I spent today on the phone with owners. Nothing dramatic. Just rolling calls and trying to see as many people in person as I could. My social battery was on the blink, so I doomscrolled, and a reel I watched made me think.

Luck is like rain

Luck behaves like rain. You can’t make it fall. But the more places you show up, the more likely you are to be standing in it.

I like that because it takes the mystery out of it. Luck stops being something that happens to other people. It becomes surface area.

What my surface area looks like

It isn’t glamorous (who am I kidding, most of the time it’s great). A lunch with an adviser, talking through the federal budget and its market impacts. A couple of networking events. A catch-up with an owner about where the market is going. And today, a prospecting day of cold calls.

None of those was a sure thing. Most weeks, most of them won’t turn into anything I can point to.

But I can’t tell in advance which one will. That’s the whole point. Each one is one more spot where the rain might land.

Where will you stand this week?

Think about the last month. Where did you show up, and where did you stay home?

Pick one room you’ve been avoiding. A meetup, a lunch, a call you keep putting off. Go.

Then tell me what turned up. I’m curious where the rain landed for you.

NB.

I had no idea what the questions were scoring me on.

Twelve of them. No obvious right answers. No sense of where it was heading.

Then the result card.

“My founder type: FN. Fierce Nerd.”

Underneath: “Quiet until the game starts.”

And suddenly it all made sense.

What fit

It fit my personality, two parts more than the rest.

I’m quiet at first.

But once I’m in it, I’m competitive.

Then the comparison part. Founders like me: Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick. I’ll take it. It was a pleasure to be put in such good company.

Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009. The growth years that followed were some of the most competitive tech has seen. City by city. Fight by fight. Reuters called his style “pugnacious”. In June 2017, under pressure from investors, he resigned as CEO.

Then he went quiet.

In March 2018 he put US$150 million into a 15-person startup called City Storage Systems and became its CEO. The name was deliberately generic, and employees couldn’t even list it on LinkedIn. It became the parent of CloudKitchens.

In March 2026, he stepped back into the light. He renamed the company Atoms and pushed it beyond food into robotics for mining and transport. His words on the TBPN show: “We’ve been in stealth mode for eight years.”

Eight years of quiet building. Then straight back into the game.

That’s the archetype in one career. Quiet at first. Fierce once he’s in it. I recognise both halves.

Where the name comes from

The term isn’t the quiz’s invention. It comes from Paul Graham’s 2021 essay, “Fierce Nerds”.

His point is simple. Nerds can seem quiet in everyday social settings because they’re “fish out of water”. Put them in their element and “some nerds are quite fierce”.

He’s honest about the downside, too. The same qualities can also make them very “annoying”, so fierce nerds should “try to keep a lid on it”. Noted.

What I’m taking from it

I’m still working out where else in my life I’m quiet until the game starts.

That’s the useful part. A label doesn’t tell you who you are. It hands you a question to carry around for a while.

Your turn. Take the Founder Personality Quiz and let me know.

NB.

Everyone I know has AI on their phone.

Ask how they use it and the answers get short. A quick email. A caption. A recipe once.

That’s the contradiction at the centre of a16z’s latest State of Markets II deck. Ninety pages on the biggest investment boom of our lifetime. Tucked inside is a slide that says, more or less, most people haven’t really started.

a16z calls it “wide and shallow”.

Wide, not deep

The headline numbers are huge. a16z describes AI revenue growth as unprecedented for speed and scale. Hyperscalers keep saying demand outpaces supply.

Then the deck turns around and says this: “AI adoption is broad and impactful, but still relatively shallow”.

Both things are true at once. Almost everyone has tried it. Very few have built it into how they actually work.

a16z goes further. The impressive aggregate picture, it says, “obscures what is going on beneath the surface”. Growth is “driven by a tiny share of power-users, who are unlocking more value with increasingly sophisticated tools”.

And then the line that stopped me: “all of this is driven by just the top 1% of users, who are only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible”.

