A couple of years ago, we experienced something of a minor breakdown. For many weeks, we had daily bouts of hiccupy sobs, bad headaches and an unbearable feeling of failure. During a particularly bad episode, Rob snot-cried his way through an entire toilet roll in two hours while I downed paracetamol like it was M&Ms. Looking back, the situation wasn’t actually that bad. We’d been working with extremely difficult and demanding clients for Mortified Cow, who seemed to hate us and need us (night and day) in equal measure. But…

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Confession time: over the last couple of years we’ve probably been far too bullish/sanctimonious/closed-minded about insisting that you should start your own business if you want to travel the world. We don’t have any agenda to push (“This is why you should start a business – now buy this product where we show you how!”), but we’ve been working so hard on trying to build our own business that we may have lost sight of the other options. Because it’s so damn hard, maybe at times we were also trying…

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Sorrrrry! It’s been a long time since we’ve written a blog post. It’s not that we’ve been out of ideas – just that we’ve been out of time. For the past couple of months we’ve been busy getting our acts together – focusing more than ever on doing the work that will be the most successful in the long term. When I last wrote an “update” on our lives and businesses, it was January 2014. So much has changed since then, and many readers have emailed to ask for a…

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Every day, I spend about a minute logging what I’ve done that day into idonethis. When I receive my daily “prompt” email, the service also includes a snippet of what I was doing exactly three, six or twelve months ago. And more often than I’d like, it makes for depressing reading. While it’s great to be reminded of where in the world we were and what we got up to, the depressing part is what I entered for the “work” part of the day: often, it reminds me that I…

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At the end of this post, we share all the document templates you need to get your own mastermind group off the ground. Scroll straight to the bottom to skip the small talk and grab the files! If you haven't come across the idea of a mastermind group before, it’s defined by growandimprove.com as: ..a small group that you meet with for the purpose of reinforcing growth and success. while offering support to one another. Which I always read as, “People sitting around talking about doing business because it’s easier…

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