then you will constantly be left needing other people’s approval, warping your own abilities and allowing people to push you aside.

It takes time to figure out what you are good at, and what you are bad at and to develop the self-confidence to admit when you have done something incredible. Take the time and start with something small today. 

The next time someone congratulates you or thanks you for doing something, just thank them for the compliment and move on.

If You Can't Find a Mentor, GET YOURSELF A FRENTOR

At the age of 11 years old I taught myself how to code. It was intense and difficult and I felt stupid and alone through most of it.

I remember sitting down at the desk in my room and logging into the dial-up internet with that crackling, undulating telephone tone that modems once made when you “connected” to the Internet so that I could meet up with my friends on mIRC chat (whatsapp-like chat app in 1995/6-ish) and talk about our website, html, hosting, buying domains and the like. I was about 13 years old at this point and would stay up late into the night hoping my parents wouldn’t see the glimmer of my screen from under the door as they walked past.

This is what mIRC looked like back then:

And here’s that dial-up internet sound that still rushes me back to the thrill of “getting online”:

This is how I taught myself to learn.

I learned from other people and curated their lessons.

I figured out which people were good to listen to and which people were trying to sound smart but had no depth.

Since then I have been on a lifelong hunt for the best people. Always looking for someone to guide me through my journey. I wanted someone who could show me how to write the best code, or start a business efficiently, and guide me through my thinking, goal setting, ambitions and life in general.

I never found a mentor in the traditional sense. After many years of looking for one, I realised that the world was changing and shifting so quickly that the concept of a mentor needed to change too.

So here’s what I suggest you do if you can’t find a mentor, or even if you have a mentor and need a different kind of push:

Start a chat group with your most talented and ambitious friends and label it something like “Frentors”. This is a place where you and your friends can help each other think through problems, challenge your thinking, share interesting links, test out business models and bend and break ideas.

If you read that last paragraph and can’t think of any friends you would want to add to this group then you have an entirely different (and bigger) problem. You have shitty friends.

In Greek culture (as in many others), kids are assigned godparents who are meant to guide them through life. Mine, unfortunately, did not manage to do so and the adults in my life seemed to struggle to maintain their own day to day existence, never mind guide me through mine.

So I set my own goals and from a young age tried to surround myself with the best people I could find as friends. Sometimes I was successful. Sometimes I found an asshole disguised as a nice person and dressed in nice clothing because they had rich parents.

Over the past 15 years, I have worked tirelessly to find the best people and help them, befriend them, learn from them and work my way into their lives. These people all lead different lives but are exceptional in their own way. Actors, entrepreneurs, speakers, writers, lawyers, executives, athletes, musicians and anyone else who is excellent, unique or special in some way, have all become my mentors over time.

Not having a mentor has been difficult but it’s also taught me how to figure things out for myself and how to trust my friends, learn from them, support them and allow them to support me.

Don’t be held back because you can’t find a mentor, trust me, your frentors can be even more valuable.

I Have Overinvested in Being at Home

I do not like working on my own. I have always worked in a team, built a team, recruited the smartest people I could into my businesses and created something that serves a greater purpose with the smartest people around.

You cannot replace physical human energy with video and voice calls exclusively. Fight me on it.

There is something magical about sitting in a room of brilliant people and listening to them debate a complex topic face to face. I thrive when I have other people to challenge my thinking and push me to places I wouldn’t otherwise have gone.

So when COVID overwhelmed the world and people were forced to work from home I leaned in. I embraced the idea that working from home was amazing and my home office was missing from my work life up until 2020. I obviously didn’t choose to work from home, I was forced to. So, I then started to create work that played into this and buy into the global narrative that work from home (WFH) was the best thing since the Internet. I became more alone, isolated and insular while, incredibly, still consuming and connecting more and more every day.

I purchased indoor plants and kitted out my “zoom background” to look crafted and amazing. My dogs are now insecurely attached to me and I am kind of insecurely attached to my home. I moved country and made sure that the house had enough rooms for my partner and me to both work from home.

Speaking of my partner, we settled into an “always together” life; we sleep in the same bed, we wake up and walk the dogs together, we eat breakfast in the same house, drink our coffee and tea in the same house, we work 3 feet apart every single day, we eat lunch in the same house, we finish work and clean together, we cook together, we eat dinner together, we read together, we watch TV together and occasionally we leave the house… together.

I have invested deeply in being at home.

I woke up extremely frustrated two weeks ago and I couldn’t really figure out why.

I meditated on this feeling for a few days and rolled it over in my mind, at the back and the front of my thoughts for hours on end.

And then it hit me like a crypto bro fighting for his life savings;

I have overinvested in being at home… and I think I hate it.

I miss human contact.

I miss the physical energy that humans create.

I miss going into an office and the serendipity of random conversations that lead to exciting ideas.

I miss the commute (I know, I know, insanity).

I miss the afternoon socialising.

I miss working in shoes (I exclusively wear slippers these days).

I miss wandering into a colleague’s office to solve a problem.

I miss leaving my house.

As the world goes absolutely nuts for WFH I want to balance out this narrative with an alternative: work where you work best.

If you work best at a coffee shop, work there. If you work best in an office, find one. If you work best at home, that’s great too.

I didn’t choose to work from home, the pandemic chose for me.

I believe that the future of work is all about choice. Smart businesses will give people the option to work from home or work from an office or work in a hybrid environment.

The dramatic realisation for me is that I was thrust into a situation that I thought was my choice but wasn’t. I want to go back and that’s OK.

I want to divest from my all-encompassing home orientated life. For me, that might mean some days at home, some days in a library, some days at a friend’s office and some days away from my partner and dogs.

Working from home, living at home and never leaving home is not healthy for me and I’m working on ways to strike a better home-not-home balance.

Innovation is not for everyone

I used to work at a big financial news publication. This was one of my first (and only) corporate jobs. I had a journalism degree behind me and was deeply embedded in the Web 2.0 movement. Wordpress had just begun to boom and “citizen journalism” was fast becoming a mainstream reporting practice. Blogs were exploding and the narrative was shifting from journalists covering the news to citizens creating their own publications and putting out their own news.

Said another way: The company I worked for was in trouble and they didn’t know it yet. Their traditional reporting model was fast becoming outdated and their ancient practices were holding them back in the new and immediate world of reporting online.

As a recent hire in the new media department of this publication, I was placed in a cubicle next to the existing website editor. She was a lovely lady in her 50s. It was 2006 so her job was relatively new. Each day she and I would transcribe pieces of content from the main magazine (a weekly publication) to the website. It was a static website without comments, without sharing (because social sharing wasn’t really a thing, hell, Twiitter hadn’t even launched yet) and without any real-time functionality.

This lady, let’s call her Jane, could not see the wood from the trees. Jane was too deeply engaged in a job that she had been doing for too many years to be able to stop, look up and see the changes coming her way. She was grinding on deadlines each day and each week, repetitively completing tasks assigned to her. She was being rewarded by the senior editors for doing a good job, a job that she was trained to do, a job that she knew how to do and a job she had been doing for many years.

Unfortunately, working in the online space meant that her job was evolving faster than she was.

Her salary and bonuses were not dependent on her ability to adapt to the world around her. She was given a task and was rewarded for doing that task effectively. She was not incentivised to creatively problem solve, to be curious or to experiment.

This was a problem that she did not create and thus a solution she could not find, let alone implement.