One per cent.

The gap is getting wider

You’d expect a gap like that to close as the tools get easier. It isn’t closing.

a16z’s slide on power users says “a tiny fraction are using orders of magnitude more AI than the field, and the gap has been widening since early this year”.

So the people already ahead are pulling further ahead. Not because they have better tools. Everyone has the same tools. They’re just using them more, and more seriously.

That’s the part I find uncomfortable. Access isn’t the advantage any more. Habit is.

Cheap doesn’t mean used

The price of intelligence keeps falling. a16z calls what happens next Jevons Paradox: cheaper intelligence, more demand. It says cheaper tokens have “ushered in the age of agents”.

But cheaper only creates more demand among the people already leaning in. Everyone else gets a cheaper thing they still don’t use.

It’s like a gym membership. Lowering the price doesn’t make anyone fitter. It just means more people own a card.

Even businesses are barely in

This isn’t only about individuals. a16z says most companies “are not cost-constrained, and intend to spend more on AI”. Money isn’t the blocker.

And they’ve barely started spending. a16z points out that cloud reached about 4 per cent of IT spend in its second year, and most AI spend estimates are below that.

So the businesses aren’t short of budget. They’re short of depth.

What the few are getting

Where AI is used properly, the deck shows what it’s worth. a16z collects a page of results directly from the company. Walmart’s chief executive said customers who use its shopping assistant spend 40 per cent more per order than those who don’t.

That’s what deep use looks like. Not a party trick. A behaviour change that shows up in the numbers.

There’s even a real estate example. a16z describes EliseAI, which works with renters and owners and tests regional accents on its AI calls. The idea was that people are more likely to transact with someone who sounds like them, so local voices should lift lead-to-tour conversion. a16z’s note on this kind of gain is honest: the benefits are often “incremental at the margins”, but they “have a tendency to add up to something quite substantial”.

Small, repeated, compounding. That’s how the top 1% got there.

Where I see it

I work in property and hotels transactions. It’s a relationship business. Much of it still runs on phone calls, inspections, and paperwork.

Which makes it a perfect example of wide and shallow. Most people in the industry I talk to have tried AI. Far fewer have changed a single workflow because of it.

Most agents I know use AI. Watch how and you’ll see the problem.

A loose prompt for some marketing copy. Or a spreadsheet with fifteen inputs nobody understands, when the manual version only needed five. That’s not leverage. That’s shallow use dressed up as progress. And it didn’t unlock value.

The easy wins are sitting in plain sight. Documentation. Copying and pasting the same details into agency agreements and confidentiality agreements, over and over.

But the real win is bigger. Pull several sources of information into one workflow. Do it once, properly. Then give that time back to everyone in the team.

I don’t think that’s a criticism of anyone. It’s an opening that will let teams focus on more meaningful work.

Why shallow is good news

If adoption were deep already, the advantage would be gone. Everyone would be operating at the same level. You’d be competing on the same playing field with the same tools.

Shallow means the field is still wide open.

a16z’s own conclusion is blunt. Eventually, it says, “the rest of the market will catch on (or else be left behind)”.

Being early used to mean having the tool first. Now everyone has the tool on day one. Being early means using it properly before everyone else does.

The takeaway

Having AI is not the same as using it. Almost everyone has the first. Almost nobody has the second.

So don’t measure yourself by whether you’ve tried it. Measure yourself by whether anything in your week works differently because of it.

Pick one task you do every week. Use AI on it properly, every time, for a month. Not once. Every time.

That’s how the 1% started.

Access is free. Depth is the edge.

Sources: Andreessen Horowitz, a16z State of Markets II (September 2026), full deck. AI results quoted from company earnings releases as compiled by a16z, including Walmart (John Furner, President and CEO, Q2 FY27 earnings call, August 2026).

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Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician and physicist, once wrote:

“Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.”

In English: “I have made this one longer only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.”

The art is clarity: taking the time to decide what matters, then removing everything that doesn’t.

