I’m dyslexic (yes, spell check had to help me with that spelling). I used that as an excuse for not starting this newsletter, which is a job that’s mostly writing in public.

I’d had the title Faark, I Hope It’s Not Too Late years ago. I wasn’t sure what it would actually be. I toyed with a coaching programme (I’m a certified ICF coach), an ebook, a podcast, a newsletter. This was nearly ten years ago.

Ten years of not starting. Now that I look back, that’s more embarrassing than poor spelling and grammar in public.

Why ideas sit still

Sitting on an idea doesn’t feel like failure while it’s happening. It feels like patience. You’re waiting for the right time, waiting to figure it out (I wrote a whole article about that one) It’s the mature and sensible thing to do. Starting now would be rash, and it would fail.

The idea of not putting something out until it’s ready feels like professionalism. It’s the same instinct that’s kept me employed for more than thirty years. I’ve spent that time working in broadcasting, where you don’t go to air half-baked. That instinct served me well in newsrooms, control rooms and boardrooms, and it nearly killed the newsletter before it started.

I started this newsletter because, well, honestly, because I was ready to stop pretending that coasting to retirement was enough.

That’s the real reason I finally made a small bet and published an article. That, and I’d lost patience with my own excuses.

I’d done this before but forgot

The crazy thing is I already knew how to do this. As a teen working as an edit assistant, I made music videos with mates, for other mates’ bands. Years later, working as a news editor in London, I made a documentary on the side about New Zealanders living there, called London, Where’s the Beach. Nobody asked for either one. We just did them. We didn’t wait until we were ready, or until we had the time.

I’d made small bets before. I’d forgotten that the way to get an idea up and running isn’t to wait until you’re ready. It’s to do the embarrassingly small thing that gets things moving. That’s it. That’s the whole plan, the secret blueprint: a series of small bets that turn into the thing.

Try this

Call out the idea you’ve been sitting on. Work out how long you’ve actually gone without acting on it. That feels painful, but it’s really just a fact, and facts are usually less frightening once they’re out in the open.

Then pick the smallest version of that idea you could put out this week. Not the launch version. The version you’d be a bit embarrassed to show anyone. Do it anyway.

An idea that’s been sitting for years doesn’t need more thinking time. It’s had plenty. It needs you to stop being patient with yourself.

I waited. Then I didn’t. That’s the story.

I was walking the dog when a bloke driving past shouted out the window: where’s the recommendation week article? Well, here it is.

Media

One of the things we talk about here is the rise of independent media. This chart on how streaming is eating broadcasting’s lunch won’t shock anyone. What’s worth your attention is who’s winning inside streaming. This is Nielsen’s own measurement of US TV viewing, not a survey, and it says YouTube is the single biggest thing on the screen: 15.8% of all US TV viewing, ahead of Netflix, Disney and everyone else. Off the back of that, Netflix is facing some real headwinds. It’s been a rough ride for the stock price.

Part of the problem is the business model. Netflix’s content and production spend for 2026 is roughly US$20 billion, up about 10% on 2025’s ~$18 billion. That’s money bet on content nobody’s watched yet. YouTube only pays out on content that’s already found an audience.

And you might be thinking, fine, but Netflix owns the TV screen and YouTube owns the phone. Here’s some more bad news for Netflix.

What’s this got to do with us, I hear you ask? It’s more proof that independent media is making real waves. Get on it.

P.S. Instagram has announced it’s getting into the long-form video business. It’s early days but a bunch of creators are up in arms because it looks like they’re not going to pay for the content in the way that Youtube does. They’re threatening to boycott the product. Good luck with that. Meta has never had trouble getting people to give them stuff for free and then serve them back the same stuff at a price.

Book

This month’s pick is Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City by Anand Giridharadas. It centres on the 2023 New York subway death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man once known for his Michael Jackson impersonations, killed by ex-Marine Daniel Penny.

I listened to the audiobook. What draws you in is that you keep waiting for your own bias to be confirmed. It never is. The police officer, the homeless activist, the suburban mum, each point of view sounds reasonable, at least on first pass. The whole thing works like a Rorschach test for the state of the United States.

Podcast

If you know me, you know I’m a massive Rich Roll fan. Ten years of listening, regularly. This one’s different though. It’s a business podcast, and this time Rich is the guest, talking about how he built a media business the hard way. No rage bait, no feeding the algorithm, just integrity and an actual relationship with his audience. Over 1,000 episodes in, he’s now building a platform for others who think the same way.

Rich Roll on the Masters of Scale podcast

Documentary

An ask for you this month. There are two documentaries I haven’t seen yet, both from director Judd Apatow, and I want to see them. Problem is, I’ve cancelled my Netflix account. So: if you’ve seen either, send me a review.

The first is Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald.

The other is Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story, which has only just landed on Netflix. (Did I mention I cancelled my Netflix account?)

Both are what’s called a comedian’s comedian. Highly respected, not nearly as well known as they should be.

Moment of Zen

Ken Robinson on talking to Paul McCartney about unspotted talent.

https://youtube.com/shorts/hC0-CFAUAew?si=hBqgtLySTzIkffzV

That’s a wrap

So that’s it for this month, as always if you’ve read, listened, or watched something you think I might like, send it my way.

When I left school I was a farm cadet, learning how to be a dairy farmer. Getting from early mornings in the milking shed to the boardroom of some big media businesses isn’t what you’d call a straight line.

Take a look at my LinkedIn profile and you’d never guess where it started. Group Head of this, Executive Producer of that. Looks like I had some kind of plan, a map of deliberate steps on a road to a well-curated career.

Trust me, there was no real plan for most of it, pretty much like everyone’s path through their work life.

The path only looks obvious backwards

A CV or a LinkedIn profile is a story we tell at networking events or at a bbq about how we’ve successfully managed our careers. The thing is, it’s a story written backwards. You know how it turns out. You then try and make it make sense, or try to find a thread that explains it all. Then you tell yourself that was the plan all along.

