CHAPTER 9Sell your vision
Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others
Jonathan Swift
When I was a kid in primary school, they made us read the book A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey. If you've read the book, you'll know that life wasn't that fortunate for little Bert at all. But the moral of that book really stuck with me. Despite his desperately poor and violent upbringing, Bert genuinely believed that his life was fortunate; that the slings and arrows of misfortune that came his way were opportunities to be harnessed; and that happiness was not to be equated with pleasure or ease. I love that he managed to find great motivation from the difficulties in his life and I've taken inspiration from his story ever since.
I won't ever pretend that my life has been as hard as Bert's. It's been far from it. I've been quite blessed. I was born into a middle-class family in the leafy northern suburbs of Sydney and was very fortunate to grow up in an environment that valued education, endeavour and entrepreneurship. It's those beginnings that gave me the fire to launch my own company.
I remember being all of 10 years old and thinking, ‘I want to own my own company!' Seriously, what kid of 10 thinks that? But I did. I saw my dad, in his nice suit and his shiny shoes, trundle off to work and I thought, like most boys of an impressionable age, ‘I want to be like him'. I also remember him coming down the hallway with a cheque in his hand and his eyes shining, telling me he'd received ...