Ch. 1free to read
What's Your Dream?
What It’s About
What would you do if money was no object? Entrepreneur Simon Squibb, the man behind the viral street interviews of the same question, distills two decades of building businesses into a practical playbook for finding and building toward your real dream. Direct, urgent, and refreshingly free of corporate hedge-talk.
Three Key Ideas
Dreams Bend, Goals Break
A dream is elastic enough to survive setbacks and bad years, while rigid goals collapse under pressure and get quietly abandoned.
Three Questions to Surface Your Dream
Asking what you like, what pain shaped you, and how you can help others reveals a purpose grounded in lived experience, not wishful thinking.
Stop Selling Time, Start Buying It
Employees trade hours for a salary with a ceiling, while entrepreneurs sell outcomes and build toward owning their schedule and output.
Read a Sample
What's Your Dream? Simon Squibb (2025)
---
The doorbell on the staircase to nowhere
There's a building in Twickenham that shouldn't exist. It's four stories of gray concrete, four narrow windows wide, the orphan of a demolished apartment block. No address, no mailbox, no real reason to be standing. When Simon Squibb heard on the radio that a redundant staircase was going up for auction, he stopped what he was doing and started bidding. He paid thirty-four thousand pounds for it. People in the auction room laughed. Within minutes the BBC and the New York Times were calling to ask why anyone would buy the ugliest building in Twickenham.
He bought it because of a memory. When he was fifteen, his father had died of a heart attack in front of him. His mother had told him to leave home in a fight neither of them knew how to take back, and he'd spent winter nights walking up and down the main street of St. Neots to keep warm. One night he found a fire exit door ajar. He crept inside, wrapped himself in his coat, and slept on the stairs. A staircase to nowhere had once been his sanctuary. Now he wanted to turn another one into a doorbell.
Who It’s For
- Anyone who has a side project saved in their phone but has never told anyone about it.
- Anyone who feels stuck in a salaried job that pays the bills but costs them their energy.
- Anyone who has talked themselves out of a big life change because the timing never feels right.
- Anyone who wants practical, direct advice on moving from a vague dream to a first paying customer.
About the Author: Simon Squibb
Simon Squibb is a British serial entrepreneur who has built nineteen businesses across three decades. He grew up in Cambridgeshire, was effectively orphaned at fifteen, and started his first company, a gardening business, with nothing but a deposit talked out of his first customer. He later moved to Hong Kong, co-founded a creative agency called Fluid with designer Helen Griffiths, and grew it into a firm serving clients including Fortune magazine, Estee Lauder, and CNN before selling it to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
After retiring at forty and finding it unbearable within a week, Squibb started a podcast and then began stopping strangers in public to ask them a single question: what is your dream? Those videos grew his audience past five million followers on TikTok and Instagram. He now runs HelpBnk, a free platform aimed at helping ten million people start a business. This is his first book.
