I recently recorded a short YouTube video explaining the background to my journey so far, why I share what I share, and how investing became tied up with a bigger question about freedom.

If you want to watch the original video first, you can do that here: The background to my £1M journey.

It did not start with a master plan

From the outside, a strong portfolio can look clean and deliberate. The truth is usually messier than that.

I had a decent job, a decent life, and the kind of setup that should have felt reassuring. But there was a gap between being comfortable on paper and feeling fulfilled in reality. That gap ended up mattering more than I expected.

Before I became serious about building wealth through stocks, I had already had two experiences that stayed with me. I made some money in Bitcoin early, but not enough to change my life. I also bought Tesla years ago, watched it fall, got nervous, and sold far too early.

Neither decision was a disaster. Both still taught me the same thing: being early is not enough if you cannot hold your nerve.

The emotional cost of selling too soon

One of the hardest parts of investing is not finding interesting ideas. It is living with the emotional discomfort that comes after you buy them.

In the video I talk about putting around £5,000 into Tesla, seeing it drop, then eventually selling around £6,000. At the time that felt sensible. Looking back, it was a classic case of protecting myself from short-term pain at the cost of long-term upside.

That experience, combined with an earlier brush with crypto, left me with a feeling that I had seen opportunities without really backing myself. The money mattered, but the bigger issue was what those decisions said about conviction.

That is part of why themes like what financial independence actually feels like and defining what enough means have become so central to how I think now.

Rocket Lab changed the scale of the journey

The real turning point came later when I started doing deeper research and came across the Rocket Lab story. It was not just a case of hearing a tip and buying a ticker. It was the combination of hearing a compelling thesis, doing my own work, and feeling that I understood enough to take the risk seriously.

I come from an engineering background, so some parts of the company and its culture made intuitive sense to me. That did not make the investment risk-free. It did mean I felt able to judge it with more confidence than I had in the past.

In the video I explain that I built a large position in Rocket Lab and that decision ended up changing my financial trajectory in a very real way. It is still one of the clearest examples in my own life of what can happen when research, timing, conviction, and luck line up together.

If you want the fuller stock case rather than the personal background, I have a separate post on my Rocket Lab investment thesis.

This is bigger than stock picks

The video is not really about trying to prove I was right on one company. It is more about why I started documenting all of this in public.

For me, the portfolio is tied to a broader question: what does freedom actually look like when work no longer has to dominate your life?

That is why a lot of my content sits at the overlap between money, investing, work, identity, and fulfillment. I am interested in the numbers, but I am just as interested in what the numbers are for.

That is also why I increasingly prefer to talk openly about the emotional side of the process. Missing opportunities, selling too soon, feeling isolated, wondering whether you have enough, and trying to work out what you actually want your life to look like all matter just as much as the ticker symbols do.

Why I am sharing this publicly

I want to be very clear about what this is and what it is not.

I am not trying to present myself as a guru. I am not selling a dream. I am not pretending there is a formula that, if copied closely enough, guarantees the same outcome.

I am documenting a real process in real time. That includes the parts that went well, the parts I got wrong, and the parts I am still trying to understand.

That is also why transparency matters to me. Over time I think my website will work best if the evergreen stock theses stay in place while the changing reality of what I own, how I think, and what has shifted gets documented through dated portfolio reviews and more personal reflections.

The real point of the journey

Reaching a number is not the whole story. The harder question is what you do with the freedom that number might create.

I am still figuring that out. That is probably the most honest way to put it.

If this topic resonates, the video is worth watching because it shows the thinking behind the account in a more direct and personal way than a written post can. You can watch it here: The background to my £1M journey.

You can also follow more of the day-to-day thinking on X, where I share portfolio thoughts, reflections, and updates as the journey continues.