Calum Douglas

Full transcript: Calum Douglas on London Real

0:03 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Calum Douglas, recent graduate of our Business Accelerator course. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Brian, this is amazing. Tell us a little bit about you. Where are you from, what do you do? I was born in the north of Scotland, in Aberdeen, to a family of musicians and engineers. It’s a kind of a bit of a melting pot like that.

0:33 And I had a sort of very tumultuous sort of early upbringing, and I really felt very lost for a long time and didn’t apply myself, and it was only till I was 20 years old that I focused on one thing. So I felt always very practical. I was always very practically gifted with my hands, but I knew I wasn’t stupid.

1:03 And I decided that I would train to be a welder, because it was very intricate. It’s practical, but it’s an intellectual pursuit. It’s an art, no, it’s a craft form. And I started doing that, and that was the first time that I started something and went from never having done it to being an expert in three years. So in three years I was the instructor of the company, and that was a complete life-changing moment.

1:36 I thought, wow, I didn’t know how to do that. I worked really hard and now I’m the instructor. I thought, well, maybe I can do this for other things. And that led me onto the path of going to university to become a mechanical engineer, to try to follow my dreams of applying my practical talent with my mind.

2:00 And if it hadn’t been for that experience of going through that trial by fire, literally trial by fire with welding, of mastering something and receiving feedback, very harsh colleagues, you know, these guys aren’t there to be nice. You’ve all got to do a good job, and the impact’s on everyone if you don’t. And if you get the feedback that it’s good, that it’s meaningful. And so that was a massively powerful life experience, to get that feedback and learning.

2:35 Okay. And why join the Business Accelerator? What was going on inside of you, and what were you trying to achieve before you joined us? That’s a huge story, but condensing it down into a digestible form, I’ve been going through a lot of personal struggles with work and engineering and industry and how everything is done these days, and I began to get more and more disenfranchised with a lot of it.

3:09 And I really thought more and more, I need to be taking some control of what I’m doing. It’s not enough to be doing a good job for someone else anymore. It’s really not enough. You wake up in the morning, painful here, not enough. And two friends of mine had been, I think, quite early guests on your show, and I had been talking to them, and they had a great experience.

3:34 And I saw a notification come up that you were doing this and that it was once a year, and I thought, if not now, then when? I’ve got to do it. So, a really sort of transitionary phase, and I thought this is exactly what my mind needs right now to get to wherever I’m supposed to be going afterwards.

3:50 And you’re frustrated with the industry because you didn’t feel like you had the control, and you wanted to take it back yourself and see if you could create something on your own? I wanted control, and I felt more and more that everything is being more and more computerized, and it’s taking the creativity out of the work, out of your control, and more and more into the computer. But worse, I actually think it’s not the right thing.

4:20 I don’t think it’s better. I don’t think it makes better products, I don’t think it makes products faster, I don’t think it makes cheaper products. And I passionately believe this is the wrong direction for engineering and people as a whole. I think it’s the wrong direction for us. And so I’m a passionate believer in first principles, and that’s going to form a big part of what I’m gonna do after the Business Accelerator.

4:52 Okay, and why London Real? When my friends were on here, I started looking at it, and I watched Rupert Sheldrake, and I’d never watched his stuff before, and this was an incredible interview, even though I didn’t really know what to make of half of it. I thought this is incredible. It’s a really long, in-depth interview, and he’s really being given the chance to talk about some really far-out things, but not necessarily absurd things.

5:24 Just far-out. And I hadn’t seen anyone have a platform to speak about things like that anywhere else, so I thought, right there and then, this is something special in some kind of way. Well, this isn’t happening in other places. We have a second interview with him coming out soon, which is as incredible. He’s an incredible guy, I’ve gotten to know him as a friend now, he’s very special.

5:51 And what made you actually pull the trigger? Because it’s a big decision. I really took to what you said about making an investment in your own future. And that may be a sales pitch, but it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. And that just felt to me like it contrasted with all the other options that were available to me, because you really put the onus on me, saying, this is about me and what I want. It’s not about me paying a company.

6:24 That may be the end result, but obviously you believed that it didn’t have to work like that in your mind, and it was an important mental distinction to have when you begin on a new path, and that meant a lot.

