Things Have A Funny Way Of Working Out For The Best

The wait will be worth it

This feels more like a hopeful wish than something I really believe at this moment in time. Today we found out that our supplier doesn’t stock what we desire from them; they’ll have to make it to order. That’s not so bad, it means less people are using what we’re using, we’ll be unique, just like we hoped.

“Supplier people, how long will it take for you to make it for us then?”

“Mid to late July.”

“Mid to late July? 4 months?!”

Four god-damn months. Four late Winter to Mid-Summer months. I shit on you Spring. The days warm up, the people get happy and look forward to their summer travels. The rabbits start humping. The world will be happy. All except this fucking conejo. Left in his burrow wanking, wishing and wasting the time away.

Everything else is set up to go. Id they only stocked the ones we wanted we’d be ready to go so soon and all this time spent dreaming and planning and hoping and wishing would finally be turned into something real. Real action. Finally building my future, my dreams, for real. Not just in my scarecrow haired noggin.

Maybe this is a good thing? The ideal release time for the product we’re making is September/ October and this does coincide perfectly with that. That’s it. It’s a sign from the universe. We were rushing ahead faster than we should have been and must slow down further, be even more considered. There are lessons to be learnt before then. Our will is being tested. It shouldn’t be so easy to achieve what we desire, we must first prove how much we really want it. The process must be long and drawn out. The tension must build. Our heads, hearts and souls must explode with desire, dirt and desperation. Is it a case of petulant impatience? Or thoughtful ambition? Do I sound spiritual? Or like a god-foresaken theist, desperate for answers where perhaps there are none? Either way, if it serves a purpose and doesn’t infringe upon others, I’ll take it. The idea of signs and a reason for everything is comforting and I am a Paulo Coelho Fan. I’ll take in as much of my surroundings as I can and continue to follow my gut, instinct, that feeling you can’t explain. It doesn’t always lead me where I hoped, but it’s always led me to something I needed to learn. And I’m happy where it’s taken me to now.

We could stick to our previous schedule, but we’d have to compromise on quality. It’d save us a few thousand pounds and a lot of headaches in doing so. But no, that’s not us. We know what we want to make and we won’t compromise on that. We’re doing it, and we’re going to do it to the best of our capabilities.

So what now? Well, we could still launch as before, build our email list and raise awareness for the main product launch with a range of fringe products we had planned anyway. That’s an option, one that might stave off insanity from my impatient-to-get-going skull floater.

Skull Floater

That would still leave me plenty enough time to write that screenplay I mean to write one day. I certainly can’t spend all my mental energy on the business for an extra 4 months with nothing productive to do about it. That would be mental suicide. We have a one year pay back holiday from the loan we’re taking to start the company. (Three times the loan we initially expected, ouch..no pressure). This leaves my own bank account in a somewhat healthier state for a while. Although with an extra 4 months to wait before any possible earnings, I may have to take a months summer work teaching English again. And maybe a cheap break away somewhere too, Madrid, or the beach. Or both if things were really cheap. I still need to replace my dog chewed passport that was chewed before I even had chance to pick the envelope off the door mat containing the passport that was replacing the the emergency passport I’d used previously to get back from Madrid that I needed to replace my stolen passport from a local feria in a small pueblo in Segovia. I am suffering from spending too much time indoors. I do need to get out and see things. Do things. I underestimate just how much I’m sacrificing in order to start a business, in the short term: Time & Money. My two favourite and most valuable commodities. I’m playing the long game.

What is for sure is that I’m going to have to find something to do for the next four months. Something productive, active. Movies, brains and my imagination are all great, but four (more) months of that doesn’t fit me too well. Something that doesn’t leave me in the red and, sometime after the four months are up, I hope to be able to connect the dots and see how things really did work out for the best, and be thankful for the time spent on the sidelines, watching others live their lives. I’ve always preferred playing football to watching it. I’m an awful spectator.