She was in a position to innovate but was not capable of introducing anything new to create opportunities, grow and evolve the online reporting tools and platform that she had efficiently operated over the past few years.

CURIOSITY

There is research that shows that most people lose a sense of curiosity after just 12 months of doing the job they were hired to do. 12 months is not a long time.

What happens is that people are taught to do their work and generally they are smart enough to understand how to do the job efficiently, effectively and well enough that they are rewarded for completing the tasks every day. They become more efficient every day and are incentivised accordingly.

These are the dedicated, hard-working and dedicated members of a team who keep a business running. These are the very important cogs in a machine that must keep moving to create income and survive. Every business needs these people.

But these are not the innovators.

You cannot ask someone who has been doing a job in a very specific way and who has been rewarded and incentivised in a very specific way to all of a sudden stop doing their work and create an innovative outcome. It is very unlikely that this person is able to read the label from the inside of their own bottle. They are trapped in the bottle and very few are able to climb their way out of the slimy glass walls, out the spout of the bottle and crawl down the side to walk far enough away to read the label and figure out how to change the ingredients.

If you are leading a team right now and expect your hardest working and most trusted long term employees to solve big, hairy, audacious problems then you are in for some trouble. These people can definitely assist in explaining how things currently work but will not be able to introduce completely new business models, revenue lines or ways of working.

Curiosity is the god particle of innovation.

Asking someone who has been doing the same work for five years to all of a sudden discover their curiosity for different ways to do their job is not an easy task. It’s like asking a squirrel to put down its acorn and find a different kind of food. Possible, but very unlikely.

Diversity

One way to spark curiosity is to find a diverse group of highly talented people and assign them the task of thinking about the biggest problems in your organisation.

Let’s go back to Jane and her online media job. I was placed in Jane’s department but given absolutely no power, no ability to experiment, no resources and no internal support. We had the chance to create something innovative, to launch a blog network that allowed our journalists to post frequently, update their articles and engage with our readers but the senior editors could not be moved from their legacy thinking.

We should have hired a diverse group of people who had skills in software development, citizen journalism, new media and front-end website development. We should have been given a small monthly budget to launch new and interesting projects and test out what worked and what did not. We should have been allowed to freely fail and learn from our experiments.

Jane should have been allowed to carry on doing her work as before and maintaining the business in the state that it was until the small skunkworks team had learned verifiable lessons to implement on the main website.

INNOVATION IS NOT AN ACTION

Innovation is an outcome.

Innovative outcomes are achieved when diverse and highly skilled people are given budget, freedom and time to experiment. These people must be allowed to be curious, inefficient, and to build, test, learn and fail while iterating and building more robust solutions.

There is no straight line to creating innovative outcomes and allowing people the freedom to be curious is scary and not always the most efficient way to build the future but without a doubt, this is the most effective way if your organisation is committed to continually creating innovative outcomes over a prolonged period of time.

How I Stopped Being An Asshole Entrepreneur

I used to be an asshole. Not in the self-deprecating, funny, quirky sort of way. I used to be the kind of asshole who would make people leave dinner parties and resign jobs. The kind of asshole that people don’t want to work for, don’t want to socialise with and don’t want to call their friend. 

I’m not trying to be humorous here either. It was very difficult to be around me for many years.

Unbelievably, I wore this like a badge of honour, an “A-badge” if you will. I used to proudly declare that upon meeting me, 50% of people hated me immediately and from the rest, I would try to patch together friends or business partners. Those are some shitty odds to impose upon yourself.

Being an entrepreneur is a conflicting endeavour. It’s your job to stay positive, to build something from nothing, to create a narrative and build a vision of the future that you can sell to other people so that they join you and help you build this vision of the future. It’s also your job to get the best out of people and build hard things, to strive for perfection and fight for survival, to be well-read in a wide range of topics while you dive deeply into your particular vertical. It’s a combative career choice filled with ego, failure and massive success if you get a million variables right at precisely the right time. 

Entrepreneurs are always competing. With themselves, with their colleagues, with fellow entrepreneurs, with actual competitors, with partners, siblings, parents and anyone else we can find along the way to compete with. 

There are books, TV shows, podcasts, articles, interviews, movies and legends of entrepreneurial assholes who created the world we live in today because they pushed for perfection at every possible turn. The example that jumps to mind is Steve Jobs. A notorious asshole perfectionist who excelled in almost every avenue of business that he touched. I read the Steve Jobs biography written by Walter Isaacson when it came out in 2011 and instantly became an even bigger asshole than I already was. You cannot fathom the magnitude of asshole that I was at this time. It must have been unbearable. It was laughably predictable and embarrassingly ineffective to fall into the trap of believing that the core reason for his success was that Jobs was an asshole and to repeat his success I just needed to be an asshole too. 

That is absolutely, 100% not the message of the Jobs biography. The message is that Jobs had to learn to be less of an asshole to truly find success and happiness. I completely missed this message and ploughed forward treating my friends, family and staff like they were mere mortals and I was a god sent to them to create a company that would change the world. 

I didn’t change the world and nor did my company. 

I was never going to change the world with that shitty attitude. 

It wasn’t just in my professional life that I was an asshole. In my twenties, I would attend dinner parties with close friends and slowly manipulate the conversation toward topics that I was comfortable with and had read up on extensively so that I could appear to be the smartest person in the room. I am embarrassed by this looking back on it now and don’t know how I kept any friends at all. But the shocking thing is that when I looked back on this time with my psychologist I realised that slowly but surely, as I started to manipulate the conversation more and more, my friends would quietly pay their bills and leave, one after the other. They literally couldn’t stand to be near me. 

Something had to change. 

The breakthrough for me came when I was forced to drive myself to the hospital, burned out with a stomach ulcer that was ready to burst at 2 am in the morning. 

I had nobody around me. My partner was in a different part of the country. I had left my family, my friends weren’t close enough friends to call at 2 am and I was desperate. 

So over the next few years I started to drag myself out of the asshole spiral. 

Here are a few things that changed my life:

Find A Professional

You think you can psychologise yourself. You can’t. 

You think you can therapise yourself. You can’t. 

You think you can council yourself. You can’t. 

You need a mental coach as much as you need a personal trainer for your muscles. If you are trying to be the best entrepreneur you can be, you need perspective, you need a coach, you need a psychologist, you need help. 

And why wouldn’t you utilise every possible resource to become the best version of yourself? Why wouldn’t you want better mental health, stronger mental fortitude, more resilience and the ability to gain perspective on your actions?

I thought I was fine without professional help until I bit the bullet and found a psychologist who changed my life. 

Listen More, Talk Less

I started to derive energy and value from listening and not talking. This was one of the most difficult changes I had to make. 

I finally understood my grandfather telling me that people have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listen more than you talk. It’s incredible what you can learn when you shut your mouth and listen. 

This applies to your business, your personal life, strangers, meetings and everything else. 

Listen and learn don’t talk and enforce. 

My Opinion vs Your Opinion

I read a lot and that provides me with strong opinions about a lot of topics. I am not right about these things, I just have strong opinions about them. 

But here’s the thing: I know what my opinions are. I don’t know what yours are. 

What’s the best way to figure out what other people think? Listen to them. 

When I reframed listening as the acquisition of other people’s opinions, everything changed. I began to listen to my team, my partner, my parents, my friends, and people online and devour their opinions so that I could challenge my own. 

