I never really played it and only got into it in my early twenties but it is undoubtedly now my favourite sport. Working from home can be a double edged sword because I can easily lose track of time and spend all day watching England on the TV when I should be working.

I used to tell myself that if I won the lottery, I would follow the England cricket team around the world on their Winter tours to Australia and the Caribbean - now I’m waiting until my business is established to a level that I can run it from my laptop and a mobile phone and I’ll be away.

I was on holiday in France when Michael Vaughan resigned and at first was totally confused as I start to piece together what had happened as I listened to the radio commentary of the 1st day of the 4th Test as we were travelling around in the car. (You can pick up Radio 4 on LW throughout a lot of Europe - much to my family’s dismay).

At the time I didn’t understand why he had done it. Did he jump or was he pushed?

Yes, he had been a bit out of personal form recently but even though we had lost the Test Series at home, it could have been so much different - if only a couple of breaks had gone our way. We weren’t outclassed overall and South Africa were a good team.

He is our most successful cricket captain of all time and his honest, strategic, calm, collected character epitomised that which we expect (but rarely get) of an English leader. He had led us to a great victory over Australia in 2005, an event that escalated the profile of cricket in this country, and was surely the best man to do it again.

A few minutes after I came to discover that Vaughan had resigned, I had even more jaw droppingly shock to contend with. England’s new captain was not Strauss, who was being talked about as Vaughan’s possible successor, but a cocky, arrogant upstart with seemingly little previous experience of captaining a first class team.

What’s more, he was more South African than English AND he was called KEVIN !!

Of course those two factors weren’t the primary reasons for my initial feeling of despair at the decision.

Undoubtedly Kevin Pietersen was a very talented and committed cricketer with a genuine passion for the sport and an unfaltering desire to be a winner, but he always came across to me as an individual rather than a team player. This, along with his inexperience of captaincy, perceived cockiness and young age (actually he isn’t as young as I thought he was) made me feel that England had made a monumental mistake for the future of the team.

Or was it something more personal and deep rooted than that?

Over my last few years in the corporate world, I had had to get use to the situation of two younger, less experienced people coming in above me. Perhaps I subconsciously saw parallels in Kevin Pietersen’s promotion to team captain and my own past experiences?

Although I never took it personally against them, it took a while to rationalise this in my own head before being able to move on. In the end I didn’t leave because of the people promoted above me but because my outlook on life was changing and I was unfulfilled by what I was doing. Even if I had been promoted to the top job, I know now that it wouldn’t have changed this, maybe for a short while but not for very long.

Whatever it was, I just didn’t believe that Pietersen would make a good leader.

But that was five weeks ago and a lot has happened since then and I am not just referring to a transformed English team that cant stop winning and, but for an abandoned last game, probably would have jumped from 7th to 2nd in the world rankings.

At the moment it seems an inspired decision by the selectors who were closer to him and obviously knew a lot more than I assumed about his character and talents. The way that he has reacted to the captaincy and the success so far has been impressive. I no longer see him as arrogant and cocky but assertive and confident and these are qualities that every person who wants to be successful should aspire to.

He was recently quoted as saying, “All the guys are just hungry for success. There are a lot of players who know they have settled for a comfort zone in certain areas, but I don’t live with any comfort zones. I don’t settle for mediocrity; I want guys to perform and to be the best people they can possibly be - there’s no point living if you don’t want to be the best person you can possibly be”

Taken out of context this could be just another motivational quote, all be it one which we know to be a very important concept which we must grasp to achieve a successful and meaningful life. But it is much more powerful if you can imagine him sayingit.

You know that this is truly what Kevin believes and is the reason he has achieved what he has achieved and will go down in history as one of cricketers greatest stars. It is not just words to him, it’s in his blood, it’s in his DNA, its the way in which he leads he life and because he believes it he can make other people believe it too.

Most of us understand if you want to be successful in any field whether it be in sport or running your own home business, then it all starts with your head and your mindset. If you get this right then you are over half way there then you just need to take some kind of action.

When we conquer this just think how much better our lives are going to be.