I’m doing what feels to me to be right. That, I really do believe, is the only way to be happy in the long term. It’s really true that nothing is ever completely straight forward. You don’t follow a perfectly linear path. Sometime you are forced to take steps backwards. Sometimes you go off track, you can’t avoid it but, with a centering vision of where you want to go and how you want your life to be, you can’t help but keep coming back to it and moving forward. And that’s worth everything, despite taking longer to get there than you had imagined.

Are you the luckiest or unluckiest person in the world?

You’re at the bank, queuing up to pay in some cash when two men walk in but you can only see their mouths and eyes; they’re wearing balaclavas. They run up to the cash register and ask the cashier to fill their bags with cash. The cashier obliges and they leave running with a sack full of cash each. As they are leaving, one turns and without looking fires a shot. Of everyone in the room the bullet hits you. It hurts, but it’s not fatal. It has hit you in the arm.

At that moment in time, are you the luckiest, or unluckiest person in the world?

Apparently, how you answer this question is hugely important in determining your mind set in life and hugely affects your happiness and levels of success. The answers tend to be split 50:50. Which one are you?

The Dreamer’s Fears: Doing What I Want With My Life.

Good Life Project

“Don’t confuse genuine peace of mind with the passing lack of angst that follows the demise of a dream but precedes a mounting wave of regret.”

A job is so appealing because there is very little risk involved. You turn up, fulfil a simple set of predetermined criteria and you definitely have money in your account at the end of the month. No-one belittles you or tells you “you can’t get a job.” It’s also much harder to fail when there is a strict set of guidelines telling you what you can and can not do and a boss who takes responsibility anything outside your defined role and will tell you what to do when unsure.

You are told when to go to work, when to leave, what to do whilst you are there and how to do it. Everything is secure and defined and there is little room for judgement, failure or loss. If you play by the rules well, maybe you’ll be the lucky one and someone can tell you that you can now follow a new set of more esteemed criteria with more money and responsibility as a reward. This may or may not be fine for most people, I’m not going to discuss or judge people’s life choices, we are only responsible for our own and should be free to make them as we please, but the idea of being told what to do, when to do it, how to do it and having to wait for someone else to tell me when I can move a step up a ladder and can earn X amount of money doesn’t appeal to me. I’m in control of my life, the good and the bad and would not swap the freedom of choice in exchange for a steady, limited but reliable amount of money into my account each month. Life really is too short to give someone else control over 40 hours+ of your week in which you must do, in many cases, not all, work you don’t enjoy. Not to mention being told when and when you can or can not go on holiday, how to dress and how you must act. But this is the industrial way. It’s necessary to have a well oiled machine of compliant workers to maximise productivity and minimise costs. The problem for me is that it seems in an unfair exchange:

Humanity, Freedom and the Bulk of your Time for Compliance and steady pay.

Cog In The Machine

I understand the desire for security and to have money coming in now and to have the responsibility of finding what to do and how to do it taken off your shoulders. Someone else tells you what to do, easy.

It is becoming more and more evident that the key to becoming a successful entrepreneur is to develop your mindset. To see things clearly, the whole picture, to make a decision and run with it, not fearlessly, not in the absence of anxiety, instead learning to live with the fear and anxiety and understanding where it comes from and why. When you attempt anything great you will come up against resistance. Resistance from others, resistance from a lack of resources and resistance from people you need to help you create what you’re trying to create but the only fatal resistance, the only resistance that really ever stops you from doing what you want with your life? That’d be your mind and what you allow it to think.

I shouldn’t do this because I feel guilty that it might make my friends and family feel bad that I want to make different life choices than them, they may resent me for wanting to do something outside of the norm, for wanting more.

I shouldn’t do this because It’s selfish, who am I to want, hope and expect more from life?

I shouldn’t do this because I’m not good enough, I don’t know all the people I need to know, I’m too young.

If your family and friends want the best for you, they won’t stop you, if they don’t want the best for you, you shouldn’t waste your time caring for them.