Your opinion is only valuable when it is held up against other people’s opinions. If you never challenge your perspective then how do you know it holds up?

Winning

I realised that just because my opinion was right for me didn’t mean it was the right opinion.

I studied debating at school. Debate is an art. It’s not a stupid Twitter argument with a nameless, faceless troll. But not every conversation is a debate. Debates usually require two opposing sides to battle one another and in the end, there is a winner and a loser. 

Sometimes a conversation is just an exchange of opinions, not a battle. Trust me, you’re not going to change anyone’s mind over a beer at a pub. So get comfortable expressing your opinion and then moving on. 

Personal Values

At the start of my transformation from asshole to whatever I was becoming, I started to codify my personal values into what I now call my Nicisms. 

Whenever I experienced something that shifted my perspective enough I would write it down and over time I evolved these perspectives into a set of personal values that I now live by. Some drop out occasionally and new ones enter when they shift my world again but on the whole, they are constant and help me lighten the cognitive load of decision making. 

Here are my Nicisms, in case you need some examples: 

1. There is nothing after this

2. Learn the rules but ignore them

3. Be honest if possible

4. Do more but sometimes wait

5. Be patient

6. Trust people until you have a reason not to

7. Listen more, talk less

8. Everything is easier without ego

9. Burn it all down if you have to

10. Strong opinions loosely held

11. Be consistent

12. I am not building a future. I am building a life.

13. Find an optimal challenge

These values trickle into every aspect of my life. They help me figure out what businesses to build, and who to bring into and remove from my life. They help me quieten the asshole within. 

Learn to Apologise

I hate losing. I hate getting things wrong. I hate when other people tell me something and I disagree but am proving wrong later on. I hate it. 

I hated getting things wrong so much in my past that apologising was agonising for me. It was a sign of weakness. It was proof that someone else had beaten me. 

This applied to my friends, my life partner, my co-founders, my employees and mentors, everyone. I hated apologising or admitting I was wrong. 

But then one day my partner and I got into a fight/debate about a petty issue and she said something to me that rocked my foundation: 

“You realise we’re on the same team, right?”

I stopped dead in my tracks. 

I thought about her statement for a minute and then realised that we were, in fact, on the same team. So I apologised for my aggressive approach, listened to her opinion, decided I was wrong and her view was the appropriate one and moved on. 

Apologising is a sign of strength, not weakness. 

This newfound ability to apologise and mean it sincerely has changed my life for the better. 

It helped me drop my ego, it helped me bring people into a safe space and provide them with an intellectual victory that imbues confidence and makes them feel good. “Losing” can be a form of winning if you’re playing a long enough game. 

If you’re all on the same team then the end goal must surely be victory for everyone, not just for you at this particular moment?

Being an asshole entrepreneur was holding me back and it’s probably holding you back too. 

It’s a fallacy that you need to be an asshole to be effective. It’s fallacy that only the assholes survive and thrive in business or as entrepreneurs. 

I know a lot of successful people who are nice too and I want to be one of them. This is how I have started my journey.

Three Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Say Yes To Anything

Ihave a shocking confession to make - I am an optimist, not a pessimist.

This is shocking because a lot of the time I feel like a permanent pessimist and sceptic. I challenge norms, push boundaries, disagree openly and publicly and put myself out there opposing the common narratives.

I look at something and see the flaws in it. I read something and question if the source is honest, transparent and objective. I review a business plan, assume it will fail and then begin hunting for the points of failure. Perhaps it’s my journalism training. Perhaps it’s the fact that I am a nihilist and an atheist. Perhaps it’s just that I see the world for what it is while others choose to live in blissful ignorance.

Whatever the reason, I default to scepticism in most situations.

But the truth deep down in the crevices of my brain, heart and gut is that I am an optimist. I believe this to be true because I have trouble saying no.

Saying no is doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s a skill I have spent years developing and flexing. I often listen to people pitch an idea and think: “Oh shit, I can’t miss this opportunity. There’s something here and I gotta jump on it or I’ll miss out.” I then say: “Yes, sure let’s meet.” or “Of course I can help you.” When what I really want to say is: “FUCK NO! This idea is dumb, I don’t think it’ll work and you’re a terrible founder.” But I placate them and myself by diving in just in case there’s an opportunity there.

I believe that my default scepticism is an over-exercised muscle that I have needed to evolve to survive my optimism. I know in my subconscious that if I keep saying yes to everything I will never make any headway in life.

So I went the other way and became a mental grinch.

Looking back over a career of decisions, businesses, engagements, partnerships and choices I realise that I was actually unable to get my optimism under control. I say yes too often.

Recently I’ve taken a hard line with my work, my time and my choices. I default to no. My 2022 mantras include:

• More focus

• Fewer, bigger bets

• Move slower

• Be present

All of these involve saying no more often.

I needed to do this to save my mind from turmoil. I needed to do this because I am trying to focus exclusively on things that make me say “HELL YEAH!” (a mantra I’ve adopted from Derek Sivers). This extends deep into my life and as close to the edge as I believe is reasonable to go.

For example, I was meant to go to the dentist today. I don’t particularly mind going to the dentist, it’s not a fear of mine. But they only had a time that was inconvenient for me — a 75-minute drive there and back, no use of toilets at the dentist due to COVID restrictions after a long drive makes the anxiety palpable and I had a meeting shortly after that I was probably going to be late for because of the 9 am dentist appointment.

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Two things come to mind:

1. Why did I say yes in the first place?

2. Why would I go when I feel this pit in my stomach and it’s so complicated?

So I cancelled. I said no.

Going to the dentist isn’t a big decision so why should I agonise over it? Why would I commit to something so small and then force myself to do it even when it gives me physical pain in my chest just thinking about it? I wouldn't and you shouldn’t.

I have spent the past 20 years working hard to gain the privilege of one word; no. I have afforded myself the luxury to say no to things that I don’t want to do. The dentist is a trivial example that illustrates a broader point.

Success is a difficult thing to define but one of the benchmarks for success in my life is the ability to say no to things. The fewer things I am obligated to do, the more success I have achieved.

Think about the things that you have to do on a daily basis. How many of them would you choose to do again if you were just starting out? Would you change the work that you do? The car that you drive? The partner you have chosen? The pets that you have in your life? The place you live? The house you own? Would you say “no thanks” to any of them knowing what you know now?

Remember, you are not a tree. You do not have roots. You can move.

Ask Yourself These Three Questions

1. Will this make me happy and for how long?

I know that sounds selfish, but so what?

Going to the dentist will improve my life because the chipped filling will get fixed. But right now, it’s giving me a stomach ulcer thinking about the 75-minute drive there and back + the meeting I’ll be late for + the sore face + the traffic. So, it doesn’t make me happy and it won’t improve my life enough to justify the immediate suffering.

I still need to see a dentist so I’ll just book a new appointment at a dentist closer to me.

Some things need to be done and won’t make you happy. That’s OK. You have to figure out if it’s important enough to endure the unhappiness and then shut up and get it done.

2. Do I really give a shit about this… like, for real?

Excitement is contagious. When someone talks to me about something new, a business idea, a restaurant, a show, a band or whatever, I get excited because they’re excited. I jump in with both feet and I’m all like, “HELL YEAH THIS IS THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD.”

And then we part ways and I begin reading, researching and thinking more about the conversation and slowly I talk myself out of and away from their initial excitement because it’s their excitement, their vision and their enthusiasm. Not mine. It’s their perspective, their context and their insights for their lives. Not mine.