Kevin has done this and now he is reaping the rewards. Bring on the Aussies.

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Despite all the doom and gloom dished out daily in the media at the moment I believe that it is still very possible to find sources for encouragement and inspiration if you work with yourself to adopt a more positive outlook.

To be honest I feel much more affected by the miserable weather and the frustrations that my business is not as far ahead as I would have liked it to be by now than letting myself get depressed worrying about the state of the economy.

After all it is not something that is in my control - so what can I hope to achieve by spending every waking hour worrying about it. It is a cyclical occurrence that always follows a time of great growth and prosperity. It’s happening now and eventually it will pass - we hope that it will be sooner rather than later and without too many life threatening casualties - but it will pass .

It’s like being a sea in a fierce storm - all you can do is baton down the hatches, steer a steady course and wait for calmer times to return.

Don’t get me wrong I am most definitely affected and feeling the pinch of the current economic situation.

I have taken time to make sure that I am getting the best deal on my mortgage and all my insurances, secured the best energy deal, made my whole family more conscious of saving energy (they might put it a little more strongly than that!), thinking about unnecessary journeys in the car and generally being more careful in shopping around for the best deals. More than that what can I do?

Admittedly I am not as affected as those who have absolutely no hope of covering even their basic bills or may end up losing their house, but equally I am affected more than most who have not given up several tens of thousands of pounds by quitting their jobs within the last 15 months to pursue the dream of having their own business.

So am I now beginning to regret the decision to leave the regular wage and relative security of my job to start a business from home at this time?

No, empathically not.

In fact what has happened over the last year or so has only served to endorse my decision and I will tell you why.

1) Quite often when you have an idea for a business or, in fact anything, it all seems great at first but then as you begin to look at it more closely and work on it, problems and flaws start to emerge. You can easily find reasons for yourself why it wont work, get despondent and maybe even give up. In fact this is probably what happens in the majority of cases.

This has not happened to me though. Despite the monumental changes in the economy and public confidence that have taken place since I made my decision, I feel more positive than ever about the business opportunity, I just need to keep going to bring it to fruition.

2) The current economic situation would not have affected the way that I felt about my job and my future. I would still feel as unfulfilled and frustrated by the constraints it was having on my life, undoubtedly even more so by now.

3) If I hadn’t left when I did, I would have found it very hard to leave a year later. It was a hard decision to make financially in the first place but this year it would have impossible. Last year I was able to let my heart make a decision in unison with that of my head - this year my head would have been too strong in saying “Just give it a year or so until things settle back down again”.

My head would have been wrong.

4) I would have lost 15 months (and probably many years into the future) of being at home around my kids and of starting to build the foundations of a better quality of life for us all.

5) Having to reinvent myself somewhat, learning new skills and forcing myself to think totally different to how I used to, has energised and revitalised me from the rut I was starting to get stuck into.

6) I know enough now to know that I will never ever regret my decision. Even if things don’t work out as I intend them to and I have to go back and get a job at sometime in the future, at least I will know that I gave it a go. I may regret for some reason why I wasn’t able to make it work, but I will never sit there at 65 and say “Why did I spend 20 years in a job that I didn’t really like?”

“Why did I allow myself to waste 20 years of my life?”

There are always two ways of looking at any situation. I always believe that if you can maintain a positive and confident attitude then you can achieve anything that you want to, although I freely admit that I sometimes have to work hard at it.

Over the next few days I will share a few of the people and recent events that have given me inspiration and motivation to keep myself on the right track - starting with Kevin Pietersen, the new England Cricket captain.

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With my children’s summer holiday’s only a week away, I was feeling nostalgic about how my school summer holidays seemed to last forever when I was a kid, and now - how quickly they arrive after Christmas!!

Why does time go so much faster as you get into your 30’s and 40’s?

I just can’t believe it. And, does it go even quicker as you get into your 50’s and 60’s? I suppose the answer to that would depend on what you are doing with your life.

