My Sports trading journey – Part four
Links to Part one, Part two & part three
The leap into the unknown
So I was in my early 30’s, had a desire to work for myself, but was in a well-paid job and travelling all over the place; which I quite enjoyed. Some things had always niggled me though.
If you work for somebody else, you feel you never truly control your own destiny. As you rise to more senior roles, you realise you are pretty much running everything. That seemed to mean that while you carry the risk, you generally didn’t get the reward. It was frustrating the hell out of me!
So for years, despite a decent salary, I deliberately underspent and didn’t carry any debt at all. The grand plan was to give myself some breathing space when I finally decided to go and work for myself. Making the decision though didn’t get any easier, especially when I started a family. After our first child, we went for a second child and got twins! But, as you get older, you learn that it’s not important what life does to you, it’s how you deal with it that’s the real deal! As betting exchanges gained traction, I began to realise that perhaps this was an opportunity to do something. Not only that but something new and exciting that nobody had done before. I had no idea if it would be viable in the long term.
I realised things had reached a critical point when, during a meeting, the MD gave me a ticking off for ‘playing’ on my laptop. I was actually looking at a market on Betfair, whoops! Previous experience had taught me that you had to move quickly if you spotted an opportunity. So, to the complete surprise of everybody I knew, I decided to make a break for it. It was out of character for me, as in the past I probably often been far too cautious when opportunity struck. When people asked me what I was going to do, I didn’t really know. I had some ideas but didn’t really, completely, know what I was definitely going to do. I knew I just wanted to do something. I’d been good at spotting opportunities in the past, but pretty terrible at doing anything about it. But this time I decided that I had to go for it. So I did.
In the next part, life outside the corporate bubble.
Corporate life did have some perks!
Category: General