There most likely wasn’t a thought-out plan. People don’t choose a sensible job because it’s part of a grand plan. They pick it because there’s a mortgage to be paid or school fees due. Author Ken Robinson used to make this point about life being organic, not linear. You don’t grow in a straight line any more than a tree does. You just look back and draw the line in afterwards, because the alternative, admitting it was mostly improvisation, feels less impressive on a profile.

The alternative, admitting it was mostly improvisation, feels less impressive on a profile.

The talent you left behind

Somewhere back on the path, before you got all buttoned up and sensible, there was something you were good at and loved doing. You probably left it because there were more “important” things you needed to be doing.

Ken Robinson used to tell a story about this. He was talking to Paul McCartney, who said his school music teacher never spotted any talent in him. George Harrison was in the same class, taught by the same teacher a few years later, and when Robinson asked, the answer was the same: no talent spotted there either. One teacher, half the Beatles sitting in front of him, and he missed it completely, twice. If a trained teacher can miss that, you can forgive yourself for missing it in you.

I got into media at a video duplication plant, having left the farm gig. A pretty inauspicious entry point. As I’ve mentioned in the past, my mates and I made music videos for our other mates’ bands for nothing. A few years later I’m in London working as a videotape editor cutting news, and on the side with friends I made a documentary called London Where’s the Beach about New Zealanders living there. Always unpaid, always wanting to make the thing and see what happened. All the while in my day job building a sensible career in broadcasting.

Reversioning isn’t about fixing your profile so it looks more honest. It’s about looking through your past for what you dropped too early, because that’s the clue to what’s next.

Reversioning isn’t about fixing your profile so it looks more honest.

Going back for it

That’s what happened to the creative theme in my own career. I’ve spent much of the last couple of decades building management skills: budgets, teams, transformation plans, all the serious work of broadcasting. I was good at it and most days I enjoyed it. But it was a growing number of steps away from the creative work.

Faark I Hope It’s Not Too Late is me reaching back into my past. A newsletter and a podcast are about as hands-on as it gets: I write it, I record it, I edit it, I publish it, same as the kid who made music videos and documentaries with his mates.

Try this

Go back through your CV or LinkedIn profile and look for the things you’ve left out. The things that didn’t fit the narrative of a perfectly planned out career path. Look for the things you were good at but dropped, right before you started doing something else for the money.

Revisit it. Is it something you could pick up again as part of your reversioned self?

Wrap it up

Your LinkedIn isn’t lying because it’s dishonest. It’s lying because it’s tidy, and nothing that actually happened to you was tidy.

Go find the untidy bit. It might be part of the reversioned you.

It’s happened to me a few times lately. I’m going about my business and I spot someone I recognise from twenty, thirty years ago. That full-body recognition, the kind you feel in your gut before your brain’s caught up. Then a beat later: no. Wrong person.

Then the second realisation lands. Even if it had been them, they wouldn’t look like that anymore. My memory of that person is frozen in time. The head of hair, the poor attempt at a moustache, the athletic figure, all of it would have fallen victim to the signs of a life lived (nice way of saying getting old).

It’s not just them.

Mistaking a stranger for an old friend sends me straight to wondering how others see me. I kinda think I look the same. I even kinda feel the same.

It’s hard to read the label from the inside of the tin.

But the same thing that just happened to that poor stranger has happened to me too. Like the person I mistook him for, I’m not frozen in time either. I just don’t get to watch it happen from the outside.

If them, what about me?

I wonder how that person I haven’t seen in decades has changed, not just in how they look, but in how their life looks compared to all those years ago. Are they married? Kids? On a second marriage? What happened to all those plans and dreams they had back then? Did it work out? Hell, what does “work out” even mean at this point. More importantly, are they happy and well?

Now turn all of that around on yourself. We rarely give deep thought to the path that’s led us to this exact moment. You are not who you were. Most of us just plough forward without much deliberate thought or planning, and call it getting on with life.

A review is a chance to be deliberate about what comes next

I’m not suggesting you wallow in the past. Far from it. I’m suggesting you use the path you’ve already walked to help map the one still ahead. Think about the things you thought were important back then and check how they stack up against who you are now and where you actually want to head. What’s the thing you put down because life got in the way? Is it something you’d like to pick up again?

You are not who you were. Most of us just plough forward and call it getting on with life.

Try this

Pick one thing from everything above. Just one. Message the old friend you half-recognised in a stranger’s face. Dig out the plan you shelved when life got busy. Write down what mattered to you at twenty-five and tick off what’s still true now.

Don’t overthink which one. Pick it, and do something with it this week. Not “one day.”

Me now

I caught up with an old friend from way back recently. He’s the same but different, and I imagine I am too, to him.

I’ve done things in my life I’m proud of, and plenty I’m not. But one thing I’m sure of: I’m not done yet. When I look back in ten years at where I am right now, what will be different? How much of me will still be me?

The whole premise of this project is to help myself stay curious to stay relevant, and help you do the same.

Get going. And get changing.

Kia ora,

Quick one, and it’s my fault for not making it clearer.

As a paid subscriber to Faark, I Hope It’s Not Too Late, the Small Bet Kit is already yours. You don’t need to buy it. But the sales page has a big yellow “Get the kit” button, and at least one person (a very good sport about it) clicked it and got charged. That’s on me, and I’ve put it righ…

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Kia ora,

You’re one of a small handful of people who pay for this newsletter. When I started Faark, I Hope It’s Not Too Late, I had no idea if anyone would read it, let alone put their hand in their pocket for it. So first, thank you. It keeps me going on the Sundays when the cursor is blinking and the coffee isn’t working.

