Fuck Luck
I just re-read an announcement post I drafted about 3 months ago to launch a business I had been building for 18 months.
Back in Aug 2019, I started work on something I thought had legs. One of those things you day dream about over a cold beer sat in the sun when anything is possible. Now I don’t know about you, but I have had hundreds of these, mostly they end up lasting as long as the beer I’m drinking. Why ? For the largest part of my adult life, I was an employee. It was easy to sit there and fantasise, work it all out in my head, pat myself on the back at how clever I was and move on. Safe in the knowledge my holiday would soon be over, and I’d go back to London to earn a decent wage in a job I loved, and I’d never really need to put myself to that test.
Then in 2018 I lost that job, on my birthday. This was two weeks after delivering one of the highlight moments of my career to that point. Redundant. Have you ever thought about that word’s meaning?…. “not or no longer needed or useful; superfluous.” Now don’t give up on me just yet, this isn’t going to be one of ‘those’ posts. I ended up taking a pretty cliché path from there for a while - drank a lot, partied a lot, assumed I’d be back in the saddle soon enough and waited for the world to come find me. It didn’t. So I tried looking. Still nothing.
So once again I was back on that deck chair. No chance to double bluff myself now, I had no job to go back to, so what next? Well, as you can see from some of the examples on this website, I considered what I was good at, and made stuff happen. I rebuilt a network of incredible clients and regained confidence from every small win, no longer guaranteed anything. Nothing life changing, but I was learning again, and was meeting new people. I was suddenly being judged and rewarded by people I’d just met, not people I’d worked with for 20 years. It was cool, but it wasn’t enough, I wanted more than that.
So I started building something for myself, took one of those deck chair ideas, and actually started doing it. Long story short, I grafted my way to £150k investment into what on paper was a really exciting opportunity, and I was proud that I did it all on my own. I missed working with people, and having bright minds around me to help me stop and check my own plans, evolve them and improve them. But I was learning, and I made it work. One day I’ll get those people back in my life. So there I was, 3 months before an event date, everything setup, ready to roll. And then…..March 2020, once again on my birthday, the two year anniversary to the fucking day of my redundancy, and covid hit. Scuppered, investment gone , and plan dead. On top of that I lost every paid retainer contract I had built up over the past year in a fortnight, and also every event I was due to work on for the rest of 2020.
Undeterred, I resurrected my business in Sept 2020, in the hope we had seen the worst of the pandemic and by March 2021 I’d be back on track with the big idea. For a while it looked like it might actually work out.
So back to the beginning of the blog. I wrote the post I had avoided for over a year, and was about to put myself out there publicly in a way I had been scared to do as it meant telling the world my plans, and making it real. However, here we are again, 2021 is cancelled. The post remains in my drafts and whilst some people might move on, I’m doubling down on 2022.
Fuck Luck. I’ll only share the title of that post, a quote by Michael Jordan….“SOME PEOPLE WANT IT TO HAPPEN, SOME WISH IT WOULD HAPPEN, OTHERS MAKE IT HAPPEN” …. I’m hoping the rest of the drafted post will come in handy later this year. Stay tuned, you’ll be the first to know.
In the meantime, I’ve finally built this website as a showcase of the work I have done, and want to do more of. I fully intend to build my own business opportunities, as well as deliver for those who place their trust in me as a consultant. If you’re reading this and fancy a chat, send me a note, I’m still not very good at pricing my work up, so you’ll get a good deal.
