Why I’m starting this website

It’s time for a change in my life.

I left school nearly 12 years ago with amazing grades and aspirations of college and university followed by some high flying job that I would love and everything would just fall in place. It’s taken me a long time and a hell of a lot of failures to learn that it’s near impossible to be successful at anything if you don’t have the passion for what you’re doing. Well at least for me it is. And I can’t be the only one, right?

As much as I wish I could’ve had things figured out sooner (and I definitely don’t have things completely figured out now), as I’ve gotten older I’ve grown a lot less critical of myself when it comes to judging myself by my failures. They’ve all gotten me to this point in my life and I do feel like now I have a clear picture of what I want my future to be. It’s not fancy houses and fancy cars. It’s not going to expensive clubs and having expensive clothes. What I want for my future is to keep having adventures that society conditions us to think are unrealistic and show that anyone in life can achieve anything they want if they truly commit to it and believe it’s a real possibility. I’m well aware this is still a pipedream for myself at this stage, but here’s me right at the beginning of this journey and who knows, maybe in 10 years time I can look back at this first blog post and be incredibly proud of the person writing this knowing that they made their dreams a reality.

Travel has been the one constant in my life where the passion for adventure has never lessened. Ever since I was a kid and had my globe in my bedroom, I’ve been dreaming of visiting so many different countries and seeing what every unique place has to offer. I’m extremely grateful that over the past 10 years, although I look at my stagnant career and multiple academic failures, the one thing I am extremely proud of is how much I have travelled. I’ve been disillusioned with Britain, the weather and the societal norms for so long, travel has acted as my escape from this. But I’m at a point now where it’s clicked, why am I allowing myself to stay somewhere I’m not happy and feel completely out of place like an outsider? I don’t want to rely on the odd week here and there to escape and reset my mind, I want to live a life where I constantly feel enriched and challenged, meeting amazing people along the way who think the same way as me. The way I do this in my life is to get out of England and break from that societal norm of working a 9-5 and living for the 2 precious days a week you get off.

Over the past few years this passion for travel has led me down many YouTube rabbit holes and sparked another true passion in my life, cycling and running. I’ve come to learn that there’s something incredibly rewarding about travelling by means of nothing except your own human effort. Knowing that your own energy and effort you’ve put into something is capable of moving you incredibly long distances gives me a satisfaction I can’t describe. So this gave birth to my interest in bikepacking and more recently (all the thanks goes to Russ Cook), running. I’ve now seen just how resilient and capable the human body can be and I want to be able to unlock that potential within myself.

Finally, the last element of this journey I want to embark on is to create meaningful human connections with people that push each other to be the best they can be. I think deep down I’ve always known I’m a bit of an introvert who is shy when confronted with strangers and who does enjoy time by myself. But I think this is because I’ve never been around too many people who have the same kind of view of the world and what it means to live a successful life as me. I’m definitely not saying my way is the right way, but I feel it’s the right way for me and the only way I’ll ever find true fulfilment in life. I need something different and I know that I need to have a network of likeminded people to talk to who help push each other to be the best version of themselves that they can possibly be. Everyone needs someone there to push you on when times get tough.

So this is where the creation of this website comes in. I want to create a life for myself that involves all 3 of these key areas: Travel, Exercise and Human Connections. I’ve got so many different ideas of things I want to do going forward that will not only test me both mentally and physically, but will also give me that sense of personal satisfaction and growth that I’ve somewhat been lacking in my life up to this point because of the many failures I’ve mentioned before. My aim with this website is to document some of my previous adventures that haven’t ended how I’d have hoped, going into detail of how I went wrong and what can be done better if someone was to attempt them again. But the majority of what I want to be talking about is the new chapter of my life I want to embark on and create a meaningful community where people help each other and share their own experiences of the world. Life can be a rough journey sometimes and people help people. I’m not saying anything revolutionary here but travel, sport and human connections are three ways I think that can seriously improve your standard of life; and I want to use these as vessels to not only unlock my true potential, but also that of the people that may be reading this too.

Here we go…