I'm Back! New Beginnings

After eight and a half years with Amazon and decades in corporate life, I've made the decision to step away and pursue a more balanced life focused on different forms of wealth beyond just financial success.

• Crossed 1,000 podcast downloads milestone after last episode
• Expressing gratitude for my incredible DC Security team at Amazon
• Reflecting on valuable leadership lessons and frameworks from corporate life
• Travel experiences taught me that people worldwide share fundamental values despite cultural differences
• Sahil Bloom's "Five Types of Wealth" book changed my perspective on time allocation
• Establishing new habits like daily bushwalking in the Blue Mountains
• Training for a 28km Cancer Council fundraising walk in October
• Planning a vocation that allows more time outdoors while maintaining income
• Next episode will focus on career coaching and mentoring

Thank you for following JD's Journal. Until next time, I encourage you to live your best life and be good to each other.

Chapters

• 0:00 Podcast Introduction and Updates
• 2:12 Leaving Amazon After Eight Years
• 4:54 The Global Traveler Experience
• 10:54 Five Types of Wealth and Life Priorities
• 14:18 New Habits and Future Plans
• 17:30 Next Episode Preview and Closing

Transcript

JD: 0:10

Hi folk, and welcome to the JD's Journal podcast where, every couple of weeks, my guests and I share some of our life's journey, our successes, our failures and the valuable lessons that we've learned and resources that we've gathered along the way. I'd like to start by acknowledging that this podcast is being recorded on the traditional lands of the Dorug and the Gundagara people. We pay our deep respect to elders, past, present and emerging. This land is and always was and always will be Aboriginal land. The stories, opinions and recommendations here on this podcast are intended to inform and entertain you. Whilst it's always the intention to provide good advice, it should always be applied with your own good judgment and your feedback is always appreciated. The podcast is deliberately mostly unscripted and unedited and self-engineered by little old me, so you can definitely expect there's going to be some glitzers from time to time. Hopefully the nothing that takes away from the content being presented. Anyway, enough of the formalities, let's get this episode going.

JD: 1:10

Hi listeners, welcome to the JD's Journal podcast, or should I say welcome back. It's been a long time since the last episode and up front I want to apologize for the extended hiatus. I'm not going to bore you with the details, but let's just say that work, travel and other aspects of life consume me a little bit more than usual, so it's great to be back. I have so much news to share in this episode. First of all, you will have heard a new theme song for this episode or for the podcast in general. A very good friend of mine, thomas Ho, reached out to me and very graciously offered to build a brand new theme, in fact, a new intro and a new outro as well, and I love them both and I'm so excited to share them with you today and going forward. I also want to share that just after the last episode back in September, we broke the 1,000 download barrier, which I know for a lot of podcasts is not a huge number, but for this little baby of mine, it was very exciting just to finally cross the line on a thousand downloads, and let's hope that we can get that moving even further as we start to rebuild this podcast. So the big news for me is that after nearly four decades working for large US multinationals and eight and a half years with Amazon, last week well, actually two weeks ago now I stepped away, and for good. This is a massive change for me and I'm incredibly excited about this next chapter of my life.

JD: 2:33

But before I want to share the kind of details on what the change looks like, I want to take a moment to really reflect a little bit on the past but not too much, but just a little bit to kind of share some experiences. Firstly, the past eight and a half years have been amazing. I've had the honor and the joy of working with some of the best people across the globe, including my most recent team, spread across 14 countries in Asia Pacific, japan, china, middle East and Africa. Not only are these wonderful people and then so inspiring for what they accomplish every day. They're just good people who are genuinely great to be around. Saying farewell to this team was so much harder than I'd expected. I really love them and I will miss them terribly, but I will be cheering them on from afar and continuing to monitor progress, because I know they're going to continue to do incredible things going forward. I also want to take a moment to say a huge thank you to so many people who commented or messaged me in relation to my announcement about leaving Amazon. I've been completely overwhelmed with the kindness and the generosity of the messages that I've seen, and I have a feeling that those will be a tonic that I turn to when I'm having doubts or lacking confidence in my future. So thank you to everybody who provided me with your messages for your very thoughtful sentiments. As I say, they are a gift that I will continue to appreciate.

