If I Only Knew When I Was Younger — Career Learnings, Chat With Nico James

Yasi: Welcome to the Fast Track podcast, Nico.

Nico James: Yes. Hello, good morning. It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Yasi: If the audience is listening to it in the morning, good morning, everyone. You mentioned tat, you know, you want to make it as a young man. Tell us about why you want to be successful and make it.

Nico James: Well, as a young man, I always had these visions of becoming rich and famous.

And making it was just a natural destination. Being successful and having nice cars and having a nice job and a nice family and living the good life. It’s like a reward for all the work that you put in of all the skills that you learn, and you know, making it. Back in the day, it was just like the icing on the cake, you know, you’ve made the cake, you put the icing on and wow.

T,his is the dream fulfilled. And yeah, that’s why I want it to do that. I was inspired by many people during my life, many entrepreneurs back in the day. When I was young in the UK, it was Richard Branson who everyone talked about and you know, with this company, Virgin, he just really inspired me to make it in the UK.

He was like a hero. He was a student. He had this I think it w.as a magazine he had in the university he was studying. And then slowly, he came up with this, a Virgin thing, the brand and he made it, you know, and he was like a role model. One of the many owners I had that was back in the day, you know, nowadays Richard Branson is different.

I think he’s still very, very people still sort of admire him, there are people that I think have ever taken his place. And obviously he’s getting older now.

Yasi: And since you are inspired by those famous people, successful people, how did it affect your career path?

Nico James: Well, my career path it was k in the day when I was at school, I just wanted to, you know, I just wanted to work in the bank and I told one of my father’s friends, I wanted to work in a bank and he just basically said, why do you just want to work in a bank? You need to be more ambitious; you need to do something else, you know, you should study business, that’s where the real money is. So, then I said, okay, let’s study business.

And I researched then I found some courses that I wanted to do. And then I told my uncle about it, my German uncle, and he said, why do you just want to do business? You should do European business. And, you know, cause I’m half German and half British, he said to me, basically that, you know, it was better to do something more international.

The course I did in the end was European business with German. And it was like three years in one, two in the UK, and then one year in Germany. The idea was to get a double qualification, but the university I was at in the end, they fell out with a partner university.

And in the end, I just got one degree, not two degrees. But that basically sort of put me on the course, you know, for an international career. And I started off working in a German company, setting up a subsidiary in England. Basically, I had to translate a catalog and once I translated the catalog, my boss said, ah, okay, well you’ve translated the catalog, why don’t you set up our subsidiary, and, you know, you can head up the subsidiary. You can be the leader of that project. And you know, you’re young, you’re only 23, but let’s do it.

And that’s what I did. I set up a subsidiary. I had no experience. I found a place to actually sell this company.

And it was very successful that the company was basically dealing with promotional material. You know, it was a new company with a very innovative way of marketing. It was basically this catalog, which you know, back in those days, the internet was just starting out. This was 1996.

So, there was internet, but it was still, you know, it was still people who had a hobby.

Yasi: Yeah.

Nico James: Hackers and stuff. I set up that company. We sent out the catalogs, we had a really good start. Things were very successful. But then after a couple of years, I got bored. You know, I’m the type of guy who needs challenges.

And the challenge was over very quickly after a couple of years. And then I had a calling to learn Spanish. And I left that job and I moved to Spain.

Yasi: When you say calling where’s that calling coming from, how do you feel that calling?

Nico James: That’s a good question. Basically, it was an inner calling.

I had Spanish in the last part of my course. I had a module in Spanish, and I basically said to myself, okay, Spanish, let’s do that. And I actually want to do that after university, but then this opportunity came up to set up this subsidiary, to translate the catalog and instead of the subsidiary, and I said, okay, the Spanish thing, let’s put it off.

You know, we can do that some other time. And you know, after these two years in the company, I said to myself, okay, well maybe now there’s time to go back to the original idea and study Spanish. And so, I did, so I left the job, and I went to Spain. It was an inner calling basically that I had put off two years previously and I said to myself, okay, let’s do that now.

