This is a story about bridge burning...

How many of us are afraid to declare the causes we support, for fear of impacting our professional reputation. Does supporting mental health and homelessness charities make me look somehow less corporate, and consequently, make me less employable? Does the fact that I have even experienced these things first hand make me unemployable?

In fact, if my employment options became coincidentally curtailled at the same time as I have started blogging, despite a successful full-time career of some 18+ years, it would not take a brain of Britain to recognise that this must be because of institutional discrimination, which is probably illegal.

There is absolutely nothing to suggest that I am any less able than any other candidate in the job market, and in fact, my history makes me more of a 'catch' to a potential employer: the man who has nothing has nothing to lose. Plus I have been 'stress tested' to the limit and beyond. I know exactly where those limits are, and I can empathise with my colleagues when they are under stress and pressure.

When 'sh1t goes bad' who do you really want in the bunker with you? People who have never been in that kind of situation before, and are therefore an unknown quantity, or people who know their personal breaking point.

I've been in some hair-raising situations, both through choice and by accident. Challenging yourself, and being challenged by things that are out of your control, teaches you how to handle stressful situations. A certain amount of training, discipline and drills will prepare your muscle memory to pull the "parachute rip-cord" to use a layman's term. But how do you deal with the long plane journey up to 13,000ft? How do you mentally prepare to throw yourself out of a perfectly servicable aeroplane?

Worse still, how do you prepare yourself for people yelling at you and telling you you're an idiot? People do this because they are scared and have lost faith in your leadership. People believe that pain and fear can be magically taken away by those in positions of authority.

Losing authority can be dangerous, especially if you are the leader in a dangerous place. Generally, most people don't know what to expect when they are entering an extreme environment: the mountains and the sea (the poles and the deserts too, but I don't know much about those places, yet).

Let me tell you about crampons. These are a spiked device that attach to your feet, so that you can move safely on ice. I always shake my head in disbelief at people who are blunting an expensive pair of crapons on rocks. If they do encounter any ice, they will certainly not be effective if they are not sharp.

Let me tell you about ropes. These long flexible cords are no use at arresting a fall unless they are attached to something solid. In order to attach a rope to a mountain, you will need a whole load of other heavy metal gear that will need to be secured to the rocks, and the rocks themselves will need to be large and heavy and generally immovable.

So, if you see climbing parties with crampons and ropes, moving on snow - in an area with no glaciers - then these things are only there as a confidence trick. The fact is, that there is very little stopping you from plunging to your death, even with ropes & crampons.

I personally, don't like to be weighed down with unnecessary gear. It's not about not being prepared. It's about recognising that I'd rather have saved the energy, so that I can use that surplus reserve of energy in order to scout ahead of my group for problems, or fetch assistance if necessary. The main thing though, is to stay within personal limits as a leader, so that when people are tired and cranky, and scared and their feet hurt and they are cold and hungry, you don't mind giving them your personal stash of candy bars, you don't mind them calling you names, you don't mind them questioning your leadership skills.

The main thing that qualifies a person as a leader is how they cope under crossfire.

The more I lead people in stressful situations, the more I learn about my personal weaknesses, the more I learn about my personal limits. Nobody should underestimate just how hard I had to be pushed before I cracked, but nobody should consider themselves such a 'rock' or a hard nut that will never crack under pressure.

My best friend and climbing partner sustained life-changing injuries in a 'freak' accident when the chockstone he was abseilling from shattered. I have only just started to deal with feelings surrounding this, so I'm not going to write any more about this today, but my thoughts always turn to him and how I have shyed away from post-accident involvement, as it was such a terrifying reminder of our mortality and fragility. I knew I couldn't do anything to turn back the hands of time. Accidents happen, and the first thing you learn in the mountains is that you can't control all the variables. It's still something that victims, survivors and those connected to them, have to come to terms with though.

Ropes have their place in sport rock climbing. Modern equipment is so good - the Petzl Grigri in this case - I don't even have to hold the rope to be honest, but old habits literally die hard (October 2012)

Addendum for climbing nerd trolls: no, I didn't leave the rope all over the place like that. I was asked to step in and belay only seconds (sic.) before the photo was taken. And, no, I'm not even standing on the rope even though it looks like I might be from the low-resolution image. Anybody who has climbed multi-pitch with me will tell you my ropework is above your nitpicking.

Tags: #climbing #leadership #homeless #career #london #banking #adventure #mentalhealth

This is a story of imitation...

I pitched the Cambridge Angels in flip flops. They didn't like this very much. It was a hot day in June though, so I thought it was appropriate. Perhaps I was a little over-inspired by The Social Network, but at least I wasn't wearing my dressing gown.

I also structured my company, so that my shares would be less diluted when the company received investment.

I was even so paranoid about anybody wrestling control of my company away from me, that when I wrote and signed a vesting agreement for my co-founder in a pub, on a napkin, during the first weeks of the Springboard Accelerator Program, in Cambridge, I deliberately held the pen upside down for the photo. Plausible deniability.