AI has made length cheap. But writing that respects the reader’s time still takes work.

Short is the luxury.

I was at a mixer event recently and met the next generation — one of those rooms full of young people finding their way into the working world. Name tags. Slightly careful conversations. Everyone clocking who looks settled and who still looks like they’re figuring it out.

Standing there, I noticed how my path into adulthood had been slightly different.

Not better in some absolute sense. Just different. And maybe, in the ways that matter for how you engage with people, better than it might have been — because of my teacher. My mum.

She homeschooled my brother and me from Year 1 through Year 10. Every childhood has trade-offs. Ours meant we got thrown into situations with people older, sharper, and further ahead — and expected to keep up. We didn’t always relate easily to kids our own age. Forming those connections was sometimes hard. What we did get was a different muscle: how to speak and engage with people who weren’t peers.

We’ve kind of messed up how we look at education. It’s never really been about memorising a stack of facts. It’s about waking up an appetite to learn — the hunger that keeps going after the timetable ends.

The formula is almost annoyingly simple:

Exposure + Imagination = Ambition

Exposure is the underrated one. Put yourself in environments that aren’t your default. Different ages. Different intellects. Different rooms. If your world stays small, your ceiling stays small — quietly.

Homeschooling did that for us, whether we liked it or not. We weren’t wrapped in a peer bubble. That can feel uneven when you’re young. It also trains you to stop waiting for the room to come down to your level.

Imagination is what you do with the exposure. You see someone further along, and you don’t just clock the gap — you start sketching what’s possible. Without imagination, exposure is tourism. With it, you rewrite your map.

Ambition shows up after that. Not as a poster on the wall. As a byproduct. Once you’ve seen more of what’s possible, drive has somewhere to point.

Could that path have gone sideways? Sure. Different doesn’t automatically mean better. In our case, mum’s way of bringing us up set both of us up as pretty engaged, skilled adults — comfortable in rooms that intimidate many people our age.

I’m still living this out. Still choosing rooms that stretch me. Still catching myself when everything gets too familiar and my sense of the possible starts to shrink.

If ambition feels stuck, the fix might not be “try harder.” It might be: get exposed to something that doesn’t fit your current map — then let your imagination do the rest.

What would one week of better exposure change? Who might you meet and become?

Cheers,

NB

“It's very hard to step back from the soup when you're cooking in it.”

Anything new: decide on an immersion, head down, learn the set results on the board. But decide a second task underneath the first: how you want to operate. The soup makes that invisible. There's no natural pause that asks, “Is this working? How can I improve this workflow?” The pot keeps needing stirring.

Willpower won't fix it. Nobody thinks their way to perspective mid-shift. It has to be booked, a fixed hour, same time each week, for craft, not tasks.

Busy isn't the same as effective. It just feels like it.

NB.

Name them.

In 2022, someone was the 87th richest person alive. In 1012, someone was the 9th most-followed person on Earth.

Nobody remembers. Not you, not me, and probably not the people who held the spots.

The scoreboard felt permanent. But it was drawn in chalk.

We don’t actually chase money, after basic needs are met or status. We chase the feeling of being seen holding them. That feeling has a half-life of about a week, which is why the number always has to go up.

The number you’re chasing right now is the same chalk.

None of this is an argument for doing less. Ambition is fine. Play hard, build the thing, close the deal.

Just notice that the stakes are ones you invented — and that you’re allowed to un-invent them.

Play the game.

Don’t take yourself so seriously.

Consumption is a trap. Not because ideas are bad, but because they’re cheap dopamine for zero effort. Open the app, get the hit, tell yourself you’re “researching.” Three hours gone, nothing made—no forward momentum.

There is a fix, and it has to be non-negotiable: create before you consume. Make it your eat-the-frog religious rule. No exceptions.

You still need input eventually — there’s no original idea, everything’s remixed from somewhere. But sequence matters. Create first, while your attention’s still yours. Consume later, once the day’s work is already banked. Then let what you absorb feed tomorrow’s session, and run the loop again.