So I did. I packed everything up. I went to Spain; I did a six-month intensive course, and I became fluent in Spanish. And then basically I said, okay, my idea was to learn four languages. So after Spain to go to Portugal, then to France and then Italy. But I fell in love with Spain. I was in Barcelona.

Life was good, the sun was shining. Yeah, I was having a ball of a time. I worked in a company, selling ecological fly traps around the world. And they sent me to Australia, and I went to Australia and then came back. But the company had no money. There were some bad, bad things going on in the company.

Money embezzlements, and I don’t know what else and that job didn’t last long. Then after that, I had to find a job. And back in those days in Spain, there was a big crisis, a huge crisis. I sent out 300 applications everywhere around Spain.

Yasi: Wow! Which year?

Nico James: This was 1997.

Yasi: Yeah. Okay.

Nico James: Okay. So, it was a long time ago.

Okay. I’m going to be 50 next year. So, I may be a bit older than you and yeah. So back in those days there was a big crisis. 300 applications, you know, that’s all I did. And there was no response. I just got rejection letters and I felt okay, well, my Spanish dream maybe is going to come to an end.

Maybe I have to look elsewhere for work. I looked for work back home Germany or the UK. So I sent out four applications to the UK, four applications to Germany. And I got accepted for an interview with a big chemical company in Germany. And I went to an assessment center. Of the 18, 6 of us were picked and I was lucky enough to be one of them.

And a couple of months later, I was working in Dusseldorf in sales. That’s where my sales career really started.

Yasi: That you already have a quite international career. From UK to Barcelona, to Australia and then to Germany.

Nico James: Yes. Yes. I mean, people call me a citizen of the world because you know, my father was from a little island called Saint Lucia from the Caribbean.

He left the island. And when he was 20, he went to the UK and then he listed in the British army. And then he got stationed in Germany and in Germany is where he met my mother. And later on, I was born. So, I was born in Germany. I spoke German to my mother; I spoke English to my dad. But you know, the English that my dad spoke to me, it wasn’t a proper English.

He was a Caribbean in English, you know, so probably the closest is probably a Jamaican accent to a solution accent or the other differences. Just imagine in a way you’re growing up with Angela Merkel and, you know, you’ve got Bob Marly as your father while he was trying to speak to Angela.

And you know, I mean, my dad wasn’t a Rasta, okay but you get the idea that two completely different cultures, but I grew up in Germany and then I was in Germany until I was seven. And then from seven, we moved to the UK. You know, as a child, it was quite difficult for me because I grew up between three cultures.

So when I was in Germany, I was the German with a German mother living in an army camp or army residential area, let’s say. You know, all the kids who I played with, they were all children of soldiers. But most of these guys, you know, they had white parents. And my father was one of the few black soldiers at this residence.

And then I have my, you know, my German mother. So it was, you know, it was crazy. So I was being called all sorts of names. You know, when one day I was called the N word. And then the next day well, the two N words actually. One was you know, I’m not gonna say it, but the, you know, the black kid and then the other one was a Nazi, you know?

So one minute I was a black kid, but I wasn’t really black, not curly hair. And then the next minute I’m a Nazi.

Yasi: Back then the world is not so flat. in a way, less diverse and people travel less and then they are, you know, not so used to people with different backgrounds, different colors, you know, different ethnic group. Do you think your childhood has impact on you as a person or personality or later your career path, internationally or personal choices in life?

Nico James: Yeah, so definitely. All my life I’ve been foreigner. You know, wherever I went, I was a bit of a foreigner even though, I’m half German, half British, you know, I’ve always been the strange one.

I think all my life, especially in the early part of my life, I was always trying to fit in, you know, I always wanted to be a lighter skinned. I didn’t want to have curly hair. You know, I was being made fun of all the time. It took me a while to get back, to get up to standard within the school. My English, you know, it was good, but it wasn’t good enough to learn at school when we moved to England when I was seven.

So I had to take some extra lessons, but then after a year I was fine. And then every time I went back to Germany, you know, in my holidays, I was always the dark kid. I was always the guy who lived in UK, you know, with the black dad. So I think this has definitely influenced me, but in the end, they got me used to being a different, you know, a different person wherever I was.

