About Me

All of our lives are full of stories and we tell ourselves stories about our own lives and experiences all the time too. We can’t possibly tell or remember them all but here are some of mine…

A bad start, hating Welsh…

I was born in 1977 in the town of Preston in the county of Lancashire in the north-west of England. When I was four, we moved to the small town of Colwyn Bay on the North-Wales coast.

At Eirias High School, Mrs Jones tried to teach us Welsh (and music) but it was all too much for her and she ended up shouting through most of our Welsh-language (and music) classes, which meant I ended up learning no Welsh at all (or music).

In fact, I was so happy to stop Welsh classes when we moved back to England ten years later that I made a bonfire in our back garden and burnt all my Welsh books.

I finished my schooling at Hartford High School and Sir John Deane’s Sixth Form College in Northwich, Cheshire but I was not to hate all languages forever.

I like French much more…

My aunty, you see, was kind enough to marry a Frenchman, which means I have two French cousins, which led to holidays when I was a teenager (in Rouen and Dieppe) which meant I met French girls, which led to my love of languages and much later on to my degree, during which I lived in Nantes for six months.

Those first teenage trips to France were like voyages to another planet, and as my French improved I began to realise that there were some very different ways of seeing the world than those I had been used to.

At Sir John Deane’s Sixth Form College, we had a fantastic French teacher called Mrs. Rose – she was meticulous about note taking and precision and very, very dedicated to her pupils, always encouraging us and demanding we improve.

At university in Nantes, we studied the French version of Applied Linguistics and lots of translation; we even ended up doing simultaneous translation between French and Spanish, which messes with your head a little bit if your first language is English.

I have decided that I shall start producing this blog in French in 2012, as well as in English and Spanish (Read more about why here).

To be a soldier…

Considering a professional military career, I joined the British Territorial Army when I was seventeen years old to see what that might be like.

Two fine Cheshire Regiment officers—Majors Steven Murphy and Simon Bell—decided shortly after I joined that I too for some reason should become an officer, so at the age of nineteen I was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion as an infantry officer, after completing the short course at Sandhurst. Sandhurst’s motto—“Serve to lead”—has since seemed appropriate in more than one non-military setting.

This is a picture of me at Warminster after successfully completing my Platoon Commander’s Division course. They only passed 13 out of 42 of us, which was a very satisfying experience.

I was trained by lots of blokes who had just come back from—and kept going back to, in some cases—the war in Bosnia, where the Cheshire Regiment had provided the first British UN ‘peacekeepers’ as part of what the British called Operation Grapple and the United Nations called the UN Protection Force or UNPROFOR.

They said that most of the time there wasn’t much peace to keep but by all accounts—their own and press reports—they had done a very fine job in a very difficult, and very new, soldiering environment.

After four years, though, I decided I did not want to dedicate my life to fighting wars, although given everything that has happened since September 11, 2001, I have often wondered how different my life would almost certainly have been if I had decided to stay.

What to study…?

In no small part thanks to Simon Bell’s insistence that I study something, I ended up choosing to study for a degree in Modern Languages & Linguistics at the Manchester Metropolitan University, beginning in 1996 and graduating four years later with a 2.1 (Honours).

I chose to study French and Spanish. We learnt lots about translation, lots about French and Spanish literature and lots about the different varieties of linguistics.

Before beginning my degree in 1996, I spoke not a single word of Spanish, not even ‘hola’, something which was soon remedied, not only by the Spanish classes we were given but also by the discovery of that wonderful pan-European institution known as the ERASMUS programme.

Four years on a languages degree course, in three countries, gave us the chance to get to know an awful lot of foreign students from lots of different European countries.

I spent the third year abroad studying at the universities in Murcia (Spain) and Nantes (France) as well as the three months of the preceding summer teaching English to Spanish children in a wonderful little summer camp in a small village called Cervera de Pisuerga, tucked away in the northern Spanish mountains.

A small writing prize…

In my final year at university, I entered the annual national student copywriting competition organised by D&AD and The Guardian and—shockingly—won first prize, with a short story titled ‘Sad Black Bastard‘, which is about perceptions and immigration.

