The Race of My Life

The marathon. The race itself. And everything that pressed me toward it.

It carries the redundancy on a Monday morning at an agency in Farringdon, where the company motto was Media Made Human and they brought back my bag without my notebook. I sent a thank-you email on my way out, named everyone I worked with, wished the company well, and walked to Wembley for chicken at Popeyes. That is who I am — I always do the right thing. The shame, where it sits, sits with the people who needed shame as a motive. I never did.

It carries BrightonSEO — where I gave the talk, Is Quality Score Dead?, with no company data, no client accounts, no slides under the safety net of a job title — and where, on the day I was meant to be celebrating it, I lost access to my best account. The redundancy was not the cracking point. BrightonSEO was.

Then the launch of Your PPC Doctor on my forty-second birthday, 8 October 2024. Then the loss I could not have prepared for: my father, three weeks into the formal training programme.

I did not miss a single training session.

It carries my 3NOs philosophy — no excuses, no complaints, no self-pity. The conviction that I was being prepared for something larger than myself. The day itself, where the watch said sub-four was on and I chose 5:56:00 instead — to share, not to earn alone. I stopped for selfies. I danced. I high-fived strangers. I promised, on that day, to anyone who would listen, that this book would be a bestseller — and that when they saw me on television, they could come and I would give them whatever I had promised.

It carries the influences that shaped how I show up — my invisible council. David Goggins on mental toughness. Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Thomas Edison on the audacity of building. John Maxwell on leadership. Napoleon Hill on the architecture of belief. Joe Dispenza on the awakening of self.

And, sitting above all of them, Bob Proctor: "You are limited by weakness of attention and poverty of imagination." That sentence is the operating rule of how I move. It is the reason this book is more than a marathon memoir, the reason the practice is more than PPC, the reason the company is more than a service. The pattern is not a side-track. The pattern is the point.

And, before any of them, my grandfather — Ekoko. "He who planted a tree before he died did not live in vain, for that tree will shelter travellers long after his death." He was a teacher. So was my mother. They taught me that generosity is not performative. It is structural. I sign my personal letters with his name. The tree he planted is the work I am doing now.

It carries the story of how I was born — a story my mother and I have agreed I can finally tell. It carries the answer to the question people most often ask me: how do I show up so confidently when I do not always know how I will pay the next month's mortgage.

And it carries a practical framework — how anyone without a medical condition can finish a marathon, and how to enjoy it instead of suffering through it.

This book is not a charity appeal. I am building a practice that earns commercially — Your PPC Doctor, Indigo Luxury Hospitality, the work I do publicly across the search industry. The book itself will earn. The speaking will earn. The wealth that comes with all of it is not something I will apologise for, and it is not something I am ashamed to enjoy.

What I will do is what I built into the company at founding: structurally give. Ten percent of Your PPC Doctor revenue flows into the Charity Reserve. The book contributes a further 50% of profit per signed copy directly to the same Reserve. The first beneficiary is Marie Curie. Other charities will follow. I have shown, more than once, that I do not mind paying the cost of integrity. This is the institution that holds it.

If you ask me one day why I show up so confidently when the mortgage is not always paid, this is part of the answer: I have already decided what I am building toward. The other part is that I have been told, by people I trust, that the way I move is the way I am meant to move. I have decided to keep moving that way.

"Would you like Serge Nguélé to be the richest man on the planet?" I asked that question in the epilogue of the book. The answer matters less than the second half of the sentence: not for what I take, but for what I can give.