Simple order of operations. Enormous difference in output.

If you’re creating after you’ve already burned your best hours doom-scrolling, you’re not undisciplined. You’ve just got the sequence backwards.

Ps.Learnt this while doom scrolling… 😉

I watched a short clip from Saleem Asaria on Instagram, who’s spent 30 years in behavioural healthcare, and he named the gap precisely.

Two Triangles

His argument is that the people who seem to have it sorted aren’t chasing happiness. They’ve built a life that can’t sustain unhappiness.

Triangle one: Purpose. Mastery. Autonomy.

Triangle two: Autonomy, broken into its working parts — Data. Recognition. Communication.

His example is in the eyes of Fitbit:

1. Purpose: don’t be sedentary.

2. Mastery: 10,000 steps.

3. Autonomy: the data sits on your wrist, so you never have to ask anyone how you’re going.

Then recognition and communication, which he says is the part we all need and most of us won’t admit to.

His mother is 86 and lives with interstitial lung disease. When she’s 200 steps short at the end of the day, she walks the stairs. Not for the steps. Because she knows that the moment the number ticks over, her grandchildren, her nieces and her nephews will ring and tell her well done.

The Fitbit didn’t motivate her. The loop did.

Where I was thin

Test yourself against the six points honestly and you find out fast which one you’ve been coasting on.

Purpose was fine. I knew exactly why I made the move. Autonomy is arguably better than it’s ever been — I can see my own pipeline, I don’t need anyone’s permission to know where I stand. Recognition sorts itself out over time; it’s slower at a new firm, but it’s a function of results, not a thing to engineer.

Mastery was the hole. And it’s the sneaky one, because from the outside a busy calendar looks identical to a measurable standard.

I had activity. Meetings, inspections, appraisals, calls. What I didn’t have was a number I could fail against by Friday. Something I either hit or didn’t, that I could see without opening a report someone else wrote. In a transaction business the natural metric is settled deals, and settled deals are a terrible daily standard — they’re lagging, lumpy, and mostly determined by decisions made months earlier. You can have a fantastic quarter of work and a blank month of outcomes.

That’s not a measurement problem. It’s a design problem.

Why it matters more than motivation

Motivation is a feeling, and feelings are circumstantial. They’re highest in the first fortnight of anything and lowest in the middle, which is exactly when the work matters.

A system doesn’t care how you feel. Clear purpose, a standard you either meet or miss, data you can see without asking, and someone who registers the win — that structure holds weight on the days you’d rather not.

Most people, me included on this occasion, run the opposite way. We optimise the visible stuff — the title, the platform, the market — and assume the daily architecture will assemble itself. It doesn’t. You end up with a genuinely good decision and no way of knowing, on any given Tuesday, whether you’re executing it well.

The correction

The good news about a design problem is that it’s fixable in an afternoon.

I’ve set a leading standard. Not deals. Something I control entirely, that I can count before lunch, that says nothing at all about whether the market cooperated this month. A standard you can only hit when conditions are favourable isn’t a standard — it’s weather.

What surprised me is how much lighter it made everything. The pressure in a transaction business isn’t the work; it’s the not-knowing. Am I actually building something this week, or just busy? Give yourself a number you can meet by Friday and that question stops running in the background. The deals still take as long as they take. You’re just no longer waiting on them to tell you whether you’re doing the job well.

Asaria’s conclusion after three decades in behavioural health is that happiness is engineered, not discovered. I’d extend it. So is a career. The move was the easy part — and the far better part is that the rest is entirely in your hands.

Run yourself against the six points. Whichever one’s thin, it’s usually a smaller build than you’d expect, and the payoff is immediate.

Remember;

“Happiness is engineered not discovered.”

Source: Saleem Asaria (@saleem_asaria)

Five years and 35+ motel transactions deep, across leasehold, freehold going concern and freehold investment deals. Savills gives me a national platform and a global network to back the same specialist focus: motels, caravan parks, hotels and accommodation assets.