It’s not selfish to want to live a good life. That’s a stick people use to beat you with to keep you in line. It’s not selfish nor greedy. It’s not ‘normal’ to get a job, it’s an industrialised idea that’s around 200 years old. In turbulence you always put on your air supply before you’re children’s. This way you both survive, you can’t help anyone else in your life if you can’t look after your own life properly.

Richard Branson didn’t know everything when he started and still doesn’t now. You don’t have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great.

These fears, this resistance I personally have seen and conquered. So what are my fears now?

• That our products don’t sell.
• That our story, our USP, doesn’t resonate.
• That we fear being ourselves and instead create something average, safer, that no-one will neither love nor hate.
• That Arya eats the cat shit from the cat litter tray and licks me on the mouth. Seriously, she does eat that nasty shit.

That’s it. No-one likes us so our (great) products don’t sell and I’ve lost all my money, I’m in debt and have to get a job to pay that back before I can ever dream of starting another business again. To be accountable to myself for wanting more and falling flat on my face.

I believe in today’s world, more and more people want to be human again. They want products they care about by companies with a message and story they can relate to. This is far less likely to lead to mass, industrialised, billion pound profits, but will connect with people, will be enjoyable to create and will still, with any luck, make me rich and allow me to live the life I choose, on my own terms.

My dream job isn’t a job at all. I want to create, connect, control and have the freedom to live as I please, enjoy what I do and make enough money to allow me to do that. I want a life of projects, many projects.

The actual point of this post comes from the past week or so of moving the product forward, meeting people in London. Older, experienced people who know a lot more than us and work with famous, huge, established brands. We’re just 2 young dreamers, but it didn’t feel like that at all. For the first time possibly ever, I felt that my actions were in accordance with my views and beliefs. It wasn’t an ecstatic, jumping for joy occasion, it just felt right, peaceful. I no longer internalised everything, I wasn’t inside my head. I was genuinely in a 5 day daze, just doing and being, taking everything in. It’s how I felt during my first trip to Madrid. I felt I was on my the way to becoming the man I wish to be and that felt peaceful, I felt fearless. I had a purpose, my purpose was truly in-line with who I am and what I believe, and it was no longer intimidating to meet experienced people nor did it concern me in the slightest what they thought of the 2 young upstarts. I was doing what I wanted with my life. And that is priceless.

P.S. The Living Creed at the top is from Jonathon Fields Good Life Project which has a lot of great, 45 minutes, deep, beyond the surface, living, learning, loving, fearing, video conversations with people doing great things with their lives. It’s really worth checking out. One can learn and relate a lot.

A Weekend In London: Business & Pleasure

London Shard Skyline at Twilight

Friday 1st of March 10:30am

We had a meeting arranged for 2pm with manufacturers to discuss the production of samples, numbers, what we needed to provide, what they could help us with, see the production line and get to know each other, so I boarded the train at Stowmarket for the 1 hour and 20 minute journey to London Liverpool Street, when my brother rang me to let me know he blew his uni interview at Leeds, his 1st choice uni. 6 years of army life and taking a non-conventional route to uni has knocked his confidence and he went in with a negative mind frame; that he wasn’t good enough for Leeds, which is ridiculous. He’s always been smart, he can write (wants to study literature) has more life experience and really, truly wants to enjoy uni life. It’s not just ‘the next logical step after school,’ it’s something he wants. He was feeling down and, against my advice of staying for the open day to see how wasn’t out of place there, he decided to come home early, possibly sulk, and probably drink.

Matt got on the train at Ipswich and we spent the next hour going through CAD designs and questions we needed answers to. We went directly to Maida Vale to drop off our bags at the flat we AirBnB‘d, ironed our shirts and headed straight out to the meeting. It could not have gone much better. We had a lot of questions answered, they can help us with a lot of the sourcing and we now have an entirely clear and focussed path and time scale from which to work towards. We looked around the production line and the future was laid out before us. We left feeling good.