Anyway, so Hubflow is winding down operations, and that means I failed as CEO, despite the fact I stepped down a few years ago. Of course I wanted to give all my investors a big payday, so put a black mark against my name.

People should remember that I always had one eye on the sales pipeline and another eye on the bills, taxes, and wages. I would never bankrupt a company. However, it's all credit to my co-founder for getting things in order when I became unwell.

It's tough at the top, and I have nothing but respect for anybody who is in a CxO position. I'm not after anybody's job... I know how much of a kicking the executives get from investors, customers, and the sleepless nights thinking about everybody who is depending on them.

I'm also not so naïve as to believe that I should be telling anybody how to build a successful startup yet. I learned loads on the Springboard program, but those lessons have yet to express themselves in a useful and productive way for everybody who invested time & energy in me.

I'm wrestling with an unquenchable desire to research and develop stuff, to innovate, to explore ideas. I know that I can deliver a project as a solo founder, or build something from day one with the right co-founder(s). Bringing people in later in the life of a startup, is very difficult.

I also know that I can be a developer, or I can be a startup founder...  not both. Sure, I can write code, I can fix bugs, but the demands on a founder are so great that it's impossible to do the development as well. I was writing and maintaining code for the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, web application, maintaining the database, doing sysadmin, operational support... it was too much, on top of raising money, meeting customers, pitching and meeting mentors.

On the Springboard Program, Jon and Jess did a great job of supporting the founders. I know that Jon also went by far the extra mile for the teams that were dealing with issues, and the safety net that was there for me could not be faulted. I had bitten off more than I could chew.

I was always torn between raising any kind of investment round (friends & family, seed) or bootstrapping. I also was conflicted about bringing anybody into my startup, except hired help. I didn't trust anybody. I also couldn't let go of control and empower anybody to help me.

When you are bootstrapping, you don't have any money. For anything. Making rent payments, wages, expenses... everything comes down to one thing and one thing only: how much runway have you got left for your burn rate? You run lean, but you also run stressed. That's not an excuse for me not being a team player though. Hubflow probably could have been a bigger success if I had learned the importance of Team, as well as Traction and Technology.

You live, you learn.

Photographic evidence that I did make people laugh as well as cry. I think we had great times in Cambridge. I know I did (May 2011)

Tags: #startup #entrepreneur #university #career #leadership #computing #apple

This is a story of a culture that is destroying people's mental health and lives...

Management by balance-sheet, bean counters, spreadsheet jockeys and "yes" men and women are joining a set of executives who do everything in their power to abstain from any of the hard work and responsibility that is necessary in the world.

We have all heard horror stories of people being sacked by text message. In fact, skilled workers, professionals, have been steadily robbed of their worth and self-esteem since powerful rich men, behind closed doors in gentleman's clubs were allowed to asset strip British industry. The practice continues today, as companies are allowed to be headquartered in the UK, but are offshoring all the jobs for cost reasons, and are draining the wealth of the nation.

Europe is fast becoming little more than a tax haven for global businesses, with billions, if not trillions of dollars of profits being pushed through legal entities that have little reason for existence other than to evade the taxes that these companies rightfully should pay to the countries that they have extracted the profits from.

Luxembourg is the most obvious example, but Ireland has recently jumped on the bandwagon. The amount of tax that is paid by Vodafone (group HQ is Luxembourg... funny that, considering that Newbury, UK is where I thought they were founded?) or Apple and Amazon (taxed via Irish legal entity... I know Apple Maps is rubbish but it's a long way from Silicon Valley?) is a pittance. The amount of profits that these companies make is disgusting, versus what they pay as percentage of their gross profits.

However, maybe there is a good reason for all of this?

When I became unwell, and asked good old UK government for support - as somebody who has always paid my full taxes, has no offshore bank accounts, has never tried to evade or avoid taxes - I found that there was worryingly little of a safety net there.

I went to my doctor (General Practitioner, or GP for short, here in the UK) and had a 30 second conversation about what was going on in my life.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine"

Well, yes, I have heard of Fluoxetine. It's the generic name for Prozac, which is an antidepressant from the 1980s. What the hell is my doctor doing dishing out 25 year old pills to somebody who they have taken 30 seconds to get to know? Well, we know that the NHS is extremely cost pressured, given that we have to give such large tax breaks to profitable billion dollar companies and make sure that we don't take too much inheritance tax from dead multi-millionaires. Oh, and we need nuclear atomic bombs too. Yes, we need to make sure we can always annihilate every person on earth at the flick of a switch.

Luckily for me, I walked away from a course of powerful psychoactive medication, that has been proven in long-term studies to be less effective than placebo. It also takes 6 weeks to take effect. My episodes of depression tend to be about this long anyway. Also, SSRIs make you fat and destroy your sex life, as well as blunting your emotions and generally making your sh1t life even more sh1t, but you'll be too doped up to even realise, unless you ever emerge from the chemical haze.