This happened to me with Web 3 recently. A lot of people I know are building businesses in the Web 3 and crypto worlds. They are leaving their careers and shifting their attention so I spent a few months reading before I let myself get carried away. I mark this as personal growth because ten years ago I would have sold my shirt to start building something in the new hot space. But I was calm, collected and measured and realised that there is always time and I don’t really give a shit about it right now.

3. Does this move me closer to my idea of success?

By saying yes to this big thing am I moving closer or further away from my defined idea of success? The first thing to notice here is that you need to have a defined idea of success and if you don’t, you need one. Stop now and think about it. Not someone else’s idea, not the fast cars, big houses, gold watches, expensive alcohol idea of success. No. Your idea. The comfortable, contextual and relevant version of success for you and those you care about.

If you say yes to building this business, marrying this person or moving countries does it move you closer to or further from your success?

BONUS: 4. Is this altruistic or selfish (for them or for me)?

I don’t believe in altruism.

I think that there is a self-serving benefit to everything we choose to do.

You give someone your kidney because you love them and want them to survive and you’ll feel good when they do and you’ll benefit from their existence. Sure, you sacrificed but it’s not altruistic.

So if you’re doing something because you believe someone else needs you to do it then you better fucking care about that person about as much as you care about yourself because doing things for other people exclusively is terribly difficult. It may not be tough in the short term but over a period of time constantly doing things for other people will chip away at your relationship with them. The best outcome is usually when both parties benefit in some way or another.

This will be different depending on who the other party is. In business, are you talking about your business partner and cofounder or competitor? Different outcomes lead to different feelings. In life, are you talking about your favourite sibling (I know you have a favourite) or a distant cousin three times removed? Different relationships and commitments lead to different feelings about the outcome.

Sometimes the best option is to be selfish because you may be a happier person to be around if you aren’t forced to do the thing that you hate doing.

Sometimes trying to be altruistic is the best option because it feels good to put other people’s needs ahead of our own and reap the benefits of that sacrifice.

But don’t fool yourself, every decision you make is a decision. You have agency and you exercise it whether you admit it or not. You are never trapped, you never have to say yes, you never have to do something you don’t want to do. You choose to do things and then you choose to be irritated and anxious about doing the thing you said yes to. You choose these things.

Choose better.

Here’s Why You Feel Like A Failure Most Of The Time

Ifyou judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will always feel like a failure. If you judge your success by someone else’s definition you will always feel like a failure.

Your success is not mine. My success is not yours. His success is not hers. Her success is not his. Their success is not ours.

I used to feel like success was a universally understood concept. Something that anyone from anywhere could relate to and strive for. Something that made me feel like we were all playing the same game, moving in the same direction, pushing for together.

But it’s not.

Success is not universal and the fact that so many people believe that Kanye West or Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Oprah have it all figured out is worrying to me and does not bode well for general theories of happiness and contentment.

I know many wealthy people who are desperately unhappy. I know many famous people who hate their lives. I know traditionally successful people who just cannot bring themselves to be happy or stop working so hard. Success is nuanced, contextual and personal.

If your idea of success is wholly understood through watching Kim Kardashian’s Instagram feed then you probably think that you need fake body parts, a rapper ex-husband who is batshit crazy (or an eccentric genius depending on your perspective), houses that are too big to clean and material things to make you happy. And that’s OK if you truly, one thousand per cent believe that you came up with that version of success all on your own. But you didn’t. You copied it. You subsumed it. You enveloped it through social media osmosis.

So here’s my question to you:

How do you define success for yourself?

I’m not asking you what you want to own to make yourself look successful. I’m not asking you what you think other people think success looks like. I’m not asking you about your parent’s opinion of success. I’m asking about your personal idea of success. What has to happen for you to think to yourself “I am a success”?

Success could be a family with two kids, a dog, two cars, a nice house in a safe neighbourhood and a job that you love.

It could be a one-bedroom apartment in New York where you live alone and get to paint all day without fear of being broke.

It could be travelling the world while you work.

It could be as simple as feeling loved.

But have you actually sat down and considered what success looks like in your life? Have you ever asked yourself that simple question? Have you sat down with yourself and taken the time to quantify in fine detail what you desire, why you desire that specific thing and how you plan to achieve said thing?

This matters because the marker on the map will keep moving if we never lock in a destination. If you have no idea where you want to end up one day then how the fuck do you know if you’re on a path towards success?

Here are some questions I have asked myself to try and figure this out:

• What is important to me? Family? Money? Material things? Sleep? Work with purpose? Relationships? Food?

• What are my values? Honesty? Integrity? Balance? Beauty? Faith? Consistency? What?

• Who is important to me?

• Do I care about “stuff”? Cars? Clothes? Houses? First-class? Jewellery?

• Do I want to retire or find work that I want to do forever?

• What brings me energy?

• What takes energy away from me?

Bling Bling, money ain’t a thing. (Photo by Serge Kutuzov on Unsplash)

Life is filled with many different dimensions and each part should have its own definition of success. Here’s a list of the possible areas of your own life to start thinking about:

• Relationships

• Love

• Money

• Profession/calling/vocation

• Spirituality

• Emotions

• Practices & habits

• Health & wellness

• Adventure

• Learning & growth

• Dreaming & longing

• Hobbies & recreation

• Community

It took a lot of thinking and observing of myself, my life and those around me to figure out that I was building a life that other people thought was successful.

When I was about 23 I purchased my first house, bought my first (and only) new car and had a well-paying job at a large corporate. I woke up one day and realised that I didn’t care about cars at all but I was spending 1/4 of my salary paying for a car. I realised I didn’t care about the outdated idea of owning a house because I preferred to move around a lot. I realised that a family which includes children felt more like a burden than an achievement. With time I understood that I had inherited other people’s ideas of success, mostly my father’s because he always wanted but never achieved real financial and material success.

I have my own understanding of success now which includes:

• Free time

• No obligations

• The ability to say no to anything at any time

• Working with the best possible people

• Surrounding myself with people I want to be like and am proud of

• Travelling as often as I want to

It’s easy to fail when you are being measured by someone else’s idea of success. It’s easy to feel shit about what you have when you have been tricked into thinking you want what someone else has. It’s much more difficult in the short term (but easier in the long term) to set your own definition of success and move towards it confidently.

The difficulty is that we are constantly told to be ourselves as long as that looks like everyone else. We’re constantly told to move against the flow of traffic as long as we’re not disrupting the traffic.

I can’t claim to have it all figured out because my life is constantly evolving and changing. The important part is the practice of challenging your own understanding of success on a frequent basis. Don’t set and forget. Don’t sit idle as the world passes you by while you wait for success to just arrive.

Nobody is waiting for you to succeed or fail. In fact, nobody is waiting for you at all.

The Victim Leader VS The Opportunity Leader

There was a time when I believed that things happened to me. The universe, I believed, was actively working to thwart the efforts I made to build my business, to close a deal, to hire that person or to do something good. There was a time when I believed life was a movie and I was the star. To be clear, I believed that I was the star in everyone’s movie.

Here’s the (un)surprising truth; the world does not revolve around me. As much as I want it to and as much as that would justify my victimhood, it just doesn’t.

In one of the upcoming episodes of my podcast It’s Not Over, Ethan King told me that he chooses to believe that the universe is conspiring for him not against him.