We went directly to Old Street, to the google campus, for a TEDx talk which was a 90 minute video of the recent TED 2013 conference held last Wednesday. The talks were all interesting but Amanda Palmer’s really struck a chord with me. I’m not going to link it, so youtube it if you wish to see it, it’s worth 15 minutes of your time. At about 8pm we left the campus and headed, unknowingly, towards Liverpool Street (we were just following the gherkin). We had a mojito in a nice, classy 3 story club there and as we entered a girl fell down the stairs and dropped her drink. It was barely 8pm. After work Fridays in the city must be fun. So shocked, she got up before we had the balls to not feel her embarrassment and help her up. I still feel bad about that. One of the waitresses inside can only be described as every man’s dream. Every man’s, in her little black work outfit. Beautiful feminine face, olive skin, thick brunette hair and a great body. Proust said to leave pretty women for men with no imagination. He hadn’t seen this lady.

I’d been wearing a straw fedora type hat all afternoon and an attractive brunette walked over, again in a little black dress, and offered “I’ll let you be in a photo with me if you let me wear your hat in the photo.” It came across as arrogant and not charming. I didn’t like her accent either, but I obliged to the photo, she was attractive after all. Then came the killer blow “why are you wearing your hat inside?” I replied that it was easier to wear than to carry as I had a drink in one hand and my blazer in the other. I don’t know if she just didn’t know what to say, but I didn’t like how this girl spoke; both her words and way of speaking. We finished our drinks, took one more longing look at the pretty waitress and left for Leicester Square.  In leicester Square we had one drink, then another, then 4 more and headed to the penthouse which, as a bar, I love. Good drinks, great 180 degree views of the London skyline towards the city and parliament. As a club however, I do not like it. £20 entry well wasted. We bought a noodle stop, 2 toppings, and took a £20 taxi back to Maida Vale.

Saturday we slept in late and woke up to a good start-up scene conversation with Arun, our host and got to know all about his entrepreneurial background and current work as app developer and mentor for seeders and other groups and organisations. We went for a 4 o’clock breakfast of sushi and Moroccan mint green tea at Toast around Little Venice before tubing it over to Mayfair to check out some clothes around Jermyn Street and Saville Row: a man must aspire to something. Never have I seen so many Bentleys in one place.

Back at Maida Vale we stopped off at an off license to buy Coronas and Magners and I gave the homeless man outside a few pounds and wished him a goodnight and he was appreciative of it.

3 hours of music and beer/ cider later and we took the tube to Covent Garden where Matt’s escapades began. This is what I imagine must have been going through his head: “Is that a girl? Does she have a pulse?”

The first two were women in their early thirties. Not attractive and not particularly interesting to talk to. We ended up going to the a live band underground bar/club place called roadhouse. The boys behind us in the queue were kicked out – ‘mixed crowd entry only.’ Men were not allowed in without female company. We went inside after the girls, left them and headed to the bar and to Mexico; Tequila and Sol. Matt, who doesn’t like tequila, ordered 2 more shots another beer each before bouncing over to the other side where he introduced me to 2 Hungarian girls he had found in the 10 seconds it took him to cross the bar. They were both nice girls, good to talk to, quite interesting but not attractive even after the tequilas. Maybe that hadn’t kicked in yet. I motioned to leave and we moved along and met 3 attractive girls from Surrey: A pretty hat wearing blonde – who is the most similar girl to Jessa from Girls I will ever meet, just like her, only less Daddy issues I’m assuming – an upfront, confusing, but also pretty brunette and an equally pretty but too-tall-for-me brown girl. We paid for an expensive round of drinks but by this time I do not know what they were. 7 hours of beer and tequila shots later, along with shouting over the music for the last hour, or two, I’m really not sure started leaving me with a croaky voice which the brunette picked up on “haha you have a frog in your throat” and she happily pointed it out every time I croaked a little. The girls were nice, we were getting along well, I think. They asked us to dance but Matt declined. This is where his decisions in the night regarding the girls became questionable. I went to dance and the tall one took my hand and we span each other round a few times. I’m not sure how long we danced for but we went back to the bar for another round and my tequila had loosened my tongue. I told the brunette “I don’t know if I love you or hate you.” I imagine this was at the point she asked me if I like blondes. She cheered when I said not particularly, I prefer brunettes, before she then went on to jokingly ,I-tell-myself, insult me again. I could not read this girl. Matt and the hat-wearing-wearing blonde were getting on well by this point and the lights went on. I met a cute blonde at the bar on the way out, half-German half-English but raised in Germany and it turns out she was only 18 so I left that. The brunette asked if my ‘friend’ was coming with us.