I’ve made something, and it’s y…

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My wife and I are selling our family home. We’ve lived here for thirty years. Our kids came home from hospital to this house. They went from the local kindy to primary to high school without ever packing a bag between stages. The narrative in my head (the story I tell myself) is that this is a big, hard thing. Moving is hard. That’s the story.

We have friends who’ve lived in the same neighbourhood for about as long as we have. In that time they’ve moved house so many times I’ve lost count. I find myself wondering what narrative they’re telling themselves, because it clearly isn’t mine.

What’s that got to do with me?

Probably what you’re asking right now.

So much of our lives comes down to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Tell yourself moving is hard, and guess what, it’s hard. My friends have a different story, and that’s the whole point. One thing I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before is the idea of borrowing virtue. I think of it in terms of the four Stoic virtues: courage, justice, wisdom and temperance.

Say you’ve got a difficult conversation coming up at work. You think of someone you actually know, someone you consider wise, and you borrow their wisdom by imagining how they’d handle it. Same goes when you need self-control, or courage. You use the virtue of people around you to guide your own actions.

It’s like having a board of directors in your head.

Borrow a library of stories, too

I think you can do the same thing with personal narratives. If your life is a series of stories you tell yourself, why can’t you use someone else’s narrative to get yourself through something new or difficult?

Our friend who can’t stop moving has been extraordinarily generous, acting as a coach while we navigate what is, for us, a genuinely difficult thing to do. She’s helped us reframe our view using hers. She’s acted as a guide, using her own story to help us see the whole process as an exciting adventure rather than a loss.

Pass your stories on, too

This works both ways. What stories or narratives can you lend to someone else, to help them through theirs?

Think about everything you’ve picked up across a life actually lived. All the jobs, all the moves, all the versions of yourself you’ve already been. You’re a library, whether you’ve noticed or not, and other people are allowed to borrow from the shelves when they hit something unexpected or new. You don’t always have to wait to be asked. Sometimes you just notice someone standing where you once stood, and hand them the book that got you through it.

Try this

Think of one thing you’re finding genuinely hard right now: a move, a decision, an ending, a beginning. Now think of someone, anyone, who’s lived through a version of it and come out the other side with a better story than the one you’re currently telling yourself. Borrow it. Not to pretend you feel differently than you do, just to remind yourself there’s more than one way to tell this particular story.

With thanks

My nomadic coach won’t have a bar of being named publicly, but shout out to you and yours for your friendship and guidance.

A youth newsroom nearly a decade in the making shut down. A fortnight later, its star reporter won her second national award for the work that no longer existed. She’s still, stubbornly, hopeful.

I was at a panel on the future of media not long ago. A row of old hands, me included if I’m honest about my age bracket, talking about where news goes next. There was one young person on the panel, and every time she spoke the whole room leaned in. Like she was a time traveller and we all wanted to know what the future looked like from where she was standing.

That was Zoe Madden-Smith. So I got her on the podcast to ask properly.

Zoe’s spent nearly ten years in journalism, most of them at Re: News, TVNZ’s youth platform, the place she calls where she “cut her teeth.” Cut from a team of twelve down to three over several rounds of restructures, until there was nothing left to restructure. Then Re: News was gone altogether. Two weeks later, she won Video Journalist of the Year at the NZ Media Awards. Her second one in a row. For a job that no longer existed.

“People kept mentioning, do you know you’re living the plot of Devil Wears Prada 2,” she told me. “Essentially she wins an award right after being let go.” But the timing wasn’t lost on her. Winning big two weeks after losing your job opens doors, she reckons, and it stings in exactly the way you’d expect.

Zoe doesn’t think young people are the problem. She thinks the business model is.

“Youth media is actually just really good journalism that’s usually told from a youth perspective but appeals to other people as well.”

She pointed to the Cornell 7 story, which broke through a student newspaper. Nobody asks whether that story counts as “serious” journalism because a twenty-year-old broke it. It’s just journalism. The audience was there too. Re: News matched or beat mainstream platforms on social engagement, with a fraction of the staff and budget. The problem was never that young people wouldn’t watch the news. It’s that advertisers couldn’t figure out how to pay for an audience that can smell a sponsored post from across the room.

Which is its own trap. Mainstream media looks at youth coverage and assumes it should be cheap. “Here’s an iPhone, go out and get some Vox Pops,” as Zoe put it. Dumb it down, keep it short, and somewhere along the way you’ve told your audience you don’t take them seriously. “We’re marketing it as throwaway content.” Treat an audience as disposable and don’t be surprised when they decide you’re not worth their time either.

What struck me wasn’t the critique. It was that she’s not bitter about it. She’s now freelancing, and genuinely excited about the work ahead: longer-form video, documentary, the kind of human story and shoe-leather investigation that’s expensive to make and hard for AI to fake. “I think there is a push towards more human stories and investigations because that’s gonna be a lot harder for AI to take.”

A few things worth stealing

The audience was never the excuse. Zoe’s clearest point: don’t blame the people you’re trying to reach for a funding model that doesn’t work. If the platform proved engagement and still couldn’t survive, that’s a business problem not an audience problem.

Cheap and youth-friendly aren’t the same thing. Treating any audience as if it deserves less effort, less resource, less respect, tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They notice. They leave.

Trust runs both ways. Zoe’s line stuck with me: journalism doesn’t exist without an audience, and an audience that won’t engage leaves journalism with nothing to source from either.

Hope isn’t the same as denial. She’s lived a platform’s full rise and fall and still believes the work matters. Not because she’s naive about the money. Because she’s seen, firsthand, that the audience was real.

My AI agent messaged me asking where this month’s recommendations were. It said I’d better hurry up, because there’s a 10% chance they’ll be cancelling us humans and it might not reach you in time.

So here it is. The best of September, before the robots pull the plug.

Media

There’s a lot going on in the world of media, but one thing stood out this month: the President of the United States barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. Officially it’s about national security. Unofficially, it looks a lot like he didn’t like the coverage.

