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Five words that rocked my world

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Five words that rocked my world

As you may, or may not know, earlier on in my entrepreneurial journey, I dealt with a pretty massive failure. The business I was running fell apart, and the impact was um, catastrophic, to say the least. That might sound like I’m being overdramatic, but trust me, it was every bit as awful as it sounds — bankruptcy, losing investors’ ( some of whom were dear friends and family) money, bad press, having to sell my house & ultimately, the loss of pretty much everything I held dear.

So yeah, it was bad.

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Thoughts on following your bliss

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Thoughts on following your bliss

Often people mistake Campbell’s words ‘Follow your bliss’ to mean that you should just do the fun stuff. But in reality, the fun stuff and the stuff that lights you up can look quite different. Don’t get me wrong, I’m having a great time, but following your bliss is not always the easiest option. It is, quite often, the scariest option. The option that requires immense courage.

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Here’s how I learned the importance of brand clarity (Note: It ain’t pretty)

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Here’s how I learned the importance of brand clarity (Note: It ain’t pretty)

I remember sitting in a meeting one day, with the event crew, looking around the room thinking ‘I don’t even know half these people. They don’t know me. I’m working on an event I don’t even recognise and building something that doesn’t resonate with our brand whatsoever’. We’d gone from running award-winning boutique eco surf music festivals to producing 15,000 capacity shows with commercial lineups & massive scale infrastructure that was about as far away from ‘intimate’ as you could get.

It felt like a runaway train. Like we were too far down the track to do anything but push on.

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Reflecting in Indonesia: 5 business lessons from the last 5 months

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Reflecting in Indonesia: 5 business lessons from the last 5 months

So I’m sitting here at a surf camp in the middle of the jungle in Java. My arms are aching from this morning’s surf, my belly is full of the banana pancakes I had at breakfast and I’m hanging out with a super nice bunch of surfers from all over the planet.

In short, life is pretty damned good right now. Days like these make me wanna press pause. Because seriously? This is as good as it gets.

The tide is too low to surf right now so we’re all kicking back and soaking this awesomeness in.

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The one thing that is amplifying your problems…. and what to do about it

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The one thing that is amplifying your problems…. and what to do about it

This little gem of wisdom came from Lucy, a friend in the live events industry. I’ll always remember the day she told me about it. She was working as our event manager, and we’d just run a kick-ass festival.

It was the day after show day, when the adrenaline buzz has worn off and you’re left with an overwhelming sense of exhaustion, mentally & physically. We were eating lunch and talking about the event. I was questioning everything… Was it good enough? Did anyone even like it? Maybe we could have done better?

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Reflections on non-conformity

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Reflections on non-conformity

I found myself inspired to write this post after spending a couple of days with an old friend. He’s one of those buddies that you don’t see for months/years on end, but somehow hang out for 5 minutes and just pick up where you left off.

We worked together years ago teaching kids to surf, and we’ve both been on pretty interesting journeys since. But we’ve always kept in touch, and whenever we’ve been in the same country at the same time, we’ve managed to hang out and catch up with each other’s adventures.

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Time to unroll the mat

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Time to unroll the mat

My time on the mat leaves me feeling grounded and calm. And that’s the perfect way to start a day. I find that when I sit down at my desk with that mindset (as opposed to the just-woke-up-yikes-look-at-that-to-do-list mindset), I’m super clear on what I need to be working on and I seem to be heaps more productive and methodical in everything I do.