Lesson 1: The Great Thing About Knowing Your Why
Written by Amira Aleem
“You’ve got to know what makes you tick and what doesn’t — if you don’t like doing something you have to have a plan to deal with it.”
In August 2016, Andy attended a meeting at Escape the City, a community group in London for people looking to develop interesting careers. At the meeting, members of the community discussed the need for an alternative living and co-working space. There had to be a way to work, they insisted, that created a better quality of life.
Something about the idea stuck with Andy. Seeing how many people were interested in the idea — and given his relative flexibility — he leapt at the opportunity.
A few weeks later, on the suggestion of a friend he had met in Bali the year before, Andy flew to Portugal to see with his own eyes a place called Cascais. It was a sunny Sunday and Andy was awestruck by the glistening Atlantic Ocean, the yachts racing in the distance and the natural beauty of the coastline.
Within a day, Andy had decided that Cascais was the place and he began scouting houses that would be a good fit for what would later become the Escape House. Apart from the obvious proximity to London and the significantly less red tape than Bali, Andy began to visualise an experience in Portugal that could be a simpler, more successful version of his ideas for what life on a tropical island like Bali might have been.
Then in November, with things quiet at his job in London, Andy rented a house in Cascais, 30 km from the capital, Lisbon. The weather was beautiful, costs were cheap and it was a short flight from London.
The project got off to a promising start, with 23 people making their way to Portugal in December and early January (2017) to experience an alternative way to live and work together in the house. The first weekend the house was completely packed.
Over the next two months, Andy met with potential partners, organised paddle-board sessions and kept the house in Portugal alive and vibrant. It was something he enjoyed immensely, bringing his love for community building and people together.
“Portugal taught me a few things: I loved being the driver, picking people up, that was really important to me. I loved doing the fire. We ate dinner together every single night.”
But in time, a fatal flaw made it hard to operate. Andy points out that so much of his time was spent on building the ‘product’, that he wasn’t planning the model for the future. “The bit that I completely underestimated was building a sales pipeline.”
Although the original excitement had been high just before Christmas, Andy recalls seeing the numbers fall for people being able to come out. Add to that the growing expenses of the house and irregular signups and the finances soon stopped making sense.
In the days leading up to New Year, Andy recalls feeling awful. Although the house was full of people (with, at one point, Andy sleeping in front of the fire having given up his bed for a guest), there was the growing realisation that he wouldn’t be able to continue with the house into the future.
Finally, with much sadness having to pack up a project he had spent a few months pouring his heart and soul into, Andy describes his feelings in one simple word: ‘devastating’.
Back in London, the validation kept coming, with members of the wider community congratulating him for trying something new and hustling a project. But it didn’t take away the feeling of worthlessness that had settled within him.
“I made the huge assumption that if I made the start, someone else would come along and it would sort itself out. And it didn’t.”
Part of the lesson is that we live in a world where entrepreneurship is glamourised and the idea of starting something and believing in yourself can be mistaken for the magic bullet of career success. “I had heard too much rhetoric of just get started and it will work itself out along the way and I really don’t think that stacks up.”
In hindsight, Andy insists that protecting yourself when something goes wrong and having a back-up plan is crucial. In the months that followed, Andy found himself asking questions like, “How do you manage risk? What precautions do you put in place before moving somewhere?”
He answers his own questions with the lesson he has learned along the way. “Smaller steps,” he insists, “testing your risks in a much smaller way and having a plan if it all doesn’t work out.”
The Great Thing About Knowing Your Why (by Andy McLean)
Looking back, chasing both community and purpose has been to crucial to my story. It’s something I’ve reflected on constantly, thinking “I’ve failed at that, I’ve failed at that, that didn’t work out.” But, I accept, it is often due to not having a clear reason to want to do it, and remembering that success and failure is relative, not absolute.
And that’s knowing ‘why’ you are doing something is vital and it doesn’t matter how many times you have to ask yourself the question. It requires patience, something I realise now that I should have been much more mindful of having!