Journalist Paula Penfold writes in Not The News about why this matters, even from way down here in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Book

Ever heard the term cosy crime? It’s the genre that harks back to Agatha Christie and her lot. It’s a bit of a dismissive label, but I’ve found myself flying through Richard Osman’s latest, We Chase Shadows.

You might know him as the very tall guy fronting Richard Osman’s House of Games, or as the exec producer behind 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. He spent decades making telly, then at 49 dropped his first novel, The Thursday Murder Club, and became one of the biggest crime writers on the planet. He’s since got a Netflix film out of it and has two bestselling series on the go. Not bad for a late starter.

We Chase Shadows is book two in his We Solve Murders series. The mismatched trio of bestselling novelist Rosie, ex-bodyguard Amy and retired cop Steve finally land their first proper case. A bodyguard is found shot on the steps of an Italian villa with a threatening note on him, and their client, a very rich criminal, would rather the police stayed well out of it.

I’ve read the Thursday Murder Club books and enjoyed them for what they are. This one’s more caper than cosy. If you’re after something funny, light-hearted and easy, give it a go.

Podcast

Yes, Osman again. This time he’s the guest on comedian John Robins’ podcast, How Do You Cope?

He kicked off the latest series with a properly open chat about food addiction. He traces it back to childhood, talks about finally getting therapy in his thirties because he was sick of his own weird behaviour, and gets honest about living with shame. Or as the episode title puts it, “the addiction itself becomes the shame.”

Frank, and useful if you’ve ever wrestled with a habit you’re not proud of.

Documentary

Nothing this month. I’ve just ditched Netflix, so I’m flying blind. Seen something good lately? Hit reply and tell me.

Moment of Zen

Those who know me have heard me say it plenty of times: nostalgia is lazy. I stand by that. But every now and then you look back at something and think, wow, we were around for that.

This month’s moment of zen is Sinéad O’Connor. What a voice. What a loss.

No. There’s no figuring it out. There’s only starting.

Like most of what I write, this one’s a tell on myself. Every job I’ve ever had, I walked in without having it figured out. As a video editor I didn’t know everything I needed. When I became Executive Producer of a current affairs show, I didn’t have it all figured out. Even running a team of 200 for a billion-dollar business, I was still working it out on the job.

Nobody really knows what they’re doing.

Everybody’s faking it. I remember sitting in a boardroom at the start of the pandemic, looking around the table, and realising every person in the room was making it up as they went. Of course they were. It was new to all of us. That wasn’t something you could figure out first. People were relying on us to do something, so we did something, and worked out the rest as problems presented themselves.

If we’d waited until we had it all figured out, I don’t know what would have happened. I’m fairly sure it wouldn’t have been good.

The leadership lie

Nobody tells you this. The higher you climb, the less figured out it gets. The stakes rise. The certainty doesn’t.

What you find at the top instead is people with a bias towards action. The good ones, anyway. They don’t wait. They move, then adjust.

The higher you climb, the less figured out it gets.

We treat “figuring it out” as the mature, measured, grown-up thing to do. Getting your ducks in a row before the first step. Except the ducks are never all lined up. The real world doesn’t care about your damn ducks.

Here’s something that might make you feel better about your anxiety around getting started. Korn Ferry surveyed US chief executives and 71 percent of them owned up to imposter syndrome. So the person in the corner office you assume has it all sorted? They’re winging it too.

Try this

Next time you catch yourself “just figuring it out”, stop and ask one thing: what’s the next move I can actually make? Then make it. Then ask again.

The old saying about how do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time, is the way forward. Start by accepting you’ll never feel fully ready. Then the tactical one, pick the smallest next step and take it today.

.

There’s no readiness waiting round the corner. There’s only the first move, and then the next one.

Get on with it.

When I started out in media, a bunch of us made music videos. We’d get together, pool our gear and skills, and shoot them for mates in mostly terrible bands. The big dream was to get them played on one of the local music shows on TV. We put our heart and soul into them.

You know what we never called this work, we never called it content. It was something we were proud of. It made us feel special and important (probably a little too important, lol). We’d made a thing out of nothing.

Thirty years later, I was talking to a friend about the newsletter and the podcast, and I heard myself say I needed to create some new content for the newsletter. It had crept in without me noticing. I was labelling my faarking hard work content.

“CONTENT”

Being all fancy, I asked AI where the word came from. Turns out it’s from the Latin contentum (look at me, all Roman). That which is contained. Think about where else the word content turns up. What’s in your stomach? Contents. What’s in a box? The contents. It should not be the word for the article, the film, or the podcast you’ve busted a gut to make.

This feels like a good spot for a quote from someone famous. Here’s Emma Thompson at the Royal Television Society Cambridge Convention in September 2023

“When I hear people talk about ‘content’, it makes me feel like the stuffing inside a sofa cushion.”

She called it a rude word for creative people. I think she’s right.

Think about the people throughout history who have made a bunch of stuff. Seneca wrote a fair bit. Shakespeare, hell, he was flat out. Taylor Swift never stops. Nobody dares call any of it content or them content creators. Now I’m not saying you’re a Seneca, a Shakespeare or a Taylor, but you’re putting real time and real effort into whatever you make. So stop calling it content.

Why is this important?

A song is a song whether it’s on vinyl or coming out of your phone. The fact that it reaches you through a platform (container) like Spotify, YouTube or Facebook doesn’t turn your hard work into content. Your work is not grist for their mill.

There’s an actual cost here. The machines are always hungry for something faster, shorter, and preferably angrier. You find yourself chained to the work of feeding them. Before you know it, you’ve become a content supplier/creator instead of a creative worker.

Call it content, and you become a supplier to a machine that’s always hungry.

If you subscribe to this newsletter, I don’t think that’s what you’re after. You’ve already spent decades making stuff for the man. The campaigns. The reports. Why would you hand your creative skills to a faceless content mill now? Don’t just become another content creator.

