Hello friends, peers and general blog-readers.

Here’s something to get your brain ticking:

‘The purpose of life is to be happy’ — Dalai Lama

A great quote, right? For some this may strike a chord with you because it’s the very thing you strive for in your everyday living: to be happy. Looking for that one thing that gives you a little bit of joy and ensures you go to bed with a smile on your face each day, happiness is something we are taught to be one of the primary factors of a long and fulfilled life.

However, though I think this quote is a great sentiment, I actually don’t believe it to be true.

Over the years I have met countless people from all kinds of backgrounds with all sorts of theories on life fulfilment. Parents, high earners, low earners, CEO’s, people with families, the homeless, orphans. And for each one of them, when asked ‘what is the one thing that makes you happy’, you will get a different response. For some it will be family, for some it will be finance based, others it will be to have a roof over their heads. Different life experiences, situations and world views bring us a different perspective on what it means to be fulfilled and give us that thing which makes us happy.

So, why am I telling you this?

Besides getting us to think a little deeper (apologies to anyone reading before 9am who haven’t yet had their morning coffee), I recently made a decision that has turned out to quite drastically change my life direction. A choice that has brought a number of varied responses from peers, family and work relationships. Some being elated, some indifferent, others completely perplexed at why I have chosen to make such a life change.

In light of that and to share this news with my wider circle of peer and business relationships, I’ve created this blog to give you the bigger picture and context of my decision, to tell you exactly what I’m going to be doing, but ultimately to give you my perspective on this question:

‘What do I believe is life purpose really all about?’

As some of you reading will be aware, 9 years ago (and very out of the blue) I became strongly connected and involved with my local church. It’s a place I have grown to love and forms a huge part, if not one of the biggest things in my life. It’s given me the opportunity to look outside of myself and put into the younger generation below me, to travel all over the world and to give my time to things that I could never have dreamed that I would ever have the opportunity of being involved in. What an incredible few years it’s been.

However out of all the things that I have been able to experience, there is one thing in particular that I have grown to love, and that is the nation of Africa. As well as my family being rooted there (South Africa), I have been involved with a charity organisation called Saturation Trust that are helping to eradicate poverty and injustice across the continent by working to bring a difference and change to people’s lives through community projects. It’s through working with this charity that over the years, I have developed a real connection to Africa to a point where when I land on its soil, it feels like a second home. From this, I have for a long time had a real sense that part of my future may involve this nation and have explored various opportunities to make this happen.

To give you an idea of some of my involvement with Saturation in Africa, in 2011 and 2014, I had the opportunity to go to Nigeria and be a part of a leadership team running a ten-day medical trip into the villages of some of the most impoverished parts of Western Africa. We worked from sunrise to sunset to diagnose almost 1,000 peoples illnesses and give medication to people that were dying from very treatable illnesses, simply due to lack of finance for medication. The impact on the community was unbelievable and left an impression and memory on me that I’m sure will stay with me for a very long time.

In another time during 2014, we helped to fundraise a trip into Pienaar, South Africa, where we provided brand new footwear to over 150 children who had worn the same pair of shoes for the past 6 years. Some whose feet had not been able to develop further due to being restricted by wearing shoes 4 sizes too small for them. A simple pleasure most of us have here in the Western World, but, a miracle to those that we came across.

So, why am I giving you this context? Well, having been a part of many other projects similar to the above, one of the challenges we as a team have realised over the years, is that in order to keep sustaining these projects and having the kind of impact we want to achieve, we cannot continue individually funding them ourselves, which is historically what has happened. To date, we have all individually invested our personal finance to set these projects up and although it’s a privilege, it is not a long term, sustainable and viable way of doing it. We have always known that we are going to need to find a way to properly fund these projects long term.

For this reason, over the past three years we have been racking our brains and looking at ways to establish some kind of ‘financial engine’ on a model whereby 100% of the profits created are put back into these projects so that we can continue building on the work we have developed over the years and properly fund them long term.

After a long period without much success, we finally in 2012 had a breakthrough opportunity present itself to us.

On a trip to Australia, we met an organisation that for the past 10 years have been running an adventure conference centre in New South Wales, close to Sydney. The centre this organisation runs is so successful as a fundraising business, that they have been able to invest tens of millions of Australian Dollars into community projects across many nations over the world. Naturally, something as successful as this with the same kind of vision had us thinking. So, back in the UK, the team asked ourselves:

‘how could this involve us with what we want to achieve in Africa’?

Following this in 2014, friends of ours who own a cattle farm in George, South Africa caught wind of our vision to establish a financial engine and got in contact to present us with an opportunity. Being an older couple in their 70's, it had come to the stage in life where they were ready to retire and needed to decide if they wanted to either A) sell their farm and retire, or alternatively B) give their farm away to a charitable cause. So in 2014, it was miraculously agreed that this couple would give us their farm, for free, with no ties, and purely for the purpose of helping us establish our vision of pioneering a fundraising business, a conference adventure centre in the Mossel Bay Area of South Africa.

So by now you’re probably wondering where I come into this?

Well, in light of the above, I have been in a process of slowly working my way to a decision over the past six months of deciding how much involvement I want to give of my life to seeing this engine established and what my future involvement in Africa looks like. This is a decision that I have not taken lightly, spent many sleepless nights wrestling over and have given considerable length of thought to. But finally, I came to a decision, and that decision is that I will be moving permanently with a team of 11 South Africans to George, SA at the end of July 2015. I will be giving up my job, family, friends and leaving everything of my life in the UK behind to pursue my dream of Africa and bringing positive impact to this nation.

I am hugely excited about what this will entail and the future that is ahead of me. I’m excited to be able to put into South Africa and give back to a place that has made a huge impact and impression on my life. To give to people that are some of the poorest in the world, yet at the same time also the most joyful and content with the little they have. It’s going to be an exciting adventure and I can’t wait to begin.

So back to the question, ‘What do I believe life purpose is really all about?’

Some of you may think this decision is very out of the blue, some may think it’s great to see someone ‘doing their bit’ for charity, others may be perplexed. And a small minority may not even have read this far ;-).

But Ralph Waldo Emerson sums up my thoughts and response to this question quite well:

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

For me, whether you are happy in life is not completely, but quite irrelevant. Life purpose is about being uncomfortable, taking the hidden path and looking as outwardly as possible. Some people live so cautiously as though they are waiting to get safely to the grave, we should rather get to the grave and see how much we have lived!

I want to spend the next sixty years taking risks to be able to make a difference in as many lives as possible and this opportunity in South Africa presents just that. I would love for you as peers, family and business relationships to join me on this journey and drop in every now and then to see what we as a team are up to. Catch us on my blog here from time to time (internet permitting!) to keep updated.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and be encouraged — take the road less travelled, you never know where it may lead!

Fundraising