Over the weekend, some friends that had emigrated to Australia two years ago, returned for a holiday - the first time that they have done so since they left. When their two boys arrived in our hallway, instantly it was like they had never been away. Yes they looked a little older but as they disappeared up to our son’s bedroom, it seemed impossible that two years had passed by since we saw them last.

How could it have gone by so quickly and why has so little appear to have changed/happened in that time?

Also I left my job over a year ago now and it doesn’t seem two minutes since I was tied to a chair, being covered in aerosol cream and then going out to find my car completely wrapped in black shrink wrap. That was the leaving ceremony by the way, not a part of my everyday job!

As I think about it, I wonder if it is because we have so many more first time, momentous experiences when we are younger. Because everything is new and an adventure our lives are more fulfilled and seem longer. Even as an adult the more activities you fit into a day, the longer it appears to be.

My Sunday’s for example can go a choice of two ways - both equally enjoyable I hasten to add.

Firstly I can lie in bed until 10am, get up have a cup of coffee and some toast while watching yesterday’s football analysis on Sky, wander down to pick up the newspaper and then laze out on the sofa and read through it until dinner time and Top Gear.

Or I can get up at 7.30am meet some friends an hour later for a 2-3 hour, 30 mile cycle ride, dash home to get a quick shower before watching my son play football, get home have a bite to eat before doing a few things around the house and maybe having a quick tea time drink at my local before dinner time and Top Gear.

Both equally enjoyable in their own way but I feel that I have achieved a hell of a lot more in option two. It may seem completely paradoxical but I find that time lasts longer the more that you do.

My final thoughts came out of a conversation that I had with a friend a few weeks ago and the subject has the ability to be either very motivating or very demoralising depending on your outlook on life.

Firstly, I don’t know about you, but most of my weeks just FLY by at the moment. One minute it is Monday morning and the next it is the weekend again - all in the blink of an eye. I have just turned 43 and if I am lucky enough to live to an average life expectancy, then I have probably got another 35 -37 years left.

If you work that out in weeks, which I did on a calculator, that is under 2000 weeks left. I don’t know about you, but actually 2000 doesn’t seem a lot when I consider how quickly that they are going by at the moment.

To me that really was a call to action to do something about the rate at which my life just seems to be rushing by.

But is there anything that we can do to slow down the acceleration of time or do we just have to accept it?

Well I think that there is and I believe that we need to learn from the approach to life that we had when we were children. If we believe that our time went more slowly then because we were learning more and experiencing so much more for the first time, then it is perfectly reasonable that this will work at any age in our lives.

The examples of my two Sunday scenarios prove this for me and I am sure that we all have similar experiences.

Personally I have already taken a massive step forward by leaving my unfulfilling job. The weeks that fly by are the ones in which I feel that I am making slow progress in the new skills that I am learning to develop my home business. But when I make a breakthrough and a giant leap forward, then I know that I am one step closer to achieving the quality of lifestyle that I plan for myself.

I believe that the key to controlling time comes with the making of the decision to seize control of your life. Once that you realise that almost anything is possible in your life then you can develop a plan of action to achieve anything you want to achieve.

YOU have to make the decision that YOU are going to control time and that you no longer going to let time control you.

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Test your geography by flying your plane to airports throughout Europe 

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Last night my wife said to me, “Thank goodness its Friday tomorrow”, obviously meaning that it was getting near to the weekend. But only hours earlier I had honestly been thinking, “Oh no, its Friday tomorrow, I wish it was only Tuesday or Wednesday as I have so many things that I want to get done”.

Now I hasten to add that she doesn’t always think this way, it’s just that she hasn’t been feeling well this week - but I’ve met a lot of people in my life that do.

Where I used to work, one of the members of staff used to have to come and get her keys from one of the managers before starting work. If it was me that she found first I would ask her how she was that day, as I would out of habit and common courtesy to anyone that I spoke to during the day.

Almost without fail she would reply “I’ll be much better at home time” or words to that effect and I used to think “Good God woman you’ve only just started your shift and you’re wishing the day away”. It used to really get to me sometimes. With some people you can tell that it is just a phrase that they have learnt and repeat as an almost unconscious response, but with her I wasn’t so sure.