Queensland remains the core of what I do. But the brief now runs nationally, and that opens up more for the buyers and vendors I work with — bigger pool of capital, broader deal flow, more ways to get transactions done.

Full announcement here: The Hotel Conversation — Experienced accommodation broker Nathan Benjamin joins Savills

The berry bush problem

In 1976, biologist Eric Charnov formalised something foragers already knew instinctively: animals don’t strip a food patch bare before moving on. A bird lands on a berry bush, eats the easy fruit near the surface, and leaves — while the bush is still half full, while the berries left are still good to eat.

Charnov called it the marginal value theorem. The logic is simple once you see it. Every patch starts rich and then slows. The berries get harder to find, smaller, and further apart. The bush hasn’t failed — it’s just decelerating. And the animal’s real question was never “Is this bush still giving me something?” It was “Is this bush still giving me more than I’d get somewhere else, once I account for the cost of moving?”

The moment the answer flips, the bird leaves. Not when the bush is empty. Long before that.

Working and working well aren’t the same thing

This is where it gets uncomfortable for anyone running a business, a deal pipeline, a portfolio, or a career. Most of us were trained to finish what we start and to read “still producing something” as “still worth doing.” That’s the wrong test.

A client, a listing, a market, a role, a strategy — all of them behave like berry bushes. They start rich. Early effort returns fast. Then the curve bends. You’re still getting something out of it. It’s just costing you more time and attention per unit of return than it used to, and there’s a version of you, or your business, that could be getting a better rate somewhere else.

The trap isn’t staying in something bad. Nobody needs a model to tell them to leave a bad deal. The trap is staying in something that’s merely no longer the best use of your time — because it still feels like it’s working. Slower returns don’t announce themselves as failure. They just quietly become the wrong home for your effort.

What the model actually asks you to track

Marginal value theorem thinking isn’t about optimism or pessimism. It’s a rate comparison. Two numbers:

What is this specific thing returning me right now, per unit of time or capital I put into it — not what it returned me at the start, not what it could theoretically return again?

What’s the average rate available to me elsewhere, once I price in the cost of switching — the deal I’m not chasing, the client I’m not prospecting, the capital sitting in something else while I hold this?

When the first number drops below the second, the model says go. Everything after that point is sentiment, sunk cost, or fear of admitting the bush changed.

The hard part is that this requires you to actually track the rate, not the total. A deal pipeline that’s “still bringing in commission” can be quietly bleeding your best hours if you never measure velocity, only volume. A portfolio position that’s “still up” can be dead capital if the market’s diminishing-returns curve has already bent and you haven’t clocked it.

The uncomfortable version of this for operators

Nobody builds a business, buys a stock, or takes a job intending to overstay. It happens because leaving requires admitting nothing went wrong — which feels irrational. It’s much easier to justify quitting a disaster than quitting something that’s merely fine.

But the fine is the actual cost. Fine is the bush still worth eating from while a better one goes unvisited. The birds don’t wait for the bush to fail. They don’t need permission from a crisis. They just run the rate comparison, quietly, constantly, and move when the number says move.

That’s the whole discipline. Not grit. Not loyalty to the thing you started. Just an honest, ongoing read on whether this is still the best use of what you have.

The bush doesn’t have to go bad for it to be time to leave.

The Six Needs

Tony Robbins has been teaching this framework for decades, but it landed differently when I heard it in a recent Instagram reel from a Diary of a CEO podcast. (Watch the Instagram Reel)

We all have six core human needs:

1. Certainty.

2. Variety.

3. Significance.

4. Connection & love.

5. Growth.

6. Contribution.

The first four are everywhere. You can feel them being constantly sold to you.

Certainty is why you check your phone six times before bed. Variety is why you’re already bored with the thing you wanted three months ago. Significance is why people post on LinkedIn. Connection is why someone is telling their relationship problems to an AI that agrees with everything they say.

