I earned $120K a year working for Shell in 2012. Ten years and multiple promotions later, in 2022, that figure has doubled to $240K a year. In 2023, I stumbled on an internal, confidential, document that showed the salaries of my superiors. I saw that even if I were promoted multiple times again, the best I could hope for in another 10 years was another doubling to around $480K a year. This may sound crazy saying it out loud but that wasn’t cutting it for me. I simply didn’t want the next 10 years to be a repeat of the last 10. I wanted geometric progression, not an arithmetic one. On my 40th birthday, in 2023, I was asked to make a wish as a blew the candles on my birthday cake. “Get the hell out of Shell,” I quietly whispered. Months later, I was out. In 2024, my businesses grossed $500K; in 2025, they did $1M - geometric progression. It required me to be delusional about my abilities, to bank on the faithfulness of God and to trust that inner voice that always nag at me that I could be more, I could do more and I could have more.
