Alex Packham

Builder of companies | Founder of @ContentCal_io (acquired by @Adobe) | Building AI for Health, Work & Life

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

34 today. Some things I have learned in life:

1. Prioritise work and financial freedom early in your life and you will potentially have less time for ‘fun’ but reap the rewards later in life (ie higher salary faster, exit a biz etc). Prioritise play in your early life and you potentially have more fun but have to work harder for longer.

2. Do things that are counter intuitive in your work and personal life. Most things that are seen as big risks (e.g. starting a business or going all in somewhere in your personal life vs steady approach) are often much less risky than their ‘stable’ counterparts.

3. Most things are really out of your control. So stop worrying about them.

4. Life moves in phases. Take time to work out who you are each time you feel life changing, and prioritise personal growth as much as possible.

5. Mental health and physical heath are intrinsically linked and both should be trained multiple times a week.

6. Work out what you will and won’t tolerate in your life and prioritise life accordingly.

7. Having a similar sense of humour and shared values are key ingredients to a successful relationship.

8. Nurture your relationships with friends, family, loved ones etc. Relationships are like flowers, they need to be watered, and if you don’t, they will eventually fizzle out and die.

9. Be generous with your resources and people will be generous back to you.

10. If your gut tells you someone isn’t a good person, you are almost likely 100% right. Remove them.

11. Music is unbelievably good for the soul. Find the music you like and use it as a tool (for motivation, invoking feelings, partying with your homies, etc etc).

12. Life is an incremental journey. The experiences you have (good and bad) will incrementally grow who you are. You will never be ‘complete’.

13. YOLO.

14. Seriously, YOLO. We will all die. Fucking live the life you want.

15. WEN BILLI.

16. Relationships take time to build and nurture, getting to know each other etc etc. But when you get to a place of happiness together, a good relationship should make you sleep well at night.

17. Don’t feel guilty for looking after yourself.

18. Imposter syndrome is real but can be conquered. Work at your self esteem and analysing your experiences to get you where you are. You deserve everything you have earned in life.

19. Holidays and travel are living.

20. Family is everything.

21. When you’re going through something difficult, you’re often growing more than you realise, and you will come out the other side 100x better.

22. If you think you have found ‘the one’, go all in.

23. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does buy more opportunities for fun and joyful moments, and having money ‘takes the edge’ off life.

24. Don’t be afraid to have huge goals and communicate them to friends and family etc. People looked at me like I was crazy in my 20s when I told them my ambitions. And then I achieved them. And it felt good.

25. What you do for work is so important if you are professionally ambitious. Pick big problems and opportunities to go after. Enjoy your work.

26. No one wins by thinking small.

27. Finding something you love for your physical health is so important to maintaining constantly. Exercise should be enjoyable. If you don’t like running find a sport, don’t like weights try bodyweight exercise etc etc. Just find something.

28. You make your own luck.

29. Be a good and genuine person, it’s not that hard. It’s actually harder to be a bad person than it is to be good.

30. Always do what you know is right.

31. The doors to new experiences are opened when you meet new people.

32. Don’t betray people.

33. Work hard and play hard. That doesn’t mean party hard.

34. Y.O.L.O.

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

@thesamparr I am in the big house post exit phase fixing lots of shit you dont want to do 😂 house is awesome but its really not fun or enjoyable, thinking of downsizing

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

https://t.co/tOlWydo5NU

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

@paulg Out of interest what are your bullets of what she is doing right?

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

@jasonlk Happened to me

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

@matthucius Take two - three weeks off work and actually step away for that time and travel. It takes the first week to actually switch off. Go to the Maldives for week 1, relax, dive etc!

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

Your Series A wont close itself: https://t.co/Fv1t5k3UQW

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

Essay:

2026: The year AI changes everything:

https://t.co/xRGZTkH6bs

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

AI and the Augmented Individual: PART II, How AI Changes the Mind, the Economy, and the Founder from Venture Wisely.

The first thing AI changes isn’t your output. It’s your mind.

Use AI daily and your thinking gets clearer, faster, calmer.
You stop starting from zero.
You stop carrying the entire mental load alone.
Your decisions get sharper.
Your pace accelerates.

MIT found AI users improve output 20–40% a year.
Non AI users improve 1–2% over a year.

That’s not a gap.
That’s a new reality.

For founders, it’s even starker:
Augmented founders get stuck less, move faster, and make better decisions because they’re not thinking in isolation anymore.

AI doesn’t replace intelligence.
It unlocks it.

https://t.co/GsD19Qkv4f

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

AI and the augmented individual:

“AI isn’t just making people faster. It’s making them calmer. Because they’re not carrying the whole load alone.”

https://t.co/j1JGd3OT2H

[Ollie Forsyth @ollieforsyth]

This is a must watch speech.

The U.K. is such a great country but it doesn't celebrate success. You are deemed a failure if your company fails vs the U.S. who celebrates it.

Too many regulations. Governments not being entrepreneurial friendly. Prime Minsters hardly lasting their term.

To change this: It must be entrepreneurial focused, learn to love success and celebrate our great entrepreneurs.

If we do not back our builders, it's very simple. They will leave the U.K. They will head west for the U.S. or east to Dubai for more favorable taxes.

