Move
Move
Training's over

Ambition

Since I was 15, one of my ambitions has been to be an entrepreneur. I used to joke with my dad about buying him a nice boat one day.

Life so far has been predominantly about education, and that stage is over now. I’m walking away from what I've come to see as a lifestyle and career that has too many contradictions, it doesn't make sense to live like this. Ultimately I want to develop multiple sources of passive income. I want to create.

Summer 2017

The last few months have been intense, with some weeks leaving me feeling ambitious and energetic, and others feeling anxious and overwhelmed. I need to get better at defining a goal, taking the quickest path there, and ignoring interesting distractions.

Ritsya is brave enough and imaginative enough to force me to think big and consider how to live a better life. My biggest fear is that I screw it up, shooting myself in the foot and Ritsya and my daughter also. We were headed safely to an unremarkable existence and it would be terrible to swap that for something worse. That won't happen.

I know that I make better decisions and produce my best work under pressure, I thrive when I'm perceived as an underdog. I need to accept this without using it as a reason to be foolish. Whilst I don’t have a clear plan, or direction, or goal, (I have many of them) I’ve got skills and I want to see what I can make. I’ll never do my best work, using my most productive combination of skills and experiences, if I’m a cog in someone else's machine.

It’s safer being an employee than self-employed. I guess the price of removing self-employment risks is the difference between the value you generate for your employer and what you’re paid. I think those risks are overpriced, and most people are more capable than they realise. Sometimes you have to walk into a situation to find out how to make the most of it. And sometimes you have to leave a place in order to gain perspective.

Autumn 2016

Last year my boss gave me some advice that was supposed to be encouraging. I’d requested to reduce my involvement with some stuff that was unrelated to my job so that I could contribute more to my team and still maintain some semblance of a work/life balance.

My boss was pretty clear that reducing my involvement in the extra stuff would not be possible. During our conversation he advised me not to worry about how much I contributed to the team because “the work will get done anyway”. This was meant to be encouraging, but instead removed any conviction that the work I did was important.