Like many kids, I grew up dreaming of playing for my favourite sports team. In my case, that was Liverpool Football Club. Admittedly, I started supporting Liverpool in the early 1980s because it was the best team at the time – so you can call me a glory supporter if you like – but I still supported my local club, Farnborough, and went to some of their games. I remember watching them play West Ham in the 1992 FA Cup. However, they were a non-league team so you can forgive a young boy for wanting to cheer on a team that played more games and had a good chance of bringing home some decent silverware!

And I've been loyal to Liverpool through all our ups and downs. It's been quite a ride; I was a teenager the last time we won the league! We came painfully close in 2019, finishing second to Man City by one point! The frustration of this was somewhat lessened by beating Spurs to take our sixth Champions League title in June 2019, a few weeks after the end of the season.

I can't remember exactly when I started supporting Liverpool – I know that my best friend growing up supported them, too, so that must have been a factor – but the game that really sticks out in my mind as the one that cemented my support was the FA Cup quarter final in March 1985 when we beat Barnsley 4-0. Even though I was watching the game on TV, I'd be dressed in my full kit with my scarf, shirt and badges. Every game I'd stand in front of the TV waving my flag and cheering. I'd get my friends over and we'd be glued to the screen. Every game was a huge event for us. There is supporting and then there is supporting… when you get serious, and you become completely embedded rather than just interested. It can turn into an obsession, as anyone who is a football fan, or knows a football fan, will tell you!

The year 1985 also turned out to be a very traumatic year for football. Only a couple of months after I watched that momentous FA Cup game, on 11 May 1985, fire engulfed a stand at Bradford City's Valley Parade Stadium during a game between the club and Lincoln City, killing 56 people. Then, on 29 May, at Heysel stadium in Belgium, a riot broke out between Liverpool and Juventus fans before the start of that European Cup Final, and 39 people died in the ensuing crush. I was approaching my 10th birthday and was just at that age when you start being affected by death.

Both tragedies, along with the subsequent Hillsborough disaster in 1989 – in which 96 Liverpool fans died as a result of overcrowding in the Leppings Lane stand after too many people were allowed to enter – led to significant improvements in safety at football matches. Wooden stands were banned and all-seater stadiums were introduced. Policing at football matches today is so powerful you wouldn't hesitate to take small children to games (as long as you covered their ears to protect them from the foul language!) Being a child of the 1980s, I feel like I've gone on a real journey with English football. That also creates quite an emotional attachment to the game.

So, it was with visions of playing alongside the likes of Ian Rush and Kenny Dalglish that I dribbled my ball around my local park and headed goals between a couple of duffle coats acting as goal posts on the muddy grass. Somewhere in my 9-year-old heart I believed I would, one day, walk out onto the pitch at Anfield and play for the Mighty Reds. And guess what? Just 33 short years later, my dream came true!

I remember every second of the moments that led up to what felt like my “Steven Gerrard” moment. If you're a fan, you may remember the belter he hit from several yards outside of the area against Olympiakos in 2004, a crucial goal that Gerrard scored in the final few minutes that we needed in order to go through to the next round of the Champions League competition that year, which we finally won in Istanbul (much more of which later!)

When I played at Anfield, my moment came quite early on in the game, which was useful as my 42-year-old legs tended to tire more rapidly than my 9-year-old legs did. The ball came to me around the halfway line. I received it knowing I had a defender on my back, but I did a nifty Cruyff turn (a move where you pretend to be about to strike the ball but then twist your body at the last minute to trick the defender – made famous by Dutch footballer, Johan Cruyff, in the 1970s). Having secured possession of the ball, I left that defender standing and bewildered, and drove the ball forward from midfield. Suddenly, I saw a second defender running towards me. I expertly dropped my left shoulder and took the ball to the right-hand side, dodging past him. A third defender was soon on my right, but I outran him and soon I was in roughly the same position as Gerrard was in when he took that shot in 2004. I suddenly visualized the moments after the goal when I'd be sliding towards the Kop stand on my knees, having done two somersaults, with my shirt over my head, soaking in the roar of the adoring crowd.

Back in the present moment, I pulled my right leg back and struck the ball… which bounced a couple of times and then dribbled, slowly forward, straight into the hands of the goalie who had waited patiently for it to reach him. My frustration was off the charts. I couldn't believe it. Basically, I hadn't connected cleanly with the ball; I'd scraped the top of it and had sort of shunted it forward awkwardly with absolutely no power behind it.

The 12 people in the Kop stand applauded my effort. But I could hear the sympathy in every clap!

My “Failed Steven Gerrard Moment” (as it shall now be known) was actually just a small blip in an otherwise fantastic day; a memory I'll treasure forever.

The opportunity came about because my company does a lot of business with the life insurance company, Vitality, who happen to be big sponsors of Liverpool Football Club. Although mortgages are the main part of our business, we do arrange life insurance policies, too. It's very well known in my industry that I'm a huge Liverpool supporter. I'm constantly posting my club's achievements on social media. In fact, there's a running joke that I only hire people who support the club (just because two of my senior managers, who I assure you were hired purely on the strength of their abilities, also happen to be fans).

