“I got rich when I stopped focusing on my finances” - Olly Richards

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0:48Back then, I was really spending a lot of time learning about personal finance. I was listening to all the podcasts. I was reading the books. Trying to essentially kind of carve out a percentage point here and a percentage point there. A personal finance obsessed, former jazz musician who speaks eight languages and runs one of the most successful education businesses in the country. Ollie Richards is the perfect example of why you should never stop learning. The exact same knowledge in my head, applied in a slightly different way and distributed by the internet, now worth millions. How can that be the case?

1:22Ollie, one thing I learned about you, you voice noted me once and said that you were obsessed with personal finance when you were a kid well wicked sorry in your early 20s was it yeah yeah how did that come about I so I think that came about because my parents were always very um very conservative with with with money and would always say you know you have to be saving you have to you know always have some money in the bank always you know take out an ISA and all of that so I had that drilled into me from an early age so even when I was like first starting out and not making much money I still had this this this this this voice in my head saying you should be saving a certain amount you'd have an ISA and so I was always I was always following personal finance stuff because you know if you don't have much money well you wouldn't make the most of it right and so that was I was well tuned into that from a from an early age what what was the the sort of ambition or goal with the personal finance stuff it's funny because it was it was and it and it in a funny way still is and probably always will be this voice in my head that said when you get to retirement you have to have enough money because i had this i had this strong fear rational or not i mean i think it is rational but i had this really strong fear of getting to i don't know 65 or 70 whatever and then not having enough money to live on and because it's just it's it's the way that it's always presented right You save and invest so that when you get to a certain point in your life, you have enough money to retire because you don't want to be stacking shelves when you're 90.

2:53And so I think I had that abstract notion that you have to prepare for that. And so then all of my other activity in my life and work became organized around this abstract goal of be okay in 50 years time. But you didn't have much money? No. And it actually became a detriment in terms of your quality of life at the time, right? Yes. I mean, you know, for the first few years of my life, I was a jazz musician. So I was doing like 40 quid gigs in pubs on the other side of the country and, you know, living very much, very much like gig to gig. I was doing that till I was like, you know, mid to late 20s.

3:37And then I was an English teacher after that. I never had any yearning power whatsoever. but the thing is that makes it even more acute in your mind because I mean I remember sitting down and thinking okay if I want to have say 30k a year to live on when I retire that means I'm going to have to save like it was something like four or five hundred quid a month at the time when I first started taking that seriously and it was a huge amount like it was like half of my take-home salary right but I thought what do I what you know what do I prefer do I prefer to ignore it and then you know have have no money at all when i retire or do i prefer to actually put that money aside and uh and then run the numbers let compound interest do the work and have something to retire and you know i've i think i've always been um i've always been stubborn enough to know that to do the thing now that's in my longer term best interests that's got to be quite rare and like in human nature.

4:35What was your quality of life like back then? Did you have a social life? Did you go on holidays or nothing? I mean, so my life at the time was, in my music days, I was living in a six-bedroom house in Golders Green with jazz musicians from Friends. Loud house. Loud house. I mean, there were two drummers, one bass player, two sax players. I mean, it was an amazing life. It's one of those lives where at the time, you're like, I'm just hanging out with my mates. But now you get older and you look back and you don't know how lucky you were. to live in that environment, you know, just surrounded by, not only surrounded by friends, but surrounded by music the whole time.

5:10And, you know, our rent was like 350 quid a month for a room in that house. It was very, like, you know, we didn't spend much money. We kind of cooked together and, like, went out and did gigs. On a gig, you get fed. You know, you can live a really good life with not very much money. But then that, you know, but then at the same time, certainly for me, this little voice in my head was like, yeah, this isn't going to last forever. You know, one day you're going to be out on your own. and then these numbers aren't going to work when you're 70. Most people I speak to say, I wish I'd figured this out earlier.

5:40Do you wish you hadn't had it at that point in your life? What a question.

