Category: Life

Next week I’m back on deck after ten weeks traveling around the world and recharging. I was doing more than upping my Instagram game I swear 😉 – I needed it to be a better mate, a better person to work with and the happiest, most effective and fulfilled dude I can be.

The funny thing about leaving the world of business ownership and joining the rat-race (just kidding – my job rocks!) is that it changes you. It’s very nature pulls you to compete, to be seen and recognised. As a 28 year old who was working for someone for the first time and in a business with twenty other colleagues, I felt myself doing things to be seen and noticed, rather than doing good work for the sake of doing good work that I believed in.

I knew this whole career thing was bringing out a little ego that I didn’t like. So, I travelled and reset. I read, wrote and thought, a lot.

While I travelled a book came out by the young gun Ryan Holiday titled ‘Ego is the Enemy‘. If you think ego is preventing you from doing your best work – or more importantly, being your happiest and most fulfilled self – pick up a copy. You’ll be happier for it.

Feeling fresh, inspired and bloody good. Time to get too it.

P.S. BodyWise

A bunch of you have asked whats going on with BodyWise on the back of my break and tweeting a lot more about digital marketing + eCommerce rather than health and fitness product design.

A few months ago we decided that we couldn’t continue bootstrapping it ourselves and that the market has changed so much since we started that we’re struggling to acquire enough users to viably seek funding.

Thousands of people are using it to track their wellness and have better health because of what we’ve made, something that makes it all worth it regardless of what happens now. We’re working out what brand/charity/person would combine the app with their audience to help more people going forward.

I’m still crazy passionate about making people healthier using technology and without any negative mental effect, but the reality is that it’s too much for me to do alone.

Watch this space…

Every year on New Years Eve I write a letter to myself summing up the year just gone and another written from 365 days into the future, summing up the year I’m just about to live.

I’m pretty competitive, goal oriented and very self-motivated so this method gets me in a great frame of mind for the year ahead.

It’s a funny exercise to do and compare results against your future prediction.
Did you do the things that you said you would?
What curveballs were thrown up and how did you deal with them?
Did you manage to have fun along the way and not just tick goals off a list?

My whole thing was learning and shit did I learn this year. At times it felt like 10 years of learning crammed into one.

Letter to 2013 Mike (summing up my year)

You’ve done well Mike.

2013 was one hell of a year. In no short order you managed to:

1. Live in another country for 5 months
2. Unwind in Mexico for 2 weeks, learning a touch of Spanish while you were there
3. Have a video featured by GoPro and amass over 250,000 views
4. Be part of a collaborative project seen by over 3.5 million people around the world and featured in countless media outlets
5. Sell your first business, making a tidy profit
6. Forge new relationships within business networks that you’ve previously admired from afar
7. Launch an app that was downloaded over 30,000 times

In short, you lived a pretty fulfilled life this year. You didn’t let yourself down imagining something and leaving it at that. You put more energy into the projects that you loved than you ever have before. I respect you for that.

Sure, it was a challenging year. You continue to question yourself on love and what you’re looking for, but man, you tried. You saw a girl you really could see yourself with and went after it. It didn’t work out but you tried. You dated a few other girls for a bit but didn’t feel it. No harm. That’s not in your makeup to just do what doesn’t feel right.

I know you’re questioning whether 2014, 2015 or even 2020 will be the year that you find someone that gets your brain going as much as your heart. Who cares because while you’re happy, it doesn’t really matter. Happiness is the ultimate measure of ones quality of life.

Keep taking chances. Take the 50/50’s in life and see what happens. Continue to explore. Get away for trips by yourself but look for new relationships wherever they present themselves. Sip Whisky in some far away city while gazing at the roof trying to make sense of what you’re learning. Hell, just continue to learn.

You’ve got a big opportunity with BodyWise. It might not work out. You might lose out financially but look at how much you’ve learnt just going through the process and taking a punt on something that you care about.

You stay classy San Diego

Letter to 2014 Mike (written in 2013 to my future self)

Well, another year has gone and holy shit did you learn some big lessons this year.

Last year you took a few bets and had a consistently awesome year. This year you had more ups and downs. You put yourself out there a little more. Sometimes it hurt but the highs were better than you would have imagined.

BodyWise is still in its infancy. It’s making money and getting some good acquisition interest, but most importantly people are using it and many love it.

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Yep, the post image is the letter read at the start of Blink 182’s epic song ‘Stockholm Syndrome‘.

It’s been 365 days since I released my first product. Plan Lab was huge for me. It signified a move from every cent I made coming from spending time working with someone to being able to create something out of nothing, and making sales while I was scratching my ass.

Of course it’s never that simple but the gradual shift into selling products rather than services is something that I’d planned since my early days studying Entrepreneurship at Uni and the ways of the world in everyday life.

Those 365 days have flown by and at the same time seem like years ago. It’s caused me to reflect on my last 365 days of life, what I’ve spent my time on, what I’ve learnt and what I’ve accomplished.

My last 365 days in a nutshell…

• Lived in another country for the first time (see my blog post on my 6 months in Canada)
• Launched my first product and made it profitable within 6 months (see my Plan Lab launch post)
• Launched my second product. BodyWise was launched 7 days ago in fact (see my BodyWise launch post)
• Launched SnowPro. Failed SnowPro (blog post on that experience coming soon)
• Visited Canada, USA & Mexico
• Spent 80 days snowboarding
• Was featured by GoPro as their video of the day and seen by over 130,000 people (see our SnowPro epic amateur snowboarding video)
• Appeared in a Harlem Shake video (seriously)
• Nearly managed to push out an election-themed iPhone game only to be thwarted at the last minute (more coming on that soon)

At the end of the day

It’s been a hell of a year and looking back, I’m not sure I can keep that pace up for another year. At the end of the day I’ve had more fun during my 9-5 creating things and working with a small group of awesome clients than I ever had consulting 24/7 but it’s the people you spend time with out of work that really made my year.

Whether you’re a friend from Twitter, an old high school mate or someone I’ve met in the last 365 days, thanks for helping to make my year the best to date. You’ve been awesome.