The judges said:

“The first prize winner was an excellent piece of writing worthy of any journalist or novelist. It was believable, moving, engaging and seamlessly constructed. The judges felt that it would motivate people to find out more about the issue and it was definitely right for The Guardian”.

Clearly this was both extremely flattering and surprising at the same time. A fine Spanish translation lecturer—Mike Crompton—helped me enormously by editing the text.

I didn’t think I wanted to be a copywriter at the time—I preferred the idea of writing about the world as a journalist and I knew by then that I didn’t want to be a soldier for the rest of my life—but this little writing prize was to take me on a much bigger adventure first…

Copywriting in Sweden…

Unbeknownst to me, my short story was displayed at an exhibition in London whilst I was spending a second summer with the kids at the summer camp in Cervera and travelling around Spain and Morocco.

It was seen by a Swedish guy called Magnus Andersson who was then the creative director of the Publicis advertising agency in Stockholm.

After I had returned from my summer travels, he phoned me one afternoon as I was about to go out for a run and invited me to lunch in London.

Over a succulent lamb curry somewhere near Hyde Park, he and Cecilia—Publicis’s chairwoman at the time—decided they believed in me enough to invite me to visit them in Stockholm the following week.

After a magnificent few days in the Swedish capital—sleeping on a hotel boat and enjoying their hospitality at the annual company crayfish party in a country house outside of the city—they offered me a job as a copywriter and I ended up living and working in Stockholm for six months.

I wrote texts in English and corrected translated Spanish copy for big corporate clients like Ericsson (mobile networks), Silja Line (Baltic Sea ferries), Fresenius Kabi (clinical nutrition) and UPM Kymmene (office paper).

I started learning Swedish, which I would love to take up again one day. At the start of September, I didn’t know any Swedish but by the end of March it was good enough to understand what people were saying in meetings and bars and to start to reply coherently.

It was a hard winter and very cold (-23ºC), but Stockholm is a very beautiful city. After six months, though, they decided it wasn’t a good idea for me to continue working there and sacked me.

I think I remember arguing with the clients a lot, which is clearly not something you’re supposed to do in business but I knew nothing about business or business relationships then: I was a creative type who spoke three languages, who had a degree in linguistics, who had just won a national student writing prize and who not two years earlier had been absolutely focused on a career adventuring around the world as a soldier—what were they going to tell me?

I wanted to be a journalist and write about the world. I cared not for business or money, and I had none to speak of. It mattered not: the important thing was to keep travelling and to keep trying.

A Journalism Master’s degree with El País…?

So I was to be a journalist somehow, but where should I begin?

I travelled back down to Murcia and spent a few months teaching English and working in a bar at weekends to earn some money.

One day, I discovered that the Spanish newspaper El País ran a prestigious Master’s Degree course in Journalism and decided to try and win a place.

I spent six months studying hard, as well as working both jobs, to get ready. I crammed Spanish current affairs, international news and Spanish language—(Grijelmo’s “Estilo del Periodista” is the best super-advanced, practical Spanish reference work I’ve ever come across, in case you’re wondering)—to get ready for the first test, which was to write an essay on what you thought about the Spanish press and why you wanted to do the course.

Some 300 aspirants sent in essays for this initial stage and 180 of us were selected for 3.5 days of tests and interviews in Madrid, which seemed a little excessive for a place on an advanced degree course, but when I got to Madrid that cold November in 2001, I discovered that people had travelled from all over the world—and especially from Latin American countries—just to try and win a place.

Coincidentally, just two months after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, we were being shown around the El País newsrooms when American Airlines flight 587 slammed into the ground in Queens, after taking off from JFK airport. We got to watch both the images live on the big-screen TVs they had and how the El País journalists started to react to the story. It was fascinating.

There were only 40 places available on the Master’s course and each was to be awarded on merit, so I was absolutely delighted to qualify in 14th place, the first English speaker to do so for twelve years, apparently.

The euforia lasted for about a week until I found out that no-one at all wanted to guarantee the loan I needed to pay for the course.

