the power of your Why

From Abatoir to Free fall, the power of your Why

University of Bedfordshire, 1994 The power of your Why It’s my first semester at University when I stumble across a noticeboard advert for a charity parachute jump. Signing up for it would have meant eating into about a month’s worth of my meagre living allowance. So I had to find a way to scrape the […]

Poking the bear

 May 2021, Swindon, Dent Zoom Call I’m on a zoom call with fifty-odd other entrepreneurs enjoying a business accelerator. It’s an excellent experience, but something isn’t sitting right.

Richard Parsons

What failing at school taught me

Winter 1993, Basingstoke, UK. I did ok at secondary school but generally didn’t pay enough attention and drifted along. I ended up with mediocre grades, just enough to scrape into A’ Levels.

Listening to signals

Easter 2005. Tignes, France. It’s April 2005 and I’m skiing with friends in the French Alps. I’ve just left my steady job at a software company to stumble into entrepreneurship. There wasn’t any great plan or well thought out strategy, I had a few irons in fires here and there, but mostly I was just […]

If not now, when?

January, 1984. Calcot, Reading.  I’m 8 years old walking home from school with my friend Jamie.  We’re walking along a pathway that cuts through our housing estate. The sort of path that passes by everyone’s back fence.  There is an open bit of scrubland along the path and I find a Tesco bag in the […]

Confessions of a recovering workaholic

I’m now in my third week of taking time out. I’ve carved out two and a half days of my working week to do other stuff. There has been the odd small encroachment when “work” has bled into my “discovery” time, but overall, I’ve stuck to it and I’m loving it. Thanks to my amazing […]

How to avoid failure and criticism

Firstly, thank you to everyone who provided feedback to my first blog post. As a brand new blog, I was expecting to be blogging into a black hole for a while, so I was pleasantly surprised that finding an itch to scratch resonated with your own experiences.

Finding an itch to scratch

Avalon Beach, 1997 I can see it in my mind’s eye as though it was yesterday. I’m sitting alone in the dunes overlooking the sea in a small town called Avalon in the northern beaches of Sydney, Australia.