I'm pretty upset about this, if you hadn't picked up on that.

Another thing that is very annoying is that, as anybody who takes a few more minutes to get to know me will tell you, I'm certainly not what you might term unipolar. My life is littered with examples of radical mood swings. Catch me at a certain time, and you will see my racing thoughts, pressured speech, lack of sleep, intolerance of dimwitted twits, and evidence of my wacky projects.

One day I whimsically decided to knock down my shed, order a load of wood from a sawmill and build a giant beach hut summer house thing in my back garden. Somebody suffering from unipolar depression does not normally do such a thing, according to the DSM-IV/V.

I had to learn all about Google Sketchup, so that I could design the thing, learn about different types of timber, wooden building construction techniques, roofing techniques, planning laws governing outbuildings, estimate how much I would need in terms of materials, locate a sawmill, find a roofing supplier, get a chop saw, nail gun and roofing blow torch (the most fun tool of all).

At no point did any of this seems slightly strange or beyond my capabilities, as a spotty IT nerd who did little more than turn coffee into software for a living, by pressing buttons on a computer, in a comfortable air-conditioned office.

Working around-the-clock seemed perfectly normal too. I remember one neighbour pointed out that the sound of nails being hammered at 9pm was not helping him to study for an English exam... but how are you supposed to hammer quietly? I did try and hammer more considerately, but it seemed more considerate to simply get the project done as fast as possible (I think I took 3 days to complete the structure) given that I didn't know the sleep patterns of everybody within earshot.

So "Mega Shed" as she was affectionately known, appeared at the bottom of my garden in under a week, at a cost of £700. An ordinary week in anybody's life? Well it's hard to judge from an internal point of view, as you can't step out of your own mind and view yourself as others would.

Naturally, friends, colleagues and family are always impressed by a person's industriousness and ingenuity, so I saw no real reason to back off the gas. When the world rewards you for efforts, this reinforces your belief that what you are doing is sustainable.

I then decided to sit in my garden and read a huge stack of books on Quantum Mechanics. This then progressed to me reading every paper that looked interesting in Cornell University's online archives. Naturally, I then started emailling a bunch of the authors, and getting engaged in particularly interesting email based discussions with people around the world about De Broglie's Matter Waves (Pilot Wave theory) which looked a hell of a lot more elegant than all that Standard Model crap that couldn't be unified with General Relativity.

Instead of being discouraged, I found academics to be kind, indulgent and generous with their time. I took things too far, of course, and wrote a paper on the measurement of collapsing Quantum States in an entangled system, spread over a physical space larger than the light-cones of the particles being measured. Standard Quantum Eraser type stuff. I even tried to get it published. Lolz.

At no point did anybody actually directly say to me "you seem to be as mad as a box of frogs on acid with lasers coming out of their nostrils" so I kept digging myself into a deeper and deeper thought hole until I sank into another depression, with no idea what had just happened to me.

The thing is, it's fairly entertaining, enthralling, to watch somebody who is hypomanic. In our age of Big Brother and myriad reality TV shows, we seem to think that it's OK to be a spectator in somebody's spectacular life.

We seem to think it's OK to sit back and watch somebody go absolutely bezerk. It's that person's fault, right? Or maybe it's not their fault, but it's not your responsibility... that would be somebody else? Maybe doctors? Maybe the police? Maybe the council? I don't know... I'm just going to watch - because this is just too horrible to miss a minute of - and I can't tear my eyes away this is just so awful, somebody should do something about it, but not me, and not yet because I'm really getting into this. Brilliant. Who needs TV anyway?

I don't think that I'm not personally responsible for getting unwell, but I don't think that people know how to help, really. I don't think that people are particularly incentivised to help either. We have a very isolated existence. We don't know our neighbours, we don't trust strangers, we ring the police to deal with things that we used to work out between ourselves, we expect our doctors to give us magic beans to cure all society's ills.

So, today is World Mental Health day and World Homeless Day. I can tell you, from personal experience, that mental health issues can lead to homelessness. When I was discharged from hospital after a suicide attempt, I was given 2 weeks accommodation, and I was expected to use that time to arrange my own accommodation. I went to the council offices with a letter from my doctors, explaining that I was extremely vulnerable and that I should receive urgent assistance. The person I spoke to then went on holiday and that was the last I heard of it.

I don't blame the system or the people. People are trying to do the best that they can, but there are so many people in need of assistance, and so little money, because we are fixated on helping the rich to get richer, rather than supporting the most vulnerable members of society. I'm not even angry about it. Living in the Royal Parks and on Hampstead Heath was an eye-opening education for an extremely highly qualified and well educated guy who fell on hard times. If you think I chose to become homeless, then f**k you, you ignoramus.

Yes, I could have sold my camera, but I wanted to document what happened to me and I already sold all my other possessions to support myself. When will you be satisfied? Sell my clothes? Locking me up for being naked will be expensive (June 2014)

Tags: #mentalhealth #bipolar #depression #homeless #sex #banking #career #london #culture

This is a story of a set of events that seem unrelated...

