What happens when you stop defining yourself by your job title, or even by the business you’ve built?
That was the question at the heart of our latest N0BS workshop, led by N0BS member, author and founder Charlie Rogers, creator of Undefinable Life Design.
Charlie has built his work around a problem that feels particularly relevant to entrepreneurs: most of us don’t fit neatly into one box. “Founder” might describe part of what we do, but it rarely describes all of who we are.
His recently published book, Undefinable Life Design: How to Design a Unique Life That Sustains Your Energy and Income, challenges the conventional idea of choosing one lane and sticking to it. Instead, Charlie has developed practical frameworks for identifying the common threads between our interests, skills and ambitions – and intentionally designing a life around them.
It’s an approach he has taken into workshops and programmes for organisations and institutions including Google, LinkedIn and universities across the UK. And this time, he brought it to N0BS.
From purpose to a 90-day plan
This wasn’t a sit-and-listen workshop.
Charlie took us through a practical process of looking beyond our identities as founders and exploring the interests, experiences and motivations that make each of us unique.
We worked through defining our purpose, identifying our unique selling points and, crucially, translating all of that thinking into a 90-day life design plan.
The room itself was a brilliant example of why this matters.
We had people at completely different stages of entrepreneurship: from those just beginning their founder journey to multi-time founders who have built and exited several businesses.
Yet the exercises worked across the room.
Because experience doesn’t necessarily give you clarity.
Our own founder discovered this herself! Sabrina is the first person to admit that she always has something to learn from everyone, so she attended the workshop herself.
Despite running multiple businesses, having an MBA and spending a fairly ridiculous amount of her life thinking about entrepreneurship, Charlie still helped her get much clearer on the thread connecting everything she does.
The purpose statement they eventually arrived at was:
I help entrepreneurs who are blinded by the bullsh*t have a wholesome life, by thinking independently, building genuine connections and educating and learning from others.
Suddenly, a collection of things that can look quite disparate on paper made considerably more sense.
The Lifelong MBA in action
This is also exactly what we mean when we talk about N0BS as a Lifelong MBA.
We’re deliberately not building a surface-level networking community where the value proposition begins and ends with drinks, dinners and swapping business cards.
Some events are purely social – because genuine relationships matter too.
But our members also have an extraordinary amount of expertise between them. Part of N0BS is creating opportunities for that knowledge to move around the room: members teaching members, founders challenging founders, and people at completely different stages learning from one another.
Charlie is a perfect example of the calibre of people within the community – and this workshop showed what can happen when we actually tap into that collective experience.
If Charlie’s ideas resonate with you, his book Undefinable Life Design explores the complete framework in much greater depth, including how to uncover your “Golden Thread” and design a life that sustains both your energy and your income.
And if you’d like to understand the person behind the framework first, Charlie also joined us on No Bullsh*t Talks, where we explored his own unconventional career, portfolio working and why he believes we need to move beyond traditional professional labels.
Listen to Charlie Rogers on No Bullsh*t Talks →
Because sometimes the most useful question isn’t “What do you do?”
It’s “What are you actually trying to build a life around?”