Unplugged Ambition

Water rushing past your ankles. The ceiling where the floor should be. Flames. Chaos. Screams ricochet through an overturned world. A sign: EXIT THIS WAY. A moment of hope. Reverend Scott (Gene Hackman) in "The Poseidon Adventure" is the forgotten hero we all need. “That sign is wrong,” he says. The ship is upside down. This moment is a death sentence for those who can’t let go of old logic. And just as others argue ever more loudly for the truth of things you know are are crazy: the performance metrics, the outsourcing, the automation, the budget cutting, the hoop-jumping, the growth projections promised to greedy investors, so survival means rejecting what once made sense: defying instructions, trusting your gut, clawing toward unfamiliar light. This isn’t about abandoning work or ambition. It’s about abandoning a map that no longer matches the terrain. Like Reverend Scott, your inner voice knows the truth. It knows the signs aren’t working anymore. It knows survival depends on climbing toward risk, not away from it. Toward purpose. Toward values. Toward something that actually matters. Will you cling to rules written for a world that no longer exists? Or will you trust your own instincts, your inner compass, your passions, to guide you toward the life you truly want? The ship is upside down. The signs are wrong. Not everyone can process that. But you can still escape. The question is: which way will you climb?

We want to know: What separates folks who remain trapped in jobs they hate and those who escape and do great things without the safety net? What are the key areas of growth they focus on? Does having kids make it more or less likely you'll prioritise values over perceived safety when making career choices? What are the benefits of organisations like ours that enable support and collaboration between alternative entrepreneurs? Who succeeds faster: those who collaborate, or those who isolate and focus? How powerful is the alternative entrepneurialism movement as a source of identity and motivation for those unfulfilled in their current role? Ultimately it's part of our mission to research the pathways into alternative entrepreneurialism and produce resources to help people reduce the average 3-4 year transition time from corporate life. All free, formers and paid members will have received a survey link. Please do take 10 minutes to help us gather this information. We will of course share the results!

Founding Member Mark Silver is one of our best exemplars of alternative entrepreneurialism in practice. After decades leading marcomms in the B2B sector, Mark now works in communications for the National Health Service and runs a community-focused business called Leeds Nomad with a core mission to discover and share hidden stories in the city he's passionate about. Through projects such as 'Leeds Goth', Mark promotes the city’s rich and diverse music culture, delivering unique experiences and fostering identity for his customers and others, as well as growing income streams from merchandise, events and other sources. Mark is an inspiration to those who are seeking to find ways to rebalance paid work and passion work, and those who work quietly to dream, plan, create and build new things, which the world has not seen before. Join us this weekend. Open to paid and free members. We’ll be talking when the big idea hits, how the big idea evolves, sustaining motivation, finding your allies, & ethical dilemmas.

"We're seaglass, sometimes I think. Circling the earth unproductively, shaped by the tides, lonely. A broken piece of something, wanting to shine, to be seen and retrieved and treasured and not need to brave the salt ice water for another eternity. Our relationships are what will save us from erosion. And our participation in radical, intentional communities in particular help us reform identities, strengthen values and purpose, and receive the support we need. We may never be whole again. Two decades in corporate life takes something from you and leaves you too, when you emerge from it, with feelings of guilt, recogition of the responsibility you wear for the sham you participated in, how little of a excuse "it paid well" truly is. But we can find a smoothness to life, and bring lustre. We can be a thing of spiritual beauty: this rounded pebble of translunce within us can be made to reflect true light. We can be seen." Excerpt from exclusive site content: "Seen: Building purposeful relationships"

The obsession of the industrialised education system on skill measurement and qualifications, the recruitment processes adopted by companies and our own evolutionary-driven 'hoarding' tendencies (anyone else love collecting certificates as some sort of talisman against failure?) collude. We begin to believe that skills predict success. We solidify around things we can do, and things we can't do. We become trapped in jobs we hate because we don't have the skills to do anything else. Skill is merely a tool, a surface-layer expression of our deeper intentions, learnable, transferable, temporal. Beneath skill lies a deeper reservoir of commitment and intentionality that we are quick to praise in others, but all to slow to credit and cultivate in ourselves.

Our weekend's recommended read is a haunting real life story of fear and desire by Founding Member Logan Steinberger You might see yourself in this tale. After all, who doesn’t want to be invincible?

We've got a new look! It's bye bye symbolic lighthouse and hello tools of the artisan (and assassin). It's adios to our old strapline "Create a life and career with meaning" and hello to something bolder and badder. "Join the revolution." We talk about "worklife" now in our proposition. Because work-life balance is one of the delusions that wastes talent and energy in the name of fitting in. When your work is in pursuit of your values, it's all one...in a way that feels liberating. You've got purpose. We talk about passion because it's that, not your skills, that will enable your success. We're got the confidence which comes from growth (300 members worldwide), from high engagement and from more and more evidence of the impact our members' work is having. We'll never stand still. We'll work harder and with more precision for our members, free and paid, and for every human. We're researching, evidencing and resourcing pathways to help everyone find a route to a life with purpose, to be a person they're proud of, to do good in this world. Because every human deserves to use their passions and talents towards goals that match their values. And support themselves finacially in that way. It's been a long five months. We're sharpening our axe for the forest ahead. Whether it's a page follow, a free article download or membership...you want to be here for the road ahead. unpluggedambition.ghost.io

We've got our first robot. A key principle of Unplugged Ambition is that we operate as a community, where everyone puts a little in so we all get a lot out. One of the advantages about a commuity of senior professionals interested in pursuing values-based life is there's a lot of talent. Our members do cool things. Founding Member John Conway "Chief Data Hero" by day, has created a bot that will parse and summarise (anonymously) our community discussions. Ultimately, we want to build pathways that will guide any human to a passion-centred, valued-focused life that supports them financially. Building an evidence base and knowledge bank over time is essential if we're going to deliver on that goal. (And how cool would this world be if we do). Free and paid members will get a weekly summary of what's been discussed. Maybe it will inspire more to hop on and share their findings and progress, like Kasun Pathirage has been doing this week. The last five months (just less than actually) have gone fast: now we have a better way of ensuring our contributions and experiences can be analysed and categorised and more guidance given to tomorrow's members. Joining isn't just an investment in yourself, you see, it's an act of solidarity with every human who wants to use their talents and energies towards goals that matter. Nice work y'all.

Feeling pulled in too many directions, office politics, competing priorities, lack of clarity as to our role purpose or workload...all of these are major stressors. It can lead us to create internal maps of enemies, sabouteurs and heroes, in which colleagues are assigned a set role, and you interpret their behaviour according to a fixed idea of their motivations and ‘role’ in your narrative, rather than responding to the facts. Opportunities for alliance are missed. Trust is misplaced. We start adopting maladaptive behaviours: manipulation, fawning, favourtisim, undermining, circumventing as we become, in our anxiety, more and more focusedon the characters in our work story and less and less able to reside in the realm of reality. Counterintuitively, this can leave you isolated. Exercise 6 in our ebook on toxic workplace healing is about regaining a sense of agency over dynamics, examining broader dynamics in your workplace, and visually mapping out where you sit and where you would like to sit. Simply, it offers a challenge and alternative to your current (perhaps subconscious) map of workplace relationships. The ebook is free for all members.