Andrew on Norwich

Our home base for this UK & Europe trip was a place to the east of London called Norwich. A good town, decent enough size. It's also probably not somewhere that people would normally go because it's not really in the touristy places. It's not the hustle bustle. It's not exactly near a heavy commercial airport or those kind of things.

The reason we stayed there was my wife's best friend got married, moved there, had a kid. One of the biggest reasons, if not the reason, for our trip was to spend some time with them because we'd never visited them over in the UK.

For the whole time, we spent about, I think it was about, eight, nine nights over in Norwich. I think for me, Norwich, at first glance, is a really lovely place, but it's possibly somewhere that you would just stay the night and continue on to wherever your destination was, if you were driving through or that kind of thing. It's not somewhere that you would spend eight to nine nights if you're on a holiday somewhere.

What I learned here is that I actually really loved spending time in Norwich and the reason I loved this place was because of the people I was there with. We were there with the wife's best friend, husband, and kid. They took us to the pub that they used to live around the corner from for lunch. We went to the forest and explored things with the kids and we went on an Easter egg hunt over Easter. And I went to the football a couple of times to watch the local team. All these kind of things, I possibly wouldn't have done, I wouldn't have known to do, had it not been for the people I was there with.

What this really taught me was who you're surrounding with in your world, I think good people, do they share of themselves? Do they give of themselves to you? And do you give yourself back? Do they lift you up and whatnot? I think, we have a choice to surround us with certain people? Sometimes at work we don't have that much of a choice because we are who we are and working with who we are. But how do we make sure we're surrounding ourselves with good people who are encouraging and lifting us up there?

I'm really blessed that our team here at Illumin8 are just a bunch of absolute legends. That reminded me of that, of the people that we have and that they're good and we do life with, and that makes it so much more enjoyable, especially when you're in a rut and you're doing things you just, monotonous to, but I find that those individuals will bring out the joy and make a dull moment fun and without them, Norwich would have just been another place that we would've visited. We probably wouldn't have even gone there. It would have been a stop-by and we wouldn't have anywhere near as fun. The challenge there is what are you doing to surround yourself with good people? Who's in your world? Are you connecting with them? Are you spending time with them? Are you allowing them to invest into you as well as you invest into them as well? That was Norwich.