March 23 2016 - Dallas Texas
I am writing this the day after quitting my 17-year career. I quit for an ideal and an idea. The ideal is that a spiritual revolution is required to make the world a more kind and equitable place – giving hope to those who have lost it. The idea is that the path to this revolution is through professionals undergoing their own personal transformations to reach a good life on their own terms.
My own personal journey to this point has been seven years and my whole life. In 2009, the year after the financial crisis, I sat in some airport in the world and thought, “I’ve made it”. Ten years into my career as an international management consultant I’d achieved my schoolboy dream of travelling the world for work and advising big companies. I knew about African politics and the Asian economy and Europe’s problems and opportunities from working on the ground in those places. I knew where to get the best steak in Buenos Aires and where to grab an after hours drink in Hong Kong or Senegal. I’d woken up in Reykjavik, watched the sunset in Sydney and swam on the beaches of Thailand and seen every continent in the same year.
Then a funny thing happened. Almost the instant after “making it” I felt disillusioned about my life and work. This is only obvious in retrospect. At the time I just kept doing what I was doing but gradually getting less and less satisfaction from it. Luckily I also drifted into some things that would be good for me: learning photography, getting fitter, and getting back into scuba diving. I didn’t know it but I’d started an existentialist quest to make sense of the world and find meaning.
Three years ago and newly married to Darcy I sat on the beach in Split, Croatia. Staring into the Adriatic sea I tried to work out a plan for what a good life could look like for us. I was still a consultant and intuitively the tools and experience I fell back on to do this were those that I’d picked up in my consulting career.
I knew that to live a good, meaningful, happy and balanced life then you first had to define what good looked like. You also had to look at life holistically and in its component parts: work, health, relationships, spirituality and the other activities that you invest your time in. There are many ways to incrementally improve these elements – but to make a substantive and long lasting change I knew that you needed to go further to transform them and yourself.
A lot of life has happened for me since then. There have been many challenging, exciting, spiritual and exhausting times. I’ve discovered many truths, which you’ll hear about throughout the guide. I know what good looks like for me – now it is time to live it. This is not a throwaway statement – I am married with a young child and another on the way in five months time. The stakes of getting the right answer are high, for me, my family, close friends and so on. I don’t know what the future will hold but I know that life will never be the same again. I have taken the step into the abyss.
In consulting it takes at least 4-6 weeks to do the initial analysis and planning for a major transformation.
Some of this is work time for sure but this also seems to be the minimum amount of time to work through the mental and emotional aspects of preparing for the change and getting started. This approach is fact based and it is logical and is an “open box” you can see each of the stages and how it works. You get your own facts out of your head and find root causes and insights. Insights lead to implications and then to actions / projects.
This guide will be written in real time, one chapter per day, as I try to condense my experience and experiences into connected and digestible chunks. On the other side I envisage that you investing four to six weeks of your time to complete the guide one chapter per day will change your life.
The regrets and scars from my own life support the earnest quest to help you to save lost time and angst in creating the good life for yourself and those around you. I will spend 30 days putting the ideas in the guide into practice and report back to you what happens.
This is not another life-coaching blah session. This is bittersweet. This is important because it is the truth.
What if I could be happier, more balanced and have more meaning in my life, be fitter and more relaxed and improve my relationships with my loved ones and friends? What if I could do more meaningful that even paid more too (even though the money would just be the cherry on the top)?
This guide is about my quest to prove that I can, and to help you to as well.
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Fragments: Gold from unpublished writings of past 10 years
Commentary March 27, 2026: Going back to go forward. Wow, powerful, direct! Like a punk shouting a manifesto into a beer soaked microphone. The guide eventually became The Good Life Book (2017), I wanted to shake myself and others awake, to see, and grip the opportunities and possibilities that are life, and make a change. Where is that guide now? If I can't find it then I should write it.