Whilst you were at brunch

….I built my business!

You always invited me but I was never sure why, was it so you could increase the size of your booking, make it look like you had loads of friends, was it so there was one more person to buy you a drink or did you need me to carry you home when you could drink no more. I may sound negative but did you really care, did you really want me there or were you just looking for other people to sit around and waste your life and money with so you could justify to yourself that you were not the odd one out and that others had the same “hobby” (addiction) as you.

I always said no because I knew the drunken stupor that would unfold, your passion for getting your monies worth and in doing so consume more alcohol in the space of 12 hours than a regular human should in a week. But I also knew that it wasn’t about those 12 hours as you somehow used the magnificently bookend them with the “warm up” the night before and the “recovery” the day after, leading to your weekends being nothing but a daze and you sitting at your desk on Sunday morning sweating, in a state of panic you were going to lose your job and riddled with guilt and regret for another weekend spent inebriated and destroying a bank balance you claim to have worked so hard to build.

Nah mate it wasn’t for me, I had other ideas. I had goals and dreams I wanted to bring to life. I also had a full time job in the corporate world that kept me busy pretty much 9-5 5 days a week but I knew that at 5pm on a Thursday when I closed my computer down it was time to work on my future, work I would not be doing with you and a bunch of other drunk pricks that you didn’t even like in a bar or many! Whilst you were at brunch I was building my business, my future, working on my dreams, the hustle was real.

I remember clearly checking the time one Friday night and it was coming up to 11pm as I sat there figuring out how to change something on a word press blog (extreme help from Google and You Tube) that would form my first website and feeling this insane sense of excitement, so much so that I would have to force myself to go to bed but struggle to sleep as though it was Christmas Eve I was that excited to get up again the next morning.

Weekend after weekend, decline after decline to your social invites but full acceptance of what it would take to build my dreams. The harder I worked on them the more driven I would become, the more exciting it would get, the more I knew I was making the right decision, it was epic. I didn’t hate you, I didn’t have time, you probably don’t remember but from time to time I would turn up at your “recovery” sessions, sometimes we would share a drink, I tried to enjoy it but it was like someone had changed our frequencies, we were no longer on the same.

I thought about that a lot, I’m no saint, we had had a number of drinks together over the years, late nights, big laughs, blank memories and good times. But I knew it was my time to change, to create a new set of rules for the game, a new way I would conduct myself. Your game didn’t have rules, the only things that would stop you having another drink was you inability to ask for one or that you had passed out, in a bar, in a toilet, anywhere. Maybe they were your rules, maybe you liked that game but I know where I wanted to get those rules wouldn’t work.

Had I grown up? Was it about growing up? Some may say but I think it’s something different. It’s self awareness, having the ability to identify what you want from this life and in the next thought asking yourself what are you willing to do to get it. Well I had dreams so clear and to me so big and I had them so often that before I started working on them it was almost like they were already happening, they were real, I had started living them and the only way I was really going to live them was with my new rules and that’s what I did. I wanted to win in my new game and had no interest in playing your game anymore.

If I see you now or you give me a call I would feel honored, actually if you are free one day I would like to take you for a drink, a drink to thank you and check how you are doing, to let you know why I did what I did and how I did it, let you know that whilst you were at brunch…..I built my business….Thank you so much, without you things could have been so different.