Extreme disappointment followed after so much hard work. If I’d have had the money myself, of course, I wouldn’t have needed either a loan or anyone to guarantee a loan. Over time, this led to me becoming much more interested in business.

Business journalism in Moscow…

I moved to Madrid anyway and even worked for a couple of days with the English edition of El País—after writing a letter to the editor telling her how badly translated some of her articles were—as well as doing some more teaching.

Later that year, I landed a job with a company called World Investment News which is based in Madrid, and they sent me to Moscow for three months in the winter of 2002 as a business journalist to help prepare a report about Moscow’s economy.

We interviewed lots of interesting Russian and expat businessmen. I particularly remember interviewing Boris Babayan—about his company Elbrus International—and the Mongolian ambassador to Moscow, who kindly invited us to tea and cakes in a traditional Mongolian yurt they had set up in the back garden of the embassy.

Culturally it was a fascinating three months and being winter it was, of course, extremely cold (down to -30ºC, even colder than Stockholm). I managed to learn a few interesting phrases in Russian, but there wasn’t really time to do more with all the work we were doing. Expat life in Moscow seemed to me to be a slightly more grown-up version of an ERASMUS trip, only everyone had more money and there were people from a wider range of countries.

It was fun living in the centre of Moscow, seeing Red Square from your window, going to banya every Sunday to work off your hangover, and soaking up all the history and the communist and Tsarist architecture. There were also some shocking levels of poverty to be seen on the streets and in the metro stations.

We returned to Madrid at Christmas and started to think about where the next project would take us, preparing plans for trips to Gambia, Slovakia, Poland, Mongolia and Cambodia, but two months were to pass before we found out what our new destination was to be, and a life–changing event was about to, well, change everything…

A terrible train crash in Tobarra…

After Christmas, on January 4th, 2003, I was involved in a terrible train accident here in Spain, in a village called Tobarra, as I travelled between Madrid and Murcia to attend a surprise party for a friend.

They found out later that the brake bar below the train had come loose and acted as lever between the train and the track, throwing the front carriages up and off the track into the darkness as we passed under a bridge. If it had happened 5 metres earlier, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

I was extremely lucky: the train split in two behind my seat and everyone forward of it was badly injured. Two women were killed. I was, I believe, the first person on the train not to be injured. There was one person between my seat and where the rest of the train had been: an older lady who was lucky enough to be in the lavatory at the moment of the crash. She broke her leg.

Apart from the obvious horror of that night and our feeble attempts to stop death and destruction, I tried to make the most of things by writing my first newspaper article in Spanish, for a regional newspaper here called La Opinión de Murcia. You can read the translation here:

There’s almost not enough time to be frightened. I think about my options. The train starts to come to a stop in great shuddering movements. I can hear the sound of metal grating against stone. That’s it, we’ve stopped. There is a moment of silence.

Then the screaming starts…

Changing plans…

Clearly, this experience was to prove a little challenging over the next few years, although it took me years to admit it to myself. Over the following months, I travelled again in all sorts of different types of transport—planes, cars, buses and, yes, trains—but it has never been quite as enjoyable again.

Two months after the crash, I was finally given a new project destination by World Investment News: Cambodia had won out over the other options for some reason, and the first interviews with the government ministers had been arranged, the hotels and flights booked. All I had to do was jump on the plane and enjoy the next trip.

Only I didn’t.

Let’s just say that in the final few days before leaving, there was a series of employment and contractual issues that needed to be dealt with before I would be getting on any planes. No-one dealt with them in time and a decision had to be made. So I resigned.

If I hadn’t been involved in the train crash two months earlier, doubtless I would have cared much less about those things than I actually did and I would have enjoyed a wonderful few months in Phnom Penh, but that’s life, I guess.

I decided to move back down to Murcia while I worked out what to do next.

Time to start working for myself

Strangely, perhaps, one of the sisters I had met in the rubble the night of the train crash was the chief lawyer at the local business director’s institute and one day she mentioned that every year they ran a 6-month start-up creation course.

This seemed like an excellent opportunity to take business and money a little more seriously, given that I still didn’t have any money and hadn’t learnt much about business, although there had definitely been progress compared with my attitude three years earlier.