Is everyone familiar with the Monty Hall problem? This is probably a much more humane way to start thinking about our Quantum world, rather than locking Schrödinger's cat in a box with a radioactive decay triggering poison mechanism, which has a 50/50 chance of killing the poor animal.

Imagine that you are a contestant on a game show, and you are presented with 3 identical closed doors, with a prize behind each door. Behind two of the doors is a goat, and the third door has a brand new car (or some other more desirable prize than a goat).

So, as the contestant, you are allowed to choose one of the three doors. That is a 1 in 3 chance of picking the good prize, right?

Imagine if the game show host - after you have picked your door - then opens one of the other doors to reveal one of the two goats. Now, you are given the choice: are you going to stick with the door you picked, or switch to the other door?

If you believe individual events in reality are probabalistically unrelated, you might be thinking "it makes no difference". Perhaps you have even gone as far as to think that "it's 50/50 now that there are 2 doors remaining". In other words, it seems like there is no advantage to switching your choice, according to our intuition.

What if I told you that I could be twice as successful at this game show than you, if you went with your intuition, to 'stick' because it makes no difference?

Yes, that's right... 'sticking' with 1 in 3 odds means you'll be right just over 33% of the time.

However, there is a 2 in 3 chance that we would have picked a door with a goat, so when the gameshow host shows the other goat, I will definitely get the car if I switch. This means that I can win the car, nearly 67% of the time.

Tags: #physics

This is a story of a red flag that gets raised before disaster strikes...

Why does a person sink? Why do they get swamped? Why do they collapse inwards, under the gravity of their own infinite stress, sadness, blackness? Why do they implode in a spectacular supernova? Can we ever understand and relate to depression so deep that it would drive a person to take their own life? Can we make a difference? Can we empathise, help and ever rehabilitate somebody who has the clinical diagnosis of depression, without pills and a padded cell?

From my personal point of view, I have always felt that making a mistake leaves a dark stain on me, a black mark. People seem to have a very long memory for the mistakes I have made, and enjoy bringing up things that embarrass and upset me. In my career, the people who I need to impress and to promote me are always very keen to know about my weaknesses and flaws, seemingly as an excuse that I should "know my place" and not challenge the status quo.

The world has organised itself into a Pyramid Scheme, where there are a handful of unbelievably filthy rich oligarchs, sheikhs, kings, queens and emperors and other scum, who sit in their palaces, while their people starve in squalor. The trickle-down effect is a lie, spun by the courtiers, the sycophants in the entourage of the super-rich.

This wealth-worship has created a totally fake society, where newspapers, TV and the media, exists only to tell the proletariat that they are 'special' and 'unique' while at the same time, getting them to buy mass produced products from factories in China.

The best example of which is Apple and Beats by Dr Dre. There is a standard line amongst the creative community, that only a MacBook will suffice, as a the workhorse for the output of recording artists, graphic designers, web developers and startup founders. This is backed with the celebrity endorsement of footballers, who are seen arriving at matches wearing their 'individual' choice of a pair of overpriced Beats headphones.

I have always said that it's the software packages that are important, not the Operating System (OS) or the hardware, provided that both of those things are adequately up to specification to run the software. It's true that Apple stuff "just works" but anybody who foolishly accepts a new software release too early also finds that Apple do a lot of their testing by relying totally on the loyalty of their Fanboys.

I have mixed feelings about the largest consumer electronics company in the world. I think they are more anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was in their heyday. When IBM's BIOS (Basic Input-Output System) was reverse engineered, which started the boom of IBM Personal Computer Compatible grey clones. This, along with Microsoft Disk Operating System (DOS) launched the home computer from the realm of labcoat wearing boffins, into the ubiquitous Internet-of-Things existance, where my car and my washing machine have an Application Programming Interface (API). This has been Bill Gates' vision for as long as I can remember.

I have always been fairly platform agnostic. I tend to go with whatever works, and ignore the marketing rhetoric and hyperbole.

That takes a lot of work and bravery, because at some point, people start to have vested interests. There are billions of dollars at stake in the tech industry. Apple majicked (sic.) a billion dollar App industry into existence more or less overnight. Who would have thought that paying 59 British pence for stupid little time-filling games (the developer used to keep 36 pence of that) would be so lucrative?

It also seems to take a lot of bravery to stick around and re-invest your cash in something worthy or pay the tax, because Apple seem to have precipitated a brain drain in the developed nations. I know far too many wealthy people who are hiding in tax havens, due to fear and greed. Why run away to South East Asia, taking your cash pile with you? What was wrong with paying tax or investing in somebody or something? What are you afraid of?

Perhaps I have little appreciation of risk? What's the worst that's going to happen to me though? The Conservative government will support me as a successful entrepreneur who invests in people, ideas, research & development. The Labour government will support me as a socialist who pays his taxes and does not try to evade them, recognising that the National Health Service, high quality schools and colleges, roads, libraries, street lighting, policing, fire service, trash collection, civic ameneties, community events, social services and the broad and rich spectrum of life in the United Kingdom is truly a model that every nation should aspire to emulate.

