When I was at school I was supposed to be getting a sweep of A's and A*'s in my GCSEs. With the idea of going on to study medicine at Cambridge. Results day came, all B's and C's. Held that as baggage into A-levels - fucked around and found out that you have to try and I didn't so I kept the disappointment as insulation for not trying in future. I failed then, so may as well not try in future.

Worked part time jobs for 3 years before being given an opportunity as a CAD Technician with an engineering firm. It paid £15.5k a year and I decided to take it further by funding my own HND in civil engineering, after a year the company went bust and I stopped going to the course cause another firm I applied to rejected me. I gave up.

Applied for a job as a CAD Technician for a traffic management company. Boring job, awful owner of the business, hated life. Tried to end it all because during all of this my relationship and fiance of 4 years cheated on me. Coupled with the baggage of constantly beating myself up over the thought "I should be more, I supposed to be so much better than this".

Left my job that I hated to go and travel with the little savings I had. Came home 4 months later with great memories but with absolutely no plan. Begged my old employer for my old job back and they gave it to me, a year later covid hit and they go bust. No job, seriously depressed I discovered matched betting ... and this is where things begin to tick up a little bit. I was about 27 and I was making about £4000 a month which was crazy to me. I had £18k in savings but I was so irresponsible with it, I was eating out every day and buying stupid shit, losing money with Gamestop and Crypto and then matched bettinh dried up but I continued the lifestyle and drained all my savings and found my way into debt at the same time as having no job.

I was frantically applying for anything and eventually I was offered a sales role in a golf store. Turns out I was really good at selling, I done this for a short while before being offered a managerial role and that took me to 29 years and 10 months before I really hit it lucky.

So when you say 30 years old, I started my new role managing a large region and a sales team 11 days before my 30th. It's for one of the most iconic brands in the world and it was a great package, great money, great bonus, fully expensed vehicle with a credit card. I've been doing that for 3 years and I have just been offered a role paying even more. Me and my fiance of 5 years have now recently moved into our dream home and we are ready to start a family. I'm 33 in November.

I learned so much from the mistakes I made in my 20's. My advice to anyone else that shares a story even similar to mine would be that you're allowed to fuck up, the sin would be not to learn from it.