The 2000s opened with what looked, from the outside, like success.

I was back in Adelaide, this time not as a young bloke trying to find a foothold, but as someone consolidating a small but growing enterprise. We were no longer simply surviving from role to role; we had something that looked like a business, with clients, reputation, and the sense that if we kept pushing, it might become something substantial.

Then we did what I’ve always done when things stabilise: we moved.

We went to Brunswick Heads on the New South Wales coast – a long way physically and mentally from the Riverland and Port Augusta. It made sense at the time: there were new opportunities on the east coast, and it brought us closer to my partner’s family. On paper, it was strategy. In reality, it was also temperament. I’m not very good at staying put when things feel settled.

From Brunswick, we shifted again, just down the road to Ocean Shores, effectively living next door to my partner’s family. By then I was travelling constantly: up and down the east coast, over to New Zealand, and across to South Asia. Airports and boarding passes became part of the furniture. Home became a place you returned to between trips rather than a stable base.

We had in Townsville, a second home condominium in the middle of an expanding enterprise. It was a good vantage point: close to the airport, in the tropics, with work that stretched across multiple states and into other countries. It felt, for a while, like I’d finally managed to combine movement, work and income into something that resembled a coherent life.

Then came Slovakia.

Through a set of connections and conversations that would sound improbable if you tried to write them as fiction, a proposal emerged: set up services in their home country, in central Europe. It sounded adventurous, challenging and – crucially – possible. I said yes.

For a few years, I lived what a lot of people imagine when they think of the “global consultant” life. There were flights to Vienna, Bratislava and beyond, meetings in high-rise buildings, long drives across borders, and days spent working in places I couldn’t have found on a map ten years earlier. It was exciting, confusing and occasionally absurd.

And then, like a lot of brave expansions, it came to not very much.

We ended up selling the enterprise we’d built in Europe back to the very people we’d partnered with. The great adventure quietly ended. It didn’t collapse in a dramatic heap; it just failed to become what we’d hoped. On a CV you could spin this as “international experience”; in reality, it was a hard reminder that not every bold move pays off.

Parallel to the European experiment, I picked up work in India – scoping hospitals and private medical clinics with links to international education and training. It was a mixture of health, education and business, run on tight timelines in crowded cities where the traffic alone felt like a full-time job. The roles were always time-limited, never designed to turn into a permanent posting.

There was similar work in Sri Lanka: an initial scoping job for a vocational training group that grew into a wider client base and feasibility studies. I went back multiple times over several years. Sri Lanka became one of those places that built up in layers: first the novelty, then the familiarity, then the quiet recognition that you’re seeing the same structural problems from new angles.

Along the way there were side trips and false starts: Shanghai for a proposed tertiary education partnership that never quite gelled; multiple stopovers in Singapore whenever I could manage it, because by then Singapore had become a kind of second home base in my head.

If the 1990s were the years of “stepping up”, the 2000s were the “stepping out” years – headlong and headstrong. Progress, adventure, chaos, and the slow accumulation of consequences that would catch up with me in the next decade.