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Entrepreneurs with Denis Oakley

I HELP BOLD LEADERS TRANSFORM THEIR BUSINESSES AND THE INDUSTRIES THEY COMPETE IN

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17 Random Thoughts about Denis Oakley

This list was inspired by my wonderful friend Lesley-Anne Long

I drink Diet Coke because I used to smoke 40 cigarettes a day. Every sip is a puff not taken

My library is uncounted. I started collecting science fiction and fantasy books when I was 13. Most years I buy about 100 books. Increasingly they are digital or audio. The physical ones are loved and treasured more. 

Stopping. I looked blankly at the psychologist when she said: “Sometimes you have to do nothing”. Still trying to get my head around it.  It’s one reason why I like endurance sports.

More than happy to eat the same food every day for months and I buy five of the same t-shirt at once, and wear a different one each day. 

My favourite meal is filet de boeuf en croute as cooked by my mum, with my grandma’s apple tart to follow. My mum and I both do pale imitations of it. Our custard is better though 

Complicated strategy games are my hobby. Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, Factorio. To my annoyance, I haven’t managed to take over the world as Ryuku. 

Few things are better than heading out with a parang into the wilderness. Following a path is less uncomfortable. When stressed I make new ones, coming home with scratches and bites. Once missing 2 fingers. 

I married the first girl I fell in love with and took her to the ends of the earth before she would marry me

I like long journeys. I’ve done walking pilgrimages. Hitchhiked to Jerusalem several times and driven from London to Kathmandu.

It’s possible to fall asleep whilst cycling, running and walking. Never managed to do it whilst swimming. 

TV and video. What’s the point? I enjoy the cinema but can’t watch anything else (except when drunk) because I get bored within minutes. TED talks included. 

Most of my reading now is about the history of ideas and human behaviour. I have to be careful about what I read as the idea stream gets too deep and strong too quickly. 

Role models are a mystery to me and I’ve read stunningly few biographies or autobiographies. I’ve settled on being the best possible Denis of all possible Denis’ using a many-worlds hypothesis of reality. 

Hugging and touching are amazing. It’s my favourite way of giving and receiving love, support, care, compassion, joy and many other emotions. 

Bacon making is fun. My go-to recipe is an unsmoked pink salt, chilli, prawn and black pepper cure 

My favourite quote is “to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars”

I a deeply, deeply flawed human, but, in the words of Maya Angelou “Still I rise”

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An Entrepreneurial Start to The Day: Morning Routine

An Entrepreneurial Start to The Day: Morning RoutineEntrepreneurs start each day bounding out of bed and getting on with saving the world. They get up and start blasting through their emails, slack, jira and social media messages. This is a terrible Morning Routine

That’s why so many burn out. Unless you have a balanced start each day it is hard to be consistently productive over time. Mine is still a work in progress but having been involved in startups for over 15 years I have confidence that it is a lot better than diving in. I will cover each aspect of my morning routine and let you know why it is important.

TL:DR – Start Gentle and Focused and Build a Resilient Foundation with a Strong Morning Routine

Wakeup

When at all possible I will sleep in until I awaken naturally. My target goal is 8 hours each night. When I don’t get this it’s important to let the body decide how much it needs to get. So I let it happen. When I need to wake up for a set time then I use an app to assist. My favourite is SleepBot on iOS which has a movement sensor and will wake me up up to 30 minutes before my target time if I am showing signs of light sleep. This helps avoid the muzziness of being woken up by an alarm when in deep sleep

Morning Ritual Mediation

I then start off my morning following a morning ritual by Jason McGrice on Insight Timer. This is a 10 minute gratitude and focus meditation that has wonderful and appropriate music. I keep on thinking of retiring it as the next step does much the same. Habit keeps me on and it delivers the results. “Today is wonderful. Namaste!” How’s that for the last moment before I open my eyes

6 Phase Meditation

This is absolutely awesome. It is a key part of my morning routine. It’s designed by Vishen at Mindvalley to deliver massive benefits very quickly. Think of how Tim Ferris would hack meditation to got all the benefits in the fastest time possible.

