I Spent 39 Years Collecting the Data. Now I Become the Experiment.

The Money Machine

As a child growing up in Sri Lanka, I never had a perfectly designed version of the man I wanted to become. What I had was an enormous desire to find him. I wanted to explore life, experience the world and discover what I was capable of becoming. I wanted knowledge, money, businesses, interesting people, difficult conversations, beautiful places, intellectual stimulation and freedom. So I left Sri Lanka and came to the United Kingdom and began living the life I had imagined as a child. I chased money relentlessly and knowledge just as relentlessly. I built things, lost things, changed industries, met extraordinary people, made mistakes and kept moving. Underneath all of it was the same fascination: if I explored enough of life, perhaps I would discover who I really wanted to be.

Somewhere along the way, people started calling me a “money machine.” I loved it, and there was a reason for the name. I had developed a habit of turning ways of making money into patterns. When something worked, I wanted to understand why, break it down into a process, repeat it and see how far I could take it. An opportunity became a method, a method became a process, and a process could create another opportunity. Quite often, it worked remarkably well. My ambitions eventually grew beyond making the next amount of money. I developed a 25-year corporate vision to build across education, energy and finance, a vision I continue pursuing today. I studied formally, but much of my education came through businesses, negotiations, relationships, successes, failures and starting again. I didn’t realise it then, but all of it was giving me something I would value much more later: information about money, people, the world and myself.

Two Lives, One Person

Then life took me into another world entirely when I was arrested over allegations of money laundering. That sentence takes seconds to write, but what started that day is still part of my life almost nine years later. While one side of my life has moved through investigations, lawyers and eventually a serious criminal prosecution, the other side has never stopped. I continued building businesses, making money, losing money, developing networks, studying, negotiating, experimenting, failing and rebuilding. My 25-year corporate vision survived the arrest, the charge, financial losses and the trial, and it continues today.

For years, I have therefore been living two very different realities at the same time. In one, I have been building towards the future I chose for myself; in the other, I have been fighting for my freedom. That combination has allowed me to see myself under completely different conditions. I have seen myself when money was flowing and when it wasn’t, when I felt commercially powerful and when circumstances were outside my control, when relationships were strong and when they changed, and when I was building with confidence compared with periods when years of uncertainty affected the way I thought. I began to notice not only what remained constant in me, but what changed.

Years after my arrest, I was formally charged—an allegation I have always contested—and the trial came approximately two and a half years later. By then, almost nine years had passed since my arrest. I hadn’t spent those years simply waiting for court; I had been living, building, losing, learning and starting again while the case remained in the background. Then the trial arrived, and for almost three months my world became unusually focused. After years of my attention moving between companies, money, people, opportunities, problems and the case, suddenly there was one courtroom, one case and one problem in front of me. Strangely, I became incredibly calm. A few weeks ago, the jury was unable to reach a verdict, so the battle continues. But I came out of those three months seeing the last nine years differently. I had accumulated an enormous amount of information about myself—how I think, how I behave, what pressure changes in me, what it doesn’t change, and what happens to the same person as money, ambition, uncertainty, relationships, success, loss and the possibility of losing freedom move around him.

Looking at Everything Differently

At 39, I now find myself in an unusual position. I can stand some distance away from almost two decades of my own life and look at what happened without feeling the need to celebrate every success, defend every mistake or immediately fight every battle again. I feel remarkably calm. There is something almost monastic about it. I can look at the businesses, money, relationships, decisions, successes, failures, arguments, mistakes and memories and ask much simpler questions: What worked? What didn’t? What made me better? What made me money but made my life worse? What made me happy? What made me powerful but less peaceful? Which parts of me helped create the life I wanted, and which parts repeatedly pulled me away from it?

Underneath all of those questions is something much bigger: what kind of human being do I actually want to become now? I don’t think we were given this extraordinary biological mechanism simply to accumulate as much as possible before it eventually stops working. We can think, love, create, experience beauty, build relationships, feel curiosity, excitement and peace. We can change our minds and our behaviour and, to some extent, consciously participate in changing ourselves. Money remains enormously important to me. I love creating it, understanding it and watching how it moves through people and businesses. I am still building companies and pursuing the same long-term corporate vision, but money is one component of a much larger life.

For years, I became very good at finding patterns outside myself. I asked what produced money, why one business worked while another didn’t and why some opportunities multiplied. When I found a pattern that worked, I learned how to repeat it. Now I find myself asking a much more interesting question: what are the patterns that repeatedly produce me?

The Human Experiment

That question is taking me beyond money and economics and towards biology. Every business I built, every financial decision I made, every risk I took, every period of confidence and every period of uncertainty had one thing in common: the biological system making those decisions—me. I now want to understand the neural pathways underneath my repeated behaviours and the nervous system underneath the life I create. I want to understand how years of ambition, reward, uncertainty, conflict, loss and rebuilding have shaped that system, and then decide which patterns deserve to travel with me into the next phase of my life and which ones I can consciously rewrite.

This is what I mean by The Human Experiment. My first 39 years gave me the information; now I become the experiment. This isn’t about becoming less ambitious, less competitive or less capable. I am still building companies, pursuing knowledge, attracted to money and willing to fight when something genuinely deserves to be fought for. What I no longer want is for intensity to be the price of ambition. I want to know whether I can retain the hunger while changing the state from which that hunger operates: whether I can remain ambitious and become calmer, remain commercially sharp and become more peaceful, and remain capable of fighting without needing life itself to feel like a fight.

Perhaps this is a second birth for me—not becoming someone completely different, but taking everything the first version of me discovered, keeping what deserves to survive and consciously rewriting what doesn’t. When I was younger, I explored the world because I wanted to discover who I could become. Now I want to discover how consciously I can become him. And I don’t particularly want to explore that alone. I want to do it alongside people who are equally curious about what they can become—people who want to share knowledge, build things, make money, challenge themselves, learn from their mistakes and perhaps help each other see things we cannot see alone. Because perhaps the real joy of exploring life is exploring it together.

For years, I learned to recognise and patternise the processes around me. Now I want to understand—and where necessary rewrite—the patterns within me. The Money Machine gave me the information. The Human Experiment starts here.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I hope our paths cross again.

Hasitha Rodrigo