In November 2015, I was invited to go and watch Liverpool play Bordeaux in the Europa League. I could have taken the train… or Easy Jet… but there was a space for me on the players' private plane. Now, I'm a well-established businessman and I've had some nice perks over the course of my professional life, but this was, literally, in a whole new league. I was like a kid in a candy store. I've quite comfortably spoken in front of audiences of thousands, but in the presence of these players I worshipped, I was a nervous mess, I was so star-struck. I got to watch the squad in training when we arrived in Bordeaux. Then there was the game, which was brilliant, and afterwards there was a book and shirt signing when the players came and talked to the 15 of us who were guests of Vitality. That evening we stayed in a nice hotel with some of the other sponsors and the Liverpool officials. Kenny Dalglish came and had a drink with us. I talked to him for a few minutes, and even though I didn't understand a word he was saying (if you've never heard him talk, he has an exceptionally strong Scottish accent), I hung on his every word. The next day we went on a lovely river cruise before catching the private plane back to the UK.

Another treat came in 2017 when Vitality invited me to the LFC Players’ Awards. It was an incredible event, and the following year I really wanted to share the experience with my family (Samantha, Hayden and Ryan), my two senior managers who were fellow fans, and four industry leaders I invited, and so – at great expense, I must confess – I bought a whole table at the event and sponsored an award, specifically the “Best Supporters Club” award, which went to a group from New South Wales, Australia. One of the women who ran the club flew all the way to the UK to pick up the award. She was obviously ecstatic. It was an incredible night; I got to meet our great manager, Jürgen Klopp, and most of the first 11, including one of our top goal scorers of the season, Sadio Mané, who I'd particularly enjoyed watching.

When a few weeks later, in May 2018, one of the directors of Vitality called to ask if I'd like to play at a special event at Anfield, I couldn't believe it. I jumped at the chance.

I was very excited to meet my team's manager for the event, John Aldridge; I'd watched him score many of the best Liverpool goals of the 1980s. He came into the dressing room and gave us our team talk, getting us all pumped up. We were in the home team's locker room and I changed at Mo Salah's locker. It was quite surreal.

When we were ready, we walked out onto the pitch to the sounds of our team anthem, You'll Never Walk Alone, and I touched the famous “This Is Anfield” sign.

The first thing I noticed when we got out onto the pitch was how immaculate it is. It's certainly nothing like the rough mud and turf that your average British kid plays on of a Sunday. This was like a beautiful, lush green carpet. It's no hardship kissing that turf, which I did, as well as sitting in Klopp's chair in the dugout for a moment.

As we warmed up and awaited the starting whistle, I got quite nervous, not least about my fitness. At 42, you can pull a hamstring just thinking about running. I briefly closed my eyes and imagined the stadium was full. There were quite a few friends and family members supporting us, including all my family (I was so proud to play in front of my wife and sons), but they hardly touched the sides of the 54,000-seater stadium.

As the game got underway, John Aldridge was soon barking orders at me. He could see I was a fast runner so he moved me onto the right wing, which meant I was expected to run the full length of the pitch. As Aldridge was shouting at me to run back when I was all the way forward, I had a moment when the head said, “go!” and the body said “NO!”

We played a total of 45 minutes (2 games of 25 minutes in a “round robin” tournament of 4 teams), and even though my body ached for a few days after, it was worth every muscle spasm. It was a fantastic day.

The crucial lesson to take away from my experience is that your dreams can come true. They might not look exactly how you imagined – so allow them some flexibility – but never say “It can never happen!”

At the end of the day, I'd rather fail to score a goal at Anfield, but to get to play on that famous pitch in front of my family, managed by one of my childhood footballing heroes, than shoot an absolute screamer of a goal in the local park with no one watching. And that shows you that everything in life is relative; every experience can be framed and weighed up in different ways. Sometimes you have to adjust your perspective to look at the positives and privileges of an experience. I could have said, “What a terrible day, the day I got to play at Anfield and didn't score the perfect goal.” But I said, “What an extraordinary privilege to play in the football ground of the team I've loved all my life. What an incredible, treasured memory.” And it's never really ended; I can replay the whole day in my mind any time I want.

That experience gives me the opportunity to show you how, no matter what you achieve in life, no matter how old you get, you can still learn new lessons. That one taught me that you can always achieve something you dream of – in one way or another!

My purpose, in writing this book, is to share with you some of the most important lessons I've learned in my life: the principles that I hold dear and try to live by every day. You might find them useful to apply in your life, too. I think they can be useful to everyone, regardless of their stage or path in life. Each of us has a unique path in life. The experiences I've had will be different – in the specifics – from your experiences; but I do believe there are some universal tenets that we could all live by, the most important of which I have outlined in this book. You might have some really useful principles that you've deduced from your experiences. If so, I hope you take the opportunity to share them, too. I know there are many similar books with similar stories, but until we are all living perfect lives and are completely content… there is always more to learn.

Whatever you do in life, whatever you hope to do in life, I believe you can apply these principles. They are not the only ones, the definitive list; they are just the ones that I have found to be most useful, and fundamental to my ongoing success in both my personal and professional pursuits.

Ultimately, I have written down the advice that is a legacy to the way my wonderful parents raised me, and that I want to pass on to my children. I hope it is of use to you, too.

In order to put my life lessons into context, I am first going to share with you a brief history of my life so far, including an overview of my family background. Next, I'll share my principles in life, along with the stories that helped me come to them. Then I'll go into my role as a boss and what I believe you need in order to build a loyal team. I'll even bravely share some of the feedback from my team when they were recently interviewed and asked what they thought of me! Finally, I'll outline my hopes and dreams for the future, and finish up with an epilogue about why I wrote this book in the first place.

I hope this book is entertaining and useful. Writing it has certainly been yet another huge experience and life lesson for me.