I’ve never been treated as a, let’s say a normal person, you know, what is a normal person? I mean, we could spend another hour speaking about that, but I think it influenced me in the way that it’s helped me accept the person that I am, you know, that I am different, that I’m not like everyone else.

And I think in the end it’s made me stronger, and it’s made me not afraid to accept challenges, not afraid to be in situations where, you know, everyone’s sort of looking at me, you know, who’s this guy. Has helped me rise above the situation and, you know, and really bring out the differences that they have.

Yasi: We can see the traits that you have from your personal experiences, we haven’t touched on your entrepreneurial journey yet. That is very interesting story. Do you want to share with us how did you start to become an entrepreneur and what happened afterwards?

Nico James: Yeah. I’m sorry. I went off on a tangent now, but you know, where did you your career, where did it start?

And it really started there, you know, you, the entrepreneur part. Yeah, that was a very exciting part of my life. So I told you about the fact that I, when I was in Germany, let’s say my sales career started. And at the time when I was in Germany because I came from Spain, my Spanish girlfriend back then, she was from Barcelona and the subsidiary of this of the company I worked for the gentleman company, it was actually based, it still is today based in Barcelona.

I was working for the international accounts and one day we had an international meeting, so I was part of a team where the customer had different subsidiaries in different countries. And so we’d have international meetings every like twice a year, just to see how things were going.

If there was a sort of synergies internationally, et cetera, et cetera. So in these international meetings, this is where I met people from Spain. And it just so happened that the company in Spain wanted to become more international. They want to become more international in their sales efforts.

Because their sales team was very Spanish. So I met these people in the international meeting and then, you know, a couple months later I had a phone call from the sales director in Spain. And he basically asked me if I would be interested in working in Spain, in taking care of these accounts in Spain.

And of course, my dream back then was to work in Spain and to live in Spain. It took a long time. It was very complicated internally in the company, but I made it back to Spain and I took the offer, and I negotiated a very good salary and very good condition. So I started from an assistant in Germany, I got promoted to a key account manager in Spain and you know, I was one of four key account managers.

Things were really going well. And I did a really good job for four years, good sales, internationally really good. So, you know, I met all my objectives, but then, you know, after four years I became bored again because things got a bit too easy. And yeah, I’ve got a supervisor one day and I said to me, okay, look, you did a good job, but your slacking, you should do trade marketing, okay. Do trade marketing. If you do good job here, we’ll put you back into sales and you’ll get some bigger accounts. Well, that never happened. So I did my two years, I did a good job there. It was probably the best two years of my whole career in the company. And I learned a lot. And then I said, okay, look, there’s no more opportunities for me here in sales, in this company, then I’m going to leave. And my boss said to me, well, why do you want to leave? If you want to look for another job, you should stay in the job. Cause otherwise, you know, other companies, they are going to look at you as a failure.

I said to him, I said, look, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to set up my own company. He goes, you can set up your own company? I said, yes, well, what are you going to do? I said, I’m going to import wine. You are gonna import wine? Wow, that sounds really exciting.

That’s how my entrepreneurial journey started. I imported wine, so I left my job. I got married. And then a couple of months later I had my company set up and I was importing wine.

I did a course as a sommelier and I did a wine marketing course and yeah, I made my first contact. And I established some supplies, some wineries from around the world, many German wineries, and you know, everyone’s looking at me as if I was crazy from you importing wine into Spain, you know, you should be exporting it.

And I said to them, I said, yeah, look, German wine is really good. And I did a few tests with a few restaurants, and they went very well. And that’s how my wine journey started. You know, I became an entrepreneur. I imported wine. I basically established some brands. Some of those brands are still going today and things went really well.

And I was importing wine also from other countries in the end, you know, from the Alsace, from France, then I had some champagnes at wines from Australia, from New Zealand, and I had a really, really good international portfolio. And I made a good name for myself here in Spain. And my wines were all over the place in good restaurants.

Well, things were on a roll. Things went really, really well. And this was back, we’re talking about 2006.

Yasi: Okay. I have a question there. It’s really, really difficult to start a new business for any entrepreneurs. Like this is a fact. So, wonder how did you plan your new venture? Did you have a business plan?