THE UNIVERSE IS CONSPIRING FOR YOU

This perspective sent me down a mental rabbit hole that I think I may still be in but I want to try and unpack this idea.

The world is conspiring for you. What an incredible perspective to hold when things happen to you, around you, for you and with you. You break your arm and choose to believe that the universe is conspiring for you. You close a deal and you choose to believe that the universe is conspiring for you. Someone hits your parked car at the mall and you choose to believe that this did not happen to you but that the universe was conspiring for you. Sure, to some this may come across as delusional but I think this subtle shift in perception really counts.

I have only been reading the ancient stoic philosophers for a couple of years so I am by no means an expert, but Stoicism teaches a concept known as the dichotomy of control which ties in nicely with the belief that the universe is conspiring for you. It goes like this:

You have two choices every day in every situation:

You can choose to allocate your attention to things you can control OR

You can choose to allocate your attention to things you cannot control.

Simple.

The first choice leaves you with agency and control.

The second choice leaves you with frustration and a distinct lack of control.

If you choose to focus your attention on the things you cannot control then how do you plan your next move? If you choose to obsess over your competitor’s actions then how is your strategy affected when you can’t, in fact, execute their strategy better than they can? If you choose to allocate your attention to the power outage and how much it cost your business and how could the energy company possibly do this to you then how do you bring yourself and your team out of this spiral of negativity.

One choice presents opportunity while the other presents you as a victim.

At one of my startups many years ago we had offices in the Cape Town city centre. It was a great old building and we had the top floor. That floor had a skylight and old roofing. One day we unlocked the doors in the morning and went up to our floor to find we had been robbed… through the skylight. We were on the second floor of this building which meant that the thieves had to scale the side of the building, break the skylight, take whatever they could carry and then make their way back up and out of the skylight. It was masterful and I remember being pretty impressed with their effort.

I was gutted. Our couch was ruined because they used it as a lift up to the light to help them leave. Our electronics were stolen as well as other items like cellphones, iPads, etc. It was unpleasant and it happened to us and I reacted like a victim because I was a victim. But I was leading a company and we had to move forward so we did. It wasn’t easy but I put on a brave face and sorted it all out.

Around the same time, I had to fire one of our software developers. He cost too much for the level of work he was doing. He basically lied to us in his interview and the hiring process and slipped through the cracks into a well-paying job that he couldn’t cope with.

So I fired him.

I could easily have allowed this to be a victim moment too but in relation to being robbed (actually a victim), I was given much-needed perspective. I had no control over being robbed but I had all the control over who I hired and I had hired badly.

I chose to see this particular firing situation as an opportunity. It was an opportunity to review our hiring process, to understand how he had tricked my CTO into believing he could code and to understand where we could improve as leaders and a business.

Every day you wake up and you get to decide if you want to be a victim or see opportunity in your business. I like to believe that I am an opportunity leader, not a victim leader, not anymore at least.

It’s easy to fall into victim leader territory because there is a lot out there that can harm you that you have no control over; COVID, economic recessions, being robbed, a corrupt government, where you were born, which family you were born into, etc, etc. The list is literally endless.

But each of these things can also be seen as an opportunity. An opportunity to turn your business around and work from home like you’ve always dreamed of. An opportunity to scale back your business, work with your favourite clients and get rid of the staff you maybe shouldn’t have hired to begin with. An opportunity to move countries, find new people to call your family and build a life with.

There is always the choice to be an opportunity leader and not a victim leader.

Opportunity leaders see gaps in the market and close them with new products or services. Victim leaders wonder why they were never handed the opportunity that the other person clearly received. Opportunity leaders exercise their agency while victim leaders blame others for restricting their agency.

I want to see opportunity wherever I look even though it’s easier to blame other people for where I find myself.

I choose to allocate my attention to the things I can control and ignore the things that I can’t control.

Choose opportunity, not victimhood.

The $6400 Decision That Saved This Business

The Daily Maverick is an important business. It’s a bastion of objective journalism in South Africa, a country that battles evil politicians, rampant unemployment, systemic corruption and myriad other social, political and economic issues.

Building a news organisation is no small task, especially in the age of social media, the duopoly that is Google and Facebook trying to dictate how media organisations disseminate their news and make money from this news.

In the first episode of my new show, It’s Not Over, I spoke with Styli Charalambous, the CEO and co-founder of The Daily Maverick.

Listen on SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS or YOUTUBE now.

It’s Not Over is a show about near-death business experiences. I talk to business owners, founders and entrepreneurs about specific moments in their businesses where they were about to call it quits. In some cases, the businesses ended in failure while in others the businesses made it out alive, lived to fight another day or went on to dominate or exit.

Styli and I cover a lot of ground in the first episode of the show.

For eight years he and his co-founder battled cash flow, outdated business models, a declining media industry and various other complexities. But there was a turning point. There was a moment in the history of this now thriving business where the founders needed to make an important but relative expensive decision. Styli was investigating new ways for his news organisation to generate income and decided to attend an exploratory trip hosted by the Poynter Institue that would cost $6400. This was a hail mary but it was so much more for their business.

The trip was the beginning of a new revenue model, one that would completely change the way that they operated, who they hired and how they made money.

Reader Revenue was a buzzword in the media space and Styli knew that The Daily Maverick needed to pivot in this direction.

To find out how this all unravelled, listen to or watch the entire episode via your favourite podcast platform or watch the YouTube video below.

Here are a few lessons that Styli shared in this episode:

Create work that is worth paying for

It’s easy to expect people to pay you for what you produce but if you produce sub-par news, media, products or services then it’s very unlikely people will pay you. So focus first on creating an incredible product.

The Daily Maverick spent 8 years producing the best journalism in South Africa before they were confident people would be willing to spend money to read.

Use data to help you with your decisions

The best decisions are a combination of data, insights and gut. Relying purely on any one variable is dangerous.

The Daily Maverick used years of data to drive its paywall and marketing strategy.

The importance of a clear and consistent mission and vision

For 13 years, the mission and vision for The Daily Maverick have not changed. They set out with clear intentions and didn’t change these intentions with the weather. Regardless of how difficult it was or which direction investors, customers, sponsors, advertisers, politicians or business people wanted them to move into, they stayed the course and it paid off.

Changing your vision and mission too often is not a good thing for any business. Stay focused.

Personal development counts

The best founders are doing the work on themselves while they are working on and in their own businesses. It’s imperative for founders to evolve as their businesses evolve and that requires a lot of hard, personal work on yourself.

Styli speaks openly about his own struggles in this regard, the tough choices he had to make and the importance of mental health and professional help.

Styli is a founder with grit and determination building a business that is helping to shape the future of a nation. Listen to this episode now!

How Does A $150m Business Almost Go Bankrupt? Quickly…

Most people would be excited to own and run a $150m business. Most people would consider themselves successful with a $150 business. But businesses with thin margins are vulnerable to fluctuations of any kind and for Howard Mann, the fluctuation came in the form of a recession.

In the latest episode of It’s Not Over, I talk with Howard Mann, who was the CEO and founder of a logistics business in the late ’90s and into the early 2000s. He has been a business turnaround expert since selling this business and has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs find stability, scale their business and thrive.

