People I work with say I fail upwards. Ten years as an electrician. A first business that flopped. Then a job offer with no job description. Here's the whole path, failures included: At 21 I went to the UK for a gap year to be a personal trainer. I ended up a removalist. The company moved high profile clients, so I packed up homes for Madonna, Jude Law and Ozzy Osbourne, then drove the loads through eight countries at a time. Back home I was an electrician. In 2012, still on the tools, I started my first business: LED lighting imported from China. Two mates and I flew over to choose samples. We spent most of the money in Macau casinos on custom suits. Dumb and Dumber all over again. The tech was too early anyway. It was the first of a few businesses that didn't work. By 2015 I was ten years into the trade and wondering what came next. A close mate asked me a strange favour. Could I go and find some trees? I didn't ask questions. I found a few decent sized trees at a scrapyard and drove them to a childcare centre in South Melbourne. The owner wanted them on the top floor, so we tilted them on an angle, squeezed them into the lift, and built natural play for the kids. The owner was Mark Woodland. A while later I was doing electrical work at another of his centres. He told me he was starting a childcare software company and asked if I wanted a job. I asked what I'd be doing. He said he had no idea. But if I wanted a job, I had it. I said yes. I was his first hire. The company was acquired by a US private equity firm in 2020, and I stayed until 2022. Today my wife and I run three businesses together, and I'm a co-founder at Kismet with Mark, building in healthcare. The trees, the suits, the job with no description. Most of the good parts started with a yes. If I could tell my 10-year-old self one thing: You've got a crazy life ahead of you. Take every opportunity. Say yes more than you say no. Follow me @SammyRArmstrong for more on building something that matters.

1 in 5 Australian women aged 45 to 54 is an unpaid carer. Most carers of working age are holding down a job too. Here's what the numbers say about the sandwich generation, and the one thing the research says to watch: At Xplor, we built software for three people: the parent, the educator and the childcare business owner. Ten years later, those three are the same person. Caring up for a dependent parent and down for a dependent child. That's the sandwich generation. The ABS last counted carers in 2022: - 3.0 million Australians were unpaid carers, up from 2.6 million in 2018 - 1.2 million were the main carer for someone, and two in three of them were women - Of those caring for a parent, almost six in ten were aged 45 to 64 - 70% of working-age carers had a job, against 79% of people who weren't caring Most people assume all that caring wears your health down. The research is more specific than that. A 1999 US study followed older people caring for a spouse. The carers who said they felt strained had a 63% higher risk of death over four and a half years. The carers who didn't feel strained had no raised risk at all. A bigger study in 2013 matched 3,503 family carers against 3,503 similar people who weren't caring. Over six years, the carers had an 18% lower death rate. But inside that group, carers under high strain had a death rate about 1.5 times that of carers with no strain. The risk followed the strain. These are observational US studies, mostly of older carers, so they don't prove cause. They do point at the same thing: how much you're carrying, and whether you're carrying it alone. It takes a village to raise a child. It takes one to care for a parent too. If you're in the middle of it: - Be honest about how much you're carrying - Tell someone, even if nothing changes straight away - Hand one job off this week, however small If you know someone in it, ask them what you can take off their plate. Follow me @SammyRArmstrong for more on health, community and building something that matters.