Do you talk to people, or you already know what you’re going to do? You already know the opportunities; you just need to do it. Like how did you go from quit your job to start a very successful business?

Nico James: Yeah, I listened to my intuition. So, I said to myself, okay, because back in the day, my then wife within later got divorced and I remarried.

But she was from a wine growing region and all the friends that we had they were in the wine industry. So, I was introduced to the wine world and the sparkling wine word here in Spain. And it was just fascinating. And it was, you know, in Spain, especially with this nice weather that we have in spring and summer, you spend a lot of time out of your house.

So you spend a lot of time dining. Yeah. And you know, when you dine out or when you eat out, wine is always there. And you know, you don’t get drunk with wine. I mean, sometimes you do, but you know, the wine is the accompany in drink to the food that you eat. You know, it’s like part and parcel of the culture.

So, wine has always played an important part in my life since I came to Spain and I thought this would be natural, you know, it would be a natural progression. So what I did, I spoke to a few people, a few friends and then some other people who previously worked in my company and then moved to the wine industry.

And I asked him, you know, I had this idea I wanted to put some wine and maybe export some wine as well, you know, some Spanish wines to other countries, but do you think this could work? And they said, yeah, yeah, you could work, and you’ll be so good at it. So, I said, okay, let’s do that. And I did do a business plan and a few business plans drawn up.

But because I had the money because you know, I’ve got a good pay-off from the company. And I always had a few investments that the monetary aspect didn’t really worry me, you know because I knew that I could make it work. The thing I didn’t take into consideration was that there was a big crisis coming.

And I think that was a big mistake I made, I just thought I was bigger than any crisis and a crisis couldn’t affect my performance because I was better. You know, I was gonna make it, I had all this money, I had no debts, and you know, it was going to work. So, the business plan was there.

And I sort of stuck to it, but then later on, you know, other forces took effect and the crisis, even in the beginning of the crisis, you know, the crisis I think started in 2008, but it didn’t really affect me until about 2011, 2012. That was when it became really, really bad.

And then with some really bad decisions I made, you know, things were going bad, but I had these crazy expansion plans and, you know, I borrowed money from family and from friends and from the banks, you know, I did it all. I didn’t just go to one source. I went to, you know, how people talk about multiple streams of income. I had multiple streams of loans and it was totally crazy. I had no idea how I was going to pay these back, but you know,

Yasi: Which year in your business?

Nico James: This was only a few years. So, I think the first loan I took out was probably in 2008. And then I took out other loans progressively.

Yasi: Four or five years in your business?

Nico James: Yeah, four or five years in my business. And today, if I were to do something similar, I mean, that’s just totally crazy. I mean, any business that you start, you should get into profit, you should get into the black as soon as you possibly can. My accountant, he was saying, yeah, Nico, this was the first year he said, Nico, you’ve made a 40,000 Euro loss. And I said to him, yeah, but it’s the first year. Yeah, yeah. It’s the first year, but you know just so you know, 40,000, but there’s 40,000 you know, every year it just got worse. I didn’t care, I wasn’t aware of it. It didn’t sort of affect me properly.

I should have sort of taken out and made some adjustments, but yeah. You know, I just borrowed more money because things were, you know, in the back of my mind, things were going to get better. The crisis was going to be over and all I had to do was sell more and, you know, these sales would magically appear, you know because I was blaming everything on the crisis.

So sales were down one year. Yeah, because there was a crisis, but next year, things are going to get better. Okay, how are they going to get better? Well, I don’t know, there’s not going to be a crisis. People are going to buy more. That was my answer. And I was totally arrogant, I was totally out of touch with the world.

I wasn’t listening to my intuition. And I made some really bad decisions. I was probably the worst entrepreneur in Barcelona at the time. And then I bought a house and then my lifestyle didn’t change. I went out and I spent money., I mean, it’s not like I spent money lavishly, but it’s not like I spent loads and loads of money, but I spent more than I should have, let’s say, and I did this on a continual basis. And I think in the end, this was my downfall. Not because there was a crisis, but how I reacted to the crisis, I should have reacted in a humbler way, and I should have taken action. I should’ve cut my spending earlier, cut my spending and I cut my workforce and my outgoings.