5:51I can't say I had that wish, no. I mean, because I think that way of thinking, I think with money, the more that you learn, And the more that you discover about how the world works, the more, the wiser you become and the more able you are to use various economic forces to your own benefit. So, you know, it's difficult to say, you know, regret the thing that never happened. But there's certainly an element of, you know, a little bit later when I was living abroad and teaching English. So I spent four years living in Japan. And I had a bit more money at that point. I was getting paid a couple of grand a month as an English teacher and had a little bit left over.

6:40But I was still saving huge amounts for that same reason. And I do look back at that now and think, you know, there were so many ways that that was a really unique opportunity to be there in Japan, to be living that life. I was kind of conflicted between that do I spend that money to really enjoy Japan to enjoy this experience or do I put it aside because you know the whole retirement thing there's definitely been a lot like significant periods where I probably could have and maybe should have spent more liberally to enjoy the experiences that you only have at that time of life. um but you know it's i think it's always a risky game to sort of undo wish away the stuff that you had because then that doesn't make you what you are today right i can really relate in the sense of i feel like i wasted my 20s because of like bad financial decisions in my early 20s that took me a long time to dig out of so then it was now that i earn more money than i ever have it's like need to screw it all away so that you know when i'm 40 i'm financially free or whatever and i and And then I sit there thinking, are you going to regret this decision, Damien?

7:49You know, because the trend has been actually that you earn more every year. And I find it really hard to kind of like decide what the best thing to do is. Does that make sense? No, absolutely. But I think, you know, the entrepreneurial case is a special one because, you know, when you get into entrepreneurship, you kind of start to realize that all the rules and your way of looking at the world that you grew up with, you realize that's all, that's just something that someone made up somewhere at some point. And it's like, actually, you know, it's not, they're not these fixed boundaries. But, you know, earlier on in life, you don't know what's around the corner.

8:24And so, you know, when I was teaching English, I was basically settling down for a career of doing that. And there wasn't much prospect of, you know, when you're an English teacher, you don't, you don't really, I mean, you typically earn the same when you're 60 as you do when you're 30. You know, you get paid for an hour of teaching and you do it because you love it. And it's just, it's the most fulfilling, rewarding work. And I wouldn't change that for a second. I learned so much doing that. But it was also true that I knew that financially not much was going to change for the rest of my career.

8:57And so I think that brought home the need to act now and do something about it now. Because you're not going to see a spike in your own life. Because you're not going to see that spike. You've got to have a linear saving, basically. Exactly, yeah. And even if you're in a career where you do have prospects for progressing and for getting promotions and even making adjacent moves or whatever, there's still generally a limit on what you can expect to earn during the career. You can pretty much spreadsheet the whole thing out based on what you can expect to earn. And so based on that, you can figure out, well, if I want X when I retire, this is what I need to do now.

9:34And so that's how I was behaving at the time. I don't have great expectations for anything to change. And so the decision I make now, month by month, based on my paycheck when it arrives, this right now is going to define what happens later. And so I think one of the things I always did was automate savings and have the money pots. I don't remember where. I mean, a lot of people give this advice, don't they, about automation being the key to personal finance. So when your money arrives every month from your work, a certain amount goes off into savings you don't even see it so you don't miss it and then that automation then uh you know uh is the thing that really has the power and compounds over time so i did that much harder when you did it though like it's much easier to do that now you were you were doing this at a time that was 20 years ago yeah like not easy was it hl that kind of hargreaves lansdown was maybe the broker of choice at the time aj bell i mean legacy brokers i would call them i i don't even god i don't even remember i had a hargreaves landsland account yeah but it would have been clunky tack oh yeah but it was still it was still miraculous at the time though because you're like damn i can sit on my laptop in my little apartment in tokyo and buy shares and whatever um but it was no but it was literally that it was like i had money land in my uh that west account or whatever and then there would be a standing order to send it out to hargreaves land like a couple hundred quid a month or something and i just had that i just had that going did any other did any other of your friends invest like you or were you like the only one because like damien said oh i feel like i wasted my 20s and i feel like a lot of people put pressure on themselves like when in their 30s and 40s oh i should have invested earlier and ideally we all start investing when we're like five and we compound for our whole lives yeah but like do you not think that we put a bit too much pressure on like you need to be doing this all in your 20s like you were the outlier in your friends group i was definitely i was definitely an outlier but you've got to bear in mind that i I was surrounded by jazz musicians and English teachers who, you know, for the most part with the best foot in the world, I'm not thinking like personal finance first.

