About Benjamin

I know I keep saying I’ll look at your website, but to be honest I’ve been very busy. — Mum, two years ago.

I had no idea what I was doing during my school years, but I do know I held back. I was more than happy to let other people take charge while I sat around and observed from the sidelines.

At sixteen I fell in with a small group of people who instantly made me feel like I belonged. Still, even in this group, we never did anything or went anywhere because I’d suggested it. The only reason I applied to university was because everybody else was doing so. I was simply tagging along for the ride for fear of being left behind by the masses.

After graduating from my marketing degree in 2009 I gleefully started sending out a small handful of job applications, assuming all would get back to me immediately gushing over the very prospect of meeting me in person. Eventually, through persistence, I landed a marketing role in a small organic food company in south London.

Six weeks in, they let me go.

I spent the next two months applying to any job that sounded remotely respectable. Each day I would phone dozens of companies in the morning, followed by a sprint up and down the city of London, child-sized briefcase in hand, in the afternoon.

After a couple of months trying to fit in with the people I assumed I wanted to be my peers, I suddenly realised this is what I had been trying to do all my life.

In that moment I threw down my tiny briefcase and phoned my ex-boss at a book store I’d worked at part-time during my final year of university. He immediately offered me a job at his new location, a large department store in central London.

I went on to have the best nine months of my life with the most interesting and vastly different group of people I had ever met. It was during this time, November 2009, that I started blogging while continually searching for something new to work on.

In the summer of 2010 I fell upon the idea of lifestyle design, a concept of creating multiple monetary streams online in place of a more conventional (and location dependent) job. I was immediately taken by this new take on life, one I had never considered possible before. From this moment until the end of 2011 I worked tirelessly not just to create a new life for myself, but to create a new way of living.

I handed in my notice at the end of 2011, and less than 28 days later I became self-employed.

Now, tagging along for the ride for fear of being left behind by the masses has become a thing of the past. Who wants to form a part of the masses anyway?