It Starts With Passion: Do What You Love and Love What You Do

The best activity I can give you is to write down 100 goals you want to achieve in your lifetime. People often call this a ‘bucket list’. When a doctor gives you six months to live and you decide to write down all the things you want to do before you kick the bucket — that’s your bucket list! One of the best ways to discover what is important and meaningful in your life is to complete the ‘100 Goal Challenge’.

For me it started when I was 23 years old. At school I was academically challenged, not a high achiever at all, and at 15 I dropped out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life so I took the first job I could get. I began as a labourer and got a job working for Klaus, a 6 foot 4 inch German bricklayer. Klaus was a record-holding brickie who could lay bricks faster than I could get them to him. After six weeks I thought to myself, ‘I have to be smarter than this job. I can’t do this for the next 40 years,’ so I took the easy option and went back to school.

School didn’t get any easier for me. I just got worse at it until one day my mum said I was wasting my time at school and suggested I get a job. Mum asked me what I wanted to do and my response was, ‘I don’t know!’ Mum was solution oriented, but aren’t most mums? She had a lot of push in the local council — she was the tea lady. She got me my first real job working in local government with Albert Shire Council ...