It is Mo Gawdat who said: “It is not the events in our lives which stress us, but how we deal with them which does.” By reducing our exposure to unproductive stressors, shifting from a Threatened to a Challenge mindset, and intentionally raising our stress threshold - we expand our capacity for growth. Life will always challenge us. We cannot control that. But these four things we can.

As we continued to talk, I became more detached from the highly engaging conversation. Not detached because I was distracted, but because I was thinking. I’d had an insight. 

 I must have been listening to Taylor Swift that morning because about one hour and thirty minutes into the free-flowing conversation I was ready to interrupt. “Guys, I don’t think anything we have shared is particularly revelatory.”

Discipline, does not shackle, it frees. Frees us from our ingrained drive for status, approval, comfort and excess. The biological mechanisms which helped our ancestors survive in the harsh Savannahs, but which have become maladaptive in the overabundant society in which we live today.

Conformity is good, but it has never led to the creation of the Apple Macintosh or the lightbulb. The two Steve’s sat in their parents’ garages making computers and Thomas Edison spent 1000s of hours failing to eventually create a working lightbulb. The world doesn’t change when people remain the same. The world changes when a critical mass of humanity slips out of alignment of the norms of society.

Wildest Dream is the new business that Jack and I have started, but it is also more than that. Wildest Dream is a mindset, a way of life. Each individual, leader, and team that we work with is unique, and that uniqueness is something which we celebrate. But, when I sit to think about these great people, and about Jack and myself, I ask: “What are those common threads that enjoin us?” And here’s what comes to mind.

That’s the thing about life, you have to try things in the full knowledge that it could be a terrible idea. A Brit moved to Sri Lanka to try the digital nomad life and ended up starting my new favourite Black Honey Café. So, try something, at the very least you’ll get a cool t-shirt, at best you might open a new café.