None of that is inherently wrong. But Tony calls the final two the spiritual needs — not religious, just the ones that sit at a different level. And here’s the thing most people never clock: you can meet the first four completely and still feel empty.

What “Meeting a Need” Actually Costs You

The problem with certainty, variety, significance, and connection is that they can all be met cheaply.

Text instead of call. Scroll instead of build—post instead of produce. Agree instead of grow. The friction is gone and so is the substance.

I have lived the version of busy that looks fine from the outside and feels hollow from the inside. I’ve lived in it. Everything ticking over, nothing actually moving. The work equivalent of treading water and calling it swimming.

The Ones That Actually Matter

Tony says if you’re not growing, you start to die inside. Not metaphorically — structurally. Everything in the universe grows or dies. A relationship that’s not growing is, by definition, declining. A business that’s not growing is losing ground even when the numbers look stable due to cost cutting into magins. You feel this before you can prove it.

But growth alone isn’t the full circuit. It’s the setup. You grow so you have something to give.

Contribution is where meaning lives. Not the significance of being seen — the actual act of making something better. Whether that’s your industry, your team, your family, or just the person across the table from you.

These two needs, Tony says, have no downside. You can’t over-invest in growth and contribution. Every other need has a trap built into it. These two don’t.

Build Something

The instruction at the end of his point was one word: build.

Not optimise. Not manage. Not protect what you have.

Build. Because the act of building forces both — you grow by doing it, and if it’s worth anything, other people benefit.

I don’t think this is a productivity insight. It’s closer to a question worth sitting with: what are you actually building right now, and will it matter?

If the answer is unclear, that might be the whole answer.

I used to call that luck. I don’t anymore.

Nassim Taleb has a name for it — positive optionality. Stop narrowing toward one outcome. Expand your surface area so that good things have somewhere to land.

Most people do the opposite. Lock in early, cut everything that doesn’t feed The Goal, grind in a straight line. Feels disciplined. And it works — until it doesn’t, because you’ve built a strategy with no peripheral vision and no room for the unexpected.

The Maths Nobody Checks

Rory Sutherland made an observation I haven’t been able to shake: most people chase goals where the cost of entry already outweighs the prize.

A hundred people in the world make serious money from tennis. Everyone else is funding the dream through years of coaching and lost income. The prize is real. The odds aren’t.

I see it in property constantly. Everyone wants to be a developer, a syndicator, a high-end agent. The money’s real there too. But the cycle windows are short, the cost of entry keeps rising, and the people actually capturing the upside almost always got lucky with timing and didn’t realise it.

The goal looked achievable from the outside. The maths said otherwise.

The Honest Question

Morgan Housel writes that most financial decisions are identity decisions in disguise. People don’t want the outcome — they want to be the kind of person who achieved it.

If that’s the goal, the cost of entry is irrelevant. You’ll keep paying it regardless of the return.

So ask yourself: would you still do the work if the specific outcome never came?

If yes — the maths don’t matter much. If no — they matter a lot.

Most of the best things to date didn’t announce themselves in advance. Take the call.

Real research has no logical stopping point. You go deeper because you’re genuinely trying to understand something — not because you have a meeting on Thursday and need something to say.

Coffee is a good example. Most people drink it. Some people taste a hundred, read every expert, test every machine, and walk away with a barista certification they'll never use professionally. That's not a hobby. That's the researcher identity in action.

Fanatical depth on anything you care about.

It sounds a bit unhinged when applied to espresso. It sounds like an edge when applied to a deal.

The brokers and investors who consistently outperform aren’t operating with better information. They’re operating with more of it — because they kept going after everyone else stopped. They know the asset better than the vendor. They’ve already found the problem buried in page 47 of the financials. They’d spoken with three operators in that market before the first meeting.

They’re not performing expertise. They have it.

Here’s the thing nobody talks about: this only works as an identity, not a tactic.