11:33That's not their main thing, right? I mean, if I'd been, I mean, I had other groups of friends from school who had gone on to be like lawyers and bank, like they live finance on a daily basis. They're much more tuned into this kind of stuff. They also, you know, had employer contributions and things like that. As a musician, you have none of that stuff. And typically you're not thinking much about, you know, you're not reading books on personal finance and all of that. So I was definitely an outlier. And I remember with my mates in the shared house, from time to time I would say things like, oh, yeah, I'm going to change my ISA to this or I'm going to open a pension here.

12:09And they'd just look at me like... Like you're crazy. Yeah, like, what are you talking about? So I was definitely an outlier, for sure. But I would like, I challenge that you probably have exhibited the skill set to be an investor through all the endeavours that you've done like a jazz music a musician right is it's like a multi-year sacrifice to be at a level where you're good you've learned eight languages which is just wild you know and again that's a commitment of time of years you know and investing is it's like a lot of work to see a payoff down the line I feel like that's your personality type that's a very interesting point that I haven't thought about so I often get asked in the in the language world I often get asked what's the connection between music and languages?

12:52Because I think we all like to, it's nice to think that, okay, if you're good at music, that should help you out at languages. I personally don't think there's any connection between the two. The only thing that I think music really helps with is if you've got a good ear from music, it helps you hear accents in different languages. So it helps you speak like Spanish with a more Spanish accent than you might otherwise. But one of the things that I found that music was really useful for was that it It trains you to be able to sit in a room and work on a piece of music hard for hours a day, going through the process of being useless at it.

13:31You don't even know the notes. You can't play it. You train yourself to play it, to learn the piece, to practice it, and then go and perform it. That's, like you say, is a multi-step thing that takes place over days, weeks, and months. And so when it came to learning languages, it's very much the same thing. It takes time. there's not much you can do in a week or a month but a lot you can do in a year and so I would be I think the music trained me to be patient and just diligently work at the language every day for the future payoff and now that you mention it I think it's exactly the same thing with investing it's like am I prepared to sacrifice my afternoon to to practice the piano or to learn Japanese or whatever, so that in the future I can play the music or speak the language, like answer yes.

14:18With investing, am I prepared to sacrifice 300 quid from my salary this month so that I don't have to live with baked beans and toast when I'm 70? Yeah, it's a similar spectrum. My financial markets risk management lecture at university said that investing is the sacrifice of consumption today in the hope of greater consumption tomorrow. And that's exactly what you've just said. it's like a sacrifice of your time and effort or your resources which represent time and effort in the hope that you might get better and it's the same with like playing an instrument right it's like a frustrating process almost of sacrifice which is like if which is it's it's not breaking news right with investable this is this is the whole thing it's like it's sacrificed now for something more later but i mean do you think that what determines someone what makes the difference between someone that actually does that and and doesn't because if you boil it down it's super simple i take from whatever age take 10 of your salary invest it and never touch it like it doesn't have to be more complicated than that yet most people don't do it i mean what what do you think makes the difference between someone actually doing it and not awareness of like your own mortality like if you you become aware maybe you've had a child which i think like that helps with that like you become aware of like oh i there's a life outside of me i am getting older and i now have to care for people outside of myself or as you get older i think it's almost like a cliche at 35 you become aware of your health and your wealth and you start like going on runs and saving someone in their 20s i think you're a rare breed there and i think it's the same kind of rare breed of to learn eight languages and be a highly skilled musician in your 20s you know i was playing around in the mud going out on nights out and drinking beers like you know so i think we all get there maybe well most do but it's also confidence like confidence and knowledge you're like well if i invest my money i don't know what i'm doing i could lose it whereas and that could affect my life whereas if i just keep doing what i'm doing i'm having fun and i'll figure out later on yeah so like a lot of it i think it's got to be confidence yeah and people like i've got friends that know they should invest like i want to get started they always say should i invest in this what should i invest in and it's just they're educated but they just don't have the confidence to or know where to put their money yeah i think i think the education piece is absolutely fundamental we see this in entrepreneurship a lot as well where the thing that really you know you put 10 people on you start 10 people off on an entrepreneurship journey with the same goal same resources and you get 10 wildly different outcomes like one one person goes on to make millions the other person's still stuck where they are like 10 years later what makes the difference i mean fundamentally it's education if like if you know what to do then then all you've got to do is decide okay am i going to do it or not but if you don't know what to do then you just don't have options and it's the same thing about how many people saying like Investing is risky or starting a business is risky.