6:39 Talk to me about the first two weeks. You get thrown into this Facebook group with 150 people around the world, you’re on the live calls, you got these modules coming at you, workbooks. What were you feeling that first two weeks? It was a cross between very excited, panicked, I wasn’t sure if I’d done the right thing, kind of semi nervous breakdown, because it’s really not a business accelerator. It’s a kind of intense life learning experience which happens to have business goals that can result from that.

7:15 And to really sit down and think about all the things you love and put it on paper, and then show them to other people. You may spend a lot of time thinking about what you like, but until you actually put it down and get it out there, it’s a completely different way of looking at yourself. And it was almost a sort of existential crisis type thing. It sounds crazy, but it is that intense, that it has that effect. It was astonishingly intense.

7:54 What was the biggest breakthrough for you? The biggest breakthrough was realizing that the whole answer I should have had in the first place had been staring me in the face for the last two years, even before that, to what I should be trying to do. And I ignored it because, exactly as you had said, I was viewing it as a hobby.

8:17 That’s hobby, it’s not a real thing. And then after, I think in week six, I got an email from the head of mechanical design for a major Formula One team, and they said, hey, this subject, which was my hobby, they said, can you, well, we’re going to take you over to our factory and we want to talk to a whole design department for two hours. You’ve got the floor for two hours, and this is during the working day, so they basically shut their department down for two hours to listen to me.

8:52 I thought, that’s it. That’s it. For 30 years I’ve been missing this, right? That’s it. Right. Wow.

9:05 Biggest challenge for you on the course? The biggest challenge was having faith in myself. It’s just what you really tried to drum into everyone. It’s like, have faith in your passion, this is where you’re gonna do it. But it’s really, really difficult, I think, especially for someone with technical training, to look at themselves and their passions in that way, to take it away from a numbers game and what other businesses might be doing in this and that, to have faith in yourself and what really does it here. That was massively challenging. I had to pretty much just flip my whole mindset around to get that.

9:48 Talk to me about the classmates. What are these people like, and what is that experience like? I know you met a lot of them for the first time in the flesh last night. Can you describe it? It’s a little bit like if you were to kind of write down a description on paper of 10 ideal people you would like to spend time with, and then you discover they’re actual real people who are thinking the same things you are. How do I take control? How do I get things going?

10:26 I’ve got these alternative views, or different stuff they’re interested in in their lives, and every waking moment they’re putting their time in to try and make these changes. And it’s a completely different social atmosphere to be around people like that, digitally or in person, who think that way all the time. Because, like it or not, most of the normal people, of course, a normal person as well, but most of the people we hang around with all day, because of the way their lives are set up, they’re not in a position to be thinking in that way all the time.

11:01 And it’s hard to break through and have discussions with even people you’ve known for years about things like this, and suddenly you meet all these people who are thinking about all this stuff all the time, and so you don’t feel weird anymore. Like, okay, this is, I feel a little bit like I’m home now. I don’t feel strange anymore. This feels right.

11:25 What’s the road ahead like for you? What are your plans, and what are you gonna implement from the course, from a business standpoint and from a personal standpoint? So for four years I’ve been writing a book, and it’s now my intention that this isn’t going to be a hobby. I’m going to turn this into a really serious piece of intellectual property, and I’m gonna use that to publicize and market my own viewpoint on how technological development should be done, which is the subject of the work.

11:52 And I haven’t nailed down all the threads of how that’s going to be done yet, but that is the direction I’m going to take, and realizing that it’s not a hobby, it’s just what I’m very, very good at. And from a personal standpoint, I’m just going to forget everything that doesn’t help me get there. There’s so many things that have been floating around on the side that I’ve been trying to do bits of, and I can just see it all falling away now. It doesn’t contribute to where I need to go.

12:31 So there’s so many little things I’m just gonna stay off. I’m going to stay off social media. There’s a whole load of things I’ve been wasting time on, and that’s going to help me in my personal life a lot too, to have a clean-out, a mental and sort of metaphysical clean-out of things that don’t contribute towards this goal. I should have done that years ago.

12:55 And why do you think you hadn’t done that, or pursued this thing you call the hobby? What was holding you back, do you think? I think partially the social media systems that are set up are very, very clever at not letting you do that. I think there’s a kind of breakaway force you need to get, like an escape velocity you need to get to break away from all the things that take our time and try to pester us all the time.

