Exhale

I have to say that I've been chasing my tail a bit and running around like a headless chicken since the start of the month. And all because of my ambition, which makes it challenging for me to prioritise all the things that I want to work on. Plus - I really don't always have a great relationship with speed either, which tends to make my experience in any given situation tougher than it needs to be at times. Ambition is hard work. Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by [sunchannelmusic][3].

I want to run 2000km in 2016 and after a 3-week break due to illness, I'm behind schedule. So it's going to be tough to reach that milestone. That said, I'm not even sure why 2000km is even that important. Is it more important than 1900km? Or 1850km? In thinking through this, I realised that I'm not always super-clear with myself about why I sometimes set specific goals. I can remember feeling so much stress, anxiety and impatience before Conversio initially reached $1m ARR, then $100k MRR and again $125k MRR. The truth was that reaching those exact milestones brought a lot of relief and pride, but didn't materially change anything. Nothing changes when MRR increases from $99k to $100k, yet $100k MRR is a goal and milestone that every new SaaS founder fanatically aspires to reach. I certainly did. It just now feels like these goals and milestones are a little superficial and generic. It's like they're the status quo and I'm pursuing them blindly. Or the numbers should look better when rounded to the nearest hundred. I don't know. What I do know is that it's probably a much better exercise when I can think through these goals in a different way. Where reaching a goal or milestone should be about what happens after that: what opportunities can I pursue when I get to that goal or what decisions would I make then that I can't make now? Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by [sunchannelmusic][3].

My perception is that most people know me due to my two successes: WooThemes and now Conversio. I also suspect that most people don't know about all of my failures: Maiden League Records, Akkerliefies, The Cellar, Radiiate V1, Lunchbox, Radiiate V2, CFOh!, Radiiate V3 and PublicBeta. This list doesn't even include all of the ideas that were only ever ideas. Or the acquisitions I've explored in the past. The reason people don't know this, is because we don't know what's happening behind the scenes of others' lives and businesses. We have extreme survivorship bias, where we generally only see the good stuff and we aren't aware of all the other things that another individual or company is experiencing as part of their journeys. We don't know about all of the near-misses, challenges, threats. Yet we always compare ourselves to our perception of others' journeys. Read this article I referenced in this episode: "We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward" Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

Whenever someone rhetorically asks "What's the meaning of life?", I have a wry smile, because it always seems like such a loaded, unanswerable question. Yet when I look at my life, I've always had a very clear tactic for answering that question: I've used the work I do as a way to find purpose and meaning in my life. Whilst this has not been totally misguided, I get the sense that I attached a little too much weight to the purpose and meaning I was really deriving from my work alone. In fact, today I feel that it would be a gross understatement of my own value or worth if I reduced my purpose in life down to only relate to the work I do. Instead I'm taking a little more holistic approach to answering this question. And I'm even okay with not having a definitive answer either. As a modern society, do we perhaps try engineer too much purpose and meaning from the work we do or the things we produce and create? I definitely think so. Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

I had an uncomfortable realisation earlier. The only minority that I've ever been part of, has been one of privilege. When I initially realised that, I was totally overwhelmed. Not in a way that I felt bad about myself or what I've done in my life thus far. But it I was suddenly very aware that I could and should be doing much more to just love more. Be more inclusive. Promote and enable unity. An idea that has been very prominent in my life in recent months is one of having an impact. One of my primary pursuits of that impact has been how I've tried to change my work and business around to be family- or life-first. Today I just feel that I have a responsibility to pursuit that with even more fervour. I have an opportunity to make an impact. Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

Earlier this week, we rebranded and relaunched Receiptful as Conversio. This was ultimately a project that represented our own evolution and what we had learnt about ourselves in the last 2 years since we first launched. See... In those two years, we had done quite a few things that weren't necessarily planned. We launched as a bootstrapped company with a paid-only product then switched to a freemium-only model, which meant raising $500k in a seed round all before we even had a feature set for which we could charge. And then we came to a fork in the road whilst raising our next round of funding, where the question was simple: Whose game do we want to play? That was a year ago today and I'm incredibly proud with the decisions we've made since then, because they've all been about doubling down on who we are. Our rebrand was just a practical manifestation of the mindsets and culture that we had grown in the last year. It was almost as if the way we were communicating our business and ourselves to the world hadn't yet caught up with who we were already. I don't think we're where we want to be just yet, but as a team, we have greater freedom today than at any stage previously in our journey. I feel that freedom so intimately every day. And it's growing too. And this is at least partly down to our decision of playing our game, where we accept that we can't change external things, but where we can make our own rules, we will do that. It means being clear about who we are and why we do things. It means we have the opportunity to play a game, so why would we play someone's game with their made-up rules? Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

