“You can have everything you want in life, if you just help enough other people get what they want.” Zig Ziglar Mystory… I am conscious of oversharing and I wasn’t going to include this bit of personal background in my collection of one pagers, but in retrospect it might provide a little context about what drives my obsession, and why I started to create one pagers in the first place. So here goes… Imposter syndrome is a funny thing. I’ve had it for most of my professional life and it’s pretty hard to shake it off. I graduated from college with pretty good grades and was accepted to City University in London to study investment banking. It sounded like the sensible thing to do, especially as I fancied myself as the next Gordon Gekko. But after a several debates with myself and my parents about whether or not greed was good, I decided to take the road less travelled instead. I chose to take control of my own destiny and pursue the exciting life of an entrepreneur, so I set off on a crusade determined to become the next Richard Branson or Anita Roddick. For the next few years I wrote and re-wrote my business plan. I read the Financial times every day! I had a photo of a Porsche 911 Carrera with a “Jeremy” licence plate above my desk and surrounded myself with books from great leaders such as Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, Tom Peters, Jim Collins and John Maxwell. I think I even owned a pair of Gekko-style red braces at one point! In search of my millions I first attempted to buy the family printing business. Then I set up a kids golf company. A skateboard clothing company. A food packaging design agency. And a branding consultancy. I was proud of all of them. Unfortunately this is not an inspirational tale of my personal success. I did not flirt with failure only to rise from the flames and become an award-winning entrepreneur. I did not appear on Dragon’s Den. I wasnotfeatured in Forbes, Fortune or the Wall Street Journal. I failed. Badly. And publicly. I lost my house. Marriage. Many of my “friends”. The design agency I had poured my life into. All my investments. Mybeloved John Cooper Works Mini was repossessed. I’m pretty sure I even lost my mind on more than one occasion... having only £10 to my name and being forced to decide between putting petrol in mycartodriving to a pitch, or buying bread and milk so that I could live on tea and toast for the rest of the week is an experience I don’t fancy revisiting. I had to complete some paper work for an internal move not too long ago and the form I needed to fill in asked me to use the additional lines to complete details of my second degree and which school I got my MBA from. I didn’t need those extra lines. I didn’t even need the line that came before it. No, choosing to bypass higher education in favour of the glamourous life of an entrepreneur was not my best decision. But here’s the thing...my decision to not extend my education for four years after college sparked a fire that has not gone out since I graduated and it doesn’t show signs of stopping anytime soon. I have an unquenchable desire to keep learning and a hunger to study from the past in order to create a better future. Maybe I’m just motivated to catch up with the executives who are far more academically qualified than me? Imposter syndrome… It’s a funny thing. It’s that weird feeling that you don’t quite fit in. But it’s also the fuel that creates the energy you need to survive. It’s what pushes you to try harder. Instead of worrying about the few things I didn’t study for the investment banking degree I never took, I have tried to study EVERYTHING! In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell teased me with the idea that 10,000 hours of focused learning could propel me to the top 1% of my chosen field. I believed him and embraced his concept whole heartedly. In some ways, that book rescued me (or it at least rescued my brain with the promise of success at the end of a long dark tunnel). Gladwell’s book was released in 2008, the year my design agency collapsed, as well as a few other companies such as Lehman Brothers. It was a rough year. I now needed a new mountain to climb. My back-of-the-napkin maths estimated that if I was going to take a different route to scale to new heights, then 10,000 hours would be about 7 years if I spent up to 4 hours a day learning new things. In that moment I decided to dedicate my life to storytelling and to helping other people get better at telling their stories. Fast forward 7 years and we’re in 2015. I’ve learned to speed read. I’ve been an early investor in Masterclass.com and I’ve devoured every business strategy, communication, marketing and motivational book that I could get my hands on. I’ve worked at Facebook. I created one of the first social media teams in Europe for £1 billion telco retailer. That led me to the software company Adobe, where I helped to develop their go-to-market strategy for a new marketing cloud. Adobe opened the doors to Salesforce who were in the middle of buying ExactTarget for $2.5Bn to compete with Adobe. I was recruited to help them tell their story to CMOs and investors. And then came 2016. That was the year I was hired by the biggest tech company of them all, to tell stories about AI, blockchain, cloud and quantum computing. Today, I’m a communications designer for a 110-year old start-up called IBM. I draw stories, write speeches and help executives to communicate better. It’s a great job title because I invented it. IBM has never had a ”communications designer” before so I’m rather fond of it. Those two little words that speak volumes. Not just about what I do, but about where I’ve come from. I don’t think I’m a failure anymore. I don’t have imposter syndrome. And I’m quite proud of the fact that I’ve fought my way to the top without a degree! So what was it that made all the difference? Two things. One, I’ve never stopped learning. Two, I write every day (even when I don’t feel like it). d direct me towards pastures new? When I was diagnosed with ADHD one pagers WhenI first started to scribble my thoughts down onto large sheets of paper who knew that they would rescue me an helped me to make sense of my thoughts and process them better. And who knew that not only would my one pagers fill the void created by incomplete education, but they would help me to inspire entrepreneurs, business leaders and civil servants to become more successful? This book is a short collection of the things I’ve scribbled over the last few years, but they’re really rooted in what’s happened to me over the previous thirty. So please, feel free to view my notes and one pagers with idle curiosity, or the kind of pleasant voyeurism that you get when browsing through someone else’s journal. But don’t for a second think that these are just words on a page or pictures simply coloured in to pass the time and share on social media. To me, these are the words and ideas that helped to change my world. Not the world. Just my world. And who knows? Perhaps they’ll provide a little dose of inspiration or that kick up the ass to encourage you to change your world too...