The one thing a platform can’t manufacture, and an algorithm can’t fake, is a human making a specific thing on purpose. Naming your work, a newsletter, an essay, a show, is a small way of insisting it’s a made thing. Not fuel for the beast.

Try This

For the next week, catch yourself every time you call your own work content, even in your head. You’ll be surprised how automatic it’s become.

Then rename it. Say “my newsletter”, “my show”, “the thing I’m making”. Out loud if you have to. Don’t let yourself, or anyone else, file your hard work under the heading of content.

Those terrible music videos were precious to us because we knew we’d made them. The stuff you’re making now deserves the same. Give it a name, but whatever you do don’t call it content.

It’s yours.

It’s the strangest thing that at 50 we still find ourselves seeking permission. Grown arse adults, waiting for someone to say you’re allowed to start that business, take that trip, or make that career change.

I’m calling myself out here. Numerous times in the past I’ve come up with an idea (let’s say post-it notes, everyone knows someone who reckons they came up with that), shared it, then done nothing about it. In fact I think the act of sharing the idea was an act of self-sabotage. What? Let me explain.

There have been studies where the people who kept their intentions to themselves were more likely to follow through than those who announced them to all.

It seems the act of sharing your intentions ticks some kind of box in the brain. It convinces itself you’ve actually gone and done something, when no actual progress has been made. This is different to telling someone who’s meant to keep you accountable. We’ve talked before about accountability being the secret sauce to achieving goals, and we’ll no doubt talk about it again.

Sharing the idea was the self-sabotage.

There’s a another version of the same thing. Sometimes we want people to save us. We want approval, or someone to hold our hand when we take on something hard. It’s kind of a get-out clause. If nobody says “sure, let’s do that”, it gives you permission to say “well, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea after all.” That way it’s not your fault for not taking action.

Why the faark is starting something new so hard?

The other thing holding you back is the fear of looking foolish. Being a beginner at your stage of life just feels wrong. You’re meant to feel accomplished, you’re a pro. But nothing new happens without starting over.

Adam Gilbert, the founder of MyBodyTutor, talked about this on the podcast. If we do what we’ve always done, that’s going to feel comfortable. If we do something different, it’s going to feel uncomfortable. And it just means we haven’t done it yet. It’s just new. What’s easy now was once hard. What’s uncomfortable now will soon be comfortable if you stick with it.

If you’ve been following along at all, you’ll know this is where we bring in some old white guys from 2000-odd years ago. Epictetus said, “if you want to improve, be prepared to be foolish.” They knew even back then that nothing comes from standing on the sidelines.

Nothing new happens without starting over.

What the faark do I do with that?

Fair question. Whenever I’ve set out to do something new, the fear of a misstep holds me back. The fear of being a beginner again is sometimes overwhelming.

Try this. First, notice who you’ve actually been waiting on. Say it out loud if you have to. Most of the time there’s no one there, just a version of you hoping someone else will make the call so you don’t have to. Then take the smallest, most embarrassing step today. Write the first bad paragraph. Tell one person it’s already started, not that you’re thinking about it.

Nobody’s coming to give you permission. There’s no letter in the post, no nod from on high.

So give it to yourself.

Once again, it’s that time. People have been running after me in the street shouting “where’s the recommendation article?” So here it is. No documentary this month, I haven’t seen anything worth your time. If you have, tell me, and I’ll pass it on.

Media

With so much pessimism in the media industry, what I like to do in this newsletter is highlight some of the more positive things happening.

Another great episode from the OpenTab series from Substack is an interview with Joanna Coles. Joanna’s professional life in the media business extends from Fleet Street to Chief Creative Officer of the Daily Beast.

It’s fair to say she’s seen it all and through that still remains positive about modern media. She’s a champion of people finding their voice and taking it independent.

Open Tab Joanna Coles

Book

Thirst by John Robins

I love a good recovery story, and if you’ve followed me for any length of time you’ll know my fondness for British comics. John Robins ticks both boxes. You might know him as one half of the Elis and John podcast, or the funny, slightly frazzled one off Taskmaster. Thirst is the other side of that. He tells the story of his drinking through twelve specific drinks, from the first one as a kid to the last one in 2022, the year it got bad enough that stopping stopped being optional. It isn’t the breezy comedian’s memoir you might expect. It’s honest to the point of being uncomfortable, funnier in places than a book this bleak has any right to be, and clear-eyed about the childhood stuff sitting underneath it all. Worth reading whether or not drink is your particular thing, because the real subject is what we reach for, and why.

Thirst: Twelve Drinks That Changed My Life, John Robins (Viking, May 2026)

Ryan Holiday’s Reading List

You’ll know Ryan Holiday from his stoicism books, Ego Is the Enemy, Courage Is Calling and plenty more. He also owns the Painted Porch Bookshop in Texas, and runs a reading list that lands in your inbox about once a month. I always come away with something worth chasing down. Have a look.

Ryan Holiday’s reading list

Podcast

This one’s from the same John Robins. It’s an episode of his podcast How Do You Cope?, and the guest is comedian Fatiha El-Ghorri. Fatiha grew up in Hackney, one of thirteen children in a British-Moroccan Muslim family. She’s insightful on how both that upbringing and comedy became the things that keep her steady, and she takes apart a fair few of the assumptions you might have about her.

Travel- Albania from our man in the field aka my daughter Scarlett.

After taking a wrong turn on the Velbonë–Theth hike last year and somehow ending up in Montenegro 🫣, I decided to give it another shot with my best friends Elise and Josh!

We started in Shkodër and booked a three-day adventure through a hostel — kicking things off with a bus and boat to the Shala River, followed by a night in a local guesthouse in Velbonë. We ate delicious local food, played cards and had an early night before the big hike.