JD: 3:57

To be completely honest, you know, when I made this transition from data center operations to physical security back in November 2020, I was completely unqualified and unprepared for the role. Some might argue that and frankly, I wouldn't push back that hard that I'm probably still not qualified for the role. There goes my imposter syndrome again and I'm going to acknowledge that'm going to move on anyway. My point is that, as is always the case as a leader, any success that I've had over this period and the fact that I survived as long as I did in the role is really completely on the shoulders of the incredible people, their knowledge, their wisdom and their patience, which allowed me to regularly be the dumbest guy in the room, and I'm quite comfortable in that position. But I've got to say this team really helped me over the last four years and I appreciate them for that.

JD: 4:53

I've got so much to be thankful for from my career, you know, obviously, beyond the income that it's provided. I've had the good fortune to work with some incredible leaders and some change makers and, yeah, some who are not so much but I've learned so much from these leaders the habits, the mental models that they use to change the world for better and that spawn leaders of the future, that have spawned new leaders in that period, and also the behaviors that should be avoided, and so, again through this podcast, my aim is to share some of those experiences and some of those gems that I've picked up along the way. I've learned many new frameworks and mental models, many that I expect to employ for the rest of my life and some that I definitely intend to share via this podcast in future episodes, but hopefully in ways that are accessible and applicable both in a professional and a personal context. The Amazon leadership principles, for example, were one of the major reasons why I chose Amazon back in 2017. And while I feel like they may have lost some of their luster recently, I believe that they are a powerful foundation that other companies and communities should be mimicking in a way that suits their needs. Tenants is another thing that may be a little bit less well understood, but I've observed as an incredibly, extremely valuable mechanism for establishing the critical guardrails for teams and programs, and I intend to share this framework with you in the future as well.

JD: 6:20

Through my careers at Microsoft and Nokia here, and then at Amazon, I've been so blessed to experience the multiple countries that I've called home or where I've been a regular visitor as part of my work, the magnificent diversity of people that I've been able to work with. Many of them are now lifelong friends. I've relished the vast array of cultural and culinary experiences I've had along the way. Vast array of cultural and culinary experiences I've had along the way, and, frankly, anyone who's followed me on my socials knows that, while my travel has almost exclusively been for business purposes, I've definitely taken every opportunity to take time out to see the sites and immerse myself in local cultures, and if you look at my tummy, you'll know that I've been loving the local culinary delights as well.

JD: 7:11

They say that the best way to cure racism is to travel, and I, frankly, couldn't agree more with that. The more years that I've spent on the road, it's been more obvious to me that, when you strip away the politics, the media and the often negatively distorted stereotypes that we are subjected to people are ultimately the same. They want the same things. They share the same values. Generally, I still believe that, fundamentally, all humans act with the best of intentions. Their value systems may be slightly different, or significantly different in some cases, and unfortunately, as we're seeing so painfully in the current turmoil across the globe, we are, as people are, too easily coerced to be hateful or harmful through misinformation and manipulation, and so I do believe that being a world traveler helps people understand and have context that goes beyond that. This was very much for me, brought home so clearly during one of my most recent visits to China a country I love, by the way.

JD: 8:10

During one of my most recent visits to China a country I love, by the way I'd been strolling through a large shopping center that, frankly, could have been any city-based shopping mall or shopping center. The store's the same, the major retail outlet's the same. In fact, I was sitting in a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Would you believe I had this thing. I like to try KFC in every country that I go to and, for the record, I'm happy to say that South Korea not surprisingly, frankly, has the best KFC in the world. They do chicken and beer like nobody else, but anyway, I was sitting in the KFC there in Beijing, watching people as I do and it could have been any major city. To my left there was a group of teenagers gossiping and laughing like teenagers do, and in front of me a family of four mum, dad, two kids just enjoying their family, outing just like that would be if it was in Sydney or in Los Angeles or in London or anywhere else in the world that I've been.

