In 2014, my wife and I packed up all our stuff and bought a one-way ticket to Colombia. 

We got married a few years earlier, but punted our honeymoon to when we had more time, as we were both neck-deep in the grind as young 20-year-olds. 

But this honeymoon wasn't why we left Australia. It was actually answering a call to adventure—one that would change our lives forever.

We had so much to learn about the world, and we felt that if we were going to live overseas in our lifetime, we had to make the jump before we got too bogged down with kids' school routines and chauffeuring them around on weekends.  

We both had good careers, were making good money, and were comfortable. We knew we wanted to live and work in the US. and our honeymoon was going to give us 3 months to celebrate while we found jobs there. 

We didn't set any intention for how long we would be away, and I didn't realise it at the time, but this was the start of a massive chapter in my life of being overseas for 10 years. 

And it wasn't even just a chapter; it was more like a quest to find myself.

Coming back to Australia 10 years later, I wanted to share what I learned about myself professionally and the biggest lesson I learned from a near-death experience.

Part 1: Mindset

So the first thing I did when I left Australia was I treated self-development as my number one goal. 

In the five years before leaving, I was working long hours in finance—day in and day out doing similar stuff, and then spending my weekends partying and at the beach. 

Because the truth was, I was comfortable in my job. I was on this safe and steady path to financial freedom, and all I had to do was keep showing up. 

But they say that comfort is the enemy of growth, and I was in the comfort zone, feeling safe and in control.

The first step was to get out of that and get into the fear zone—walking away from a good job and security so I could get into the learning and growth zone of acquiring new skills and conquering new objectives.

Our mindset is the lens through which we see the world. The clearer I was in my mindset, the clearer I was going to be able to get to that learning and growth zone.

Two books were really transformative for me on this:

1. The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday: This introduced me to the concept of stoicism and gave me a shove into separating events and their meaning.
2. Mindset by Carol Dweck: This opened my eyes to the fact that I can learn anything. I wasn't a fixed product; I actually had the opportunity to build any skill through practice.

Without the right mindset, I wouldn't have been able to take advantage of the huge growth period I was about to experience.

I thankfully discovered both these things during that hiatus from being in an office environment. 

Because when I touched down in San Francisco and started my first real job in tech, I felt like an idiot.

This leads me to the second part of the journey, which was developing the skills to build.

Part 2: Skills to Build

One of the key reasons I wanted to get to the US was to learn about building companies. Because the US is where the biggest and best companies were being built. But outside of a few side hustles, I didn't know anything about real business. 

I had spent most of my days in spreadsheets and PowerPoints, but real business is much more than that.

I felt embarrassed not understanding the words people used in meetings. People would talk about the CTA, debugging the front end, or mysterious UTM codes. 

I was way out of my depth, and there is a quote that has always stuck with me on this:

"As my island of knowledge grows, so too does the shoreline of ignorance." 

What this means is that the more we learn, the more we realise how much we don't know.

In this new environment, I was constantly reminded of that. But with the right mindset, I was able to see these obstacles as opportunities to grow.

These were exactly the skills I needed to be exposed to and learn. But it wasn't just about the technical skills; it was also about people skills.

On the honeymoon, I’d spent so much time introspective and stuck in my head. In this job, I saw how little we can achieve by ourselves and how much we can accomplish together.

Business is the most important vehicle for driving change in the world. And to build big businesses, you need teams working together. 

I got to see first-hand how you need product, engineering, sales, marketing, finance, and more to come together to build incredible customer experiences. 

During this period, there were so many skills I got the opportunity to pick up amongst those teams.

I know skills are one of the most important things in your life. Once you learn those skills, your value in the marketplace goes up. 

So I wrote down the list of skills I wanted to acquire—both technical and people skills. I asked the people on my team who were much better than me, 'Hey, if you wanted to learn this skill, how would you go about doing it?'

I read the books on sales management to better understand our sales team. I took SQL courses on Codecademy so I could relate to the engineering team.

It was important for me during this time in my life not to develop mastery in any one of those skills, but to develop an understanding of all of them.

Being able to talk to someone in marketing about funnels, click-through rates, and email campaigns allows you to understand and build trust with them. 

Similarly, being able to talk about GitHub, product roadmaps, and the challenges of deploying stuff to production allows you to build empathy with software engineers.

I'm a detail-oriented guy and learning a lot of these skills came naturally. But it's not skills that that get you far in life.