We set off at 8am, stopping for plenty of snacks along the way and, thankfully, making it past the infamous Montenegro turn-off this time! After summiting the mountain, we headed downhill, playing games to pass the time until we discovered a mini-mart selling one-litre beers. We ended up sprawled beside the ice-cold river, eating chip sandwiches and feeling very pleased with ourselves.

The next day, we took a short hike to stretch out our legs and discovered the Blue Eye — a spectacularly clear, turquoise swimming hole that genuinely lives up to its name. 💙 A pretty perfect way to finish the adventure!

Moment of Zen

Sometimes a new take brings the right artist and the right song together and you hear the thing afresh. This month it’s a pop princess doing a punk queen. Heart of Glass, sung by Miley Cyrus, is a reminder of how good the song is, and if you didn’t already know, proof of what a voice she’s got. Turn it up loud.

That’s a wrap for this month. Got something I should be reading, watching or listening to? Send it my way and I’ll feature it next month.

That tells you something. MyBodyTutor got me out of an office chair and, eventually, through an Ironman, back when Adam was just a voice in the inbox. I’ve followed the business ever since. So getting him on the podcast felt less like an interview and more like finally meeting a mate who’d changed my life from the other side of the world.

The Day-One Exit Plan

Adam started his career at Ernst & Young, one of the big four accounting firms. The dream job on paper. His mum was thrilled. And from the first day, he knew it was wrong.

The pull came from somewhere harder. He watched his father’s health collapse through his childhood: a heart attack in seventh grade, triple bypass days later, then multiple sclerosis and a long decline until he died. That was the making of Adam’s obsession with health and fitness, and he became the go-to guy handing colleagues a plan.

They always loved the plan. And there was always a but. “I love the plan you made for me, but I got caught up with work, life, kids.” The follow-through was the hard part. Adam had found his business hiding inside everyone else’s excuses.

He quit in January 2007. His mum thought he’d lost his mind, told him people would kill to be in his shoes. He started MyBodyTutor the following month and hasn’t stopped since.

A mission is something you have to do no matter what.

The distinction stuck with me. An opportunity is something you chase because it looks good. A mission is something you’d be doing anyway. “I will outlast anyone,” he told me, “because I’d be doing this no matter what.” That’s not a growth hack. It’s a reason to still be standing nineteen years later.

The Broccoli Problem

Here’s where Adam’s story gets useful for the rest of us, whatever we’re trying to change.

He’s not in the information business. Never has been. Everyone knows broccoli is good for them. Nobody ends up in hospital with a protein deficiency. The knowledge is free and everywhere, and it changes almost nothing.

Across ten thousand-odd clients, what Adam has learned is that success is mostly what’s going on between your ears. Food is a coping mechanism. The long-term rational part of you wants the goal, the short-term irrational part wants to sit down and eat, and they’re at war most days. His real job is helping people get out of their own way.

The standout thing he said was this: he can’t help someone solve a problem until they work out why they like having it. Every behaviour has a motivation. Telling yourself you’re too busy is reinforcing something. Being overweight can be a security blanket, and once the weight is gone the question becomes, well, now what. Get to the root and the plan finally has somewhere to land.

The Cost of Standing Still

I asked him the big one. Why don’t people change? No hesitation. Fear.

His definition of self-sabotage is simple: fearing the very thing you say you want. A business owner who wants to serve more people but believes growth means less freedom will keep a foot on the accelerator and the brake at once, forever. A few good days, then nothing. Until you reconcile that contradiction, you’ll keep undoing your own work.

And the thing we all forget is that doing nothing is not the safe option. Adam cleaned out his garage recently and found boxes that had sat untouched for six years. If he hadn’t, they’d sit there another six. “The cost of inaction is massive,” he said, “and it does not get talked about often enough.” Look at how your typical week goes, then ask whether you want twenty more years of exactly that.

The more we seek comfort, the faster we’re going to age.

He’s a big believer in self-imposed discomfort, the small hard things you choose, because they train you for the hard things you don’t. Doing something new only feels bad because it’s new. What’s easy now was once hard. Discomfort, he reckons, is a compass. It tells you you’re heading somewhere different, which is usually the right direction.

Small Is the New Big

For anyone standing at the edge of a change, this was the most reassuring bit.

Adam stayed at Ernst & Young two years longer than he wanted to, not because he lacked the nerve but because he thought he had to build the next Google. The bigness of the idea made it impossible. Then it clicked. He didn’t need to build an empire. He needed to coach one person. MyBodyTutor started with three clients.

Start small. And if that feels too big, ask what’s the least you can do without doing nothing. Treat it as an experiment or a project rather than Your New Career, and you give yourself permission to have the ups and downs.

He’s wary of the expectations social media loads onto all of us, not just the kids. The fitness “experts” who do nothing but train and film themselves all day. The business types renting the Lamborghini. Audit your feed, he says, because your feed becomes your thoughts, your standards, your idea of normal.

What AI Can’t Do

I put the obvious worry to him. Couldn’t someone build an app that does what he does? Wake you up, count your calories, tick the box?

He didn’t flinch. AI makes knowledge more available, which is fine, because knowledge was never the problem. His whole business is the gap between knowing and doing. The test he offered was perfect: would you feel bad letting AI down? Of course not. The accountability that works is human to human, someone who spots your patterns, names the limiting belief, and would actually be disappointed in you.

Same with the GLP-1 drugs. A tool, and a genuinely useful one for some, but it handles hunger, not habits. Nothing beats changing your relationship with food.

What I Took From Our Chat

The thread through all of it, the pivot, the coaching, the nineteen years, comes down to follow-through. And follow-through is a deeply human thing. Adam built a business on the least glamorous truth in self-improvement: knowing what to do was never the issue.

The thing he said that stayed with me is about what this has done for him. At Ernst & Young he’d get a stomachache on the walk to work. Now, besides being a dad, this is the great joy of his life. “Every day that I’m not at Ernst & Young is an amazing day.” Nineteen years in, and he still means it.