17:04And it couldn't be further from the truth. Like it's risky not to do it from the other perspective, right? So I feel like there's an education piece, which is like what you guys do is so important. Just raising awareness of like the fundamentals and the fact that it is urgent and pressing now today. Because every day that you're not doing it, you're missing out on the compounding effect in the future. so yeah i mean i i feel it's a it's this combination of um of education that which has to be in place plus then it's just the down to your your your your own person right am i going to actually do this or not and that's that's i don't know how to account for that i think we're impatient as well you know as as humans and i think for the majority of human civilization men were lucky to get past 35 right so like this idea that we we live to 90 is is not within us And I think we're very bad at projecting forward for retirement in that sense when, you know, like we would all be, you might be dead, you know, and we would certainly be considered old in that point.

18:05And I think it's only really in the last hundred years that people have had to think about living to a hundred, you know, and I think that's like, that's tough for people. Yeah, and when you think about the effect of basic investing and compounding, it's difficult enough to save for a retirement that starts at 65. The idea that you're going to work from the age of 20 to 60 in order to fund a retirement from 60 to 100, the maths are getting harder and harder the longer it works, which just makes it even more important to start early, which comes back to the education piece. People struggle to not eat the burger when they know that it destroys their health long term.

18:40People struggle not to smoke. We are all kinds of messed up. Short term, aren't we? We just want to scratch the itch in the short term. It's like the get-rich-quick stuff. Like, why do people find crypto so alluring but not, you know, I can sit there and go, the S &P 500 has compounded at a rate of 10 % for 100 years, and that's not exciting. But, you know, shitcoin's gone up 100 % in a day. I'll put my money on that, you know. Guys, we completely skipped over the fact that you speak eight languages. I know. I don't know how you got it. I'm going to say eight languages. What are the eight languages and how did you learn them?

19:14Because most people learn by living in the country. So I did French and German at school, like pretty much everybody did at the time. And I mean, I did okay. I did GCSE, but I had no reason to learn. So I went on a French exchange when I was 14. I kind of left school pretty much with the same level of language that everyone has at that stage, which is basically nothing. You can ask, where's the train station in French? Where la gare? There you go. You just want to show off. That's what's on French knowledge. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I had some awareness of what it meant to learn a language, but that's where it stopped.

19:56When I went to uni, I went to music college, and I was surrounded by people from different countries. Most of the people there in that college were from other countries. and at one point I had a job in Cafe Nero, Cafe Nero Seven Dials, that was 2000, year 2000? And I was making coffee in Cafe Nero surrounded by like French, Italian, Japanese, Swedish and all these people could not only speak English but they could often speak each other's languages as well. So, you know, the Italian barista was like speaking Spanish with us but that's the coolest thing And I just felt really, really inept because I was like the typical monolingual British guy.