I had an office in Barcelona, you know, in the end they got rid of that office. And in the end, I was working from home, but I should have done that three years earlier. And I didn’t and I paid the price. And you know, even today I’m still sort of paying the price because you don’t get rid of the kind of debt that I built up.

You don’t get rid of that just, you know, from one year to the next. You become a millionaire like you know, after you hit rock bottom, which, you know, wasn’t the case in my case, so many learnings, many, many learnings Yasi.

Yasi: I totally relate to what you said that as entrepreneurial, when you start your business, you should try to be profitable as soon as possible.

And then there’s one saying from a serial entrepreneur, he said people with money come to entrepreneurship leave with the experience. People with experience come to entrepreneurship, leave with money. That was correct.

Nico James: Yeah. It’s funny. Huh? It’s funny. And there’s a saying in the wine world because you know, a lot of people are well off.

I mean, I have a friend who’s used it very well off and he said to me, how can I make money in the wine business? And I said to him, look, there’s a saying in the wine business that, you know, if you want to make money in the wine business, if you want to make a small fortune in the wine business, you’ve got to start with a big fortune and many people they have this vision of the wine world that is, you know, is very sort of luxurious. People working in the wine industry, all they do is drink wine all day and this, you know, because everyone wants wine and everyone and we sell it all over the world. It’s an easy business to get into.

And I’ll tell you, the wine business is very difficult business to get into. It’s a very long-term, strategical business to get into. And the payoff is very long-term. When you start a winery, you know, you’re not going to make money. This is like general sort of lines of people, you know, that people take. You don’t make money in the wine industry in the first 10 years. It takes 10 years to get your money, right. That’s the start to get your money back. And even then, you know, it’s a slog because there’s so many wines all over the world. So many wineries and unless you’ve got a big brand and unless, you know, you are Moab or one of these big guys is difficult to get your name in the heads of the consumers.

And otherwise, you’re just fighting for survival and you’re marketing all the time. It’s a very, very difficult business to get into. Very difficult.

Yasi: I can imagine, especially in wine countries, the market is kind of mature than emerging markets, where there was still a lot of white spaces.

Nico James: Yes, definitely. In Europe, for instance, where we drink a lot of wine.

I mean, it depends where you are in Europe. There are countries where they drink a lot. Like in Switzerland, the consumption per capita is very high, in Belgium they drink a lot of sparkling wine. And, you know, we can go through the countries, but in the emerging markets that the wine consumption pickup is very low, but there’s lots of opportunity, especially in China. For instance, you know, everyone’s going to China, but there’s lots of brands, everyone’s going in there.

And then you’ve got the regulation to contend with as well. Not an easy market to break into either, especially if you don’t have a brand which has a name or some kind of established reputation.

Yasi: And then from there when your business was not in a very good situation, you took a lot of loan and afterwards, how did you reinvent yourself? What changed?

Nico James: Well, I really hit rock bottom because it wasn’t just the business that, you know, that went under. Everything went under my personal situation, my marriage, and you know, the house that I just bought or that we have bought. You know, in the end, I had to give it back to the bank.

I couldn’t pay the mortgage anymore. And yeah, everything just fell apart. I was actually thinking of leaving the wine industry and just starting a new and somewhere else, I attempted that. But it didn’t work, and my real opportunities were within the wine industry, but I just had to sort of take a sidestep.

So I wanted to sort of get away. It’s like, you know, you’re in a house and things aren’t going well. And you just want to leave that. That’s kind of how I felt. I felt like you know, shouldn’t be in this house anymore. Let’s go to another house and started fresh, but there were good things inside that house.

There were so bad things, but I just had to find the good things within this house. I had to go into the seller, and you know, just tidy up the seller. And just figure out, you know, what is good in a seller? You know, what can I use in the seller to make the house better? And that’s basically what I did.

I dug deep and I really mentored myself in the sense that I stayed within the wine industry. Well, I became a freelance export specialist, and I basically used my language credentials, I speak German and English and I’ve traveled around the world, and I’ve been to many wine fairs.

And because I have this network of people in the wine industry all around the world, especially in Europe I said, well, maybe I can use this. And that’s what I did. And once I made that decision within three weeks, I had different opportunities. I had three potential customers and the end of the three, I took two customers.

