Hi, I’m Dave

About a decade ago I sat in a work training session that changed everything. The guest speaker was a coach from a professional sports team. He talked about something he called the ‘life pie‘ — the idea that your life is made up of different slices, and if the biggest slice was suddenly taken away, would you still feel whole? Do the slices actually reflect who you are and what you value?

I did the exercise honestly. The majority of my pie was work. And for the first time I thought through my personal values — really thought about them — and realised I was only meeting one of them. The one that was already consuming everything.

That was the moment I started paying attention.

The honest backstory

I’m a middle-aged family guy living in Australia with my wife and our daughter, who arrived five months ago and immediately reorganised every assumption I had about time and control. I’m a manager in a fast-moving commercial industry — about as far from slow living as you can get most days. I was raised to be independent and self-sufficient, worked hard from a young age, and had a genuinely blistering twenties — late nights, share houses, cheap travel and vague memories. No regrets. Well, maybe just a little.

While definitely not an entirely bad thing, being in the moment usually meant working far too long, then staying out late in a classic work-hard play-hard culture. I spent all my cash with nothing to show for it. Nothing was intentional. Everything just happened.

The life pie moment coincided with a period of twelve-hour days at a company that had quietly stopped replacing roles — a slow squeeze I could see would eventually break something. My now-wife, girlfriend at the time, pointed out how different I was on holidays compared to at work. I thought I was the same person everywhere. I wasn’t even close.

I gave it twelve months and a clear plan. When nothing changed, I resigned on the spot — with no job to go to, and two offers by the end of the same day that I turned down. I needed to breathe first. Three months later I went back to work. But differently.

What I’m building toward

Since then I’ve been learning slowly how to design a life that actually fits me better. Making more intentional choices about how I spend money, what I eat, how I spend my time. Buying less, but buying better. Travelling more meaningfully. Growing things. Reading more. Building financial freedom quietly in the background.

I’m still in corporate Australia. I haven’t escaped to a farm or retired at forty. This isn’t that kind of story. It’s a more ordinary one — trying to live well within a real life, with a job and a family and the same twenty four hours as everyone else. I think there are a lot of people out there just like me.

Things got more real when our daughter arrived. Intentional living, it turns out, gets simultaneously harder and more important when a small person removes all your assumptions about how the day will go. I’m still figuring that one out.

What Slowly Better is

Slowly Better is where I figure this out in the open. It covers things I actually think about — mindfulness, money, health, food, home, travel, and the process of choosing better over more. It’s honest, practical and written by someone still very much in the middle of it.

If someone else can learn something from my experience — including the parts where I got it wrong — that’s almost better than a benefit only to me. If you’re interested in learning more, maybe start here.

No perfection here. Just better, slowly.

— Dave