13:18 And I think you need to kind of reach a bit of a breaking point to just tear yourself away from it all, and I think it requires a lot of energy to do that. I don’t think you can do that just with a kind of a blasé, or, it would be better if I didn’t. You need a real shove to do it. And I think this course, being around the classmates, talking to you on all the live calls, that really gave you the impetus to say, I’m going to do this, I can do this, this is what I should do.

13:58 I know it, everyone else knows it, I’ve got the energy now, I’m gonna do it. And that applies also, it’s the same thing with the hobby. You realize that it’s a hobby because that’s what I’m spending my time doing, because I like it, and that’s why I’m very, very good at it. That’s not a hobby as well, just to be doing. Yeah, it sounds so obvious.

14:21 And what was your biggest aha moment, of something you learned on the course where you were like, okay, that opened up a bunch of ideas for you? That’s really hard to nail down, but I would say it’s the four levels to the business, four levels with the introduction all the way to the business to business. That was a real, I’d never heard that before anywhere. I’m sure maybe it is out there, but I had never heard that before. Yeah, the end-to-end ecosystem. That was a kind of, well, it’s like seeing the Matrix. And I know I said that, a lot of people take that lightly because they hear it all the time, but as soon as I started thinking of business that way, it’s a game changer, complete game changer.

15:01 It’s been amazing seeing your transition, and I’m curious, if we both walked out on Old Street right now and went down the sidewalk and we bumped into the Calum that didn’t take this course, how was that guy different than you? He’s just gonna be feeling kind of disgruntled because he’s not getting what he wants, but doesn’t quite know why he’s not getting what he wants, and it’s probably just gonna carry on kind of feeling a bit disgruntled and not really understanding how to go about getting it, and maybe looking at other people in the street, seeing them disgruntled as well.

15:32 I’m thinking, he’s not very happy, so, right, that I’m not happy too, that’s a normal thing. Whereas now I’m not thinking like that. Sounds like you had a major mind shift. Yeah. And if you had to describe what this course is like for someone who has no idea what we’re talking about, what would you say the experience is like?

15:55 It is a self-discovery voyage. It’s maybe called a business course, and it will give you that acumen to apply it, but it’s really about having faith in yourself, your own passions, understanding what those are, even if you don’t know at all what they might be. You will find that it’s often something that’s been staring you in the face, but you need an environment like this to pull these little threads out, which were there all along.

16:27 But if you don’t have an environment like this, that is something that might take you the rest of your life. And I think that’s the most powerful aspect of it. The way you’ve chosen to apply that is then to a business setting, but I really think you could apply the same principle to almost any area of real life and see a huge benefit.

16:49 And what would you say to someone who’s thinking about taking this course, they’re not sure if it’s worth the investment? I’d say if you’re already thinking about taking it, that pretty much means you should already do it. If you’re already thinking like that, it means you were already very uncomfortable with and unhappy with something that you’re doing or not doing in your life. You know you need to make a change of some sort. So I think you’ve already got to that point if you’re thinking about it.

17:21 So I’d say, I can’t really think of a good reason why you shouldn’t do it if you’ve already got to that point of thinking about your life. What’s your life look like in one year? You wake up, what’s your new reality that you’ve manifested? I don’t know yet, but I know I’m gonna be in control of it, or at least all the bits I can be in control of, and I’m gonna feel okay about what goes wrong,

17:53 because I know that’s my fault, but that’s okay, because I know I’m accountable for what happens, even if it’s bad, and I’m okay with that now. I’m not gonna blame anyone else. So whatever I’m doing, it’s gonna be taking me where I need to go, and I’m gonna be okay with all the failures, and I’m gonna be able to accept them and learn from it. And I don’t want to predict the future about it, but I’m just going to be in an infinitely better mental state to deal with all these kind of problems as they come along, and that’s gonna get me where I need to go.

18:33 Calum, I think you got this course, and so thank you for putting in the hard work. I know it was uncomfortable, I know it was bumpy, you were questioning yourself, but when you see those kind of breakthroughs you got in week six, where people are literally shouting out to you, yes, this is what you should be doing, and now you’re not ignoring it, that’s a huge thing. And I always joke that the Business Accelerator is in fact a Life Accelerator to a certain extent, because you unblock all of those mentalities that were holding you back from being successful. So it’s been a pleasure having you on the course. I look forward to knowing you for many years from now. Welcome to the family. Thank you so much.