JD: 9:02

It looks very much the same, and so you know, for decades we've been subjected to a paradigm of life in China that's extremely different from what I've experienced firsthand as a regular visitor. Sure, their government's very different from what we are comfortable with in the West and they apply significantly higher levels of control over local businesses and trade, and there are obvious differences in the way of life. But in my experience, for the average person in China, quality of life is generally high, infrastructure is good and I feel like they might actually be a little bit happier, to be honest, than than I see in other countries that we think are more progressive. I'm looking at real data online. I was doing some research before this podcast and you know when I look at things like poverty rates and infant mortality rates and so forth. Frankly, china and the USA are in very similar positions, and Australia and countries like Singapore and New Zealand are slightly better off, but the numbers aren't vastly different by any stretch of the imagination, which I think is quite contrary to what we're led to believe.

JD: 10:07

So you know, if we live in a world where our leaders and the press focused on what unites us as humans instead of creating division by drawing our attention negatively to the differences that we have, I can tell you that, you know, I've worked with and socialized with people from more races, cultures, religions and the many attributes that we have, and, with almost zero exceptions, I've enjoyed every engagement opportunity. Anyway, I digress. The point is that I will forever cherish my time as a world traveler and the many special people in my life that I've gained as a result of that. So, beyond the effects of getting older and my resilience in coping with the regular travel diminishing, a turning point in my mindset was a great book called the Five Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom. It's a book that I listened to quite recently and the timing of getting into this on Audible was quite appropriate, I guess, for what was going on right now.

JD: 11:04

But in the book, bloom does a tremendous job of really challenging our definition of wealth, which is often really boiled down to a financial or a measure of the things that we own, and instead he explores wealth under dimensions of time, where he thinks about time as a luxury and encourages the reader to think about the allocation of time as a luxury. A luxury, and encourages the reader to think about the allocation of time as a luxury. Social wealth, so our connection with the people around us, and he talks about the connections or the ties that we have, being a great predictor for happiness and longevity. He looks at mental wealth your mindset, your emotional resilience and the sense of purpose that you have. He talks about physical wealth how you look after your vitality and your general you know, movement and nutrition and the way that you manage your space. And then, finally, he talks about financial wealth. And I think you know, as I went through this book, it was really interesting to see the different dimensions that Bloom looks at in terms of what we value as a people.

JD: 12:09

But the analogy from the book that had the most marked impact on myself was the realization that he had had that living a long distance from his parents in the US, so still in the same country, but looking at the distance and the frequency that he had a chance to visit his parents, he calculated based on his age and his expected life expectancy was that he would probably see his parents 15 more times in their life, and that really was a was a stark realization for him in terms like just counting, like I'm only going to see my parents 15 more times now. In my case, my parents both passed away a long, long time ago. But I guess my manifestation of what he was talking about in this was how often am I going to see my children and my grandchildren between now and the end of my life? And to me, the consumption of my life in my work and the travel and so forth I was really challenged in terms of thinking about am I focusing on the right priorities or giving myself the right space to do that? And so this triggered in me some consideration about how do I give myself more free time and so forth. And so it wasn't the only catalyst for the decision that I made, but it certainly was a big part of how I was thinking about my life and the rest of my life and where I want to spend my life. So where do we go from here?

JD: 13:26

Well, initially I'm taking some time to reset. It actually feels like a bit of a detox process to me to some degree, the process of unlearning the habits that I've been so embedded in from a life in operations and security. You know, for example, I compulsively can't leave the room without carrying my phone with me, just in case something happens. Guess what Nothing's happening. Phone with me, just in case something happens, guess what Nothing's happening. I find myself opening email literally every 10 minutes to see if something new has come in that needs my attention. Well, guess what Nothing needs my attention. With that level of urgency. I still wake up at stupid o'clock in the morning. I wake up often before the sun rises so that I can review what has occurred overnight and what my priorities need to be first thing in the day. Well, guess what Nothing significant has occurred overnight that needs my immediate action. So I will know that I've made this adjustment when I can actually leave my phone behind and not care about it.