There are two sides to this that I see.

Firstly, if it’s your job that is making you unhappy then don’t you owe it to yourself to leave and go and do something that you will be happy in? Half of your waking day in a job that you don’t like for maybe 30-40 years has to be a tragic waste of a life.

Surely you have to do something to change your perspective of it OR look for another income earning opportunity.

Personally I couldn’t say that I hated my job at all. I never felt miserable that I was going to work because I liked a lot of the interaction with other people, both the staff and the customers. I knew my job well and was paid well for doing it but I had got as far as I was going to on the career ladder (one step short of what I thought I was capable) and I felt unchallenged and unfulfilled.

To me staying in that job for the next twenty years, no matter how well paid and ‘comfortable’, was NOT an option. So that’s why I decided, after 12-18 months of deliberation, to leave and to start my own business.

Secondly, why is it that so many people are prepared to just put up with being miserable and not do anything about it?
For many, doing something as drastic as leaving your job may not be the right thing to do and just forcibly adopting a more positive outlook of the world would work wonders for their happiness.

Becoming more positive and eliminating negative thoughts and feelings will not only make you feel better but is a solid foundation for a more rewarding and prosperous life. You start to see opportunities and possibilities that weren’t there before and in some cases they fall into your lap.

Of course there are a small percentage of people that are habitual whingers and moaners, it has been nurtured within them and in fact they are probably at their happiest when spouting their pessimistic woes.

Stay away, well away, from these negative people - they are likely to be holding you back.

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One thing about working for yourself is how you motivate yourself to get things done. When you are in a job, it’s easier. I’m not saying it is better but you usually have either accountability to your boss, pressure of deadlines, awareness of company standards, customer expectations, legal obligations etc etc to drive you on.

When you start your own Home Business you initially have to find a way to motivate and discipline yourself, especially when you suffer setbacks or if things aren’t happening as quickly as you would like. Surprisingly having money to pay the bills doesn’t always do it and in fact it can have exactly the opposite effect if you let it take over your whole thinking.

I get my motivation by knowing that I made the right decision in quitting my job, knowing that if I work hard in my chosen venture then I can be successful and from articles and reports on inspirational people.

People like Randy Pausch.

Randy is a 46 year old American College Professor who you will see delivering what is called “The Last Lecture” to his college students. This is an academic tradition whereby a professor delivers the very last lecture that he would ever give if he were hypothetically about to die, only in Randy’s case it is not hypothetical….

But it is not about death, it is about life. Over 1.3 million people have watched the full lecture on the internet, this is a shortened version for the Oprah show. It is very moving and a message of inspiration for us all.

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=ithct48cqw

By way of a brief update, Randy is not well at the moment as he has recently had another session of Chemo therapy but he is still alive, 10 months after he was told that he had 3 - 6 months to live. You can follow his personal blog (which contains another inspiration message that he gave to the graduates of Carnegie Mellon University) at www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

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I used to work from 11.30am until 9pm four days during the week and then one day at the weekend, so this restricted my opportunities to see my son play football during the winter and cricket in the summer. I particularly enjoy the cricket season as it is far more civilised to sit down with a beer on a warm summers evening (OK they are a bit few and far between this year) than stand on the touchline, freezing cold and being battered by horizontal rain.

It’s far more sociable as well and even the Friday training nights are an excuse to “go up the club” for a beer and a chat. And even though I am not seeking it, I often find inspiration or even direct business ideas come from the conversations I have. In fact once you get tuned into it you can get ideas and motivation from many situations that you are involved with in your everyday life.

Last Friday night I was talking to a friend that I have known for five years now through our son’s friendship and what he had to say greatly enforced my own opinions about starting my own business.

I suppose that he is more of an acquaintance than a friend in that we only really meet at our sons football or cricket matches but I like talking to him because he is always very open and honest.

