Archive of posts from November 2025

Productivity isn’t a competitive advantage anymore.

Anyone with a LLM can feign productivity boosts beyond your best day five years ago.

Maybe we don’t need to optimize for “productivity” anymore.

Maybe “efficiency” is best left to the machines.

Maybe “effectiveness” is what we should look for today.

Maybe “effectiveness” is what we should have looked for all along.

That thing you’ve been wanting to learn?

But you never have time to do?

Because there’s always something that gets in the way?

Do it for one minute per day.

You may find two, or three, will show up, in time.

And maybe, one day, that’ll become thirty, or sixty.

And if it never exceeds 10 minutes a day, that still amounts to over 60 hours a year.

Let the time adds up.

A good sport says “no sweat!” when someone makes an honest mistake.

A good sport says “it happens!” when someone drops the ball when it matters.

A good sport says “next time!” when something doesn’t work out on your watch.

And if that other person is also a good sport?

Together, they’re destined to produce great things.

Now…

A bad sport says “it better not happen again” when someone makes an honest mistake.

A bad sport says “how could this happen” when someone drops the ball when it matters.

A bad sport says “there will be no next time” when something doesn’t work out on your watch.

And if that other person is also a bad sport?

Neither will produce anything great until they change.

Which are you?

Complex processes come from two places:

One, a simple process that once worked, then got bogged down ‘because we need to grow’.

Two, someone over-engineering something as a form of procrastination, in fear of going to market.

Yet it’s the simple processes that takes us furthest.

Ones allowed to rest, to be, to work as they do, resiliently, for a long time.

If you’re lucky enough to have a simple system that works… don’t spoil it.

Sometimes, when I take my son to his favorite coffee shop for a hot chocolate, the experience is great.

The staff are welcoming. They smile at him when he says “hot chocolate”. They tell him “Good job!” when he holds my card and taps it to pay. They put a little espresso cup on our tray so I can decant a bit at a time for him.

Good experience.

Other times, there’s a miserable guy working there. Stone-faced when my son says “hot chocolate”. He seems put out that we’re slowing him down as my son learns how paying for things works. Makes no effort.

Bad experience.

My two-year old son is learning the world. He’ll have been looking forward to that hot chocolate all day.

A smile costs nothing.

A good attitude costs nothing.

Celebrating others costs nothing.

And yet, combined, they are priceless.

People don’t buy solutions.

They buy solutions and the stories they tell themselves.

No story, means commodity.

A Birkin bag is a $800 purse and a $19,200 story, rolled into one, designed to hold your things while making you feel bigger than those around you.

A no-name mass-produced $50 purse is a $50 purse, designed to hold your things.

They’re both bags, but they’re not selling the same thing, nor playing in the same games.

A Birkin bag, at $20,000, is a bargain at what it setes out to do compared to driving a Rolls-Royce.

The $50 purse might be overpriced if its target market can get the same bag for $40.

There is always a story being told.

Whether you’re deliberately telling one or not.

Folks always seem to want more money.

Happy to throw away time to have it.

Because money looks cool to peers.

Time doesn’t, for some odd reason.

The curse of the short-sighted.

‘Momentum’ is one of the best feelings.

‘Stuck’ is one of the worst.

Everyone wants momentum.

But momentum doesn’t start big.

It starts really, really small.

So smal it feels pointless.
So small that no one notices.
So small that you question if it matters.

But small is where momentum comes from.

Don’t wait for big.
It ain’t coming.

Team members: “I’m drowning, I hate all of this, I can’t go another day like this.”

Managers: “I believe in you and believe you’ll hit the deadline.”

Leaders have a lot to learn about EQ.

Brand positioning in a nutshell:

“It’s that, plus this.”

“It’s this, minus that.”

“It’s that, but for these.”

“It’s that, combined with this.”

Know which you are, and lean in.

Struggle to come up with content ideas?

Find someone you enjoy talking to…

And complain.

Complain about the things that wind you up.

Get a proper strop on about it and how you’d do it differently.

There’s a week of content ideas right there!

Fall in love with mastery: be anxious.

Fall in love with the pursuit of mastery: enjoy every day.

The first kind is seeking relief, or a byproduct.

The second kind realizes the more they know, the more they know they don’t know.

Endless enjoyment.

Marketers track the wrong things.

Clicks? Signups? Appointments? They’re metrics… But in isolation they don’t say much on their own.

E.g. tracking appointments set. Not how enthusiastic the booking was. Not whether or not they showed up, and in what mood or with what interest. Or whether they bought something, or whether they were biting your hand off or reluctant.

Just “appointments”.

The best thing to optimize for isn’t individual stats.

The best thin to optimize for is your ability to do things people love so much they come to you, asking for it, then love it so much they tell their friends.

“Procrastination” and “Research” look similar from the outside.

You can convince yourself you’re doing the latter vs the former.

The best way to really spot the difference?

Look yourself in the mirror.

You’ll know.

People have always feared blank pages.

It’s one of the reasons people love AI so much.

It protects them from blank pages, having no ideas, having to start from nothing.