20:41Couldn't, you know, they all had to speak English for my benefit. And that, for some reason, just really, it just got me. And I didn't like that. So I said, right, I'm going to learn language. So I started with French. So I went to Paris, got a job working in a youth hostel in Paris. And, you know, spent six months there, was working hard, was speaking with people. and by the end of it I was pretty pretty confident in French and the main thing that that did was it gave me the confidence to say hey if I want to I can I can learn a language I know I can do it so after that went back to London and went back to to university because I'd taken a year out in order to go to Paris a stupid decision really but you know it is what it is went back to to London And now I was like playing music with these guys from Brazil and Spain.

21:32And I got really interested in them and their cultures and their countries. And I thought, well, this guy speaks Spanish. Why can't I go and learn Spanish? I've just learned French. And so I would spend more time. I like get the textbook and I sit down and I just study. And I just do exactly what I did to learn French. so you know i learned uh french spanish portuguese all while i was living in london and then i went to live in i went to changed careers went to teach english in japan so i learned japanese uh went to to the middle east well i lived in qatar and egypt so i learned some arabic uh saying this like it's so simple i know right i went to japan so i learned japanese like these are not easy like i dated a chinese guy and i tried and chinese yeah you can barely talk i tried to learn chinese like just the alphabet i couldn't get my head rounded because it's all symbols so assume japanese is similar with the alphabet like you've got to draw the characters yeah and it's worse because there are three different scripts so you've got it uses chinese characters but it also has two native japanese scripts as well is it tonal the language is japanese is not no no chinese is mandarin chinese is cantonese is uh you know languages like thai are tonal as well um but you know i think the thing is with this it's a lot like music where everything is difficult when you're coming at it for the first time from the outside you think like oh my god all these different things i've got to learn all the grammar and the languages and the tones and the pronunciation and man it's and then and then you realize you sort of eating a bowl of rice and you leave your chopsticks sticking up and you just offended everyone in the room And it's like, oh, all this stuff I've got to learn.

23:08But in my experience, the thing that you just sit down and make the decision you're going to learn and then get at it and just don't stop until you've learned. The thing that you're motivated to do is the thing that's easy. Last time we recorded, Tamein, you were having some real dramas with your accountant. So how's that been going, mate? They're sacked. So drama sorted. They're a big corporate firm. They didn't really reply to my emails very quickly. like took a week or two at times. And they charged me way too much. I mean, I've got pretty simple taxes and yeah, they were charging me thousands.

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24:12The price is also decent. So if you're self-employed with one income stream, it's just£89 as a one-off fee. No big accountancy fees. And we also have a discount code, of course. If you need to file a self-assessment this year, give TaxApp a try. We've left a link in the description and use the code MONEY10 for 10 % off your first tax filing. That code is MONEY, M-O-N-E-Y, 1-0. so mr carolet i hear you are a salesman elite salesman yes one of the best they say i've got a little bit of experience in the game yeah i could say you've done a few deals uh bill a bill what what would your compliance team say about you they will say that i am always nagging them and that um essentially i just have i have beef with compliance i love the team compliance slows down all my deals because every time i get to the finish line they've got to check documents kyc GDPR and it's just a nightmare it slows the deal down by like two three weeks it's always on both sides as well as sometimes it can be blocked on the other side exactly well that's where today's sponsor can help indeed Vanta helps companies of all sizes get secure and compliant fast and they stay that way they do it by automating compliance with over 35 security and privacy frameworks like SOC 2 ISO 27001 and HIPAA yeah all of them and this saves businesses so much time and money According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers save over half a million dollars a year in costs.

25:34Not bad. And they also help you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster, which is great because everybody hates filling out forms. If you're a business that needs to prove security and compliance, visit Vanta.com forward slash making money to sign up for a completely free demo today. That's Vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description though, so you can just click that. but you know they say some people have like a different types of brain like they say one was like a language brain like i did english spanish french all these like theology whereas some people have like a financial brain which is all like maths and numbers do you think that works do you think that's true and do you think you have a language brain so it's a bit easier for you i think so i i think i think that the you know you've got the classic distinction is like the is the the scientists versus the humanities, right?

