This two-part blog is a little bit about the redesign of the podcast and how, in February I hope, it will be released as something entirely different and something that I can be utterly proud of.
But first of all, I just want a little exploration of success.
On the 24th of January, I woke up at about 5.20 in the morning and my alarm was going off, vibrating on my wrist and vibrating on my bicep.
That's the first successful thing that happened that day is that I woke up.
I think sometimes I overlook the fact that I go to sleep at night and then wake up the next day, but I do know and know of people who didn't and so, the first thing I do, as my Dad has taught me, is to open my eyes and be grateful.
I went downstairs and had a coffee at about 5.30am, a little coffee in my little glass coffee cup with my stainless-steel saucer, using a Nespresso capsule of strong coffee, and sat with my two dogs on the sofa, waking up for 10 minutes. That is success.
I then went outside and sat in my car, my fantastic and beautiful and powerful and heavily functional car and let it defrost itself whilst I sat there before driving away at 6.50am.
How lucky am I to have a car like that?
How lucky am I to have a car that defrosts itself without me doing that thing that I did for so many years where I scraped the windscreen with a CD box.
At about 5.55am I pitched up at the tennis club down the road from my house and went in to see Gregor, the personal trainer I see twice a week at six o'clock in the morning.
I spent an hour with him getting my legs wrecked and then I payed him for another 10 sessions, how successful is that?
Not only did I get out of bed and go and train for an hour (I don't look like I train) but I had money in the bank to pay for it.
I came back home and had another one of those coffees while I sat with my dogs and then I took them for a 25-minute walk.
The dog walk is extraordinary, I can think about things, I can look around or I can listen to things in my headphones.How successful is that?
The sun was rising that day at the time that I was walking the dogs around about 7.10am. It was absolutely magnificent and burning in the sky.
I turned around from the dog walk and went back home.
I wasn't at work that day because I was off work for 6.5 weeks (how successful is that) and I went back to have a breakfast meeting with my wife about what we would be doing, where we would be going and what plans we had.
I want to talk in the podcast about success, about people who have achieved success not because of but in spite of, not success that society tells them is success but success which gives them their own contentment and their own sense of achievement.
But for me, it's taken a long time to understand what success actually is.
It's inextricably linked with contentment and happiness and achievement, but it's different for every single person and what I want ‘success story’, which will become the new name for the podcast that we’ve reinvented over this period, is to explore other people's stories of where their success is in the hope that it might inform mine.
Blog Post Number - 3350