I don’t know too much about his background apart that he is a very accomplished motor bike rider, “probably the best road racer in the UK without a major sponsor” says an independent profile on the internet and, until about 8 months ago, he was a self employed builder to facilitate his passion. I know from speaking to him over the years that he had to work a lot harder than other riders that have contracts with the major teams - riders that he regularly beats in competitions like the famous TT races. As well as maintaining high fitness levels, practicing and racing he had to organise everything that was needed for him to get to the meetings.

He had to get a bike that was competitive, arrange sponsorship and financing, organise a support team, make sure that he had enough spares and equipment, book himself into the races in which he wanted to compete, arrange travel and accommodation AND work inbetween to support his family.

Would he have preferred to have the quality equipment and facilities of a major team?

Yes of course he would and it was more frustrating for him because he knew he was worthy of a place in a sponsored team. For many years he raced and competed at the top level hoping to get the call from one of them. I once asked him if he had actually approached any of the teams to let them know that he was available and interested but he confessed that this was not really his style (and it may not be how it works in the motorcycling world, I honestly don’t know) - he believed that his performances should speak for his abilities. But I fully understood his mindset because this is how I had been in the corporate world.

I was never one to talk myself up or play the political game of self advancement. I believed that performance, results and capability should be the yardstick for promotion but of course this is not always the case, sometimes more subjective decision making comes into the equation. It wasn’t a question of naivety on my side, just a matter of personal principle that I wasn’t prepared to compromise myself on.

Anyway back to my friend. Last winter, after the racing season was over and after years of working for himself he went out and got a job. I don’t know the why’s and wherefores of why he got a job because I never asked, but it was obvious that he was not as comfortable with it as he had been as when he was working for himself. It was still within the construction industry and he had a regular income and a car but I could tell that he never seemed truly happy in having to wear a shirt and tie and working on paperwork and estimates all day. He also decided to take a break from his racing this year.

So I suppose I shouldn’t have been really shocked when he told me on Friday that, although he had given it a fair crack over the last eight months, he had decided that it just wasn’t him and he had gone back to working for himself. From another conversation that we had earlier, I think he just felt that life was too short to ‘put up with’ a way of life that he wasn’t happy with.

It is this philosophy that I so strongly agree with and the reason for which I left my long term and well paid job to start my own business. The two of us are not by any means unique regarding feeling discontented within our jobs, in fact the majority of employees feel this way at some time or another, but most people only see a choice of happiness or security and end up sticking with the latter. But you don’t have to sacrifice your happiness.

So he is back on more familiar territory and happier for it, but that is not the end of the story.

A couple of weeks ago and totally out of the blue he received a call from the owner of a team that want him to ride for them. Although still at the discussion stage, they will provide him with the quality machine, full support team and freedom to ‘just compete’ that he has been working to for the last fourteen years since he started racing. I was really pleased for him, just as I am for anyone who works hard and is dedicated to being successful in a targeted goal or objective.

Also it goes to show that you don’t just have to read biography’s of the rich and successful and other motivational books for inspiration, there are stories and examples all around us which we can draw from to give us confidence to achieve our own goals.

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There have been a number of reasons for this but it is also a question of once you get out of the habit and, more importantly the discipline of doing something, it can be really difficult to get back into it.

This can be both one of the biggest pro’s or the biggest con’s of having your own home based business. There is no one breathing down your neck everyday to push you on (except maybe the wife) but when you do pull things back round and start making progress, then you get a far greater feeling of achievement and satisfaction because you’ve done it all by yourself. You have to search out your own motivation and momentum but if you can achieve that it is infinitely more powerful than that provided by someone else.

I was absolutely gutted when I wiped two of my three sites completely off the web, but after I’d had a stiff drink I realised that it wasn’t exactly the end of the world. Although I had spent a lot of time on them, there wasn’t actually that much content on them that couldn’t be replaced. I even had about half of the 6 - 8 blogs that I’d posted on this site saved in Word documents but there didn’t seem much point in reposting them.

I decided that it would have been a lot worse if it had happened in six months time and I certainly won’t be making THAT same mistake again. I’m also a lot more aware of backing up, I was able to go through the whole ’setting up’ process again (a lot quicker this time), I changed the theme and I made improvements in the back office of the sites that I probably wouldn’t have returned to for a while.

