My real name is Benjamin Robert Wallington,

Not sure why I needed such a long English name considering I’m approximately 57% Aussie bogan.

I prefer Benny and in 2014, I found myself in South London learning in a church.

In the basement of the church was a bar.

In the middle was a chapel.

Up the top, a radical loft space.

Here, I was studying advertising and entrepreneurship.

One day a man came in to speak about another man.

The second man was Howard Luck Gossage:

A humble warrior in the advertising industry

who’d had an epiphany.

"Fuck selling Coca-cola, the world needs my brain for something better."

Paraphrasing there ;)

'Fuck yeah' I thought.

I'd done my fair share of selling sugary drinks to kids and working for big shitty banks

so I ditched the Ad industry and joined a start-up raising money for projects the world needed.

I cut my teeth on campaigns for animal conservation, disabled athletes, homelessness and rare diseases.

Ohhh.
And there’s one thing I forgot to mention...

I loved to party*.

From 15- 29, Drinking was the other 43% of my personality.

Drinking raged into the night with Bogan.

They were fun, funny but also

sometimes

down-right fucked.

Maybe you can relate...

So at 29.25 years old,

when I found myself out of the job I loved and floundering

to get a charity project with a professional football club off the ground.

Life was in a spiral.

And you know how drinking 4-5 nights a week is OK, til it's not?

I was unfit,

wrecking relationships

and about to ruin a dream of mine,

to work with a Premier League football club.

My epiphany:

I didn't want to relinquish one of my favourite habits,

but it needed to change.

I'd told myself I was going to change before...

But you always say that when you're hung over.

So I invented 101 Beer Tokens.

Now called The Token Game.

The long and short of it was...

Every time I’d drink alcohol I asked myself the next day ‘was it worth it?’

Over the last nine+ years this little question

has helped people in 76 different countries change their relationship to booze

while increaseiong their vitality (some call it Vicetality - mostly me)

We've had over 100,000 Tokens entered into our app.

The app + coaching folks through their transformation

has saved, jobs, relationships and even lives.

The whole "live your best life, life design" movement is lame and boring,

but I'm definitely into asking the question,

How do we unlock the hidden potential in our vices.

That's Exciting and Fun (Frothy) to me.

This question was further explored when graduating with Distinction as a Peak Performance Coach

with the Flow Genome Project going on to facilitating workshops

for the likes of Adobe, Ogilvy and even top execs at Brown Forman (Jack Daniels).

Turns out people and brands are slowly getting interested in this Vicetality / Vice Optimisation thing.

And YES I believe you can change your relationship to alcohol

so much so that it becomes a positive in your life.

My partner doesn't drink much and there is no way I would be with her with the old Benny.

But I still love going to a brewery with the boys and sending it at a festival every now and then.

A friend of a friend (convenient for stories), 40 years old, almost died of cancer.

He'd been living the healthy puritan life and let go of all the fun stuff.

When he came through remission, he said 'I would have been so pissed if I'd died after my last ten years cutting out everything I loved.'

And it's not about going back to our teenager years and getting belted for 3 days straight.

Our bodies don't do that anymore.

It's about being selective hedonists and desiging a life that has all the good stuff in it

as well as the health, success and rad relationships.

So if you're interested in learning more, I've been practicing this Vice Optimisation stuff for creeping up to a decade. I've made some mega mistakes but also learnt a thing or 50.

If you've read this and you want to share what's going on with you, I offer a 30minute exploration call

or email me at benny@101tokens.com

Cheers (literally),

Benny

PS. I have a Now page which is about all the stuff I'm doing now, pending when I update it.