Feel the fear and do it anyway (Y2K)

Tags: #apple #computing #career #NHS #politics

This is a story of a leap of faith...

This is what's happening to me now that I have stopped drinking strong coffee.

"Coginitive impairment" sounds terrifying, and it certainly isn't pleasant to experience, but that's what I have chosen to go through by stopping my caffeine intake fairly abruptly. I didn't taper down, because of the long half-life of caffeine and the fact that it's in so many everyday things, like cola and headache tablets.

That's actually the first symptom of caffeine withdrawal that I experienced: an extremely unpleasant headache. The symptom onset can take a surpring amount of time, but then again, caffeine takes a long time to be metabolised.

The next symptoms crept up on me slowly, slowly:

• Inability to concentrate
• Poor impulse control
• Motor/verbal tics
• Cognitive impairment

I definitely do not "have wings" at the moment. It feels like my frontal lobes are completely inactive, which I guess is a little bit equivalent to a partial lobotomy.

Definitely not good for productivity, but the brain is a plastic organ, and can learn how to re-regulate its neurotransmitter levels in my synapses and at receptor sites.

So, it's hard work at the moment, but I no longer want to be a slave to tea, coffee, cola/energy drinks etc. etc.

It feels pretty horrible at the moment though, and I've been doing it for weeks.

My sleep is improving all the time though.

Wish I could write more, but I'm really struggling!

Tags: #caffeine #addiction #mentalhealth

This is a story of the part of Great Britain without a voice...

Our media misrepresents "youths" (young people) just like they misrepresent "refugees", "insurgents", "benefit cheats", "drug addicts", "criminals", "con men" and a whole host of other convenient 'bad guys' that help them to tell stories to sell newspapers, magazines and sell TV and radio advertising slots.

I saw a TV program the other night that was criticising a small business owner for paying somebody cash in hand to work for them. Surely the real story was that this well presented, educated and posh sounding journalist was even able to get a job paying £6.50 an hour without alerting suspicions... that's about the best job that even high-achieving school leavers and graduates can expect to get.

The prospects for young people today are atrocious. There are not enough training contracts and apprenticeships. There are no jobs to gain the valuable experience that will make these bright, energetic, enthusiastic and hard-working people into productive members of the workforce.

The Conservative Government has done what it normally does, which is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and I'm pretty angry about that.

The Tories presided over the Big Bang, which resulted in the Yuppies and Loadsamoney generation of the 1980s, but still left big social divides. When the Tories then tried to introduce the Poll Tax, which was a massive tax on the poor, people were outraged.

The Tories have now started to attempt to dismantle the social welfare system, leaving many unemployed, unwell and less abled people, living well below any acceptable standard for a developed Western nation.

Have you actually spoken to people, about how hard it is for them to stretch their budgets? Have you really gotten to know what the daily problems they face are? Have you attempted to live on Jobseekers Allowance, Employment Support Allowance or Disability Living Allowance? Have you filled in the forms? Have you been to assessments, been to the centres, tried to navigate the system? No, I didn't think so.

Many parents have masked the problem, until now, by subsidising their children and grandchildren. This has merely propped up a completely untenable government and lined the pockets of the rich. So much money has been siphoned off into wealthy people's pockets, with little or none of it actually reaching those who work so hard to improve the day-to-day lives of British Citizens.

Do our Nurses feel better off under the Tories? No. Do our Teachers feel better off under the Tories? No. Do our Police feel better off under the Tories? No. Do our Firemen and women feel better off under the Tories? No. Do our Armed Services feel better off (financially) under the Tories? No.

While the Tories have fanned the flames of nationalism and warmongering, and attempted to stoke up a culture of Union Jack and St. George flag waving. This hoodwinks the undeniable erosion of the standard of living of ordinary people living in the UK.

Have the Tories made it any easier for people to buy their first house? No. Have the Tories made it any easier for young people to get their first job? No. Have they increased wages, or reduced rents or generally taken control of the fact that people's debts are spiralling out of control because most young persons' incomes are not sufficient to pay for the basic essentials for an acceptable life.

We are living, for the first time, in a generation where our opportunities, our standard of living is significantly worse than that of our parents and grandparents. Can people afford to get married, buy a house and have kids? No.

If you take away all hope from people, of being able to own their own little piece of the world, to put down some roots, to fall in love, make a baby and raise a family independently... you are robbing people of their self esteem. You are robbing a whole generation of the chance for them to show you just how hard working and intelligent and resourceful they are, in 'legitimate' ways.

The 'austerity' has merely drained the pension pots of our parents, in supporting the children that have been abandoned by a government run by rich old people, for rich old people. These greedy greedy career politicians are so completely out of touch with what is happening in high-rise council flats in Britain's towns and cities. They haven't got a clue what's happening on the huge estates and new housing developments.

