Read my full admission:

The first thing I remember were those uncomfortable chairs. Sitting on them for an hour would generally result in a loss of feeling in my lower back and legs. Then there were the teachers. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for teachers (my mother has been a teacher for over 35 years and counting), but I never really understood what the purpose of being required to memorise generally useless information was. You know, being lectured on stuff that has little or no practicability in the real world. Then if that wasn't enough, you were forced to cram it all into your head so that several weeks later you could be given a mark based on how well you regurgitated it in test. It all seemed kind of pointless to me.


I never quite understood why my teachers felt so threatened whenever I raised my hand to question why this information was important, necessary or relevant to the real world (although I suspect that they probably just didn't know the answer themselves). Suffice to say I wasn't a particularly popular student for some strange reason, and I was often told I would amount to nothing, or would have to make-do in life with working menial jobs - simply because I didn't fit into their system. It might have ended there in fact, I could have taken their criticisms and allowed the system to destroy me, after all it seemed to be geared that way. A lucrative career in the fast food industry on minimum wage beckoned. But then something amazing happened...


I am an avid reader. Every day I digest the newspaper before I have even gotten out of bed (it's a lot easier to do now courtesy of smartphones). I also read a lot of business books. Every night when I was 16 or 17 I used to read biographies of successful people. People such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and many others. The more I read about a lot of these guys, the more I realised we were not all that different. Sure we may have had a slight difference with the number of zeroes at the end of our bank accounts, but in each of their stories I noticed a pattern started to emerge. These people all swam against the tide. They quite often defied the conventional education system. Most of them were High School or College drop-outs. Most had even failed at some time during their lives - some had even failed multiple times! I was amazed to discover that everything I had been told was completely wrong. Failure doesn't always mean failure, failure can actually create success...


At the age of 18 I started my first business with a like-minded partner who was an entire year older than me. Soon after that, our first company morphed into another company with 2 more partners. Now here is the pay-off to the long-winded and utterly boring story of my life that you just read. Are you ready for it? Don't force yourself to read on if you don't want to find out what happened. After all I'd hate to bore you. Ready to read on? Want me to stop this annoying aside to try and build up even greater anticipation than you already have? Well here it is: The company I co-founded some 13 years ago now turns over in excess of one hundred million dollars per year. That is not a misprint. It is $100,000,000 per year - that's a lot of zeroes, right? - 8 of them in fact (I counted). Thankfully my arithmetic isn't as bad as my teachers thought it was...


The pesky thing about us entrepreneurs (the job description which I eventually discovered I had), is that we don't like to sit still for too long - I put this down to those uncomfortable chairs we used to be forced to sit in when I was in High School - you know, the ones that generally resulted in a loss of feeling in my lower back and legs. So I decided I wanted to create more companies. These have also become million dollar companies, and this time I decided to forego business partners - mainly because we kept arguing about which shade of white to paint the office walls. I still have those businesses, but my focus has shifted a little bit to other things as well.


I'm much more focused on enjoying life now and getting that balance in place between your personal life and your work. Things like traveling for instance have become very important to me (I've been on 12 vacations this year and there are more to come). I've realised that it is not just about having the business, but also about the lifestyle and freedom that it allows. You don't want to start a successful business and then become a prisoner to it - what's the point of that? You might as well just work a regular desk job like everybody else. I learned that the hard way too...


So why am I telling you all of this? Because I want to assure all of those people out there who are just like me, people who failed at High School or University or who were told they would never amount to anything in life - that everybody else is wrong. Failure does not equal failure. You can actually become incredibly successful by going against convention and thinking differently to everybody else. I'm going to give you the blueprint I have formulated during my 16 years in business and something which can be replicated by people just like you who are willing to give it a try. So stay tuned if you want to learn more, it is all coming very soon...