I knew I needed to apply them to the right problems. Fo me, this meant stepping out of my first tech job to start my own real company, this is my third big learning: the power of leverage.

Part 3: The Role of Leverage

So it's 2018. 

I'm sitting at Dolores Park in San Francisco, and one of my friends passes me his phone to check out a post on his Twitter feed. 

I didn't have Twitter at the time, but I vividly remember the moment I read a tweet storm by some guy named Naval on 'How to Get Rich'.

This was such a major moment in my life and thinking. 

Until that time, I'd focused so much on myself and what I could do. I had developed the mindset of growth, the technical and people skills to work effectively. But this lesson was really about what to work on to have a massive impact on the world.

There are many lessons in these tweets, but the one that stuck with me was about leverage. Leverage is just a word for tools that amplify your efforts.

Naval explains that there are four types of leverage:

1. Managing people through labour
2. Managing money through people's capital
3. Writing code that can be used thousands of times
4. Creating media that can be rapidly spread around the world

You need people to give you the first two (permissioned), while the other ones you can just do yourself (permissionless).

What this meant about amplifying my efforts was finding the right vehicles to actually do it in. 

Following this tweet, I’ve always looked at any business commitment, job, or investment by understanding how I or the people I work with can apply those things: labour, capital, media, code. 

But like acquiring skills in my first tech job - the acquisition of this knowledge hurt.

I started to see all these areas of my life where I was effectively cutting grass with scissors.

If there is one thing you take from this concept of leverage, let it be this exercise which has really helped me live better: understanding your value. 

If you have some skills that may get you $20, $50, $100 an hour, anything that you do which you can outsource for less than that economically makes sense. I encourage you to write that number down. 

If you find yourself investing tons of hours in something that's not making you happy or worth your time, you need to figure out a way to outsource it and get more leverage.

But I've got to be real with you. There's one thing you should never outsource or take for granted, and this took me a bunch of mistakes and too long to learn. 

This is actually the fourth lesson I learned from my time away.

Part 4: Power of Relationships

So it's 2019. 

We were living in San Francisco when I got a call from my dad. 

He stops me and tells me he has some news. This was unexpected because normally when he has news, he sends me an email first. 

I knew something was up, and after a pause in that conversation, he told me that Mum's got cancer. 

Even writing this today, I feel a tightness in my throat. Up until that point, I had lived a very lucky life as far as the health of the people around me goes. 

This was the first time I realised that my parents aren't permanent, and that realisation really shook me. 

I had unknowingly believed that my family and the people I love would live forever.

I got home to my wife that night and told her I needed to go back to Australia for a few weeks. 

We sat on the couch and spoke for hours about what this meant. That flight home is normally one filled with entertainment and excitement—16 hours of planning and preparing to be back home. 

But this flight was different. It was a flight of reflection, worry, and grief.

Landing in Sydney, I went to my family's house where I’d normally run up the stairs and yell, "I'm home!" 

There was no running up the stairs this time. I put my bags down, walked up, and just gave Mum a hug and realised that our family had changed forever.

One thing that brings our family together is Mum's chicken schnitzels. 

There was one conversation at the dinner table where we were talking about our plans for the future, and then we all realised that those plans might not include Mum.

Thankfully, Mum's treatment went well. It took six months, and even though it was a constant stress and fear, she got through it. 

The experience taught me something I should have known: never take relationships for granted.

I realised that life can change quickly. From that time, I started prioritising relationships a lot more. 

I became softer. 

I learnt to drop expectations of others and to replace complaints with gratitude. 

I tell people I love them, send random texts with memories, and try to make magical experiences whenever I can.

I share this because even though the start of my journey was about getting my mindset right, building skills, and understanding the role of leverage and building business impact, at the end of the day it's all about people and relationships. 

I'm embarrassed to say that it took a near-death experience with my mum to actually learn that. 

Now, as we're back in Australia 10 years later, I'm working hard to rekindle more of those relationships that I once enjoyed so much.

It doesn't even need to be people in your family circle. 

If you have relationships with people in your community and your career, and if you work with people, I believe that we have a big responsibility to foster strong relationships and help them become the best version of themselves.

Unfortunately, I started managing people before I learned this lesson. And if I'm honest, I think I should have been fired before I was given the opportunity. 

But thankfully, I found a framework that worked for me, and I wrote an article on it which you can check out here.