Look at that face *This is a reprint of a classic blog I wrote in November 2019, not long after I’d started my first start-up A/ One bite at a time of course… I love this ridiculous joke (not just because it entertains my nephews) but because underneath it lies the simplest of truths; sometimes if we only […]
Not everything goes according to plan when you run a small business Who doesn’t love a bank holiday? When you are an employee, it’s basically like a free day-off but, when you run your own start-up, bank holidays are quite a weird sensation. As a start-up founder, you feel a bit guilty taking a day-off but, even […]
That genie looks awfully familiar About 20 years ago I remember reading about the Stockdale Paradox in the book Good To Great. Based around the mantra; “This too shall pass” and the ability to confront brutal facts, it was highlighted as a great technique for dealing with uncertainty and challenging times. Initially I thought this was a […]
Anyone for a kiss? How much on an average day do you spend thinking about your tongue? 10 seconds? 1 minute maybe? 5 mins max? I suspect I go whole days never even thinking about it. Well this week, it was occupying my thoughts 99% of the time. Why? Last weekend I fell ill and caught a virus that caused […]
Your relationship to food and exercise is an often-forgotten part of running a small business and this has massive implications for your weight The scales never lie I’ve never been a skinny person. As a kid, I was what would politely be called “cuddly”. At my peak I must have weighed close to 120kg and had a 46 […]
How to get teams to gel quickly — harsh lessons from holidays with loose connections that holds the answer If only there was more love in teams and that everyone was more nice “There are 8 of us all nominally at the same level and we’re all senior but it is a total car crash. Nobody trusts each other […]
This is all of us chasing the moon [This is a version of an article originally written for The Portfolio Collective about portfolio careers] It’s arguably harder than ever to stand out in the modern world; not only does the average person consume about 74GB of information per day (the equivalent of 16 movies) but a […]
What would the movie credits of your life look like? “But do you actually know all those people”, a friend asked me as we were discussing our differing approaches to how we use LinkedIn. She’d read my recent blog all about how I treated LinkedIn as a journal and was grilling me about it — I’ve previously explained […]
Me looking wistful just after I receive a response about an outstanding proposal I love running a start-up; it ticks so many boxes for me such as: the massive improvements to my quality of life, the levels of variety it affords me, the uplift in my independence, the healthy challenge to build something from nothing, […]
Data never lies – my 10 years of dating apps “44, single and not going to have kids” There’s nothing like reading your life summarised in one sentence to really hammer home your situation. This was the killer sentence from a financial report an investment company sent me recently. They had pulled together a summary of my […]