The career politician went to private school, lives in taxpayer funded flat in a gentrified enclave of wealth in London, and commutes back to a rich market town or pretty village, where they are surrounded by wealthy people who have bled Britain dry at the expense of the masses. They have never spent any time in the real world.

There are exceptions, on the left and the right, of course, but in general it seems like the strategy of selecting a House of Commons from the most elite group of privately educated toffs who have never had to experience the welfare system first hand, might have something to do with why people are so angry and upset right now.

The problem is, that these people have few routes to being heard in the media and affecting the public opinion of those in power. Politicians are surrounded by an echochamber of similarly minded and educated elite people, who arrived in their positions as journalists, by very much the same route as them.

London really is a place where a politician and a journalist can live in one gentrified street, completely oblivious to the struggles in the social housing on a neighbouring street. Of course, the people in the 'council house' can't afford to shop on the super-expensive streets of London's trendier areas, so the wilful ignorance persists, because the different socioeconomic groups never actually intermingle.

You can't criticise the business owners who are only supplying to demand. It is not the hipster's 'cereal cafe' that is in the wrong, but in fact the whole system that allows such disparity between rich and poor, to exist and grow.

So, the young have ended up being misdirected into disliking the hipsters, just like they were told to hate the yuppies before. Actually, these people are the ones who got lucky or worked hardest. The people we should really be angry with are the ones who are filthy rich and didn't work for it.

I know it looks to many like riding a bike to work and wearing trendy clothes is all there is to the job, but actually, people in startups do at least 5 jobs each (e.g. Designer, Developer, Tester, Marketing and Sales) and tend to work at least double the hours that you would work in a regular job. They also work 6.5 days a week, and are always available on email and social media. They never switch off, because they are so passionate about their businesses. That's why their businesses have succeeded and not just been turned into another bland chain of corporate humdrum grey monotony.

I urge people to find their voice, and make themselves heard in a peaceful, constructive and erudite way. I'm concerned that the media will fan the flames of youth anger, racist ignorance, misguided nationalism, anti-immigration bigotry and everything else I detest about media 'themed reporting' that tends to fixate on a particular narrative that engages people's eyeballs... and therefore their wallets.

We need to remember... the only 'free' press is online, the BBC and the Observer. Everything else is paid for by a greedy rich old person with a political agenda.

I would suggest that people start boycotting newspapers that are paid for by headlines and advertising, and TV news that shows adverts on commercial channels. Start reading opinions from individuals on Twitter who you like and trust. You will also see what's trending, which is far more real than what is being chosen to be pushed by a news desk editor.

Tags: #media #politics #racism #nationalism #gentrification #youth

This is a story of two different investment strategies...

The guy on the left is Junior Banker, William Marshall. The guy on the right is Senior Analyst/Programmer Banker, Nick Grant. We are both professionals in Global Banking, economists, and philanthropists, who have read law and practice accountancy.

We have followed very different strategies for the banks that we have worked for. William is 'old money' and has practiced the buy and hold strategy of passive investment in the world's biggest companies. Nick is 'new money' and has practiced active investment in startups and disruptive companies.

I would say, that as we are well into the 21st century, and we have seen many cycles of boom and bust, that we have enough economic data to make a bold pronouncement: passive investment has failed.

Having large amounts of capital locked away in pension funds, where the fund managers are old and lazy, is not a good strategy for anything. In the 1980s it lead to asset-stripping of profitable enterprises that had employed a lot of people and were generating wealth. This made the Mayfair Set very rich, but left Britain with huge numbers of people laid off, and factories closed and sold off for the land and asset value. In the 1990s and beyond, it has led to boardroom excesses that frankly disgust me.

Male-domination of the boardroom, and eye-watering salaries, bonusses and golden parachutes that are paid to our company executives. This is a situation that must change immediately.

Both William and I share a common belief that we need to see more women in the professions, and we need to smash the glass ceiling that woman have been held beneath for far too long. Both of us have supported our partners to the fullest possible extent to allow them to be the Wonderwomen that they are.

William's wife is a Rocket Scientist, working on Europe's most important Space Missions. My ex-wife quickly became an amazing software developer, outclassing me in every company that we have ever worked for, including Research Machines and JPMorgan. I supported us delaying starting a family and her retraining to become a Teacher. With incredible speed, she rose through the ranks to become Head of the Chemistry Department at one of the best State-funded Grammar Schools in the United Kingdom. The admiration she has of staff and pupils, and the exam results that she has helped achieve are amazing.

Our boardrooms, our corporate culture, are starved of women, and a non-macho feminism in the thinking of the way that we build businesses. We are not being diverse enough in selecting the best minds in industry. We are still sexist in our thinking and our hiring. Myself and some colleagues had to fight tooth-and-nail to retain one of the most brilliant women that I have ever worked with, on the most important project in the biggest bank in Europe. That's not right.

