Big news: we’re moving. Away from Canberra. Away from anywhere! We’re going to try being location-independent for a while.
We don’t love it here any more. And when you don’t love where you live, it’s time to go. This is especially important when your house is also your office.
Because how we feel in this home affects the work that we produce. Our work is the most important thing to us. We both gave up our careers to do this.
The Small Business System (SBS)[1] feels like the thing that will make us long-term sustainable. So it has to be the best that it can possibly be. For that to be the case, something needed to change.
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We’ve both lived and worked all over the world. Now, in our late 40s, we’re not quite ready to say goodbye to that lifestyle. Because we do, soon, want to settle down. But not in this inner-city rental; this could never have been our forever place.
We need our own place, in the country. Undisturbed by neighbours. Full of chickens.
So, decision made just a week ago, we’ve already taken decisive action. Notice has been given. Many items have been sold or disposed. There’s more to go: we don’t plan on keeping much.
Where are we going? First stop is Lucy’s parents’ place, where we’ll briefly re-group and plan the next move. It might be Japan, the USA, Germany … or anywhere else. It might depend on a cheap flight! We really don’t know.
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To be clear, the production of the SBS is our absolute priority. Some of you have trusted us with a lot of your money. We appreciate that, and after a rough week – see below – we’re now in total-focus mode.
Since starting development of the SBS we’ve been talking about visiting some of the businesses we’re hoping to help. You can’t truly know what people’s problems are until you see them with your own eyes. So this will give us an opportunity to come and see some of you.
If this interests you, fill in this form.
Sadness warning. Skip if you love chickens.
This decision came with a terrible cost. Our beloved chickens couldn’t have come with us. They couldn’t really have come anywhere: they were all on medication to keep them alive, and without a chicken vet close by their implants would have worn off and they would have died painful deaths. Most vets won’t see a chicken.
And so we had to say goodbye. We took them to the vet and they went, peacefully, together. Obviously we’re crushed beyond words. It’s the hardest thing we’ve ever done.
I want to honour them with their own page. So: goodbye, sweet ladies.
I’m going to standardise the naming here, it’s been a bit all over the place. We have ‘life admin’ and the upcoming ‘small business’ systems. So their formal names are the Life Admin System (LAS) and Small Business System (SBS).
Our style guide says that you should capitalise if it feels appropriate, but if you’re in the flow of a sentence and it would feel a bit over-the-top, there’s no requirement. Or, now, I can just use the initialisms. ↩︎
, alcohol tasting cycle groups, something that you can do no matter what city you’re in. It’s important to feel like you’re not stuck working on JD on your computer, then at night stuck back at that computer with netflix. Part of the charm of travel is the feeling of freedom, so don’t accidentally forget that your free time is going to need being much more actively planned and enforced. 