Writing this from Bangkok on Monday morning, with our flight back to the UK later night.
The current plan is to stay at the hotel until 9pm, try to get Cody to sleep from about 7 until 9, wake him up, check out and then get on an overnight flight home.
I stand by this being the best way to travel long-haul with a toddler.
Yes, sometimes getting him to sleep on a plane is an absolute battle. But if you win that battle and he sleeps for eight hours, a 10 or 12 hour flight is suddenly manageable.
I’d take that over four hours of daytime flight entertainment duty every single time.
We land, I then have a ten hour round trip to collect Harvey, we get one weekend at home and next Monday I fly to California for Amazon Accelerate, our exec offsite and Amazon Ads unBoxed. In just two weeks time it' will have been Bali → Bangkok → London → Seattle → Pismo Beach → San Francisco.
A couple of people who know me well have told me recently that I push myself too hard.
They might be right.
But I don’t believe the alternative is better.
I’d rather use the body while I have it.
I got sick before HYROX Jakarta. I was fine by race day and I don’t think it affected the result.
Then I got sick again before the Bali half marathon. That one definitely did affect me a bit.
A couple of friends messaged afterwards with some variation of the same point: you do too much, you push too hard, you need to slow down. To be fair, I understand why they say it. And I know they are coming from a good place…I actually appreciate it.
I train a lot. I travel a lot. I run two businesses. I’m a dad. I sign up for races that push me. I also have a fairly high tolerance for stacking all of those things on top of each other, powering through and assuming I’ll be ok.
And 99% of the time, I am.
The thing I keep coming back to is that I’m happy. I don’t feel mentally fried, I don’t feel constantly stressed and I actually feel incredibly at peace with the life I’m living.
Maybe physically I do push the line occasionally, but I’d still rather do that than spend the next ten or twenty years cruising.
I keep noticing older people recently. Not people who are ill. Just people who are clearly much closer to the end of their physical prime (and life) than I am.
And every time I do, I have the same thought…I’m insanely lucky.
Right now I can still train hard, run a half marathon, race Hyrox and lift heavy. I can travel across the world for work and pleasure, recover and do it again. I can pick Cody up, throw him around, chase him and carry him when he gets tired.
None of that lasts forever.
There will come a point where getting stronger becomes much harder. There will come a point where getting faster becomes impossible. Eventually, some amount of physical decline becomes unavoidable.
I’d rather start that decline from a ridiculously high baseline.
“If ageing is eventually going to take something from me, I want to give it as little as possible to start with.”
That’s how I think about training now. Not just trying to look good or hit PBs (those are still my number one reasons)... but I’m also building as much capacity as I can while my body is still able to give it to me.
There’s a window with your children too.
The last three months in Bali, Hong Kong & Bangkok have made me think about this even more.
We absolutely made the most of this summer. I don’t regret a single thing.
Yes, we missed things at home. There were events we weren’t at, people we didn’t see and normal life carried on without us for three months. But I look at what we got in return and there is no contest.
Cody has absolutely thrived.
More importantly, my relationship with him has changed. He’s more attached to me now than he was three months ago.
I’ve spent more time with him. We’ve laughed together more, we’ve cuddled more…we’ve just hung out more.
And that window is temporary too.
Right now, he’s two. He wants us around constantly. He wants to be picked up, he wants to play and he wants to follow us around everywhere (literally everywhere).
At some point, that will change.
At ten, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, he’ll need something different from me. And I’m very aware that I don’t get this phase twice.
We’ll probably have another child at some point too, and I keep thinking about the kind of childhood I want them to have and the kind of dad I want to be.
There will be years where they need less from me, so I don’t see much sense in voluntarily giving them less of me now.
That’s probably the biggest thing this summer has changed for me.
I gave myself the CEO title before I knew how to do the job.
When Luke and I started Toucan, my role was very clear.
I was customer facing. Sales, marketing, winning new business, being the face of the agency. I was on the weekly client calls.
Luke was much more operational. Finance, systems, Seller Central, Vendor Central, making sure the engine actually worked behind the scenes.
It was a really clean split.
Then the business grew. We hired more people. At some point LinkedIn required me to update my job title.
So I typed CEO into the box.
Nobody interviewed me. Nobody promoted me. Nobody sat me down and said, congratulations, you’re ready.
I just…typed it.
I never really had imposter syndrome around it. I always believed I could do the job.
But the strange part is that the job has changed completely while the title stayed the same.
CEO of a small founder led agency meant selling, servicing clients, getting involved in almost everything…and putting out fires on a daily basis.
CEO of a business approaching 40 people, with teams in multiple countries and a proper C-suite, means something very different.
It’s less about doing. More about judgement, direction, people, deciding where I should actually spend my time, knowing when to step in and when not to.
A big part of being able to do that has been surrounding myself with people who are far better than me in areas I don’t need to own anymore. Luke, Dan as CCO and Sophie as COO.
That’s what makes the next week in California so exciting.
For a few days, we’ll all be in the same place. 4 brains all with the same goal. It’s pretty powerful.
“Founders get to give themselves impressive titles very early. The business then spends the next ten years finding out whether they can grow into them.”
I think I’m still doing that.
Hopefully I always will be.
Tomorrow we fly home. Then I collect Harvey, one weekend with family, then California. Accelerate, exec offsite, unBoxed.
It sounds like a lot because it is a lot.
Maybe I do push myself too hard sometimes. Ask me again in twenty years whether I regret it.
My guess is I’ll regret the things I didn’t do much more.
That's issue twenty three.
Now I just need to survive an overnight flight and a 10 hour round trip to collect my dog.