Some key lessons from Mann’s story and experience:

You cannot be everything to everyone

Mann realised that to survive the strain of small margins and a shrinking economy he would have to niche down and focus on a core customer who needed exactly what his company specialised in. Prior to this decision, his sales team received a massive book of importers when they joined his company and were told to contact anyone they could. Once the decision was made to focus the sales team became snipers, not foot soldiers and went for key clients that fit a specific mould.

Profit over revenue

Most entrepreneurs believe that bigger is better and this is true with the correct context. Bigger is better if we’re talking about profit. Bigger is not necessarily better if we’re talking about top-line revenue, staff count, leases and rent owed and other expenses that eat into your margins.

In difficult macro-economic times, it’s impossible to defend tiny margins so when times are good find ways to increase your margins.

Don’t let ego and pride drive decisions

While Mann was working with a business turn-around expert he was reluctant to close down offices that were loss-making for fear of what other people would think and how his peers would respond to the shrinking size of his business.

Once his sales team was focused and the business was heading in the right direction it became clear to Mann that the 80/20 rule was at work in his business. 80% of his profit was coming from 20% of his offices.

As one of my mentor’s once told me: if you are thinking about cutting expenses, cut quickly and cut deeply.

What kind of life is your business giving you?

Entrepreneurs will often think about what parts of their life they can dedicate to their business but Mann believes that thinking inversely is a more sane way to build businesses. We should be asking ourselves what kind of life this particular business can provide us. One that forces late nights and early mornings? A life with high stress and low profit? Don’t let your business dictate your life.

Every Tuesday at 7 am you can expect a new episode of It’s Not Over.

Scaling When The Money Stops Coming

Raising funding feels like a victory but can often be the kiss of death for a startup. You have more money than you know what to do with or you have plans to spend the money but your situation changes and you struggle to step back from the cliff. This can be an even more complicated unravelling when it’s grant funding and you feel grateful that someone has found your startup important enough to part with their money.

This is precisely what happened to Andrew Haeg and his company, GroundSource, which is a platform newsrooms and community organizations use to build and scale two-way relationships with audiences and communities via mobile messaging and voice.

Andrew managed to secure grant funding and began to scale his company in line with the plans laid out and agreed upon by everyone involved.

He told me that he felt a sense of gratitude to the organisation providing his company with the funding so when they had scaled their team and efforts in preparation for the second tranche of funding and it never arrived, he felt awkward talking to them about it, asking for the tranches and getting the necessary contracts signed.

His story is one of intense resilience and dedication to the practice of journalism that spans decades. GroundSource and Andrew are both the walking, talking embodiment of purpose-driven business which can be both a good and bad thing as we find out in this episode of It’s Not Over.

Andrew left the corporate world to start his own business and “have the freedom to call my own shots,” as he puts it in our conversation. Unfortunately, the entrepreneurial twists and turns led him to $150 000 in debt trying to revive the business and keep things afloat.

Andrew and I talk about the self-imposed shame that comes with failure, the need to prove to himself and his kids that he can build a successful business and what you do when you have salaries to pay but the grant funding just stops.

Find The Right Partner Or Suffer The Consequences

rowing your business is important. It’s all the rage, isn’t it? Growth. Growth for the sake of growth. Growth because investors expect growth. Growth because what is a business if it’s not growing?

Well, Sean Hidden would argue that your business needs to be stable to grow. In the latest episode of It’s Not Over, Sean emphatically states that the most responsible thing that a business owner can do is ensure that the business can last for ten years.

Baristas, free coffee, lunch and drinks once a month might feel cool but profits and sustainability are even cooler. This is a very counterintuitive stand to take in the world of high growth tech startups.

Sean has gone from derivatives trading to selling ads for social media platforms in Africa. He is an entrepreneurial force to be reckoned with and his latest business, Ad Dynamo went from the brink of closure to a successful exit in 2022.

Sean has a way with words and an affable personality that makes him the perfect salesman. He has used these gifts to sell everything from payment gateways to performance management software.

In this episode Sean and I cover a wide range of topics including firing clients and partners, raising the right kind of investment from the best kind of investor and doing right by your employees.

If you’re currently struggling with bad partners, catastrophic growth or being a better leader then Sean has words of wisdom not to be missed.

A few key lessons from this episode to whet your appetite:

Expanding quickly into new markets is brutal

While Sean and Ad Dynamo were expanding rapidly their growth had brought out the rats and mice, not the best partners they could hope for. So in the short term, they had traction in new countries but in the long term, they suffered because their partners were below par and needed to move on.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE NOW

Owning a tiny part of many markets isn’t interesting

After expanding into new markets through local partners, Sean realised that nobody is interested in a company that plays a tiny part in a big market. His entire business changed when he decided to focus on the untapped inventory in Africa, which nobody else controlled.

Tell a unique story

It doesn’t matter how good you are, how good you think you are or how much you believe you deserve success, if you can’t tell a compelling and unique story with a golden thread running through it then you’re dead in the water.

Sean needed to focus and tie together loose ends before his customers and staff would be able to take the business seriously.

Above are three of many, many important business lessons that Sean talks me through. Don’t miss this episode, it’s full of experience and hard lessons learned through suffering.

From a $50m listed entity to $10m and going bust

Shawn Johal worked in his wife’s growing family business until the tides turned and the listed company went bust. His father-in-law brought together many different businesses under a single group entity and listed the collection of businesses but struggled to find efficiencies required to make a group of this kind profitable.

Generally speaking, when you are building a group of companies you want to create profitable entities that can stand alone or an efficient central entity that can support the smaller group companies through head-office efficiencies. Centralised accounting, hr and other resources mean that the group can support the small collection of businesses and provide the operators of these entities with affordable resources to improve margins and profits.

Shawn and his family were running their lighting business and growing it through acquisitions but a series of events that turned from sunny to cloudy led to the business taking strain and coming under cash flow pressure. A recession, unfortunate timing of a Home Depot order mistake and other variables led to this listed lighting business going under.

Shawn and his brother-in-law decided to buy some of the more promising businesses and relaunch under a new name and with a new zest for profit. This move was not without complexity and struggle as Shawn had to take out loans from a factoring institution (kind of like a loan shark but legal and reputable) at 10–12% interest to help you get out of a hole to get a bank loan.

Shortly after growing, gaining ground, taking out loans and fighting for survival, his ex-employees launched a copy of his business. In this gripping episode of It’s Not Over Shawn talks about his mental health, working with his family, learning from his father-in-law and rebuilding a better business after failure.

This intense story of highs, lows, family responsibility, leadership and resilience kept me hanging on every word as Shawn and I discussed his successful launch and defence of a new entity after an old one died.

---

Subscribe to It’s Not Over: www.nharry.com/its-not-over

Buy Shawn’s new book: www.elevationleaders.com/Happy_Leader_Book

LIVING IN A Snowflake SOCIETY

Humanity should be proud of the scientific method.

Science has driven us forward like nothing before it. Scientists are known for their intellectual prowess, willingness to be proven wrong, and ability to withstand criticism as long as it is in the name of progress and the greater good.

Here’s a quick definition of the scientific method in case you’re unfamiliar with the concept:

A method of discovering knowledge about the natural world based in making falsifiable predictions (hypotheses), testing them empirically, & developing theories that match known data from repeatable physical experimentation.

The scientific method is a marvel. Scientists are meant to be in a constant state of intellectual discomfort. That’s their game; to constantly propose new ideas and hypotheses even if they might be proven wrong and in fact, because they might be proven wrong.