You can’t decide to “do more research” on a deal-by-deal basis and expect the same result. The people who are genuinely good at this don’t gear up for it — depth is just how they operate. The curiosity isn’t switched on. It’s the default.

And that’s the gap. Most people do enough to get comfortable. Researchers do enough to actually know.

Which side of that line are you on?

NB.

“Just checking in if you thought any more about what we discussed.”

Polite. Brief. Professional. And the deal was suddenly off the table.

That’s reactance. The moment someone senses their freedom to choose is being monitored, even gently, they pull back. In high-net-worth clients, the threshold is even lower. These are people with a strong internal locus of control. They decide on their own terms. A follow-up email two days later doesn’t read as service. It reads as surveillance.

Most clients don’t consciously connect the email to the cooling. They tell themselves they didn’t really need it. That they’ll come back to it. They almost never identify the follow-up as the thing that killed the deal. The salesperson never knows either.

Here’s the fix.

Follow up the same day — while the meeting is still warm and before private deliberation begins. Keep it short. Acknowledge the human exchange. Then add one specific piece of information framed as your own thinking continuing after they left:

“It crossed my mind after we spoke that something we didn’t quite cover off, if you would like to know more. I’ll send details when I have them.”

No questions. No booking a call. No asking for anything.

That phrase, ‘it crossed my mind’, does real work. It signals that you were thinking about them when they weren’t in front of you. That’s what care looks like. And the promise of future contact tied to a specific event pre-installs permission for the next message. When it arrives two weeks later, it’s not a follow-up. It’s the fulfilment of a promise. The autonomy was never touched.

The difference between a salesperson who loses deals at the follow-up and one who doesn’t isn’t effort. It’s timing and framing. One chases. The other continues.

If you set resolutions on the 1st of January, statistically, most of them have already been quietly shelved. Not because you lack discipline or drive — but because most goals were designed to be carried alone. And solo weight gets heavy fast.

When we talk about goals. We treat them like private matters. Personal projects. Things we will get around to when the timing is right, when we have more capacity, when life settles down. But life does not settle down. And 20% of the year has already passed like a lightning strike.

Here is what I have noticed working in a field built entirely on relationships: the things that actually get done are rarely done alone. Every deal I have ever closed involved a network of people — buyers, vendors, solicitors, financiers, advisors — each playing a specific role at a specific moment. The outcome was never the work of a single person. It was assembled.

Your personal goals are no different.

That book you want to write needs a reader who will give you honest feedback. The business idea needs someone who has done it before. The fitness goal needs a training partner who will show up even when you do not feel like it. The investment you keep researching but never pulling the trigger on — that needs a conversation with someone who has already made the move.

The missing ingredient is rarely information. It is usually people.

So with 80% of the year still ahead, I want to ask you something worth sitting with:

You do not have to have it all figured out. You just have to be willing to say it out loud.

NB.

The smarter play is to sell while the business is trending upward. When a buyer can see consistent growth and a strong trajectory, they don’t just price the business on what it’s worth today. They price it on what it could be worth with perfect execution over the next three years — and then they hand you that valuation without you having to deliver it.

That’s the momentum premium. And it’s one of the most underutilised levers in a business exit.

The second part of the equation is what you do with the proceeds. The goal isn’t to keep grinding for a larger number. It’s to take that actively earned capital off the table at the right moment and deploy it into passive compounding assets and/or your next strategic endevor.

From that point, your money works without you.

The cycle is simple: build actively, exit on momentum, deploy into passive compounding, and begin building again. Each cycle stacks on the last. Your net worth grows not from a single massive outcome, but from consistent, well-timed exits that compound over time.

Playing for doubles and triples, reinvested intelligently, will outperform swinging for the fences the vast majority of the time. The goal isn’t the biggest exit. It’s the biggest nest egg.

It’s easy to treat the beginning of the year as a warm-up. A slow start. A series of “I’ll get to it” promises. But the math doesn’t care about our intentions. 5.5% is gone.

