Thoughts - Autumn 2025

• Makers and Caretakers are probably the two most satisfying human occupations. Makers create something and put it out into the world for others to enjoy (e.g. artists, entrepreneurs, construction workers, architects), and Caretakers spend their time directly helping people (nurses, doctors, firemen, teachers). My belief is that the further you are removed from directly impacting others or putting something back into the collective pool that is the world, the more soulless your occupation feels (the rest of the corporate world, for example).

• Learning how to actually make things work is the hard skill that compounds most steeply. Most people shy away from actually *doing* it. They might still make money or hustle their way into a positive outcome, but they will never have developed the toolkit. The person who has learned the skill will come out of the experience 100x more dangerous, so that even if this project doesn’t work they are much more likely to succeed next time. Think of it as the person who learned the material for the quiz vs the person who cheated and got a good grade. It pays to actually learn the thing.

• The few fundamental things that matter often stay the same, in spite of all the noise. Those who know me know that I am prone to looking around and feeling a sense of FOMO in the face of the boundless opportunities of this world, but amusingly I have discovered over time that the really special things are still rare and worth concentrating your attention on.

• Finding flow is a muscle. It is easy to waste a lot of time being unfocused, but if you force yourself to do a flow-inducing activity for just a few minutes you will find yourself in that pleasant, warm stream again. Writing does this for me, and yet I often find myself avoiding it and watching YouTube instead. There are probably very useful products to be built around this.

• As Buffett says, “The trick is, when there is nothing to do, do nothing.” There are times when there is nothing to do, and there are times when there is a whole lot to do. Resources are always limited no matter what scale you are at, and I have found that doing things in waves of action followed by tranquility followed by action is an effective strategy.

• Better than forcing people to work hard is to have them be genuinely excited about what they do to the point of forgetting that it is work. In a perfect setup, there is no distinction between the two. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

• If you’re not feeling some fear, you’re probably not pushing yourself enough. You have to take yourself to the edge, to the point of feeling real vertigo, to understand what you are actually capable of. In that light, anxiety and stress can be reframed as good forces which you can learn to control.

• Authenticity is felt in the air around you. It is something that everyone in the world viscerally responds to. Works of genius are those that came from the heart, with no pretense. A sincere, warm smile will always thaw the heart. When people start overthinking or doing things for effect, the very smart human subconscious feels it even if the rational mind didn’t quite detect it. The more of yourself you give / put back, the more the universe responds.

• When you are uninspired, just produce. Doesn’t matter how bad it is. Quantity leads to quality. Do more, be more prolific and the genius will show itself. Forward motion solves almost everything.

• You can will a whole lot of things into being. Being high agency is more important than being smart (many more people are smart than have high agency).

• To be surrounded by people who want the best for you is the best and only way to live. I don’t think I could do what I do if I didn’t benefit from frequent interventions from those who are closest to me. They run along your side and occasionally lovingly yell at you if they feel you are straying from your personal legend. And hopefully you do the same for them.
  

• Life is a lot about self-fulfilling prophecies. It is possible to go down any spiral, negative or positive. In moments of anxiety, you have to never collapse into yourself. The answer is to attack and to fight your way out of whatever rut you might be in. You can shape the life you want for yourself. You just have to know what you want and go get it. The power of will / wanting something is infinite.

• It could all have been done better. You would have done it differently had you known. But you didn’t know. And you did it with what you knew at the time, and now the only thing you can do is to make use of your experience to best live what is ahead of you. It will also be imperfect, but you must move forward. I often feel nostalgic, and those feelings can both teach you a lot and be quite pleasant. Thinking back to things doesn’t need to be sad.

• Stay romantic. The romantic way is the only way — in love, friendship, and what you do for work. Naive is good. Jaded is bad. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

• As my London cabbie recently told me when he found out I was the same age as his son: “Go do it, son. The sands of time wait for no one.” Do everything with relentless vigor. Bite into that fresh, sweet, juicy peach while it’s ripe.