Many years ago, I had a dentist who would refer patients to me regularly. He was from the local area close to us and had done quite well for himself.
He was a fisherman and would spend tons of money going to fish in exotic places around the United Kingdom, patches beside rivers, which cost a bomb in order to pitch a fishing rod, but he loved it.
I remember speaking to him once, and I asked him why he continued to do that, and he said it was because it was the only time he didn't think about the work.
It's interesting because people hear this type of thing nowadays and they think that this is outrageous, and they talk about 'work-life balance' (whatever that might be) and they think it's terrible if you can't switch off or meditate or have every weekend free so you can do other things or watch all the Netflix you want to watch, etc but the reality is entirely different, isn't it?
Recently, I've been trying to coach my son a little bit as he tries to write a little business plan for a project he'd like to take on.
The idea is actually mine (although he will try to dispute this or steal it), but he's just in the process of taking a blank piece of paper as a 17-year-old and trying to write down what it would be like to start a business, just a little thing, nothing significant really, but something that could become significant.
Initially I find myself being critical of him, telling him that he doesn't understand and that he's got no idea and then I think 'what a dick he's 17 years old why would he have any idea?" I certainly had no idea
The truth is that when I came into business as a business owner in 2009 for the first time, I was 37 years old, which means I was 20 years older than Callum is now, and I had no idea how to run a business at all.
I had to learn fast, but the most important thing I had to learn was that I had to like it. The reason I had to like it was because I was doing it all the time.
When I had free time inside my own head, I thought about the business, ways that we could improve it, directions that we could go, and problems that needed to be solved.
It turned out that this took over, and I would think about it more and more and more, and there were times when I thought that this was a bad thing and I should be thinking about something else, but I didn't dislike it; in fact, I loved it.
As I began to grow my business, it also became one of my hobbies, and then it's where you feel like you've never worked a day in your life.
This was the greatest lesson I could talk to Callum about, and in a ridiculous turn of events, I got out the slides from a business course and pulled up the business clock. At the top of the business clock is the 'why' and so I thought to myself, if I'm supposed to be able to teach other people about how to run their business, why am I not teaching my son how to do it when he's asking? and so we started with the why.
As a typical 17-year-old (and I'm not going to tell you his business ideas in case you steal them), all they wanted to talk about was the money it would make, so we had to pull back from that. I had to explain to him that if you set up a business just to make money like that in the area that he was looking at, it would rarely work, and he would never ever achieve any of the satisfaction and happiness that he saw.
It took a while for the penny to drop.
I also had to explain to him that he was committing to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for the next however many years to get this moving and off the ground, doing lots of things he never thought he would do, lots of things he didn't want to do and going to lots of places he never thought he would have to go to.
He got it, though, at least to a point, but the other thing that was essential in explaining to Callum as we sat there that evening while Alison was out was to say to him, "none of your plans will ever come true".
For all of us who run a business, we must understand that almost none of our plans stand contact with the enemy, they have to be changed and altered all of the time, that is in fact what running a business is, it's changing, moving, altering in an agile way so that you can adapt to changing circumstances.
It's an absolute joy, and when it stops being a joy, we should all do something else.