Lesson 2: You Don’t Have To Do Anything You Don’t Want To
Written by Amira Aleem
In September 2014, while he was in New Zealand with his mum, Andy received a call from a friend in London who had been to a festival called Escape the Woods. She put him in touch with someone she had met there, Ben Keene, the founder of Tribewanted. Andy would meet Ben in person a few months later when they were both in Bali, Indonesia.
At the time, Ben was working on the idea for Tribewanted in Bali. Ben had previously built Tribewanted communities in other parts of the world, which functioned as sustainable tourism projects. In Bali, he was creating a co-working group for people from around the world to spend 50% of their time on individual projects, 25% on each other’s projects and 25% on local community projects. Andy signed up straight away.
But, it soon became clear that although the spirit of Tribewanted was well-defined, the mission of the Bali version was slightly different to the other Tribewanted projects and focused less on building sustainable tourism projects with local communities than Andy had first thought. “I made a ton of assumptions,” he says in retrospect.
A month into the three months of the Tribewanted Bali pilot, Andy sat down with Ben to have an honest conversation about what he wanted out of the experience and during that conversation, Ben invited Andy on a four-day trip to Myanmar.
While there, the group met with communities on the Bo Cho Island and with Burmese community officials. It was a time spent exploring the nuances of the tourism industry and how local communities had been affected by it, both positively and negatively.
During this time, Andy started using his phone more (having had 18 months with a basic phone), taking pictures and using video to capture the experiences around him. It was not a far leap from his first side passion as a cricket radio host, a job he held in his 20s. Being outdoors and working closely with people, showed Andy just how far the work in Bali was from his time in Myanmar.
Being on a small island, camping on a beach and being in close contact with the two tribes of Burmese people in Myanmar had really shown Andy the kind of environment he most enjoyed being in. It was Myanmar he says that made him want to look into a wilderness course with the Outward Bound trust, back in New Zealand.
Towards the end of the trip, Andy said he realised that his time in Bali was coming to an end and because the time in Myanmar had been such an uplifting experience, his six months in Bali felt like a failure. It was an uncomfortable realisation that remained hard for him to come to terms with for quite some time.
On his way back to to Bali from Myanmar, Andy had a pre-arranged meeting in Singapore with the founder of Fidor Bank that was looking to scale to Asia, and he wanted to speak to Andy about Indonesia. Andy remembers not wanting to go to at all, especially after an eye-opening trip to Myanmar.
“I just remember thinking, ‘gosh I really don’t want to go to Singapore to talk about a bank. How boring!’”, he told me given how much he had enjoyed his time Myanmar, albeit a short experience.
Andy had liked Matthias, the founder of Fidor Bank and had seen him speak before. He was someone he admired for his fresh approach to banking, and although he was resistant to the idea of meeting him, mostly because his interest in banking was undergoing a shift, the idea of turning down the meeting just didn’t seem right to him.
“What I learnt in that time was, absolutely you can change your mind. You don’t have to go and meet someone just for a bloody meeting. He’s going there anyway, he’ll be absolutely fine. Don’t worry about it. Just say, ‘look, I can’t make it’.”
But Andy went, as there was no phone coverage on Bo Cho Island to be able to tell the Matthias that he wouldn’t be able to make it and the potential for an opportunity, and a sense of obligation made him go. The conversation ended up being positive, but really didn’t provide much value to either of them in the long-run. Just before leaving, Andy texted his friend Marcus.
Marcus, who had recently arrived from London, was working on a Start-up Accelerator in Singapore and looking for some extra help. For Andy, now thinking about how to get back into work, this seemed like a good way to do it.
They shook on it. In retrospect, Andy says it was probably one of the worst decisions of his life.
We’ll elaborate on why that was further into Andy’s story. For now though, the crucial point is that the Singapore experience may have made sense on paper, but it did not have the purpose-driven aspect that Andy had craved and did not find in Bali.
You Don’t Have To Do Anything You Don’t Want To (by Andy McLean)
Taking an opportunity for which I’ve had little enthusiasm and which wasn’t appealing to my new-found interests in community-building work, led me down a path at the end of which was no fulfilment more than once over three years. And looking back, it (the six months of not achieving this goal in Bali especially), had a bad effect on me and my mental health.
The lesson here is simple: let your interests guide you, understand what assumptions you are making (write them down and keep asking ‘why?’) so that when a misplaced opportunity comes knocking at the door, no matter how sensible it might seem, choosing not to answer the call may serve you well. Conversely, if something like Myanmar comes along, grab it and build on it as best you can.
Thank you for reading this part of Andy’s story. My writing work can be found here: https://medium.com/@amiraaleem.