This past Sunday I had entered to race in my first triathlon. After a couple of weeks of hard training, I felt that I was prepared and was excited to take part in my first race. But I only swam for 100m before I quit the race. I did not finish. In reliving this experience in the last couple of days, I recognised that there was a major gap between my expectation for the race and the ultimate reality of my experience. The latter was influenced by some external factors beyond my control and it meant that I didn't have the race or experience that I had expected or for which I had hoped and trained. This was a tough experience for me, because I work hard to achieve my goals. And when reality doesn't meet those goals, I often feel shitty. I am however steadily unlearning that behaviour and have started a new practice of merely being aware of both my expectations and reality, without feeling the need to react in any way. Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

We have two young boys (5 & 2) in the house and I can positively say that their random sleeping and (subsequent) morning routines has made it really hard for me to stick to my own morning work routines. This has been especially hard on me, because I'm great in the mornings and have developed my morning routines for a very long time. As soon as I stopped clenching onto my morning routines and accepted the randomness that kids bring, my mornings became profoundly better. And in this sense, slower has been better. My mornings now includes exclusive focus on family time, meditation, journaling and exercise. All before I actually start my productive work for the day, which now happens at 9:30am or 10am on most days. Gone are the mornings where everything feels rushed and where my expectations for my mornings just didn't match the reality. The slower mornings has also really made an impact on how I experience the rest of my day. In fact, I now know that if I start my morning slowly, I'm going to have a good day. Check out the 5 Minute Journal that I mention in this episode. Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

I started Exhale by sharing my very first exhale experience when I realised that my life - and especially my work / business - felt like I was pushing a rock up the hill. That sensation and the fact that I had become unhappy and tired in doing so, was my obstacle. Where I am today, I'd very much like to avoid that sensation of feeling I have to persist and persevere with something that isn't enjoyable, isn't working and likely making me unhealthy (mentally, emotionally and / or physically). Instead I've tried to be more aware of when obstacles do pop up and having a perspective about that. I've mostly stopped trying to overcome obstacles and challenges, and have tried to find alternative routes to get to where I'd like to go. Read The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

We often hear about why work/life balance is important, how a few people are successful at achieving it (survivorship bias much?) and mostly how the majority of the world just struggles with this. I used to be that hamster on that wheel too. In February this year, I decided that I really wanted to run my first marathon this year. That goal soon become my primary goal for the year and helped reshaped my perspective on how I view work and life. My training for my marathon became the first thing on my daily and weekly calendar; my work just had to adapt to that. I didn't work any less than I did before, but I was optimising for something within which I had found purpose: running my marathon. This played into one of the discussions that we keep having at Receiptful, which is how we can be "family-first" (which may mean different things to different people), where the basic idea is that our work needs to adapt to our lives. And not always the other way around. All of this has lead me to come to the perspective that it's not about life and / or work. It doesn't have to be polar opposites. Instead everything we do is just part of life itself. Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

When I left WooThemes, one of my goals was that I wanted to create a SaaS company, because I wanted to have the challenge of hacking the recurring revenue growth curve. Inspired very much by "the startup way of thinking", growth hacking the shit out of a business just held such great attraction to me. Until I got to the point where I was trying to hack growth. And I struggled to do that. Which made me feel like shit and sometimes even made me feel ashamed that I couldn't report better metrics to Receiptful shareholders. So I typed up a 2000-word rant about growth hacking, shared it with a friend for feedback and as I listened to his suggested tweaks, I realised that I didn't feel as strongly about the article anymore. Plus I had no desire to actually publish it. It didn't however spark a realisation months later when I started learning about this idea of having a soft focus in my meditation. This idea that to find one's natural flow in the universe, we can't be too rigid in our focus. Since then Receiptful has continued to grow, but in a way more random way. Sometimes faster than expected and sometimes slower. And mostly we can't even pinpoint where that growth has come from. Having a softer focus on all of this though, has helped me avoid that sensation where it feels like I'm pushing a rock up the hill every day. ;) Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

The path I took to create this episode - and maybe the podcast as whole, but to a lesser extent - might have a bunch of different names: freestyling, intuitive and maybe slightly impulsive. The one thing that stands out to be though is the fact that this is authentic and represents me in this moment. In this episode, I introduce the start of a new chapter in my journey, where I'd like to explore and share a few other, non-obvious or unexpected perspectives through which we could consider life and business. I share a little bit about how I realised a couple of months ago that my experience of being an entrepreneur and building a business felt like I was constantly pushing a rock up a hill. And when I did realise that, I just felt tired. But in the moment of realising that, I also learnt a new experience, which is the sensation of the exhale and becoming aware of just how I felt in that moment. That experience has since made me very curious in how I can "get to the exhale" in other situations or experiences in my life or business. Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.