A few things worth stealing

Chase a mission, not an opportunity. Pick the thing you’d still be doing if it never paid off, and you’ll outlast everyone chasing the shiny version.

Find out why you like the problem. Every stuck behaviour is serving you somehow. Before you fix the habit, work out what it’s protecting you from. That’s usually the actual work.

Count the cost of standing still. Inaction feels safe and isn’t. If nothing changes, your next twenty years look like your last week. Let that scare you into moving.

Let discomfort be the compass. New things feel bad because they’re new, not because they’re wrong. What’s easy now was once hard. The uncomfortable direction is often the right one.

Start embarrassingly small. You don’t need to be the next Google. Adam started with three clients. Ask what’s the least you can do without doing nothing, call it an experiment, and begin.

Fifteen years since I first signed up, I’m still glad I did. Turns out the guy who taught me to follow through built an entire life by doing exactly that.

I am not a naturally optimistic person. I’ll always find the downside I’m an SME in what could go wrong.

When I was thinking about starting this newsletter Faark, I Hope It’s Not Too Late, all I could think about were the what ifs. What if people can’t stand it? What if I look stupid, given I’m dyslexic and the whole thing involves writing in public? I could sit here all day and come up with a million reasons why starting this was a bad idea.

This is not unique to me. Blame the lizard brain, wired to look for danger. Very useful on the savannah, when the thing trying to eat you is an actual lion. These days what seems dangerous is probably not going to kill you. Publishing a newsletter, asking for a pay rise. These are scary but not life threatening. The thing is our brains can’t seem to tell the difference.

The reluctant optimist

Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU Stern, calls himself a reluctant optimist. He lies awake listing everything that could go wrong with his businesses, then gets up and does something about it. But he makes himself ask the other question too. What if it goes right?

This question is harder one to answer and requires that we use our imagination.

It’s always easier to write a cons list than a pros list.

There’s a another less obvious reason we reach for what could go wrong, though. Pessimism can seem like intelligence. Take the down side of anything and you sound smart, like the grown-up in the room. People nod along, because worry is what they’re doing and it feels smart. Say a thing might actually work and you risk sounding naive.

Your sliding doors moments

Think back to the times you went one way when you could have gone another. Remember the film Sliding Doors? Look at your own forks. The world mostly didn’t come crashing down. It carried on in whichever direction you picked. Some of those choices didn’t work out, and you moved forward anyway, usually having learned something you couldn’t have learned standing still. When it did go wrong, it was nearly always recoverable. You did not, in fact, get eaten by the aforementioned lion.

I’ve written before about the premortem. You imagine the thing has already failed and work backwards, so you can plan to avoid them. But a premortem was never meant to stop you, just prepare you.

I want you to try the opposite. Call it a pre-parade. Same effort, pointed the other way. You picture the good outcome, probably not something you’ve put as much effort in to.

Give this a try

Take the thing you keep putting off. The job, the race, the date, the business you’ve been considering for years. Set your timer for ten minutes and write the best case. It’s eighteen months from now and it worked. What actually happened? Who did you become on the way? What did it open up that you can’t see from here? Give it the same consideration you gave the downside.

The risk nobody counts

Here’s what the worry reel always seems to leave out. Standing still feels like the safe option. When it’s mostly moving backwards.

We treat doing nothing as free. Often it costs as much as much as taking action, sometimes more. The job you didn’t take. The race you didn’t enter. The idea you sat on until someone else published it. That’s wasted time, and time is the one thing you don’t get back

So run the numbers on what could go wrong. Close off the risks you can. Then do the Imaginative thing, and run the numbers on what could go right.

Niche down. Then niche down further. That was the advice, from business coach after business coach, each of them delivering it like they’d just invented fire.

So I did it. I had a crack at a drop shipping business selling trail running and orienteering gear. Then I niched down again. And again. Until all I was doing was selling belts that hold race bibs.

They were the best selling product on the site by a mile. Admittedly the site sold about four things, and it was a terrible business (great experiment, terrible business). But that’s not why I killed it.

I killed it because it was boring. I had optimised my way into a job I didn’t want, flogging something I didn’t care about, to a faceless group of people I had little in common with.

A niche small enough to dominate is usually small enough to bore you to death.

But hang on, aren’t you the midlife pivot guy?

That’s fair, I have picked a road to play on.

I just don’t think of it as a one lane country road with a locked gate at either end. It’s a motorway. The mission here is to be broad on purpose: I write and talk about how to live deliberately, stay curious, and stay relevant. That covers your work, your money, what you read, who you give your time to, and is something I’m engaged with and is a subject I feel I have something to offer on.

So if something grabs me, I’m going to write about it. If I meet someone interesting and think you’d want to hear from them, they’re getting an episode whether or not they tick the right demographic box. It’s my party and I’ll do what I want to.

You’ve already taken the long road

David Epstein wrote a whole book about this, called Range. His argument is that specialists only win in what he calls “kind” learning environments, the ones with fixed rules and instant feedback. Chess. Golf. Everything else, which is to say most of adult life and nearly all of business, is a “wicked” environment. The rules and the environment can change halfway through.

In wicked environments the people who do best took the long road. Broad experience, slow specialisation, ideas brought together from a lifetime of experience.

Which should be reassuring, because at 45 plus the long road is the only one any of us has taken. You’ve done three careers, sat through two recessions, managed people, lost people, and picked up a strange amount of knowledge about at least one thing nobody would guess. This is experience, this is the thing that can set you apart from the crowd.

People find you for the niche. They stay for the person.

Here’s the bit all those coaches forget to tell you. The niche is how people find you. It was never meant to be who you are.

Someone finds you because they searched for a specific problem. Fine, that’s the door. But nobody sticks around for a search result. They stay because of how you think, what makes you laugh and the fact you admitted what didn’t work.