Mike McCulloch is a Physicist, PhD, Lecturer, author and artist. In his own words, he has “…proposed new physics that gets rid of dark matter & allows a new engine.”

That is some bold physics talk right there. But I’m not here to talk about physics. I know too little about it to even consider explaining dark matter in any way. I’m more interested in a recent tweet from Mike that really made me sad, frustrated and concerned about the current state of society:

Can you believe that I've been banned from speaking at several campuses because my opposition to #darkmatter makes the astrophysicists there "uncomfortable"? Physicists are supposed to be intellectually uncomfortable! That's how they discover.

— Mike McCulloch (@memcculloch) September 10, 2021

I call this kind of action Snowflake Science and it applies to society too, Snowflake Society, if you will:

A society that is too afraid to point heat at their own ideas for fear of the idea melting.

This is not science. This is not a society that values facts. This is not a society that values progress. This is not a society that values equality and equity. This is a society that values silence, fear, destruction and pain.

Our wokeness is starting to affect our ability to embrace progress and be resilient.

When scientists - apparently the most progressive people in the world - are not willing to listen to opposing ideas and put those ideas to the test where does that leave the rest of us?

You can see this new Snowflake Society evolving and solidifying everywhere.

People are afraid to say anything online, do anything meaningful, have an opinion, challenge ideas or push boundaries in case they get cancelled.

There are situations where opinions are offensive and facts are fraudulent but gagging opposing views is not the way to create progress and push the world forward. Creating a culture of fear and reticence online is not going to help humanity find common ground. Rallying mobs to destroy people because they don’t agree with us is not going to end well.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their own trauma, triggers, and right to speak up about any topic. But what happens to society when everyone is triggered by everything? What happens to the evolution of culture when nothing is allowed to be challenged? What happens to businesses when teams can’t push back and leaders can’t impart their ideology into their own business? What happens when the far left and the far right decide that the middle must choose or be done away with? What happens when the snowflake wokeness of a generation starts to feel the heat and begin to melt?

If you believe in your opinions strongly enough then a variation of the scientific method is the path of progress. Allow other people to challenge you and engage in healthy debate. Don’t shout them down. Don’t send an army to shut them up. Don’t be so naive as to believe that your made-up view of the world is better than my made-up view of the world. I may have seen things that you have missed and vice versa.

The Snowflake Society that is developing right now is dangerous because it is polarised and binary. You are either right or wrong. You are either left or right. You are either wealthy or poor. You are either white or black. You are either with us or against us.

There is no healthy resolution in a polarised and binary society that so many believe to be zero-sum.

If you believe in your ideas, allow them to be challenged and embrace healthy debate. Lower your ego and find the right platform for the right debate with the right people.

In case you wanted a quick guide:

• Twitter is not the right platform to convince anyone that they are wrong

• Facebook is a big snowflake mountain

• Shouting someone down won’t convince them you are right

• Your feelings are valid and your own, but facts are universal and belong to everyone (gravity is a fact and belongs to everyone)

It’s tiring to watch a Snowflakes Society descend into defensive rhetoric that never moves forward. It’s frustrating to see smart people believe that their way is the only way that ever was and ever will be. It’s irrational to believe that what we know and experience now is what we will always know and experience into the future.

I have a list of Nicisms that I try to live by, update and challenge constantly as I trundle through life. One of the most important is:

Strong opinions loosely held.

It’s OK to believe something strongly and to fight for and defend it but it is more important to hold that strong opinion very loosely so that when the facts change, your opinion can change too.

Your goal, our goal as a society, should be to engage our resilience and to challenge hypotheses until newer, better, more robust versions emerge. Accepting one group’s perspective as the default worldview is a dangerous path to aimlessly meander down.

We Are Builders

This article originally appeared in the Daily Maverick SME Toolkit. Sign Up to receive the newsletter in your inbox every week.

I have written and rewritten this column multiple times in the past 48 hours. Then I read the column and feel despondent and confused so I delete all the words and start again.

It’s a tough time to be South African.

It’s even more difficult to be a business owner in South Africa right now. The country is literally on fire and small businesses across our nation are burning to the ground.

It’s also a tough time to be Cuban, Ethiopian, Guatemalan, Iraqi, Venezuelan or Indian as these countries also battle inequality, protests, looting, corruption, businesses struggling, starvation and death en masse. South Africa is one of the many nations battling with a shifting world and desperate times. As a nation, one of our favourite past times is lamenting that the things we experience “only happen in South Africa”. They don’t. It can be brutal to be alive just about anywhere in the world. We suffer with the world, not apart from it.

As a business owner, you know that what you do every day is difficult.

Building anything of meaning is difficult.

Building a business is difficult. Now more than ever.

Building a new future and building a country are both difficult.

Building a culture of hope is incredibly complex.

Building a community of support and upliftment is challenging at best.

Right now it feels like building anything is futile. But it isn’t.

I oscillate between determination to work harder, and complete and utter despair for a country at war with itself. I am sad, confused, frustrated and lost as a business owner, entrepreneur and South African.

The pandemic has gutted our businesses, restricted our basic freedom of movement, and killed our colleagues, friends, and family. The systemic corruption at all levels in our country has made it difficult to remain positive and is responsible for our torment as much as the pandemic. From fat cat corporate executives robbing the poor to government officials robbing the citizens (and the poor) to ex-Presidents inciting violence and giving our legal system the middle finger.

It’s a tough time to be South African.

This week I offer no advice. I offer no tips and tricks. I offer no positive pressure that you could or should be doing more to improve your small business.

This week I offer up support. I offer support even if it is only through this newsletter. I offer my never-ending admiration to all of you for building something of meaning and value. I offer you my inbox too, hit reply and tell me how you’re doing. Maybe venting will make you feel better.

I offer up my condolences if you have lost someone. I offer up my condolences if your business has been destroyed by the violence, looting and protests spurred on by the desperate, corrupt and greedy Jacob Zuma and his ilk.

But here’s the thing, the looting, the violence and the protests are not going to disappear. The rapidly growing gap between the wealthy and the poor is tearing ours and many other nations apart. This is not a simple case of blaming one man for inciting violence and burning a nation. This is social unrest. This is deep and dark, sinister and complex and there is no single solution to drag us out of the hellfire we find ourselves in. Zuma and his cronies lit the fire but inequality is what fuels it.

From what we can see on the news and social media, there has been no political chanting, no signboards, no movement towards anything other than violence, theft, looting and destruction.

This is no longer about one man in prison, but it’s hard to tell exactly what this is about.

The extent of our inequality is reflected by the Gini coefficient, which paints a picture of one possible answer to the destruction we are seeing in our country. It’s a single number that demonstrates the degree of inequality in the distribution of income shows how far a country's wealth or income distribution deviates from a totally equal distribution. South Africa has the highest Gini coefficient in the world.

After nearly 18 months of lockdown and record unemployment figures, it’s fair to assume that people are desperate. Sadly the looting taking place in South Africa has made the leap from desperation to purely criminal.

The future of your business and our country lies in the hands of the builders, not the politicians. The way out of the darkness is to build the light, not wait for it to shine. To rebuild our broken economy we need entrepreneurship and determination. The road out is not paved with violence, blame, othering, bigotry or racism. The road out is paved with entrepreneurs building businesses and by imaginative and inspired people doing the work they have been doing for decades already. People like you.

