My Plans
Yoga Company
First off I’m going to create the best yoga company that has ever existed. It will sell online courses and after we have built a small following, after around 6 months, there will be a physical yoga studio in London. This is the website for it.
The way this is going to work is that yoga teachers will be posting daily videos and short classes on Facebook. From those videos the visitors will be directed to sign up for the monthly membership on the website. This membership will enable them to view all the classes that are available on the website for one small monthly fee. Think of it as a Netflix for yoga.
Healthy Juices And Smoothies
Once the yoga studio is up and running I’m planning on giving all attendees a free juice/smoothie per lesson. We can use the demand for these to gauge what is popular and what is not and ultimately we can then sell these juices online.
The whole clean eating trend seems to be slowly dying down but we can still capitalise on its popularity by calling the company I Eat Clean.
My Background
I’ve had a very troubled youth. My father died of alcohol abuse when I was 12 and my mother emotionally abused me daily. By the time I went to university I was a complete wreck. On paper I was enrolled for 6 years to study physics but I really only finished 1 course. I was hiding from the outside world in front of my computer, doing my own internet projects, watching TV and playing video games. Doing everything but go outside and actually attend university.
My first real project on the internet was a so called clan for the back then popular video game Quake 3 Arena. A clan is essentially a group of people who get together for the purpose of playing a certain video game against each other and other clans. I formed this clan in the heyday of said video game and got a group of 10 people together. This was around the year 2000 when I was 17. I was very awkward back then and lacked any kind of social skills so after about half a year this clan disintegrated again.
Shortly thereafter I tried again and formed a second clan. However this was way past Quake 3’s heyday so I was only able to get one person to join me, effectively ending the clan again before it really started.
Around the same time I joined my best friend in working on her project. She had a small German website for the TV show Charmed.
My technical expertise and continuous thirst for innovation and improvement quickly made the website explode in popularity. We completely redesigned the website and added a professional forum (think of a Facebook group but before Facebook existed). For the forum we implemented a role playing game where forum members would pretend to be either witches or demons and go to battle. This was the main contributing factor to the site’s popularity and we quickly got to the point where we had 2,000 to 2,500 posts being made in the forum every single day.
You can check out snapshots of the site and forum on archive.org: Website and Forum. These versions are rather bungled as archive.org didn’t properly save the formatting information.
In 2005 she decided that she had to focus more on her studies and we shut the site down. Later that year (I was 22 at the time) I started a third clan together with one of the moderators of the Charmed forum. She got a couple friends together who also played certain other video games and I joined her in administering the clan. This clan didn’t hold up for long either.
After the dissolution of that clan I worked on several other small projects of my own, none of which really got off the ground. In 2007 I turned freelancer and coded websites for other people.
I did this for about half a year when I got the idea to write a business plan for a website that would cover topics around TV in general for the German market. I worked on this full-time for several months and I pitched it to another one of the moderators of the Charmed forum, someone who had inherited large amounts of money. She turned it down.
Then I got the idea to build a website covering cars for the German market. I again worked full-time on a business plan for several months and pitched it to members of my family. They all turned it down, pointing to my lack of experience. This was in August of 2008.
Then I entered really dark times. The lethargy that would go on to destroy my life for the next ten years started to appear. Back then I thought nothing of it and attributed it to depression caused by my past. I found out about internet marketing and personal development around that time and up until now I spent the majority of my time studying those two topics. I haven’t done any actual paid work since then as I never had the energy for that so my life consisted of going through online courses teaching those topics.
Up until the summer of 2010 I was so messed up from the abuse of my past that only then was I able to fully comprehend what had happened to me. A couple months prior to that I had watched a documentary on child abuse and its horrible effects and I literally thought to myself that I’m glad this had never happened to me. My mind was so densely wrapped in cotton and ice that it had completely blocked out anything and everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary in the moment.
A year later, during the summer of 2011, I finally had the realisation that the only reason I thought people don’t like me was because of my mother’s abuse of me. At that time I was a skinny 28-year-old, acne all over my face, with a heavy stutter that I had had since my youth. I slowly crawled out of my social anxiety over the span of several years. Initially, I couldn’t even hold a basic conversation. I expelled a lot of blood, sweat and tears overcoming all these problems.