26:24So some people will do like, you know, history, languages, music. Other people will do chemistry, physics, and maths. In broad brushstrokes, from the people I meet, that tends to be true. Like scientists tend to have a very specific characteristics. And people that do humanities, art, music, they have other characteristics. I think that inevitably, I probably do have a certain aptitude for languages and music. And the fact that I gravitated towards them, it explains that. There's plenty of things I tried to do that I was not good at that I didn't do. Like you don't catch me doing ballroom dancing very often.

27:03But if I was good at that, maybe I would have done that instead. I don't know. So there's a certain element of, you know, survivorship bias in there. But I always feel at the same time, because people say this with languages, right? So they watch my YouTube channel and, you know, they'll see me talking about languages and they'll see me, you know, I've recorded whole series on YouTube where I've gone to a country and learned the language. So I go to Thailand for two weeks, like study intensively and then have a half hour conversation in Thai at the end of it. I film the whole thing, put it on YouTube.

27:33And people will message me and say like, have you just got the language, Gene? Is it just easy for you? Like, do you have to be talented? and I normally say, well, let's just say that that's true. Now what? You just have to do the work, don't you? You're still sat in the same place, left with the same decision in front of you. Let's say that you have to have a certain talent to learn language. Okay, great. You don't have it? All right. Now what? You're not going to do it then? You're just going to give up and not try? so I think my observation from music was always the same as well which is that it's if you do have a natural talent at most it's five percent of the overall outcome because 95 percent is the hard work you don't find people who like come out of the womb playing Rachmaninoff piano concertos it's like it doesn't happen they have to spend 18 years of their life becoming absolutely ridiculous at the piano in order to be able to do that and then that natural talent is the five percent that might make the difference between them being like number one in the world and number six in the world but like it's all it all comes down to the hard work you do i like i know some of the most ridiculously talented polyglots in the world right who speak there we go there it is a polyglot sounds like someone likes to eat a lot or something have lots of wives lots of wives exactly so polyglot is someone that speaks lots of languages when does it become a poly?

29:01like more than four? it's just hotly debated in the language world I can imagine this is like a bonus because someone with two wants to claim the poly title right yes I mean you know who knows I mean if you if you speak one language you're monolingual, two languages you're bilingual three languages trilingual yeah you hear that word used four up you're a polyglot i would say um but then you get into the end there's one up from there which is hyperpolyglot and that's i don't know what i think it's like eight let's go let's go eight ten something like that and that's typically people that just like devote their life to learning to learning languages i don't put myself in that category at all i'm too i'm too um like so i've never studied languages for the sake of the languages it's always been for a particular purpose well i was gonna say you said that if you might be naturally good at languages like it gives you like a 5 % increase because in the end, you still have to do the work.

29:58I assume that's the same for finance. So people are like, I'm bad with money. I'm bad with investing. I'm bad with maths. Like you just do the work and you'll still be able to invest as successfully as the average person, would you say? Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not the investment professional, but it seems to me, and you can tell me what you guys think, but it seems to me that the basics of personal finance are considerably simpler than learning a new language. You don't need the high skill and actually the jury's out on whether these guys can beat the simple approach. Right, yeah. In five minutes, you could say to someone basically what they need to do.

30:31And all they need then is to go away and go, what is an index fund? What is an ISERB? Do those two bits of research and rinse repeat. And then the hard thing, even if you automate it, then like the hard thing, the behavior that you actually need to exhibit to not royally screw it up is just don't get bored and start meddling. And that in many ways is the hardest thing of all. Speaking of bored and meddling, one thing that kind of is interesting about your story is you were this really successful musician and then you were pulled away by languages, which surely was a bad use of your time from a like, your peers would have been practicing their instrument.