I started working as a freelance export specialist within the wine industry. I thought to myself, why didn’t I do this before? You know, if I had done this before and I could have, then I could have saved myself a lot of money.

Yasi: Yeah. Cause you don’t have like a fixed cost, right. Because you are providing your expertise.

Nico James: Exactly. It’s basically sort of selling my expertise, my time to help these wineries export their wine. And before, I was actually physically buying the wine, I was storing it. I had to pay the taxes on it. I had to transport it to different customers, to different restaurants, and then you have to wait for the money.

So, the actual cash flow is just a nightmare. Whereas as a consultant or as a freelancer, you know, the only downside that you have is you don’t have any money tied up. You’re like a consultant and you have to wait for your fee at the end of the month. And then, you know, you get commission on sales.

So yeah, I did that. Basically. I did that for four or five years. It helped me to pick myself up again. And then later on, I got a better offer and yeah, for the last five years I’m now salaried export manager for a large winery here in Spain. Everything has its pros and pros and cons, but I think I learned a lot during that journey.

You know, now I’m in a better place with this inkling, you know, this, this entrepreneurial journey was a roller coaster. I had lots of experience; it was fun. And there are things that I liked about it. There are things I don’t like about it obviously, but I still have that sort of in my veins. I take entrepreneurial learning and I use it in my job every day. Sometimes we have to make important decisions and obviously that the learning I had from this experience is vital and it can help to solve problems and make the right decisions basically. And that, you know, that’s what I’m doing.

Yasi: Definitely, definitely. I think for every single entrepreneur, once you’ve started the journey yourself, the learnings are unimaginable. You can never get the same learnings if you didn’t start a business and for your current job now, do you still feel it’s challenging enough, or you feel it’s not challenging enough?

Nico James: Sometimes you have your days, and you think, okay, sometimes it’s just the other way around, you know, wow, this is so challenging, can I still do it? You sort of doubt yourself. For the moment I’m very happy, I’m very content with the work and there are challenges. Sometimes you have to sort of, you know as one of my superiors says, if you can easily jump over the bar and it’s up to you to put the bar higher.

And I liked that because at the end of the day, your superiors, they cannot do so much to motivate you. You have your own responsibilities, right, to motivate yourself and to find other ways to be curious, to make sure that your work is satisfying and fulfilling and that you’re motivated. And I think this is very important as well.

So I dig into that as well. And I think now because I’m an ambitious person, what, I’ve, what I’ve done now, when I sort of have this feeling, I do communicate it to my superior. You know, sometimes they don’t have the capacity because they’ve got other priorities. They can’t just put the bar higher for me, especially if you’re over-performing anyway.

I mean, what are they going to do? And then I’m going to say, okay, you’re grown by 20%, now you’ve got to go up by 40. They can do that, but you know, that’s not necessarily the answer. So what I’ve learned is to sort of accept situations and dig deep and put the bar high on myself. I think that’s the key.

And then the other thing I do, as you know, in my spare time, I always am on Twitter. And I do microblogging, I have this inner calling to help others and motivate them to set their bar higher and also to dig into themselves, to overcome their situations or their shortcomings and you know, improve their skillsets.

That sort of helps me on the other side of it.

Yasi: Yeah, actually, that’s what I was going to ask you about your Twitter account, that you share a lot of very motivational micro content on Twitter, and you have a lot of followers. So, is there something that you feel is that inner calling now that you want to help, like younger people, you know, to learn from your personal experience, your wisdom that you gained in the last decades?

Nico James: It’s a good question because I remember when I had my wine business back in 2009 was when I joined Twitter, my then wife, she said to me, oh, you should join Facebook as well. And you know, back in, the Facebook was just like this new platform. It was, it was to share, to get in contact with your friends and your school friends.

I mean, previous to that, there was some other social media platforms, like Friends Reunited, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that. But that was before Facebook came and you could get in touch with your school colleagues. So, this was all really new. And then Facebook, I felt, well, Facebook is just another one of these platforms.