So, in answer to the point raised in my last blog, yes, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you DOES make you stronger’.

But I wouldn’t want you to think that rebuilding my sites is all that I have achieved in the three weeks since I have been away. I did lose a little bit of momentum, but because of activity that I did before, things have still been happening.

A big thing that I had been dealing with was trying to sell my old car.

It was a bright yellow SAAB convertible which we had owned for 7 years. It was without doubt the best car that I have owned. I can still remember how many times I looked out the window on the night that we first brought it home as it sat there gleaming on the drive. I was probably grinning like a new father but in many ways it was better than that because I didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night and help with the feed. I can still remember driving down to my parents on Boxing Day, a month after we first got it, 3 degrees outside, heater full on and the roof down.

We covered about 100,000 miles in that car including several holidays in Europe and at one stage I had visions of holding on to it until it achieved classic car status and passing it down to my son. Overall it was very reliable and people we knew always waved when they saw us because we stood out - stood out against the river of black and grey cars that flood along our streets.

But alas life moves on and our ageing children dictated that we needed a car with a ‘bit more space in the back’ for those longer journeys. I suppose that it could have been the smaller, newer, more economical, cheaper to run Mitsubishi Colt that made way but for once, we had to make the more sensible decision.

It was in excellent condition but had a couple of mechanical repairs to be completed before I could sell it for top money - if I sold it as it was, with a leak on the power steering and no air conditioning then I would probably have to settle for about half of optimum price. Now, it would cause my fingers to bleed if I went into all the in’s and outs and up’s and downs that I had to contend with to finally get it finished and advertised for sale but that is not really the ultimate issue.

I will however tell you one part of the saga to illustrate my point. The air conditioning was not working and my garage owner who was doing the repairs told me it needed to be tested to see if it was a major leak or whether it just needed recharging. I wasn’t that lucky. I was told by the man that came to leak test it (not my local garage owner) that I needed a new condenser unit.

Got a local car part company to order one in, £135 and 5 days wait because it was the weekend. I booked the car back into the garage to have the work done and by now at least 2 weeks had gone by since the car was first checked. Got a call from the garage to say that they had fitted the condenser but it wasn’t just that - 3 pipes had also perished and they had got a price from SAAB - over £500 !! I couldn’t believe it, I almost ran all the way down to the garage because I had this overwhelming urge that I had to get this sorted out and find a solution because there was no way it was economical to repair at that cost.
It was probably another 2 weeks of hitting the internet and visiting 3 local scrap yards but I managed to secure a good set of second hand pipes for £65 in total. After that I had the car professionally cleaned- it looked fantastic - and the first person that came to see it bought it for £50 less than I wanted for it.

The point is I could have got rid of it without doing any of the mechanical repairs and had to settle for around half of the final figure that I finally got. Then it would have been really tempting to give up after being told that new air conditioning pipes were going to cost over £500 but by this time I had already had a replacement steering rack fitted and bought the new condenser plus labour so stopping there was not an option. I had to hold strong on my original conviction that it was better to sell it in tip top condition.

So I had to buckle down and work harder than I anticipated to see it through. But was it worth it?

Well I probably got an extra £600 than I would have done if I had just done a minimum ammount of work to sell it. Whether you think that is worth it depends on how much £600 means to you. But to me I got far more than that.

I got a great feeling of satisfaction that I had achieved everything that I wanted to when I first set out and that I kept going despite the obstacles that got in the way. I also felt good that I passed on the car in such great condition and pretty much in the condition that I bought it over 7 years ago.

And this is the way that you have to look at your own home based business. You have to have conviction, you have to work harder than you imagined to overcome obstacles that will occur and you have to have integrity in your final work.

I wonder if they looked out their window that night as it gleamed in the driveway. I suspect in fact they did.

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Everything that I have written before has been lost but, as I have only been blogging for a month I suppose it could have been worse.

If you have been following my posts then I apologise but I hope to have it fully functional again by tomorrow.

They say “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” - I’ll let you know on that one !! 

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