Law, accountancy, medicine, journalism and IT are all lacking in women, while teaching, childcare, events, hospitality and catering are lacking in men. Meanwhile, strong independent intelligent women are being short-changed in their careers and sidelined into roles that they are totally underused and undervalued in.

Myopic business leaders are also short-changing our young people too. By investing in old dying people, rather than energetic young people, the pyramid of society has been stood on its head. Retirement is not a right, it's a priviledge. You only get to retire if you have left the world a better place than you found it. Sorrry, buster... you don't get to spend your hoarded cash until you fix the environment and create some damn jobs.

It's time to do the right thing.

We do need to respect our elders, but that should be strictly in a non-executive capacity. Should these people receive huge remuneration for such positions? Absolutely not. Only those who have already managed to build enough wealth, and can therefore afford to not have to keep working, are entitled to sit on the boards of companies.

The most enterprising and hard working individuals are implementing and executing large-scale changes to our economy, creating jobs, creating wealth and inspiring the next generation. The value of sitting in a chair and criticising everything is precicely zero.

Tags: #banking #career #gender

This is a story of a sabbatical that I never got to take...

Anybody who says I'm ungrateful for my life needs to have their head examined. My life has been paired down to the nth degree. Anybody who has lived aboard a 22ft boat for weeks knows how to live a small life.

In 2003, I asked HSBC if I could take a sabbatical, so that I could backpack around Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia. The important thing about the trip, for me, was that I needed to make more friends and do a bit of independent growing up, away from the Angel Islington and Canary Wharf, which my whole life revolved around.

My old boss, an Exeter graduate who had completed an M.Phil (Master of Philosophy degree) in Epidemiology at Oxford, was a brilliant guy and did his level best to get this agreed with Human Resources. The rule at the time was that you had to have been an employee for 2 years, which I had been. It had been agreed and I started to get excited about tying my knapsack to a stick and setting off on the road to secure and happy adulthood, with some brilliant travel stories to tell when I got back.

Sadly, HR decided to change the rules under our feet, and the trip of a lifetime became a choice between resignation or cancelling my trip. I chose the latter, as I had a secure job with a conservative bank that I have loved since being a Griffin Saver, in the days of Midland Bank. Working for HSBC was very personal for me. Also, memories of the Dot Com crash and 9/11 were fresh in my memory. I valued my job, and I liked working for my boss. He's a great guy: so disciplined and inspiring.

Possibly as some kind of compensation (I'm totally speculating here) my boss allowed me to ride his coat tails into a very important project, whereupon I sulked for months and months, because I hadn't fully comprehended what he might have done, in light of the clear importance of the project that I was a part of. My boss exposed me to the very best people within HSBC, and perhaps tried to pair and mentor me - perhaps deliberately, who can say? - with people who are still to this day an inspiration in everything I think and do. I can't help but well up with tears thinking about what an amazing time that was, even if I was sullen and sulky for so much of it.

When the pressure really ramped up on the project, towards the go-live date, I flicked the switch from 'zoned out' to 'warp drive' and started putting in the hours I should have been. I had wasted a lot of time, so this was hardly anything more than working as hard as I should have been all along, but nobody should underestimate the effort that was put in, either.

Anyway, I was eventually ranked - quite fairly - on my average effort over the whole year, rather than just on the 'heroic' efforts towards the end. There was one issue that I was very very tenacious with, having to work with operations, software vendors, networks, sysadmins and security to track down a particularly nigglesome problem. This taught me some well-needed discipline, but not, however, much humility.

My boss did his very best to knock a streak of arrogance out of a jumped-up young upstart: I found it very easy to do the work that was asked of me, but I was lazy, sloppy and work-shy, to be honest. Nothing was much of a challenge, so instead, I filled my time reading the BBC News website, chatting with my friends on the Kiteboarding forums and planning my next weekend trip to the beach or overseas Kiteboarding trip.

I suppose you could say that I had my cake and ate it. I got to continue my career in London, and I also got to travel the globe and meet a set of friends who became a part my life, almost like University or "gap-yah" friends (gap year to those who don't speak posh) would be in the lives of my rich upper-middle-class white spoiled brat peers.

However, I still harboured a bitter resentment against the world for having 'conspired' to deny me a year of diminished responsibility, casual sex with sun-kissed young women with sand in their hair, and generally having fun in the playground of World's backpacking hostels. I felt I was entitled to this, like all the University-educated upper-middle-class twentysomethings in Banking.

I couldn't see that I had kind of won. I had kind of gotten both. I couldn't see that my life was awesome already.

When my boss told me that I been ranked just below the very top performing employees of the company that year, I was mighty p1ssed off. He did a very good job of staying calm and not telling such an arrogant little sh1t to p1ss off. Partly at issue, was that entitlement is bred into us by our upbringing and society around us.

We are told what to expect depending on our position in the World. Perhaps we also misunderestimate (sic.) the effort that is going on beneath the serene surface: some of us are wild swans, with our legs frantically paddling under the surface, while we glide along the surface looking cool, calm, collected & awesome.

