The lost year: What 2023 taught me about waiting for the right moment

operators log

I call 2023 the lost year, and I do not mean it kindly. It was the year the environment at Jaguar Land Rover changed for me, the year my sister told me to try e-commerce, and the year I did nothing about either. Twelve months in which I had every reason to start and every excuse not to. This post is about what those twelve months cost, why I let them pass, and what I would say to anyone who is in the middle of their own version of it right now.

It is the least flattering entry in the operator's log, which is why it is worth writing. The posts about the number and the first order describe decisions that worked. This one describes the year before those decisions, when the only thing I built was a habit of waiting.

What came after the lost year

Free guide: How I built a £500k business without quitting my job

The path I chose, the number I set and the order I did it in, from the first evening of research to leaving on my own date.

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What changed in early 2023

For most of my time at JLR the job was what a specialist role at a large manufacturer should be: demanding, technical, and fair. In early 2023 that stopped being true for me. There was undue pressure, opportunities that had been open were suddenly not, and a performance process that felt more political than fair. I am not going to say more than that, and I have never said more than that in public, because the details belong to the people involved and the point of this post is not the grievance.

The point is what it did to my thinking. Until then I had believed, without ever examining it, that a good job well done was a form of security. Fourteen years of working for other people, three of them in manufacturing, some lecturing, a PhD, research at Imperial, and then JLR: the belief had never been tested. In 2023 it was tested, and it failed, and I discovered that all of the control I thought I had over my income belonged to other people. That is a useful thing to learn. It is not a pleasant one.

The suggestion I ignored

Around the same time my sister suggested I try e-commerce. She had watched what was happening, she knew I had spent years thinking about products and supply chains, and she said, more or less, that I should stop complaining about the job and build something that did not depend on it. I said the things people say. It was not my field. I did not have the time. It sounded like something other people did, people with capital and no children and no full-time job.

"I had the problem, the solution and a person telling me the solution, all in the same year. I still waited twelve months."

What I actually did with 2023 was worry. I read about the job market. I updated my CV and did not send it. I had conversations with friends that ended with agreement that something should change and no agreement about what. I spent evenings scrolling, which felt like research and was not, and weekends being present with my family while thinking about work, which is the worst of both. I did not start anything, I did not stop anything, and I told myself that the moment was not right.

Why I waited

I have thought about this a great deal since, because the people who take the assessment on this site are often in the same place, and I want to be honest about why capable people do not start. It was not laziness. I was working hard. It was not ignorance either: I knew, in outline, what e-commerce involved. It was three quieter things.

I was waiting for the job to fix itself

A large part of me believed the environment would revert, that a reorganisation or a new manager would restore what had been. Waiting for that felt cheaper than starting something. It was not cheaper. It cost a year, and the environment did not revert.

I confused the size of the decision with the size of the first step

"Start an e-commerce business" sounded enormous, so I treated the first step as enormous too. In fact the first step was a sheet of paper with five options on it, and it took a fortnight. I did not know that yet, because I had not done it.

I had no number, so there was no deadline

Nothing forced a decision. The salary arrived every month, the discomfort was chronic rather than acute, and there was no figure written down anywhere that said: when the other income reaches this, you can go. Without the number there was nothing to build towards, and without something to build towards, not building was easy.

What the year actually cost

This is the arithmetic I did not do in 2023 and have done many times since. The business that eventually emerged launched in March 2025 and passed £500,000 in revenue in its first twelve months. If I had started the comparison in early 2023 rather than mid-2024, the six months of evenings would have ended in mid-2023, the first manufacturer order would have been placed around the end of that year, and the launch would have come in early 2024. Same business, a year earlier.

What twelve months of waiting cost, roughly

A year of the business's eventual revenue, at whatever the first year would have produced. A year of learning that only comes from real orders. And a year longer at a £60,000 job in an environment I had already decided was not fair, because the number was reached a year later than it could have been.

I would not put a precise figure on it, because the first year of any business is not the same as the second. But the cost was not zero, and it was not small.

The lesson is not that everyone should have started in 2023. It is that the cost of waiting is real, invisible, and never appears on a bank statement, which is why people pay it so readily.

The other cost was the one I noticed at the time and misread. I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with hours. Worrying about a job you have decided you cannot rely on, while doing nothing to reduce your reliance on it, is a particular kind of exhaustion. The moment I started the comparison in 2024, the tiredness lifted, not because the work got lighter but because the worrying had somewhere to go.

If you are in your own lost year, this is the file I wish I had had

The free PDF guide covers how I compared the four paths, the number I set, the first bet I placed and the order I did it in. Nothing to buy.

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Three signs you are in one

A lost year does not announce itself. It feels, from the inside, like a busy and difficult year in which you are dealing with a lot. Looking back, three things marked mine, and I have seen the same three in almost everyone who writes to me about being stuck.

The signs

You have had the same conversation more than three times

With a partner, a friend, a colleague. It ends the same way each time: agreement that something must change, and no date. If you can predict the conversation, you are in the year.

Your research produces nothing you could show anyone

Hours of reading, watching and scrolling, and not one written page: no shortlist, no cost model, no rejected idea with the reason next to it. Research without output is worry with a better name.

You are waiting for a condition you do not control

A new manager, a bonus, a quieter quarter, the children being older, the market settling. Every one of those is someone else's decision or nobody's. A start date that depends on them is not a start date.

If two of the three describe you, the honest name for the year is the one I have used. That is not a criticism. It is a diagnosis, and diagnoses are useful because they come with a treatment, which in this case is a sheet of paper and a number.

What ended it

Nothing dramatic. There was no single day in mid-2024 when I decided. There was a sheet of paper with five words on it, written on an ordinary evening, because I had finally become more tired of waiting than I was afraid of starting. The post on the six months of evenings covers what happened after: the four questions, the comparison, the research, the first order in December 2024. All of it was available to me in 2023. The only thing missing in 2023 was the sheet of paper.

The number came a little later, and it is the thing I would put first if I did it again. Once I had written down the bare minimum my family needed each month, and added six months of it as a buffer, the business had a line to cross and I had a reason to work on it every evening. The number turned a vague intention into a project with a finish line. In 2023 I had the intention and no line, and an intention without a line is exactly what a lost year looks like from the inside.

What I would say to 2023

Three things, none of them motivational. First, the job will not fix itself, and waiting for it to is a decision, not the absence of one. Second, the first step is smaller than you think: not a business, a comparison; not a product, a sheet of paper; not a leap, a bounded bet you can lose. Third, write the number down now, before anything else, because the number is what turns waiting into building.

I got the order right in the end: build first, leave second, choose third. But I got it right in 2024 and 2025, after getting it wrong for the whole of 2023. If you recognise the year I have described, you are not behind. You are exactly where I was, and the sheet of paper is still the way out.