I decided on a small project which I called MultiMediaStory.com: a website to tell stories using photos and sound and text all mashed together. Whilst working at World Investment News, I had seen some cool interactive report things made with Flash and I thought I could try and sell those to newspaper websites.

I ploughed all my time and energy into the new course without, of course, worrying overly about what was happening to my bank account in the meantime, and the idea was far too utopian to ever actually work.

So I ended up, again, with no money and spending another summer working in another bar – La Buena Vida here in Murcia (excellent wines, beers and an original menu, although the owner, a far better entrepreneur than I, recently closed it and moved to Madrid).

I managed to get a couple more articles published in a new regional business magazine, but that was no way to make a living.

What did seem to work as a business in Murcia, though, was something which a lot of people seemed to ask for help with: teaching them English and translating documents. So I started doing that and, in terms of finally making a bit more money, it started to work, although it didn’t really feel like what I really wanted to be doing.

One day in a shop near my home, I even saw the quote attributed to Gandhi about customer service displayed on the counter:

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.“

I thought that was a great quote. Perhaps I was starting to learn a thing or two about business and money…

Blogging fun

Around the same time, I ditched the ridiculous Flash ideas and started experimenting with blogs.

I set up three: multimediastory.com, about world affairs; doctorlingua.com, about learning languages; and thebigchorizo.com, which was all about Spain, but in English.

The one I enjoyed writing the most was Multimediastory.com, but the other two seemed to become more successful more quickly, so I concentrated on them after a few months.

TheBigChorizo.com in particular gained quite a lot of traction for a period of a couple of years, and I tried doing some advertising on it, but it only ever earned me a couple of hundred dollars in revenue. Which is better than nothing but, again, not enough to live and prosper on.

That left Doctorlingua.com, a blog about languages, an idea which dovetailed nicely with how my real-world business—teaching and translating—was coming along. And it was coming along very nicely indeed; so much so, in fact, that I didn’t have enough time to deal with all the clients and students.

My cousin asked me one day if I was thinking of turning it all into a company. I said I wasn’t entirely convinced…

Creating a company

…but that was the way things were going, so why not?

By the end of 2006, I had too many classes, too much to translate alone, I was starting to make much more money than I ever had done before, and I knew some teachers and translators who were looking for more work at the time.

So, after talking to a couple of friends who were thinking of becoming partners, I set up Doctorlingua SL as a limited company in January 2007.

The idea, as the slogan below the logo says, was to help companies find their “voice in a globalised world”—translating their documents and slowly teaching them how to speak and understand other languages.

For a while, it worked really well. We ended up, if I remember rightly, with 7 or 8 teachers and translators on different types of contract within a few short months.

We discovered new business opportunities which had remained hidden when I was doing it all by myself. I learnt how to do the accounting for a limited company, a huge step forward in financial literacy compared to my previous efforts.

More income followed more clients and students. The business itself started to grow.

But our internal management of the company was ultimately deficient.

 Breaking up a company…

Two years, two partners, seven employees, a hundred or so clients, 300 or so students and €100,000 later, it didn’t seem like such a good idea.

Our clients and students were very happy with the quality of the work we were doing with them but two perennial problems for small business—cash flow and internal disagreements—were enough to stop Doctorlingua before it really got going.

Our teachers were excellent teachers and our translators wonderful translators but between the partners in the company there was—almost from day one—continual strife over where we were going, what it was we were trying to do and who was going to be responsible for what.

We should have been more focused and I should have been clearer about planning and communicating our goals and strategies, as well as less permissive about certain financial decisions, especially concerning pricing.

So in January 2009, we decided to stop working on the project together and one of my former partners decided to try and take what was left of Doctorlingua and turn it into something new.

I started almost from scratch, with the backing of some of my long-term clients and students, and concentrate on what I could do for them best.

In the 6 years since the train crash, I had discovered the key question for making a business, any business, I think, work, is this:

How can you create the most value for the most people?

