3/12 - Groundhog Day On The Daily Commute

Recently I made a rough calculation.

From the age of 18 to 48, I have spent over 12,000 hours commuting - from leaving the front door to stepping into the office, and from leaving the office to walking back through that same door at night.

Twelve, thousand, hours.

Driving. Traffic. Platforms. Trains. Trams. Mask. Smile. Repeat.

As I write that number, I smile slightly - because entrepreneurship is supposed to represent freedom. In the early years, I worked from the third bedroom of our home. I was a bedroom entrepreneur. No commute. No train platform. No rush hour.

But as ambition grew, so did scale.

First, a shared office space in Manchester. Later, our own company office in Manchester city centre. Year after year of commuting. Structure. Momentum. Expansion.

The routine became fixed.

Drive to the station. One-hour train journey. Often the same faces. Quiet nods of recognition. Hoping for a table seat so I could open my MacBook and start working before the workday officially began.

Some mornings I would be drafting a proposal for a significant contract.
Other days, refining a major client presentation.
Sometimes preparing a keynote.
Sometimes building a training programme.
Sometimes shaping marketing strategy.

From the outside, this looked productive. Focused. Forward-moving.

Inside, something was off.

No matter how well the business was performing. No matter how positive the momentum. So often I sat on that train with blinkers on - thinking ahead, replaying past conversations, solving problems that hadn’t yet materialised.

Alarm. Shower. Clothes. Grab breakfast. Commute. Repeat.

Groundhog Day.

Keep going. Keep building. Keep growing.

Yet internally, the ease was disappearing.

My inner world was not reflective of my outer world.

It did not matter that I drove to the station in a brand new £40,000 Audi TT sports car. That detail was irrelevant. The car did not touch the unease.

So often I wore a mask. Head down. Wrapped in my own pressures. My own performance standards. My own fears. Unable, at times, to even raise a natural smile to a fellow commuter.

Looking back now, I wonder how many others on that same train were also wearing masks.

Executives. Managers. Professionals.

Holding it together. Spinning plates. Protecting mortgages. Protecting image. Protecting reputation. Protecting the life they had built.

From the outside, everything functioning.

Inside, Groundhog Day.

I did not realise at the time that repetition without reflection compounds strain.

And that one day, without warning, Groundhog Day would come to a sudden and irreversible halt.