We left Roadhouse and the girls wanted to go to a casino in Leicester Square so we all hopped in a taxi and went. It must have been easily 4am by this time.

We’d spent far too much the last 2 nights so I was not gambling. Matt wasn’t either, he stood by the TV watching UFC for some odd reason and I stayed speaking to the blonde and brunette as the tall one sat at a table speaking to some little asian guy. Tall girl turned and told me brunette girl had a Chinese boyfriend. Brunette said it was true, I’m not sure if they were joking or not. At 5am we left for noodles again but it was shut. We’d started to lose the girls by this point, they’d started walking ahead as we were looking for food. I was in no mood atto chase girls with an empty belly at 5am.

We went to the same taxi as the night before but this time they told Matt that they wanted £35 for the journey. I said no, you’ll take £20 or nothing. They took the £20.

We didn’t wake up until around 3pm on Sunday, but not too worse for wear. Matt was annoyed with how he left things, watching UFC and he tried searching for them in photos but neither of us could remember any of their names. You may have been wondering why I referred to them as ‘the blonde,’ ‘the brunette’ and ‘the tall one.’

We went back to Toast, this time for Camomile Citrus tea a sushi pack and Spanish toast with Serrano ham. Perfect, healthy day-after food. I’d love to set up a tea shop. Nice teas and seasonal, tasty food.

We then went to Camden to meet Simon, a video guy currently working on a Fox TV show called Man-Up and has previously worked for Ridley Scott’s production company. The quote for the video was more than we hoped but he knows his stuff and we could create something really amazing and that excites me. Will have to re-jig the finances a little maybe. Camden is a fun place. The first pub was playing metal music so we left and settled in one playing Michael Jackson song and they played 7 or 8 of his songs in a row and that makes me happy.

Sunday transport services out of London to the east are appalling. A long underground journey to Newbury Park followed by a bus to Ingatestone followed by finally an hour long train Journey and I was back. The train journey flew by as I’d paid for the ‘free for a small fee’ Greater Anglian Wifi offered on the train. Free, for a small fee, is not free at all.

As I left the train to walk home, 11pm at night, a cat came from the bushes and I was scared. But it was a nice cat. Cat didn’t attack me, cat wanted affection and I obliged and cat jumped on his hinds legs to get to my hand quicker each time and clawed at my leg to rub cat’s head on my briefcase. 2 minutes of stroking and I left, daydreaming of wanting to set up an animal shelter where all the animals we can fit in live happily, in open spaces and it’s self sustaining, no donations needed and the idea spreads and there is one of these in every county in every country.

I got home and saw Jordan, my brother. He’d had friends round the night before. The kitchen was a mess and beer bottles were left laying around. I was too tired to clear up.

I woke up this morning and my body was tired from the rest after all the walking and dancing done over the previous 3 days.

Today we spoke to our business mentor and have arranged a sit down, spoke to the start-up loans company and the loan will take 3 weeks after final application to have the money in our business account. We spoke to a supplier who is coming down to see us from Yorkshire on Monday and tomorrow we are going back to Mayfair to meet an agent of our principal supplier. Shit’s getting real and that’s exciting. DO-NOT-ASK-YOURSELF-WHAT-IF-THIS-DOESN’T-WORK-BECAUSE-IT-WILL-ONLY-DRIVE-YOU-INSANE-AND-LET-FEAR-RUIN-YOU. That’s a note to self. Sorry for shouting.

This is a marathon post after a week without writing. A splurge. Thank you if you managed to read it all.

P.s – Nathaniel received an offer for Leeds this morning. He didn’t fuck up the interview after all. What a dramatic tosser.