If you can make something that one person wants and is willing to pay you some amount of money for, you have a business. Then it’s just a question of scale and management. And sometimes thinking about scale and management highlights opportunities for everyone that weren’t visible at the start.

With all of the small business knowledge I had acquired since 2003, I started thinking again about what the most I could do for my clients and students would be, and how I could do more of that, with better quality, for even more people.

How could I make the most of the long-term knowledge I had of their lives, desires and habits—as clients, students and friends—to help them get to where they wanted to go, both professionally and personally?

It seemed difficult to ignore the internet and blogging if I wanted to answer that question properly, so I started to design a new blog—www.matthewbennett.es, the one you’re reading now—to help them learn as much English and Spanish as I could.

I started writing and translating everything into both languages. I started getting in touch with lots more people via Twitter and Facebook. I started blogging about translation and teaching more. People I’d never met started sending me translations and paying for them, all virtually, over the internet. I even ended up being quoted in a New York Times article about translation.

I came up with an idea to teach people English and Spanish, via my blog, by writing about the news in both languages and by producing vocabulary lists, audio recordings of the texts and grammar exercises to help them learn better. It started to work really well.

I ended up with about 800 people on the e-mail list, a couple of hundred people in the forum—who wrote in to say they really found that learning dynamic very useful—and even my real-world students congratulated me on the idea and said that they found it a great way of learning more too, by mixing their real-world behaviours with their virtual activities.

And then I read Gary Vaynerchuk’s book “Crush It!”

 Don’t forget what you’re all about

Crush it! is a book which is all about blogging and business, and the opportunities we have nowadays that we didn’t have even 5 years ago, opportunities that have arisen thanks to the way the Internet and social media have evolved.

As I was reading the book, I had one of those nagging gut feelings that just wouldn’t go away: there was a question in there that I needed to answer more honestly, and it wasn’t really about blogging.

I felt like I already knew about and identified with most of what he was saying—and that I was already doing a lot of it with my blogging too—but one question kept gnawing away at me as I turned the pages: is the thing you think is your passion really your passion in life?

Are you working and building your business in the right area of life? Is what you’re doing—or have been doing—really what you’re supposed to be focusing on if you have the luxury of choosing?

I knew as I was reading that the answer for me was not “teaching and translation”, not as the focus of it all.

But if not “teaching and translation”, then what? Perhaps if you have read this far you can guess.

It was certainly obvious enough for my students and readers. They laughed and said: “Of course that’s what you should be doing!” when I explained. They even said I was basically already doing it anyway, but disguising it as “teaching”.

Teaching and translation, blogging and business building are, for most people, skills; for most people, they are not the area of life they should be concentrating on;

I also discovered that, once you start thinking about it for your friends, for the people you know well, it’s ridiculously easy to spot theirs.

The thing I should be concentrating on, the topic all my students could see and I couldn’t, even though it was right in front of my nose, was “current affairs and thinking about the world“. The idea that had motivated me on my travels all along, and that had got sidetracked following the train crash in 2003.

Or perhaps it had taken a detour as I had, after all, finally learnt some valuable business skills to make life work a little better.

So that’s what I needed to get back to doing as soon as possible. The question was: would I?

 Yes, I would, and here we are, loyal reader…

Obviously, I think you can’t ignore thoughts and signs like that in life, so here we are, 8 months later.

That, loyal reader, is how I got to this point in life and how I ended up working so much on this blog project. That is why I have invested so much time and effort on it. I think it’s the best way that I can add as much value to the lives of as many people around the world as possible.

By thinking about, and making you think about, how our world works. From as many different perspectives as possible, by using as many different languages as possible, by observing as much of the “great story” of our world as possible, and by thinking about how it’s unfolding before our very eyes.

You can read exactly how I’m trying to do that with this blog on the following page: “about my blog: how it works”.

You can read more about my general ideas on what it’s important for us to be thinking about and why, on this page: think better about your world.

You can read about how I think we can make this a sustainable blogging model for all of us on the subscribe page.

And if you have any questions, or would just like to say hello, you can contact me here.

Thank you for your time and attention. I hope you will continue to read what I write. And I hope it makes you think.