Leaving the UK and moving to Bali in the pursuit of building my own businesses did not happen overnight and it didn’t happen accidentally. 

To some people it may seem that way from the outside – suddenly packing in jobs, selling up and leaving the country. Yes, there were a couple of situations that were a catalyst to this but, it has very much been the plan for a number of years. It has taken time to get to this point and behind the scenes of living a normal corporate London life, we have been slowly but surely putting the pieces together to be able to do this. 

I know moving to Bali seems very free spirit, inspirational and maybe even like I am trying to escape something? And in a lot of ways it is. Bali definitely has a reputation of being a place people spontaneously escape to, and whilst there has been a lot of spontaneity in my life for the past year, it has all been with purpose and direction. Despite some misconceptions from friends and family, this is all part of the plan and in no way is it an escape from hard work or ‘real life’. Okay, maybe a bit of an escape from real life but I hope to form a new, improved and sunnier real life.

I think the misconceptions come from Harry and I quietly hustling away behind the scenes of our normal lives to get where we are now. Trying to break away from the mould of ‘normal’ can be difficult for some people to wrap their heads around. It often comes with a lot of unsolicited negative life advice from people that have no experience doing anything remotely different. And that is totally fine – I don’t expect everyone to support or even understand the life choices I have made. So largely for this reason we kept our non-corporate hustling mostly private. I have never felt the need for external validation for the choices I make and I think this was hugely helpful in getting to this stage. Figuring out what we actually wanted our life to look like and how we would do it is a decision we wanted to make without unhelpful judgement.

I consider myself an under the radar founder – if no one ever knows what I do and how I make my millions that is totally fine by me. My preference actually. Maybe this blog is slightly contradictory to that but this is primarily a way for me to document my thoughts for me to look back on (and for my mum to make sure I’m still eating vegetables – which I am). I am in no way giving life advice or a ‘you must live your life this way also or you’re an idiot’ guide. 

All this is to say there has been a lot of hard work going on behind the scenes for a number of years to get to this point. What is often not documented or talked about are the 10 other businesses or plans (funky shaped plastic cups, dog boxes and kombucha kits to name a few) that have either lost us money, never gotten off the ground or failed in some way. But all have led us to the point we are at now and I’m SO BLOODY RELIEVED not to be running the first business we ever put significant time or money into. 

Right now it looks like we are living the dream (and we kinda are) but it has not been without a lot of purpose, direction, hard work and getting a lot of things wrong. I seem to take more pictures of us smiling on a beach than being told no for the 1000th time by an inventor or spending £1000 on a prototype of a plastic cup shaped like a cactus… 

So a tiny pat on the back to myself (and Harry) – Moving to Bali feels like the first proper victory in our grand plan to live a free life on our own terms.