31:06And then this kind of like serendipity that led to your business. How did you deal with that in first in the moment of like, I'm probably throwing away my music career here so I can speak to the Brazilian lads? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's so difficult. When I look back on it, I was just being pulled around. When I was young, the truth of the matter is I was being pulled around by emotions and life experience and just following my gut. There was no master plan here. It wasn't intentional. I'm someone who when I get a be in my bonnet about something, you just can't stop me doing it. I'm stubborn and I'll just keep going at it.

31:45and it's the same i'm the same today with the stuff that i do right um i so i i was there was something about the the musician lifestyle that wasn't for me i love the music i spent years of my life doing i was really good at it but there was just something about the lifestyle that didn't that didn't sit well with me and it's uh it's difficult for me to understand what that was it's probably a mix of the the social thing the professional thing i think also honestly there was an element of when you play jazz and you're performing you're always being judged by somebody right someone is out there whatever you perform people are always listening to you they're always uh like either enjoying what you're doing or they're not being surrounded by a lot of a lot of peers who are also great musicians they like everyone's super nice but they're also kind of judging you know is he good is he not for me that i think that didn't i didn't cope with that very well i think i found that i think i was too immature um to or not not like in that whatever aspect of your psyche that is i wasn't well enough developed in that and i think i found it really difficult to do what you have to do as a as a as a musician or an artist which is to keep putting yourself out there irrespective of how good your stuff is it's a bit like starting a youtube i was about to say but then you went from that to youtube so you deal in a world of experts the problem is like in youtube you can be speaking to a lot of beginners so they're you know they're kind you know you speak to me and you can impart wisdom on me that might seem simple to you but people who like jazz really like jazz and they know what good jazz is and it's a very high level right and the nature of the community is that you're kind of you know there's not much of a public appreciation for jazz and most of the time you're with other musicians you are uh you're playing for each other's benefit a lot of the time and i think i just i just didn't cope very well with the the with the that whole kind of peer pressure and um and other people other musicians like friends of mine will hear that and they'll say what people everyone's supportive and they are but it's just i i think it wasn't for me and so i started to i started to eventually just stop putting myself out there and there was a gradual decline over a few years where I just I decided to pull back from it at the same time as I was pulling back from that I was spending loads of time learning languages so I would go out and I would just devote like two years to learning Portuguese and but what actually the catalyst actually for me moving into doing languages professionally was the financial crisis actually to 2008 I was like you had this impression at the time the general feeling at the time that the world's going to hell in the handbasket everything was like it was just shut down uh you know the housing market had just completely stalled um like businesses had stopped spending musicians suddenly had no work and it was all this just this general feeling of right now is the time to make a make a break for things and i'd always had this pipe dream of traveling the world teaching english my uncle did that and you know he lived all around the world like italy thailand france Slovenia teaching English and it sounded like such a sort of romantic career path and I always had this pipe dream of doing that I never I'd never thought about it seriously because I had the music I'm the one I have to you know I have to stick with the music but that but 2008 was the was the kind of the tipping point so I retrained and I did a language teaching course like four weeks pretty quick and then went off got a job in Japan and moved to Japan and started side teaching and then I spent four or five years teaching English in Japan in the Middle East and so what happened was after that that period of time about you know five years or so when I was literally just searching for the next thing to do with my life what happened in the background was that I developed this real skill with learning languages and speaking languages but also with teaching languages so the professional angle to that was the teaching of it and so when i ended up starting my business which was like 2013 you know on the side evenings and weekends what i was able to do was marry up this these dual abilities of having of being able to teach languages but also having done the thing and and learned the languages myself which kind of created this unique angle.

36:16And that was what the seed of the business was. And I see that now around a lot of the time, being very good at one thing is great, but the real superpower is being good at two adjacent things and combining them. And that's what could create real fireworks. Like for example, knowledge of personal finance, plus being good on camera, like that combination of things. If you lacked either one of those, it wouldn't work. But some that's often combining two skills can create something completely new. These kind of adjacent skills that like complement each other, that might not be that obvious. Like a doctor with personal speaking, they end up on TV, like talking about, you know, like Dr.