How can we be good for my business? So, you know, this was a whole new journey, and I went from Facebook to Twitter. Yeah. I went to LinkedIn, but LinkedIn back then was much more sort of professional. It still is, but now it’s more of a blogging platform and you know, back in the days, twitter, you could only do 140 characters, today you can do 280 people use a lot of hashtags. Now, if you use a hashtag people block you totally different experience. I also went into videos, and I have an interview. I don’t know if you know this. I interviewed. Because he started in the wine industry. Funny enough as well, Gary V who’s

Yasi: Everybody knows him.

Nico James: Everybody knows him. Yeah. But he started in the wine industry. He started off doing videos of wine tastings, and I got inspired by him as well. And I said, oh, okay. Yeah, maybe I should get into the social media and do some videos, you know, do some other content. I want to be different to all my competitors.

Let’s do it. I went to a blogging, fair in Lisbon and Portugal with all these wine bloggers and you know, this got me going. So, I went off on a different tangent sort of this journey. It got me going on to you know, actually starting a blog guide to add a video blog.

And then last year in September, I sort of reconnected with Twitter. You know, we had a pandemic and I sort of, a lot of time to think. There wasn’t that much work to do. I mean, there was always work to do, but you know, when I wasn’t working, there was other things going on in my mind and I thought, okay, let’s connect with Twitter.

So my Twitter journey sort of restarted and now I don’t write about wine that much anymore. I write about other things because I’ve always read a lot about self-development and this is something that’s fascinated me, and I’ve always been interested in it. And yeah, what I basically tried to do is like you said, the wisdom and the learnings and experience that I’ve had, I transformed that into tweets. And when I’m really inspired, when I have a bit more time and when I’m in the flow, I do my threads. I want to help people and connect with people so that they, you know, they get inspired to overcome their particular situation, just to step up.

Just to become better versions of themselves. That fulfills me, that people actually get these likes and not because of the likes, but because it helps people.

Yasi: Yeah. They get value from your tweets, from the content.

Nico James: Yeah. It keeps me fulfilled. So, you know, on the one hand I’m selling wine, I’m making living, I’m also connecting with people in a different way.

And then, you know, when I’m working, I connect with people on on Twitter and I help them become better versions of themselves. What could be better?

Yasi: Yeah. Tell us your Twitter account.

Nico James: My Twitter account is Nico James BCN. BCN is for Barcelona, the airport code for Barcelona. Nico James BCN.

Yasi: Cool. Okay. Yeah, we’ll put that in the show notes. And my last question is you talk about personal development and your tweets, you know, you like this topic, what are some of the best personal development books that you like you would recommend to our audience?

Nico James: Okay. There’s a lot of books out there and everyone’s sort of recommending the same books.

I mean, the last say personal development book I read was David Goggins “You Can’t Hurt Me” very inspiring. But you know what Yasi, I like to read books which give you a bit of insight into people’s personality. I like to read biographies and I would recommend people to read more biographies.

One of the biographies that I got inspired by was biography by Andre Agassi. For those of you don’t know who that is, he used to be one of the top tennis players. Andre Agassi is called Open. And this is just a tote layout, Andre Agassi, I think he’s still married to Steffi Graf, who was the German lady’s tennis champion.

And yeah, it’s just an eye-opener, you know, just the crazy personalities of the fathers that these two had and the ups and downs, the roller coaster that they had during their lives, you know, that it just puts everything into perspective of someone’s life. At the end of the day. It’s all about. Yeah, you have alive whatever, if you’re born poor or rich or whatever, you have to put the work in to make it a fulfilling life.

That at the end of the day, that’s what life is about. And these biographies, they just put everything into perspective because we have all these ideals and we see all these, you know, famous and successful people, but we don’t know what they’ve been through until we’ve read the biographies. This is such an eye opener.

And that’s what I recommend to everyone who’s listening, read more biographies.

Yasi: I’ll put these books and the links of those books in the show notes. If the audience are interested, please check it out. Have a read and thank you so much for being here. Nico. It’s really my pleasure to have you as my guest.

Nico James: Thank you very much for inviting me. Yasi it was really great to be here and to share all the experiences of my life with you in this way. So thank you for listening and thank you for having me. I’m really, really, really grateful for this.