The only destruction that we should support is that of a corrupt and failed government. The only destruction we should strive for is that of the organisations trying to separate us all from one another. Do not support the destruction of other human beings. Do not support the destruction of businesses, nor of our hope or our intense desire to build. Do not be tricked into turning on your fellow South Africans. The enemy is a corrupt government, not one another.

We must be angry and filled with rage, but we must direct that anger and rage in the right direction. We must channel our energy, frustration, losses, and hopes into building something of value even if it’s hard – because it’s always been hard. We must not destroy the progress we have made, no matter how small we believe that progress is right now.

We must build because that’s what we do. On that note, the SME newsletter will not go out for the next two weeks as I attend to some personal matters.

Being Busy is Killing Us

It’s cool to be busy, right?

It’s fashionable to be frantic. It’s all the rage to be sleep-deprived and broken when you wake up every day.

I believe it’s time to break up with busy. Deep down, I know you agree.

It’s time to break up with the burnout culture that is slowly and systematically killing us.

We strive to achieve and acquire things that we never truly wanted. We push ourselves to earn more so that we can spend more. We answer emails and all we get in return is more email. You push yourself to breaking point because your boss’s boss’s boss needs their bonus which is dependant on your targets being reached. It’s all bullshit and you know it.

Burnout culture needs to die or you will.

I’ve spent the past few years trying to understand my role in this culture of burnout and how I can decouple from it.

Here are 10 things to help you start breaking up with burnout and busy:

1. Decouple your self worth from your output. You are not your work.

2. Drop your ego and ask for help because you can't do it all yourself.

3. Choose fewer priorities. Big ones, but fewer.

4. Stop answering email compulsively. Email is someone else's to-do list for your day.

5. Exercise. Seriously, it works.

6. Sleep. SLEEP. Get some damn sleep.

7. Eat healthier food.

8. Read more.

9. Dedicate time to being bored.

10. Use social media less. Like, a lot less.

I still struggle with #10, but I’m working on it.

Which of the above are you going to start with this week? HIT REPLY and tell me, I want to hear from you.

It’s time we destroy this culture of busyness and burnout and it starts with us. Right now.

Work Life Balance is Bullshit

I hate the idea of work-life balance.

It’s bullshit.

When you try to find the perfect balance something must break.

What if instead of trying to find a perfect balance we admit that we need to rather become better at balancing?

What if the key to finding a balanced life is admitting that there is no perfect balance?

Balance: A state of equilibrium or parity characterized by cancellation of all forces by equal opposing forces.

Balance implies equilibrium. A perfect point at which everything will work out. Balance. But how do we know when we’re perfectly in balance? How do we know what to add more of or remove? When will we have reached that perfect equilibrium? How do we factor in the variables that are changing in the world around us?

Seeking balance is a dangerous tightrope to walk without a net below you.

Let’s use the seesaw as the representation for the idea of work/life balance. You have work and you have life and you must find the perfect balance between the two.

Sometimes life receives most of your attention and then your work suffers. Sometimes work gets most of your attention and then life suffers. Even labelling these things as "life" and "work" troubles me.

There is more than life and work. Each one has subcategories and verticals that need our attention. When we seek perfect equilibrium on one end, the other end suffers. We’re missing out on something over here. We're underperforming over there. This person has it all together when we don't. It’s brutal and never-ending.

We seesaw between happiness and despair. Between success and failure. Between doing too much or too little. It’s never enough. We’re always too far behind or too far ahead.

Instead of seeking equilibrium, we should rather focus on balancing and prioritising.

The problem with work/life balance is that it’s an equation with only two variables. That’s not how life works. Life is not a seesaw.

Life is actually one giant plate-balancing act.

First, we must choose which plates matter to us. Then we can put them in the air, spin them around for a bit and give them our attention. When the plate that has our attention (our priority) is spinning successfully we can focus on a new plate. When the new plate is spinning in the air we can either turn our attention back to the first plate or spin up another one.

This is life; we choose our priorities and we give them a spin.

We either choose too many priorities and the plates will fall, or we select fewer priorities and our attention can keep them in the air. Then carefully, slowly and patiently we choose another priority to spin up and keep in the air.

Stop looking for balance. Become brilliant at balancing and ruthlessly prioritising your attention.

Balance is a zero-sum equation. Something has to lose if everything isn’t in perfect equilibrium. Life is not perfect, there is no equilibrium and wishing it so won’t help you find balance.

I want to hear what you think about balance in your own life. Comment below and tell me your views. Forward this newsletter to someone struggling with the idea of work/life balance. Help them become better at balancing.

Are You Ever Really Honest?

I want you to join me in a thought experiment.

What do you think would happen if you and everyone in your life, you partner, your friends, your colleagues, your bosses, your extended family, everyone openly, honestly and without hostility spoke the truth when talking?

There is no obligation on anyone to actually do what they are asked. I just want you to consider what the world would look like if we all were more open about our goals and our needs.

Would we be happier knowing what others need? Would it be a more pleasant world to live in to know that your employee wants a raise in 4 months if they hit certain targets? Would you be angry if your child told you that they just needed 2 hours alone without you?

Could you handle the truth?

I wish this was life. I long for this kind of reality.

There is so much anxiety tied to not knowing. So much stress that goes along with the unsaid and undone.

I know it’s not easy and I understand it wont take hold overnight but I want to ask you to do something now:

Be more honest today. Just today. For one day.

Don’t be mean. Just be honest.

If someone asks you how you are, don’t lie. Tell them you are tired because you watched Netflix too late last night. If someone asks you what you’d like for lunch, tell them exactly what you’d like even if they likely can’t make it or buy it for you.

If your partner asks you what you want to do over the weekend, think about it and tell them.

That’s it. That’s all I want from you today. One day of increased honesty.

Perhaps you’ll tell you boss exactly what you want out of the next 12 months of work. Perhaps you’ll tell your lover exactly what you want in bed tonight. Perhaps you’ll tell your family that you love them and really mean it. Perhaps you wont have the guts to be honest. I don’t know. But I want to find out.

Comment on this article when your day of honesty is over and tell me about it. What did people say? What did people think? How did they react? How did you feel? Was it easy or difficult to do?

After one day of honesty, tell me if you’d do it again.

One of my Nicisms that I live by is: Be honest if possible.

It’s not always the best idea to be honest, I get that. But when it’s possible you should choose to be honest.

I think the world needs a bit more transparency, openness and honesty when it comes to our communication. I want to decipher less and serve more. I want to be baffled less and useful more. I want more honesty.

How about you?

Rebelion and curiosity go hand in hand - Greig Jansen

Greig is the founder of PURA Soda and in this episode, we discuss curiosity as a matter of nature or nurture, how creating the future is the best way to predict it, how curiosity is like a muscle, once you start you get better at it and become more curious about more things and how PURA pushes a curious corporate culture.

Other topics we cover and quotes from Greig:

Greig discusses the idea of living in continuous discontent.

How he conducted market research - started with family and friends.

How the sporty fraternity wanted a healthier drink alternative.

His curiosity is hereditary and is also a result of the environment he was brought up in.

We discuss the Created Future - The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.

Greig believes that rebellion and curiosity go hand in hand.

“You need processes and procedures in place to accommodate for growth, that could kill curiosity if you're not careful.”

"Curiosity is like a muscle, once you start you get better at it and become more curious about more things."

As a startup having created a new product, curiosity is built into his business.

"Widen your network and widen your curiosity"

"Failure is simply a previous attempt at success"