I run a company called Misfit, Inc. Misfit is a digital agency.
We're a conference where publishing house or an art and culture fund were a tech incubator.
And we're a foundation where we've launched humanitarian projects in Malawi and Ethiopia,
in the Philippines and South Africa, and we do most of our work in northern Kenya.
I employ 25 people across the globe with no central office.
We've launched projects on every every inhabited continent.
On the globe. We spend 20% of our time since the day we opened doing pro bono work, which is our cultural and humanitarian work around the world.
The way we measure our success at Misfit is by different metrics.
I used to be a banker, so I know those metrics very well,
but I decided to pioneer something slightly different, which we call internally impact accounting.
So the idea that, yeah, your financials define your success and health of one element of your business, but the impact that you have in the world,
the social impact that you have in the world, the lives that you change, the people that you inspire,
the things that happen as a result of the things that you do matter just as much.
We're celebrating our six year anniversary at Misfit and what started out as me, Melissa and our business partner,
Dino Trading Web Design for Bagels is is now the company that I've explained to you.
And Melissa and I have travelled to 60 countries, not for business,
but because we love to travel and we wanted to build a business around the things that we love to do.
So. So the company that I run, I run literally from laptops in cafes across the world.
And today I'm going to talk a little bit about marketing, as Magdalena mentioned.
But first, I'm going to tell you a bit about myself, because ten years ago,
the life that I lead and the business that I run literally would not be possible without the tools that we have available to ourself,
to ourselves today. So I'm going to just tell you a little bit about myself in terms of an introduction when I was a kid, when I was in high school.
Some of your kids are in high school right now. I was a basketball player and All-State basketball player.
When I went up to my high school guidance counsellor, Miss Mitchell. I asked her, hey, you know, I'm thinking about going to university.
What university do you think I should go to? And I gave her a kind of options that I was thinking about, and she kind of just stopped.
You say, Hey, JJ, let me just tell you something.
A guy like you probably shouldn't be thinking about university.
Maybe you should become a mechanic and go to trade school. She offers me a brochure to go to trade school.
Now nothing gets mechanics. I have friends who are happy mechanic,
but that is certainly not what you want to hear when you're 17 years old planning what your future is going to be like.
And of course, I took this in. I look at Ms. Mitchell, and Ms.
Mitchell became the personification of everybody in my life that told me what a loser I was going to be and the fact that I would amount to nothing.
From that moment on, I decided that I was going to be a success with a capital S and I was going to win.
I marched myself over to Barnes and Noble when those things still existed.
That's a bookstore for all of you who don't. And I page through a catalogue that had degrees majors that you could study in college.
And I was looking for one thing, one metric in my research earning potential over time I was going to make as much money as
humanly possible and I was going to bury the clowns that laughed at me when I was in high school.
I decided to study accounting and finance because that's what you do when you want to make money.
I went into school. I graduated number one in my class, summa [INAUDIBLE] laude.
I did go to university and I ended up taking a job.
I basically had the pick of the litter. I could go to any firm that I wanted, but I didn't care where I'd be working, who I'd be working for.
The only thing that I it about is how many zeros were at the end of my signing
bonus and how what my starting salary is going to look like from then on.
I spent the rest of my early twenties jumping from one firm to another, doing what we call in the corporate world vertical leaps,
just leveraging one position to the next to extract more revenue, more salary.
For myself on every positional jump, which landed me to a place where I was in my mid-twenties,
had a corner office and overlooking the Manhattan skyline, making a six figure salary, even a bigger bonus.
And there was this tiny, tiny little problem, just one tiny problem that I hated my life.
I despised what I did, and I hated myself more and more for trading the hours of my one and only life away for more money at every turn.
So the day came December 31st, 2011.
I'll never forget this day in my life. It was four days before Melissa and I got married.
My boss calls me into his office. It was a monday. I go into my boss's office.
He close the door. He looks at me, he says, AJ, you're getting a promotion.
This promotion basically lands me number two three in my firm in in finance world what this means is you are minted.
You're good. Keep your head down. You're going to live a nice life.
You're going to make a lot of money. I walked out of his office. I walked back into my own, closed the door behind me.
And I just sat there staring out over Manhattan. And I just started to weep, to cry uncontrollably,
because I realised that I was trapped and that I would never be able to walk away from that type of money ever again.
And that any thought that I had of living a life of adventure, of meaning, of purpose, of doing work that actually matters, was gone.
So for 37, 30 minutes, I sat there and I wept basically uncontrollably.
And then it struck me. You always have a choice.
I could walk out right now. I could leave everything I've ever known.
Everything I've ever study. I could leave the baggage, the weight of proving everybody in my life wrong.
I could leave it behind me. I could leave it right there. And I could walk out today.
So four days before I got married and one day before this promotion was about to kick in, I walked into my boss's office.
He got the tail end of a Shakespearean, Shakespearean soliloquy about the system and.
And something that would have made Malcolm Gladwell very proud. I went over to the elevator, took 28 stories down.
I hit the street, and for the first time in my adult life, I was free.
And I realised the reason why and, and I want you to realise that the reason why I left that day,
the reason I evacuated a life plan going horribly wrong was two reasons.
A I had a vision of myself as a 70 year old man looking back at me that morning.
The glory of a life that could have been. And B, I wanted to see.
I wanted to prove, to see if it was possible to live a life on my terms and to build a business around that.