Yet those blank pages are an essential part of being great at what you do.

I stare at blank pages every day. Including this daily blog practice.

If I stay with blank pages, ideas are infinite.

If I phone it into AI, the idea muscle will atrophy.

Everyone is letting their idea muscles atrophy.

Idea muscles are becoming rarer.

Maybe it’s worth sticking with the fear, and holding onto yours.

“Busy” is a trap.

The feeling of activity mixed with a false sense of importance.

Only to realize that, by the end of the week, you didn’t really get anything done.

Again.

Quit busy. You can create so much more when you do.

Where does confidence come from?

Not the “puff yourself up and act like it” kind. That’s bravado, not confidence.

The real kind.

In my experience, it isn’t a feeling.

It’s a consequence.

A consequence of keeping promises to yourself.

Of doing the work when no one is watching.

Of showing up long before you feel ready.

Confidence doesn’t precede action.

It’s earned from action.

So take action.

The project you’re thinking of putting off?

Because it’s not a good time, or you think you don’t have enough time, or because you’re not ready?

Remember that time is short, soon you’ll be gone, as will everything you create, and every memory of it.

It won’t matter forever, but it matters now.

Make the time.

Those who complain about not having enough time?

Are often the ones who don’t realize how time-rich they are.

The ones who actually don’t have enough time aren’t spending it complaining about how they don’t have enough time. They’re quietly getting on with what must be done.

Worth keeping in mind.

‘Simple’ can be scary.

‘Simple’ removes hiding places.
‘Simple’ reveals responsibility.
‘Simple’ exposes what you should do next…
…even if it’s not what you want to do next.

Complexity is safer. It lets you pretend the problem is the system, not the effort.

And so we overcomplicate things. For comfort.

It pays to make peace with cold, hard simplicity.

Most don’t quit when it’s hard.

They quite when it’s quiet.

That’s when the inner-voices come alive.

Telling you you’ve exercised enough today and it’s okay to stop.
Telling you you might be going the wrong way and should re-evaluate.
Telling you nobody wants what you’re making so maybe it’s time to quit.

The ones who keep going aren’t stronger.

They’re just better at being quiet.

“Choosing” is a skill.

People want the choice to be made for them:

Empirical data indicating you should go this way.
Market pressure steering you should go that way.
A stakeholder saying you shouldn’t go either way.
Doing research to determine if you should anyway.

“Something.”

Anything but choosing.

Choosing to create art in your work by making a decision based on what feels right to you and how you see the world.

Choosing to make something different, something unique, with a taste that select others might share.

Choosing to be known for that taste, building a tribe around that taste, those who look forward to what you’ll choose next.

Choose.

Do you need more ideas, or fewer excuses?

Most people are overflowing with both ideas and excuses not to explore them.

Perhaps secretly, you are, too.

So one more time:

Do you need more ideas, or fewer excuses?

Everyone wants to scale at any cost.

But consider these un-scalable merits:

Committing to being uniquely brilliant at your craft.

Being so indispensable you’d be missed if you were gone.

Producing rare, finite bodies of work people look forward to.

The irony of these merits?

They’re what people trying to scale at any cost, are usually looking for.

In some games, you can be sure of the rules.

Where winning and losing hinges upon knowing them, and abiding by them.

In other games, you can be sure of surprise.

Where each time you play, something unexpected and enjoyable happens.

The same is true of marketing experiences.

McDonalds is better suited to the former, and theatre the latter.

Know which one you’re better suited to.

Bad goal: “Be a good dad”
Good goal: “Behave like a great dad, every day”

One is your inputs, the other is decided by your kids.

Bad goal: “Build a business”
Good goal: “Work on your business, every day”

One is your inputs, the other is decided by the market.

Bad goal: “Get fit”
Good goal: “Get on the exercise bike for 30 minutes, every day”

One is your inputs, the other is decided by your biology.

Focus on the inputs.

Buying decisions are often made half-heartedly,
knowing the easy choice probably won’t work,
but no-one stepped up to help the decision.
To help them over their mental hurdles.
To really solve the problem.

So they buy a cheapo-depot course, watch the first two videos, then re-enter the market 12 months later still in need of a solution.

Sometimes people choose no-decision and live with the pain over a solution…

Sometimes people choose a lousy-decision and live with the pain over a solution…

What they needed was someone to be brave enough to really try and help them. To listen.

To figure out how to help them move past their insecurities. To risk being shot down for saying the right thing.

“I collect strategies to implement in my business.”

I heard an entrepreneur with a net worth of $600 million say that. And thought…

“…imagine what you could do if you focused on one.”

Sales reps are easy scapegoats for revenue shortcomings.

Just like Devs are easy scapegoats for design shortcomings.

If you want a scapegoat, look at those on the edge.

If you want to solve the problem, look upstream.

Pick up your instrument, and play it every day.

Don’t worry about obsession and success and failure.

Don’t worry about what others did or might do or not do.

Don’t worry about what it all means, where it’s all going.

Just pick up your instrument, and play it every day.