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

@louistheroux for the love of god please do another Vegas documentary with @RichardWilk, I haven’t watched this in 10 years and it’s the best 🤣

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

@matthucius 100%

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

@HarryStebbings 👋

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

Every action writes a line in your story.
But most people are just turning pages.

Scrolling. Reacting. Waiting.

What if today, you picked up the pen?

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

@matthucius come down to mine for the day and hang - gym, countryside walk, coffee. 50 mins from Waterloo.

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

This was my Christmas morning.

30 mins on the heavy bag and a sparring session.

I cannot describe how much fitness, wellness and mindfulness has changed my entire life and approach to ‘work life balance’ this year.

This is vastly different to how I’ve spent most Christmas mornings (usually nursing a hangover!)

I’m much more in the camp that work and life are massively intertwined than separate.

We spend huge amounts of our time working, and we spend huge amounts of time doing the things we love outside of our profession.

This year my biggest goal is to ensure my time is as balanced as possible, delivering great outcomes for my life holistically.

My ambitions and bar for myself is set higher than ever.

LFG 2025.

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

This is called The Hedgehog Concept, from one of my favourite books.

Good to Great.

This model is something I come back to time after time when I look at anything I'm working on or thinking about where I spend my time personally.

1. Find what you’re deeply passionate about. You can only achieve ‘flow state’ and focus to the next level when you are working on or thinking about something you are deeply passionate about.

2. What can you be the best in the world at? This requires deep introspection when it comes to the work you want to apply this to, or yourself and how you spend your time. You need a high degree of self awareness to know what you’re insanely good at and what you’re not. Focus and double down on the things you are uniquely great at. This is why the most diverse teams win. Because they have a mix of qualities people are insanely good at, to lift each other up.

3. Figure out what drives your economic engine. In business this is figuring out what drives revenue and profit. In life this is what personally drives you and fulfils you to make money.

Apply this concept any time you are thinking about getting involved with a new company or taking something new on yourself.

It will help you get extreme clarity on the best path forward.

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

When you're building a product and business from scratch, one thing I see people get wrong time and time again is assuming who their user/customer is from the outset.

Yes, it's 100% necessary to have ideas of who they might be, a vision, a goal to target yourself against. Instinct is an amazing guide.

However, when the rubber hits the road, you need to react to the reality of what people actually want.

The customer discovery process (from The Startup Owners Manual, one of the best books I've ever read) is such a simple blueprint to follow, but so many people don't know it exists.

1. Discover who your customer is. Talk to as many different types of potential users/customers as possible, and find the trends in the feedback you get.

2. Validate these customers by asking specific questions. Show them the product, show them your designs and ideas, get as much feedback as possible. Ask pointed questions.

"Would you use this?"
"What would make you use this every day?"
"Would you pay for this?"

Do this over and over again until you find trends again.

Cycle this process repeatedly until you actually create customers, iterating the product as you go.

Then, you can move to building a company.

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

I started my first 'real' business when I was 23.

I'm going to share 23 stories from my journey over the last 10+ years in three buckets over the next few months.

Work.
Play.
Life.

Lesson #1: Work is 'everything', but it isn't everything.

When I was 23, I was almost 100% defined by what I did for work, my title, my career trajectory.

Looking back at this phase of life, I think people generally take one of two paths.

1 = Career is the priority.
2 = I’m in my twenties baby, let’s have fun.

There is no right or wrong path, and this is very nuanced.

For me, my goal was about creating freedom. Freedom stemmed from the idea of being able to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.

I asked myself “How can I learn as much as possible in the world of business in my 20s so that I am set up well for life?” and “How can I earn as much as possible to become financially secure, so that when the time comes, I will be ‘free’?”

These are two questions that entered my head every single morning.

What have I learned from asking myself these questions in my 20s:

I have no regrets prioritising my career in my 20s. I missed out on a lot of personal experiences and fun. But for me, work, play and life are fully intertwined. They all fuel each other. So over-indexing on my career for a period was ‘short term pain for long term gain’.

I still managed to have a lot of fun. I’ve met life long friends through work, who have mentored me, shared experiences with, learned from. The thing I really didn’t get to do as much as my peers was travel.

Work is NOT what defines you, even though it did for me back then.
I learned this lesson the hard way, later in life.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent a huge amount of time discovering a lot about myself and my take on life in my 30s. Which has been challenging and fun.

I theoretically achieved my goal of ‘freedom’ although I soon realised that ‘freedom’ is a moving thing and doesn’t really exist. I still work every day. I apply discipline and ambition to new parts of life like health and wellness. I travel more when I can. But challenges in my career and life still pop up daily.

I still have stuff I want to get done, and this requires prioritisation and focus.
My personal life took a major back-seat for 10+ years. And I’ve had to re-prioritise that later in life.

‘Free’ is not a real state. ‘Freedom’ is creating a life you enjoy from all angles.

The goal for me now is to find the balance between feeling ‘free’, applying my ambition and finding peaceful moments.

I feel free when I travel.
My ambition to do more in my career is still high.
I’ve worked hard to find ways to feel at ‘peace’ - something I think we all have to work at in the world we live in today where everything is so fast paced.

What have I learned from all this? Yes, work hard and achieve your goals, live your life.

But remember when you hit them, you’re never ‘done’. You just open the page to a new chapter of learnings.

[Alex Packham @alexpackham]

@matthucius Product manager from tech co +1