THE WINDING PATH
I’m a bright person but a terrible student. Even at school, I elevated “winging it” to an art form. The bright part of me had proven enough to secure an interview at Oxford University, but the terrible part meant I didn’t prepare, and together with teenage hubris, it ensured that I turned up to the interview with a raging hangover. Needless to say, I didn’t get in.
But the experience gave me a glimpse of a different life, a differ- ent version of real. I grew up in a lower-middle-class area on the out- skirts of London. As I sat waiting to go into that interview, it was obvious I was waiting with people whose lives were very different from mine. Everyone else was the sort of polished and immaculate that comes with plenty of money and a private education. There were discussions about holiday houses in Ibiza and the BMW their parents were going to get them when they got accepted into Oxford.
Really?
No one I knew had any type of second home, never mind one in Ibiza. I wasn’t even that sure where Ibiza was. There was no BMW — or any type of car — on my horizon, and I certainly didn’t know anyone who wore red Ralph Lauren jeans.
Even when I got into Exeter University to study Economics, I was mixing with people from another world, and it fed my desire to be like them and “fit in”. I wondered, what if I change my name to Piers? Al- though not that unusual considering my age, I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin, and that discomfort was amplified by the company I kept.
I wanted to be like my new friends, but I wasn’t. My solution was alcohol.
I became the wild, fun friend everyone wanted to hang out with. There are always a couple of people on every course who take it too far, and I was one of them. I attended maybe five per cent of my lectures and eventually got kicked out. Short of options, I ended up at Kingston Law School, back on my home turf, and did exactly the same thing again.
Thankfully, the bright part of me decided to show up in year three. I knuckled down just enough to get a 2:1 in Law. But even with the qualification in the bag, I still felt like a fraud. I remembered nothing from the course and I was still hiding behind a passion for vodka.
My first interview out of law school was in Battersea, south-west London with Philip, whose family published diaries. This was at the very start of the internet age, and I was to set up meetings for Philip who would then sell tech research on CD-ROMs (remember them?). The job offered a basic low wage with commission, but I was good at it, and Philip and I worked really well together.
Philip had the same unshakable confidence I’d seen from my peers in Exeter University. Like theirs, it came from a charmed, upper- class upbringing and first-class education. He was a loveable rogue with a posh British accent that opened doors and attracted investment. With his business nous and connections and my diamond-in-the-rough, can- do, desperate-to-fit-in attitude, we were a formidable combination. We worked together for about seven years off and on in various businesses.
After the CD-ROMs, Philip started another business, and I went with him as his head of sales. We opened the UK branch of a Boston- based software company at 1 Canary Wharf, London. We were even
invited to Boston to share our secrets because we were closing million- pound deals and the parent company wanted to know how.
His next venture was a web currency, and I joined him in that too, jetting to New York for meetings on Wall Street. As Philip’s second-in- command, I was sent to Hong Kong as the interim managing director. My task? To launch our Greater China division and raise $15+ million venture finance in 90 days.
It was a crazy, crazy time. The life I was so sure I wanted when I interviewed for Oxford and met all of those wealthy kids at Exeter was now my reality. I had the gold corporate Amex card and I was living the expat high life in one of the most exciting cities on earth. But I was still winging it, and I certainly didn’t feel the elation and sense of achievement I was sure I would feel. None of it felt real. Instead, it felt very unreal, a house of cards I half-expected to collapse at any moment. Each new day brought renewed anxiety that perhaps today was the day I’d be exposed as the fraud I felt I was. I did raise the money, so the illusion was preserved for a little longer, but in truth, the only real thing in my life was my growing dependence on alcohol, recreational substances, and excess.
At various points, I’d get glimpses of the ridiculous nature of my life choices. I remember one particular day in Hong Kong. I was in my late 20s, and I walked into my office on the 30th floor of an exclusive city-centre tower block. I had my sunglasses on and was sure I was presenting an illusion of cool efficiency and quiet power. In truth, I was in the grip of a major hangover. I was praying that no one would ask me anything or come too close because I must have reeked of booze. I told my EA I had an important presentation to work on and was not to be disturbed for two hours. I slipped into my office, closed the door, and crawled under the desk for a nap.
Something had to give.
I left Hong Kong and took some time out in the South of France, but I’d always get sucked back in. I worked with Philip again, this time in San Francisco, consolidating and digitising barter trade exchanges. My job involved a lot of flying around the US doing deals and getting companies on board or buying them out. One morning, I got a call from Mum asking me where I was and whether I was flying that day. I was in San Francisco working on the company IPO and was due to fly into New York later that day. She told me to turn on the news. As I did, I saw smoke billowing out of one of the twin towers. Moments later, I watched a plane fly into the second.
As it was for millions of others, watching the horror of 9/11 unfold proved to be a reckoning or wake-up call for me. Amidst the confusion, I was able to hear a whisper — “What the fuck are you doing?” “Is this seriously the life you want?” I was desperate for recovery by this point. I needed a way out from the bullshit and the excess.
