You Should Run Your Own Game
From a Conversation with Athan Didaskalou, co-founder of July
Run your own game
There is a moment Athan Didaskalou had almost forgotten until we asked him about it.
He was seventeen, a media assignment was due, and his laptop had just failed. A teacher looked at him and said the plainest possible thing, “I have to fail you”.
Athan walked to the school bathrooms and stood there with what he now knew was an anxiety attack, certain he had wasted something he could never get back.
For years afterwards, the score he finished Year 12 with was a sore point his family simply stopped mentioning. It was the first thing he told us when we sat down together, and it is worth sitting with, because most of us recognise that feeling even if the details differ.
Here is the part that matters: The boy in that bathroom went on to run a charcoal chicken shop, study marketing at RMIT, spend five years at one of the country’s biggest advertising agencies, build Australia’s largest online coffee retailer almost by accident, start a co-working space, and then co-found July, the luggage brand, the week after his first child was born and about a year before a pandemic shut down travel worldwide.
None of it was planned in a straight line.
When we asked him how he kept moving, he reached for an image anyone who has driven in Melbourne will understand. You can sit on the main road on the right path and go nowhere, he said, or you can take the side streets. It might take twice as long, but you are moving, and you feel like you are getting somewhere.
The idea that runs through everything Athan said is deceptively simple. Stop measuring yourself against a scoreboard someone else set, and start running your own game. He traces it back, with real honesty, to the first time he was ever ranked.
For most young people, Year 12 is exactly that: the first time a number gets attached to your name and you are sorted against everyone else.
Unless you grew up doing competitive sport, you have probably never been ranked before, and you are certainly not ready for how it feels.
Athan’s response, once he understood it, was to choose a life that could not be neatly compared. The clearest example he gave us was almost funny in its smallness. He does not own a car. He has ridden the same Vespa scooter for nearly twenty years, because it never costs much, it always looks good, and there is simply no one to measure himself against. No Volkswagen, no Land Rover, no benchmark. Just his own game.
What gives this its weight is that running your own game is not the same as opting out.
Athan is one of the most hands-on people you could meet, and when we asked what skill has mattered most across all those ventures, he did not hesitate…”Get your hands dirty.” He learned more from a year of work experience folded into his degree than from anything theoretical, and it is the first thing he looks for in anyone he hires now.
For a young person who feels stuck in classrooms reading about the world rather than touching it, his advice is unglamorous and completely doable. Carve out the time, and then ask. Volunteer somewhere. Take on a small project. Send the email. He is living proof of the last one, because a single message is how a well-known guest ended up on a podcast like ours.
As we often say in my family, it is always no unless you ask. You are guaranteed to miss every shot you never take. Right?
There was a thread that surprised us, and it is one parents will want to hear.
Athan is quietly brilliant at selling, and he means something very particular by that word.
Not the pushy kind, not the loud kind he failed at in a Microsoft interview years ago, but the ability to tell someone clearly and warmly why an idea is worth their time. Selling, in his hands, is really just storytelling and connection. It is a skill you can build anywhere, and it is one schools rarely name out loud, even though it shapes whether a young person can walk into a room and make their case for themselves.
If the conversation had a turn, a point where it moved from the sting of a score toward something gentler, it came when Athan talked about his parents.
He was never judged for any of the strange, risky things he tried. The support was not loud or full of praise; it was something steadier, a refusal to criticise, a willingness to stay curious, and a quiet habit of making the time and connecting him to the right person.
He told us about ringing his dad from a shopping centre car park, prompted by a radio host who suggested calling the person you respect most simply to tell them why. That one phone call changed their relationship for good.
These are not small stories…they are the whole point. The score was never the thing that carried any of us. The people were.
That is the relief Athan keeps coming back to, and it is why he frames so much of his thinking around what he calls his thirty thousand days.
You get the first ten thousand to find yourself, the next ten thousand to build something, and the last to slow down.
Most people, he says, do very little before thirty, and that is not a failure; it is just the shape of real life. All the best people he knows found themselves later, which means changing direction at forty or fifty or sixty is not risky at all.
It is brave.
His own mum has started from zero again and again, as a shoemaker, a dressmaker, a cake maker, each time happy to know nothing and learn.
Knowing nothing is okay, he said, and you could feel a generation of pressure lift slightly as he said it.
We will leave you with the line he offered for the parents listening, because it holds everything we believe at More Than a Score:
Support always. It is not the end of the world, and he is the testament to that.
There is more than one pathway out there, and a young person who feels behind today may be on a side street, still moving, still getting somewhere.
You are more than a score, and there is no one path.
If this is the kind of conversation you want more of, subscribe to the More Than a Score here to get our newest episode, article, or resource straight to you.
And if a parent or a young person you know needs to hear that a wobbly start is not a wasted life, send this to them. It might be the thing that helps them keep moving.
Dan
More Than a Score Co-Host
Dan Steele is a former educator, award-winning school leader, and co-host of More Than a Score, the podcast for parents, young people, and educators rethinking what success actually means.