JD: 14:21

From a fitness perspective, I've spent far too long, too many hours over the years sitting staring at screens, so now I'm walking pretty much every day, at least five kilometers or three miles for my Imperial friends, and most days with a six kilogram or 13 pound backpack. I had the very good fortune to live here in the beautiful Blue Mountains of Sydney, and that means that I can walk out my front door and be almost immediately in the Aussie bushlands with spectacular views of the canyons around us. Walking alone in this environment is like meditation it's therapy for the mind, while providing a reasonable level of cardio and physical movement and hopefully some of the fat burning that I need to reduce the belly that I've developed over the last couple of decades. I find that I generally need some form of a goal to motivate me to develop new habits or re-establish old ones, and so I've signed up for a 28 kilometer or 17 mile walk called the Seven Bridges Walk in October. I know that I'm not ready to walk 28 kilometers in one day right now, so I've got some motivation to get ready. This walk is to raise money for the Australian Cancer Council and, given the number of my family members and friends that have either been lost or negatively impacted by cancer, I'm excited to do my little bit to support this very important cause and, given the multiple times in some cases that they've gone through this process. I know some of this can be attributed to the important research and the treatments prevention. The reason why people are surviving today is the good work that's being done by organizations like the Cancer Council. As a bonus, the route for this walk is across seven bridges, as I said, and it provides some spectacular views, and I'll be sure to share some snaps from the day on my socials in case you want to check them out and follow me along the way.

JD: 16:18

This podcast has been terribly neglected, which is shameful given the volume of content and guests that I have in the pipeline, so this will be another one of my short-term priorities. When I launched the podcast back in February of 2024, I had no idea whether anybody would be interested, whether anybody would listen, and it was purely an experiment to see whether I could do it, would I enjoy it and so forth. And frankly, I did enjoy it and I've been quite pleasantly surprised at the number of people that I didn't even know were listening to it that have reached out to me asking for new episodes. I do have to recognize one person in particular, a data center security manager in Japan, who not only reminded me that she listens, but also took the time to write reviews on two of the episodes with her observations and how she's applying them in her life. I won't name her here, but just suffice to say I was humbled by her feedback. I felt both guilty that I had let her down and also compelled to get off my backside and bring it back to life. So thank you to that person in Japan for giving me the hard kick in the backside that I needed. I'm dedicating this episode to you.

JD: 17:30

Looking further in the future, my wife and I do have a plan of sorts. I don't expect to retire fully. I'm not ready for that and, frankly, there are things that we want to do now that need to be funded. So not earning some form of income isn't really an option for us, but I have no intention of resuming the lifestyle that I just left. So our plans revolve around a more rational, sustainable vocation and, as I hinted in a recent video that I posted on my socials, I'm hopefully going to find a vocation that allows me to be spending more time in the outdoors in the Aussie bush or that's forests for you non-Aussies. I'm not going to share too much about this topic yet, not until things have developed, but I will share more as it comes together. That pretty much wraps up this somewhat self-indulgent episode, and I thank you for listening if you've made it this far.

JD: 18:23

My next episode somewhat ironically in fact addresses the topic of career coaching, both in the context of mentoring and coaching others that you might be working with, but also as self-coaching. On this topic, I've been an active, enthusiastic mentor in the corporate world for decades now, and career progression is the most common theme of these engagements. In fact, it's the most common reason that, statistically, we're seeing people leaving the organizations that we work for. Today. It's a big deal. So in this episode, I'm going to be sharing some perspectives and some resources that will help you both in terms of mentoring others, but hopefully will be tools for you to use as you think about your own career and your next steps. In the meantime, I really want to thank you again for following JD's Journal. Thank you for your kind words and your support, and until next time I encourage you to live your best life and be good to each other. Bye for now, thank you.