Spend more time being the person you're capable of being.

I was standing in the middle of my living room at three o'clock in the morning.

I hadn't planned to be there. I'd woken up and something had come to a head, and I found myself standing in the dark asking questions I had never seriously asked myself before.

For most people that might not sound remarkable. For me it was confronting, because I have always been the positive one. The energetic one. The person with the next idea already forming. Standing in a dark room at three in the morning with no answer to the question of my own future was not me.

I was sixty-nine years old. I had built a couple of businesses, employed people, spent fifty years becoming good at something, and I could not see a future for myself.

Those three questions have since become the foundation of everything you will read on this site. They are the questions at the heart of the Human Potential Ecosystem. I did not choose them because they sounded good in a document.

I chose them because they were the only three questions I had left.

How I Got There

I never intended to spend thirty-six years doing work that drained me. Almost nobody does.

When I was a boy and adults asked what I wanted to be, I said an airline pilot. Or a doctor. I had no idea what either job actually involved — whether sitting in a cockpit or across from patients would suit me at all. An airline pilot, I can see now, is probably a bit like driving a bus in the sky; I'd have been bored within a year, after a decade qualifying for a life that didn't fit me.

I was fortunate that I didn't get in.

Many people aren't. They qualify, they commit, they take on a mortgage, and by the time they realise the work doesn't suit them they're locked in — not because they lack ability, but because they made a decision at seventeen about a person they hadn't met yet.

In 1986, after about eight years working for others, I started my own company building industrial automation systems, and I loved it. I was designing the hardware, writing the operating systems, building the microcontrollers — making things that had not existed before. I was completely energised by it.