Turns out, my lethargy wasn’t caused by depression. Early 2012 I noticed that I’d randomly stop breathing but it was so benign that I never really did anything about it. Early 2016 it got so bad that my body would constantly be in this panic mode where my brain would shut down due to the fight-or-flight response. The smallest amount of physical exertion would cause me to be drenched in sweat. I had such overwhelming lethargy that doing any actual work was impossible. A journey that only now ended ensued.
I had my body checked up and down and sideways by a myriad of doctors. Blood tests from A-Z, MRI of the brain, 24 hour ECG, and on and on. I knew there must have been something wrong with my body despite doctor’s assurances that I was fine so I went from doctor to doctor trying to figure things out. Then in April 2017 a doctor finally convinced me that I was fine after all and sent me to a psychiatrist. Six months of anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medication followed. After months on a dose so high that it crippled me I just decided to stop taking the medication as it was not worth it. This was October 2017.
A year later, in October 2018, I finally started to put the pieces together that my diet was playing a huge role in the symptoms. Yet no matter what I did, nothing could truly alleviate the symptoms.
It was only in September 2019 that a chance visit to a chiropractor unravelled this whole mystery. There are certain vertebrae in the spine through which the nerves flow that direct digestion. These vertebrae were so heavily rotated and twisted that it impaired digestion. Over the span of probably 10 years a huge amount of gas had built up in my intestines that it put too much pressure on exactly these impaired nerves. These nerves in turn signalled to the brain that an emergency was occurring and it put my body into complete fight-or-flight mode. About ten years of my life wasted because of several rotated vertebrae.
Why You Might NOT Want To Work For Me
With the exception of the Charmed website I have never had a successful website. I have done no actual work for ten years. If you want an office job that you know for certain will be there ten years from now this is not for you.
If you hate change, this job is not for you. Starting a business always means a lot of uncharted territory, which in turn will result in things changing and getting switched up all the time. Maybe one week you’re using one project management tool and then the team decides that a different one would be more beneficial. That means we’re going to switch to the other tool and you’re going to need to go through another learning curve with this new piece of software. If you need things to stay the same all the time, working at a startup is not the right job for you.
Why You Might DO Want To Work For Me
One word: Adventure. This could be a huge adventure that would add a lot of spice to the life of the right person.
Think about it like this: What does it take for someone to overcome all these problems?
Persevering in the face of so much adversity has focused my mind on what’s truly important in life: Contribution. I want to create things that add value to the life of every customer. Yoga classes, weighted blankets, healthy juices.
And after having overcome my crippling social anxiety I want to hold free in-person classes here in London to teach people personal development. How to overcome their own struggles. How to become more social and talkative.
All I want to do is make people happy. Change people’s lives for the better.
Check out https://www.instagram.com/nathanhnash/ to find out more about me.
My legal name is Arne Thoenes, which you will see in some places. For the past year I’ve been thinking about changing my name and I’ve narrowed it down to either Nathan Nash or Nathan White. So if you run into either of these names, you know it’s me.
Going Forward
If you decide to come work for me I promise I will treat you like family. Together we can create something truly amazing.
I believe in working to live. I will never be working 16 hours a day for prolonged stretches of time. I have wasted so much time of my life because of my mother’s abuse of me and because of my health issues that I am just not willing to work 24/7 for the next 10 years. I want to have fun with great people, travel the world, have an impact on people’s lives and I want everyone who works for me to be able to do those same things.
I also believe in maximising quality of output, not maximising the quantity. The best ideas always come when you are away from work, sometimes while taking a shower or watching TV. Our greatest competitive advantage is going to be the quality of our ideas. For this we need downtime when our brains can rest. Work for a few hours in the morning and then take an extended break, say 90 minutes to 2 hours. Watch some TV for example, couple episodes of Friends on Netflix maybe, something that relaxes and rejuvenates you. Then get back to work for another couple hours and after that call it a day. Working 10, 12, 14 hours a day is so counterproductive when you think of it under this light because your brain never has any chance to wind down and reflect on the current problems. And when people are 70, 80, 90 years old, they never think that they should have worked more. All they think about is the happiness that they missed out on by working so much. I will never allow that to be me or anyone around me.
Last but not least, I want everyone to use 20% of their workweek to work on their own side projects. You may have heard that companies like Google have used this to great effect and I want to implement that same policy. You will be free to choose one day of the week where you can work on any project that you like, any idea that you would like to implement, as long as it is going to benefit the company in some way.