It starts off by getting me to think about love and compassion. From a start thinking about how much I love my wife and children it then spirals out to get me to think about how much I love everyone and every creature in the world. That’s pretty powerful and moves you into a much calmer place before the day even starts.

Next is gratitude. I think of 3-5 things in my life, then in my work, and then about me that I am grateful for. most of the time I think about things that have happened in the last few days. This is super powerful because it helps me to remember what has gone right in my life. This helps keep me strong under the mountain of setup backs entrepreneurs can often face. We often think about the negative 5-10 times as often as the positive. This counteracts that.

Forgiveness comes next. I’ve made a list of several hundred people who have been nasty to me. Well they may not have been but for each of them there is some imagined hurt that I nurture deep in my psyche. Each day I think of one and visualise them. I remember the hurt that they did to me and forgive them and ask them for forgiveness. This is all inside the mind so no loss of face is involved. It kills off so many quarrels with my wife before she even knows about them 🙂

Then it’s onto looking at one of my big visions. I think of one of my big plans and imagine myself in three years time. I try and touch, smell, taste and see exactly how it feels to have achieved the success that I am dreaming of. The point of this is that if I imagine the dream during the day the next steps on the way to achieving it will come far more naturally.

After this I imagine the day. The perfect day where everything that I have to do goes right. I imagine perfect emails to customers, my children getting dressed perfectly and having a great time in the car on the way to school. I visualise eating the right food and pushing hard up the hills when I go out on my bike. It’s a great way to set the standard that I expect from myself for the rest of the day.

Finally I ask whatever it is I believe in to give me a helping hand. (I am an atheist/agnostic/theist/deist depending on how I am feeling). Something usually does which is cool.

News

I gave up reading the news a while back and this is my daily fix. I read the Espresso app from the Economist. 6 articles with a 2 sentence summary of 10 other stories. Its probably all that is important in the world. Dispassionate it rarely gets negative emotions bubbling up.

Shower and Music

Then it’s onto the floor to do 10 pushups. I’ve put on my awesomely uplifting Dawn Awakening soundtrack on spotify. I struggle through the pushups (I can run for 12 hours but upper body strength has never been a priority – so starting from a weak base) and then head into the shower. It’s cold. I don’t have hot water. So the first big test of the day is to nerve myself to get under the freezing water (it’s not really). Generally that is the hardest thing I do each day. After that most other stuff seems trivial

Preparation

Then I head downstairs and make my breakfast. At this point I’ve still not thought about work or opened any electronic devices. I quite deliberately move my thought on from any attempt of my mind to chatter about work. I need to get a firm stable foundation. So I clean the kitchen listening to an audio book. I read a bit as I have my breakfast. Then when I am finally grounded and have everything set I sit down at my desk and get things done. When I start the day like this it seems that I am twice as productive as when I do not.

Why does this work

My morning routine works because I spend the start of the day building my self esteem and my self confidence. By the time I let the outside world into my bubble I am the person I want to be and I deal with the world on my own terms. It’s like putting on a suit of armour. Go into battle without armour and sooner or later your blood will be flowing. This is like that. Actually it’s more like being a Zen master and flowing through all the sharp pointy things without them coming close. Whatever it is it works.

How do you start your day? What is your morning routine? What other things could I incorporate in mine to make it even better? Use the comments below

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Janus. Looking Back and Looking Forward.

2017 was a transformative year for me. It was painful, enlightening, hard and rewarding. I haven’t done a New Year review, for a number of years but I thought I’d do one this year to try and share some of the lessons that I have learned.  I hope they may be of use to you, or stimulate some small change that will help make the world better.

At the end of 2016 I was in a job that I passionately believed in but which had such a toxic culture that it was wrecking all other aspects of my life. I was so focused on this that I didn’t realise the damage that I was causing to myself or to the people around me until it was far too late.