We often wait for the “perfect” moment to begin our best work. We wait for the middle of the year, the next quarter, or a clearer sky.

But the plane is already in the air. We are already in motion.

The question isn’t how much time is left. The question is what we do with the 94.5% that remains if we are lucky to see all of 2026.

Go.

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Anthony Bourdain once wrote;

“It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realise the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realise how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, such as it is, means realising how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.”

I’ve thought about this a lot this year. Two more stamps in the passport - Vietnam and India, and spent a lot of time driving in Australia, and the paradox becomes clearer. The world doesn’t shrink when you explore it. You do. And that’s not a bad thing.

On Letting Go (Or Not)

This year, I realised I have a tough time letting go of people I care about.

There’s no neat lesson here. No three-step framework. Just the uncomfortable truth that caring deeply makes everything else harder. The goodbyes linger longer. The what-ifs stack up higher. The people who matter continue to matter, even when geography or circumstance suggests they shouldn’t.

I’m still working on this one.

On Not Being Alone

For the first time in my professional life, I worked alongside a colleague. Not just shared office space or traded emails, but actual daily mentoring, collaboration, the whole thing.

Turns out the lone wolf thing I’d perfected over the years wasn’t the ceiling. It was just comfortable.

The daily push, the shared wins, the realisation that “what could be accomplished together” wasn’t just motivational poster nonsense - it rewired how I think about work. About capacity. About what’s possible when you stop treating collaboration like a weakness.

On Operating at 60%

Here’s what I know: if I managed what I managed this year, feeling the way I felt, running at maybe 60% capacity on the good days, then god help the world if I get back to full strength.

I wouldn’t bet against me.

That’s not bravado. It’s pattern recognition. It’s looking at the deals closed, the countries visited, the lessons learned, the relationships navigated - all while carrying weight that would’ve flattened the younger version of me - and thinking: “Alright then. What happens when this actually gets easy?”

On Being SINK

Single Income, No Kids.

The acronym makes it sound like a demographic category or a tax bracket. Really, it’s just shorthand for “designed my life on purpose and it looks different than yours.”

And life is good.

Not perfect. Not without the challenging bits mentioned above. But good in the way that matters - the freedom to say yes to India, to build something meaningful at work, to sit with the hard stuff without needing to have it solved by year-end.

On 2026

If I’m able to take from all of the past lessons learned, I feel like 2026 is going to be the best one yet.

Life is a compounding beast. The longer you stay in the game, the greater the returns. You’ve just got to stick it through the messy middle, the tough quarters, the days when 60% feels generous.

Every conversation that went sideways taught me how to communicate better. Every deal that stalled taught me where to apply pressure. Every goodbye that hurt taught me what actually matters. Every collaboration showed me what leverage really looks like.

The passport’s getting fuller. The network’s getting stronger. The clarity’s getting sharper.

New trips on the radar. New capacity coming online. Same commitment to the people who stuck around through this weird year.

The world’s bigger than I thought. I’m smaller than I thought. The work matters more than I thought. The returns are compounding. 2026 is going to be something special.

NB.

Think about this: fear and excitement produce identical physical responses – increased heart rate, elevated adrenaline levels, heightened awareness. Your body is simply preparing for something significant. The only difference is the story your mind tells about those sensations.

When you’re stuck in the thinking phase, your brain has time to catastrophise. It imagines every possible failure, every way things could go wrong. That’s the mountain of fear you see on the left side of the curve.

But once you cross into doing, something shifts. The same physiological state that felt like fear suddenly becomes a state of growth. You’re too busy executing to catastrophise. The sensations don’t change—your interpretation does.

This is why action is the antidote to anxiety. Not because the doing is easy, but because it transforms the same biological response from paralysing to propelling.

The vertical line isn’t a barrier. It’s a choice.

Stop asking whether you’re ready. Your body’s already given you the same signal it provides when you're excited. The only question is which story you’re going to tell yourself about it.

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