Tony Blair told the world that 50% of people should get to go to University. I wanted to go to University, but always felt such a deep sense of responsibility to be self-sufficient and work hard, it seemed decadent and profligate to spend so much money, geting into debt, just drinking and reading books. I have always been excellent at cramming for exams and words seem to flow out of me like so much water in a sieve, so that part didn't exactly worry me.

It's always been a bugbear of mine that people think that education is a right. It's not. It's a privilege, but it is also essential to advance civilisation and humanity. It can improve lives and society more than any other gift that we can give to the developing nations. Teach a man to fish etc. etc.

People have tried to gently, and not-so-gently steer me towards teaching. I loved my teachers and I love teaching. I can remember all the names of my teachers, and I still fondly recall so much of what they taught me in life, and how they inspired me. I hated school though, because the bullying was so unbearable. But then again, I was always terrified of electricity and ended up becoming an electrician, so fears can be overcome.

I think I know now that, when I'm done with wearing a suit, I want to teach - so much that it makes me absolutely sob my eyes out as this realisation dawns on me - Physics, Maths and Design/Technology/IT working with underpriviledged kids in state comprehensive schools in Inner City London. This doesn't have to be soon. It's something to aspire to for semi-retirement, I think.

The only way that I can think to make that a reality from my current situation of zero cash, zero assets and massive debts, is by draining the swamps in banking, as an IT contractor, and by changing the political landscape of the UK so that we pay Teachers a decent living wage and top up the salary of those working in London so that they can afford to live here.

Ideally, I would like to finish the project I'm on, and deliver of a stint of many months and years of steady high-quality work for the global bank I have always loved admired and respected the most. HSBC really is a great place to work, and you really can be reassured that when we are all done, it's going to be good for another 150 years of helping people and businesses to achieve their full potential.

Maybe I'm just a hopeless dreamer. Answers on a postcard if you've got a better idea.

Anyone who says 'narcissist' to somebody who has decided to wear a grey suit for 18 years is going to get a punch in the mouth (Winter 2014)

Tags: #career #london #banking #university #hsbc

This is a story of the people who see you at your most tired, afraid, and in the most pain and discomfort...

I owe the hard-working, caring and dedicated nurses of the National Health Service my life, along with the Radiographers, Cardiologists, Phlebotomists, Psychiatrists, Social Workers, Psychologists, Nutritionists, Physiotherapists, Pathologists, Porters, Caterers, Cleaners and of course the Doctors, Consultants, Surgeons and Anaesthetists. It would be ridiculously selfish of me to not continue living after all the hard work that a huge team of people made in putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.

I always seem to expect that things will heal overnight, and indeed I rushed everything after a fairly major leg injury. After the accident, which luckily seemed to avoid any major blood vessels, despite severing a load of muscle, tendon and nerve. I hastily cobbled together a 'field dressing' with sanitary towels and a dressing gown cord, and wanted to make my own way home, but paramedics insisted on checking me out. It was them who discovered I couldn't actually raise my foot anymore, due to a severed tendon, and had lost feeling on the top of it, due to a severed nerve.

The operation took a long time and must have cost a lot of money. I have paid a lot of tax and National Insurance during my career, but that does not make me entitled. I need to repay my debt to society somehow. I haven't thought how I'm going to do that just yet, but I do think about it. I do have a list I'm working through, although I'm obviously never that mindful of the "one step at a time" mantra... I tend to sprint everywhere.

Running before I can walk, running with scissors (not how it happened, just a metaphor) and all the other things my Mum warned me not to do never ended in tears because I was always told to MTFU (Man The F**k  Up). A kind friend told me the other day that excess mucous and swollen mucous membrane might indicate a backlog of tears. I guess my tear ducts are fairly full.

But let's keep this about those in the caring professions. These people have to mop up your blood, pooh, pus, vomit and mucus, while you wince and generally try and hide your discomfort and be as polite and courteous as you can under the circumstances.

We should pay people in the caring professions a living wage, and more to reflect the important role they have in society.

I, for my part, am going to ensure that I pay full income taxes on my earnings when I am inside IR35, which is anytime that I have a regular place of work and commute to the same office on a regular basis... like now.

Coming from a startup and small business culture, I have always re-invested any profits into Research & Development projects in my time between contracts, but I think I need to just get a regular hobby... probably a safe one, given my accident prone nature!

I also think that a socially responsible proportion of my disposable income that I have should go as Gift Aid to Macmillan Cancer Support, because Cancer is a disease which blights all our lives, and the nurses in Palliative Geriatric care are really doing an extremely tough job and should receive all the support that we can possibly give them, as highly qualified professionals in a job that demands them to be kind and caring, loving and supportive, dealing with the inevitable painful loss of loved family members.

This by no means absolves me of my social conscience, but it's a public declaration of starting as I mean to go on. Some might see this as pathetic hypocrisy. Fine. Send me a postcard with a better idea.

Tags: #NHS #injury #startup #charity #career