The pain had risen to unbearable levels and on the first day at work of 2017 my boss said something that made my position untenable. Shortly afterwards I was clearing my desk and leaving a great bunch of people behind me.  That was a big blow and in the days that followed I struggled to articulate any sort of vision that could be used to get me a job. I felt totally worthless and unable to contribute anything of value to the world.  During this low point Senay frustrated with the pain and poison I was oozing said that she wanted a divorce.

A few weeks later I was living in the jungle an hour or so north of KL. I was trying to figure out what had happened to all the dreams that I had had in my early thirties. Why was I here without love, children, money or a future?

That’s the end of the glum stuff.

Over the next 10 months I slowly picked myself up and took some steps on the road to enlightenment. I even shaved my head. That was because it was more comfortable for running!

That was my first solace.  Long runs and rides deep into the jungle. Over time I explored thousands of kilometres of small and large trails in the mountainous jungle covered foothills around my home. Slowly that evolved into the idea of Tiger Trail, a network of trails that will reach from Southern Malaysia to the Thai border.  On the ground there isn’t much yet to see but online there are incredibly detailed maps that are now used by hundreds of thousands of Malaysians. As time goes by I believe hat Tiger Trail will evolve to be a great force for good in conserving Malaysia’s ecological heritage. More about that later in the year.

My second came via many friends and colleagues. This was the power that meditation has to help us reshape the way that we see the world. Ronan, Dan and Senay, all gave me unwitting prods that started me down a track that eventually led me and Leander to create Revolution Startups.

We’re still find our feet here, however the insight is that there are many people who are trapped and frustrated in their jobs and are looking for a way of life that is more satisfying.  Given our experience in entrepreneurship – both in practice and teaching it- we started sharing some of what we have learned.  That resulted in a first online video based course on how to design great business models. It’s great that we have people all over the world using it and creating better enterprises as a result.

Back in January I had no money and so I started providing entrepreneurial coaching and marketing strategy. As a friend pointed out I’d got 10 years of startup experience, an MBA, boundless enthusiasm and. A  tendency to ask LOTS of questions and that had got to be good for something. Progress was tough to start with as I struggled with the blows to my self esteem. Another Friend, Dilip, came to the rescue and by the end of the year our startup marketing and strategy consultancy, CalTheory, is doing well.

Finally, I joined up with a number of old engineering colleagues to create Stanway Consulting Asia. We’re going to be working on a number of high speed and mass transit rail projects across Asia helping to make them safer and more reliable.  I’m expecting great things from this venture as we go into 2018

So I picked myself up. Great. The most important person was Senay, my wife, who clearly and uncompromisingly said – whatever happens next will be based on trust and respect.

Over the year green shoots grew from the charred wreckage of 2016 and I believe that in 2018 we will see some wonderful flowers start to bloom.

So many other wonderful things happened, a very large python, red cards across Asia, beach camping, Lego, Philip Pullman, hospital emergencies and near starvation that I could go on an on. I promised you some lessons that I thought might help you with the year ahead and here they are.

  • Kill your negative thoughts as quickly and as often as they come into your mind.
  • Look for GEMS every day – gratitude, exercise, meditation and self compassion
  • When you have a wonderful idea take a step, however small, towards it and see what happens next
  • Switch your phone/iPad off when you finish work

None of these ideas are original. In fact many of us have heard them so many times that we ignore them. Alcohol, work, affairs and more seem far better routes to achieving happiness or fulfilment.

As I end this post I’d like to offer out a helping hand. If there is anything in my experience that touched you and you are in a similar place let me know how I can help or support you. I survived, and eventually flourished this year because of the extraordinary gratitude of a group of people, some of whom were strangers when they first offered help.  Let me give the same gift to you that they gave to me

With lots of love and hope for an amazing 2018

Janus. Looking Back and Looking Forward.