I don’t think that sense of being in the wrong place, doing the wrong things, and with the wrong people is that unusual. Certainly, I’ve met countless people over the years whose experiences resonate with my own. There’s a sense of just going through the motions, trying to be something we’ve been told we should aspire to, trying to fit in, trying to front having our shit together, when what we feel inside is anything but these things.
There seem to be two main approaches to this internal confusion: we chase the money and buy into the materialistic illusion or we
withdraw into some type of spiritual illusion. In my experience, neither approach works and I’ll share why in this book.
From a global perspective, humanity seems to have reached a point where the way we live just isn’t working anymore. We feel disconnected from ourselves and each other, as if we’ve been told to play a game but given the wrong set of rules.
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was another “twin-tower” moment for humanity. It forced many of us to stop and really consider whether the life we were so busy living was the life we genuinely wanted. Forced to slow down, reconnect to family, and live a simpler life (at least in the short term), many of us were reminded of what is real and vital in our lives. And with that came another reminder that something was not right with our pre-COVID reality. I believe that “something” is a growing recognition that we are not being real with ourselves and others.
For me, that realisation came on 9/11, and it forced me to slow down and pay attention to the nagging feeling that something just wasn’t right. I obviously wasn’t flying into New York anytime soon, so my girlfriend and I decided to get out of the city. We went to Yosemite National Park, and amongst the wilderness and tranquillity, I was more able to tune into how I felt. As it turned out, I’d reached a point where things felt so unreal that it was making me unhappy and potentially ill. If all of this activity, all of this manic doing, flying all over the world for meetings, raising capital, making money, and doing deals wasn’t real, then what was?
Was there a different way?
Sitting together in the national park, we decided to answer two questions: “What do we dream of?” and “Where can we do it in a country neither of us have lived in before?” The other person wasn’t allowed to laugh. I said “yoga”; my girlfriend said “train dogs”. Neither of us laughed, and we flew to Byron Bay in Australia.
What surprised me most about living in Byron was that I felt safe. It was an odd sensation because I hadn’t been aware of how unsafe I felt everywhere else. On the outside, my life looked very different. I stopped drinking completely. I lost 20kgs, my skin was glowing, and I looked fantastic. But my metamorphosis was largely physiological. I was healthier and had some profound spiritual experiences that definitely nudged me in the right direction, but with hindsight, all I’d really done was swap one illusion for another. I’d gone from manic corporate wheeler-dealer to manic yoga guy. I was doing yoga for 8 to 10 hours a day! I was still the same guy, desperate to fit in. I’d just changed the activity and the crowd. But I also felt grounded for the first time and that gave me the courage to stick with yoga.
Of course, we couldn’t stay in Australia forever. When our visas ran out, we went to Spain and our relationship ran out soon after. I moved to Marbella, where my can-do capability kicked in to create work teaching yoga, but my proximity to a famous party town also woke up my demons. In Marbella, I fully recognised that I had a drink problem and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Again, I felt like a fraud. Doing yoga by day and getting wasted by night.
Yoga had opened experiences for me physically, emotionally, and spiritually, but there was clearly more work to do. I came across various Indian gurus and felt drawn to their work, so I travelled to India to further my education. I met people in India who had a profound impact on my life, including my ex-wife (it didn’t work out) and my life
partner (it did).
On my first trip, if I’m honest, I thought the group work I’d signed
up for would mainly be yoga and some chilled-out meditation. I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong. It was intense, uncompromising, and sought to break down my carefully crafted persona.
All the strategies I’d used to avoid being real stopped working. There was nowhere to hide, especially as the guides in some of the sessions were as numerous as the participants. They spotted my strategies, calling me out every time I tried to manoeuvre out of an invitation to be real, which often involved intense pain and vulnerability. I felt completely exposed (rather like the experience of writing this book!), but that work also allowed me to glimpse the real me under all the bravado, masks, and constructed personas I presented to the world (tech guy, business guy, finance guy, yoga guy, party guy, whoever was required for the moment). It was the start of my journey towards being real.
I travelled to India countless times and became a group-therapy junky. I invested in personal development to understand myself more and worked with many great teachers. With that insight and under- standing, I started to connect the dots. I learned to live a path of mysticism, not philosophy. When there’s a flash of lightning, the philosopher looks up and asks what happened and why. The mystic looks down as the lightning illuminates the road ahead. That’s life.
I don’t claim to be an academic, a philosopher, or a guru. I’m not particularly well-read. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I’ve spent time reflecting on them, seeking to extract some wisdom or universal truth from them so that I can become even more real tomorrow. I’ve used the reality of my life to guide me rather than any illusion or theory. We can all avoid, ignore, or hide behind the illusion — or we can open up, lean in, show up, and actively go looking for the issues that are holding us back. We can hunt them down and get real with them, using them as invitations for change and growth.
Life is messy. We’re not perfect, and we never will be. So, we have to learn to love the inevitable challenges of life. We need to accept them, embrace them, and use them as stepping stones, as new opportunities for growth.
Nowadays, I share those diverse learnings via Urban OM and BYOND. Urban OM is a yoga studio in the centre of Stockholm. BYOND helps individuals, entrepreneurs, and leaders accelerate to- wards greater success with greater meaning.
