What I Wish Someone Told Me at 25
The lessons that took years to learn the hard way don't have to be learned that way by the next bloke.
When I look back at my mid-20s, I can see the pathway pretty clearly now.
I'd done my diploma in horticulture, studied landscape architecture, and I was chasing what I thought was the dream: one day having my own business.
I got there through a commercial landscaping company. I was young, a project manager with staff under me, sometimes 10 to 12 projects running at once and 50 to 70 people to coordinate. I admired my boss. I'd started there when there were only 3 or 4 of us and watched him build the place up. Naturally, I wanted to do the same one day.
Looking back, that's one of the biggest lessons from my 20s. The mentors and role models in front of you shape who you become, for better or worse. You can admire someone for a trait and still recognise that some of their values don't line up with yours. As a young man, that's a skill worth building early: looking at the older men around you, taking what's good, and being honest about what isn't.
I got caught in the trap. Chasing money and business size, using it as a measure of success, without seeing what was happening behind the scenes. Eventually, I got sacked under pretty ordinary circumstances, and I started my own business partly to prove a point. I wanted to show what I was made of.
That's ego talking, not purpose.
So, I chased size. How many guys have you got on now? Five, ten, twelve. It became a scoreboard, regardless of whether the business was actually profitable.
I did a mentorship program to sharpen my business skills, flying to Sydney every month, paying good money to learn the foundations of scaling properly. All valuable. But my focus drifted too far into that world. I started showing up because I felt forced to, chasing projects to keep the cash flow moving, and I lost the thing that got me into horticulture in the first place: the love of plants, of biology, of building something beautiful.
I was putting in stunning landscapes for people who barely noticed them, chasing clients for money that was owed. It wore me down.
If I had to boil down what I wish someone had told me at 25, it's this:
if you don't slow down
and take a breath,
life will eventually make you.
I wish I'd learned early to celebrate the wins along the way instead of racing past them. To say no more often, to projects and people that didn't align with my values. That applies well beyond business. Protecting your energy and giving yourself space between things isn't weakness, it's maintenance.
Your character isn't measured by how much you can cram into a day. It's measured by how much space you've got left for the people around you. When you try to be everything to everyone, you're running a pressure cooker, and pressure cookers eventually blow.
If I could sit down with the 25-year-old version of myself now, I'd tell him a few things.
You don't need to prove yourself to everyone.
Bigger isn't automatically better.
Learn from the men around you, but don't blindly copy them.
Say no before you have to.
Don't sacrifice your relationships to build something you think will make you happy.
And don't wait until you're broken to give yourself permission to slow down.
I know that because I did it the hard way. My business ended up collapsing. I suffered a bad spinal injury, right when my daughter was newly born, freshly married, a new house, all of it. The injury forced me to slow down, but I didn't do it well. The pain got so bad I leaned on painkillers, then other things, then alcohol to self-medicate. I lost the business. I nearly lost the house. I nearly lost my family. For a while there, I lost my mind too.
That's the honest version.
I don't tell this story because I've got it all figured out. I tell it because I know what it costs when you don't have the right people around you, don't know how to slow down, and don't have anywhere to take a breath.
That's a big part of why I'm building the farm.
Somewhere young men can step out of the noise for a while.
Somewhere they can work, talk, think, connect with other blokes and reconnect with the things that matter.
If I can help another young bloke learn some of these lessons before life has to teach them the hard way, then everything I've been through has a purpose.
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