Lesson 3: Hunches Are Great. Testing Assumptions and Decision Making Criteria Are Better
Written by Amira Aleem
A series of events and work experiences led Andy to try living and working in new environments. His first attempt was in Ubud, Bali, a place he had visited during a sabbatical the previous year.
Andy had wrapped up his life in London, to be closer to his family during his mother’s illness. After supporting her through the worst of it Andy began exploring his options. He had loved Bali, while there in 2013, and decided that it may be a place for him to go and try and build his life.
He remembers his mum saying to him, “Be careful, it might not be as good the second time around.”
Once in Bali, Andy found it hard to adjust to a digital nomad community that were primarily working on projects and businesses of their own. There wasn’t really the sense of community he craved and although he dabbled in different projects, there was nothing that really held his interest. “I never really quite found my way there.”
“I was really naïve about it,” he says now. “I think I struggled because I was going to set up a life there, as opposed to just clear my head, which is what the intention had been the last time during my sabbatical.”
Andy explains that the first few months were difficult and hard to adjust to. Apart from the routine of visiting the yoga studio regularly and attending one-off events, Andy found himself helping out in a series of different tasks, as and when they came up.
He had worked with the people on the island extensively, running projects like the ‘Better Bali Project’ and had gained a huge amount of respect in the local community. He supported people with their ideas for protecting and developing the island, whether that was ensuring the Indonesian language was protected or assisting with plastic pollution reduction schemes.
“That became my story — I became the guy who could help out with lots of things.”
Andy found during that time that his role was best suited to being a bridge between the digital nomad community on the island and the local Balinese families — two groups that often functioned independently of each other.
Eventually, Andy decided to accept an offer from in Singapore, moving from Bali. The role involved working as a financial expert on a start-up accelerator and had come about from chance conversation with a friend, and he had been exploring how he could step back into working full-time.
The details of the role weren’t entirely clear and while on the job Andy quickly realised that his contribution to the programme was unlikely to be significant in the way he had hoped it would be.
“How on earth was I going to be useful on a startup accelerator in Singapore as a banking expert, with no local contacts?” With no network in a new country, it was next to impossible for him to fill the role in the way he would have hoped.
Although the decision made sense on paper, it really wasn’t fulfilling Andy’s personal goals or giving him any sense of satisfaction. The position had given him the opportunity to step back into working again but he recalls feeling lonely in a new country where he had no friends, often leaving to visit Bali for the weekend.
Doing something that made sense for him professionally ended up having a profound effect on him emotionally and mentally. Looking back, Andy advocates a set of non-negotiables, something you can look back on and help guide your actions so that they are rooted in the things that work for you.
“You’ve got to come up with some kind of decision making criteria, you can’t just completely act on hunches all the time.”
Testing Assumptions and Decision Making Criteria Are Better Than Hunches (by Andy McLean)
I aim to give around 25% of my time to advance other people’s causes in some way or another, as this comes naturally to me — but I accept it’s not part of everyone’s make-up. Yet my experiences in Bali then Singapore — which were based on hunches that I would find relevance — have proven that this is a flawed approach to big life changes.
I now know two years later looking in the rear-view mirror that having a set of principles would have been really helpful. I created a Personal Manifesto of ten simple statements in the autumn of 2016 and I hope you’ll find it useful too.
Thank you for reading this part of Andy’s story. My writing work can be found here: https://medium.com/@amiraaleem.