Every publication or business you love is like this. You didn’t stay subscribed for the topic. You stayed for the voice the thing that continued to hold your attention.

The niche gets you found. The human gets you followed.

Hold the mission tight, but the topics loose

Pick a mission rather than a category. “Race bib belts” is a category. “Living deliberately and staying relevant” is a mission and it has lanes. If you can’t describe what you’re doing in one sentence, you don’t have a mission. You have a category.

Then hold the mission tight and the topics loose. A tangent is fine if it serves the mission. Twelve unconnected tangents in a row though will see you heading off the motorway and up the garden path.

And keep yourself in it. The personal opening, the failed business, the thing you got wrong. For most people, that is the useful content itself, they want to hear from you.

Give this a go

Write your mission in one sentence, then tell someone. If they nod, it’s a mission. If they ask “so what do you post about?”, it’s still a category and you’ve got more work to do.

Then publish one piece this week that’s a lane over from your usual. Not off the motorway entirely. Just the next lane. Watch what happens. In my experience the sideways ones outperform the on-brief ones more often than you might think.

Narrowed out of the fun

Niching down works right up until the point you’ve narrowed yourself out of the thing you enjoy.

You’re not a category. You’re a person with a decent amount of mileage and a few opinions worth hearing.

Get in the other lane occasionally.

Which is why I wanted to sit down with Jay-Jay Feeney.

Die on the Microphone

Jay-Jay was on New Zealand radio for 33 years. Twenty-three of them at The Edge, most of it on breakfast, then drive on More FM. Her last day on air was July 2024. She was fifty. When she was thirty, she assumed she’d be doing it until the end. “I’d even joke, I’m gonna die on the microphone.”

Breakfast radio nearly finished her long before that. Up at four every morning, four hours of fresh content every day, for years. She was so exhausted she couldn’t imagine ever not feeling tired. Moving to afternoons fixed the sleep and killed the challenge. Radio had become, her word, a chore. Like a long relationship where you’re so comfortable you forget to make things exciting.

So why stay? Fear. She went into radio as a teenager and learned everything on the job. “What else do I know? My CV is basically just experience. I thought, what will I do? Who am I? What will I be?”

Then something snapped. “I thought about it for a while and then I thought, stuff it. I’m actually quitting.”

No Plan B (and an Ex-Husband)

No plan B. The plan was three months off and a bit of MCing. The idea for a podcast studio arrived a week after she quit. Today she co-owns PodLab, an Auckland podcast and video studio, with Dom Harvey. Business partner, former co-host and, yes, ex-husband. Most people can’t share a fridge with a past partner. These two run a company. “We trust each other more than anyone.” (Also, in her words, “Dom is very, very, very good at just doing what I say.”)

Same Engine, New Bodywork

I asked her the question I ask everyone: reinvention or reversioning? She didn’t blink.

“Definitely a reversion. I just did something that’s already kind of in my wheelhouse. The thing that’s not in my wheelhouse is running a business.”

Thirty-three years didn’t get thrown away. They became the asset. Credibility, trust, a name people already knew. “I didn’t have to start from scratch and try to sell myself.” What she didn’t have, she’s learning on the fly: buried in admin, mystified by the financial side, paying bills to an IT company she never sees and a fire alarm guy who turns up every fortnight. She’s fine with all of it. “We’re a boutique business. I’m not gonna make millions of dollars. I just wanna be happy and make other people happy and do cool things.”

The Trap Nobody Names

But the moment that stuck with me came when I pushed on the harder question. Plenty of people are unhappy at work. Why could she leave when they can’t?

“You can be unhappy and just think that you deserve it.”

That’s the trap, right there. Not the mortgage, not the market, not the CV. The belief that this is simply what you get. Jay-Jay reached the other conclusion. “I want to be in control of my life now. I want to be excited to get up again.”

She’s honest about the cushion, too. She owned her apartment, so the worst case was selling it and living off the proceeds. Having something to fall back on buys courage, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Try This

Ask yourself the question Jay-Jay finally asked herself: do you want to feel like this forever? Then the harder one: somewhere along the way, did you decide you deserve it? Write down how long you’ve been making the same complaint about your work. If the answer is years, you’re not stuck. You’ve settled. And settled, as Jay-Jay proved, can be resigned from.

The Maths

Here’s the maths that got me. When she left radio at fifty, she’d been on air for 33 years. All going well, she has another thirty-odd in front of her. That’s not a retirement lap. That’s a whole second career, as long as the first.

Or as she put it: “Just do what you want to do. Give yourself the chance to be happy. And you never know, it might be bloody awesome.”

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The best things I read, watched and listened to this month didn’t come from an algorithm. They came from people whose taste I trust telling me to stop scrolling and pay attention. That’s the whole point of this. No fluff, no affiliate deals, just the stuff from July I think is worth your time.

Media Business: Kara Swisher on the State of the Business

For all of us feeling a bit worn down by the headlines announcing the death of “legacy media”, this one’s the antidote.

On With Kara Swisher did a live interview with New York Times President and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien and Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff. Two people actually running big media businesses, talking honestly about where the money and the audience are really going, with Swisher doing what she does best: refusing to accept a non-answer.

Book: Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

I’ve just finished Regime Change, and staggering is the only word for it. Twice over, actually. Staggering in the research, and staggering in the depravity of the people operating at the very highest level.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times spent two years and roughly a thousand interviews building this account of the first year of Trump’s second term, and it’s the inside version: the Situation Room deliberations behind the Iran war, the sealed border, National Guard troops surging into American cities.

Haberman was part of the team that won a Pulitzer for the Trump-Russia reporting, and Swan is the Australian whose 2020 sit-down with Trump became the benchmark for how to actually interview the man.

As a former news guy I love this behind the scenes stuff.

The sort you only get when sources trust you enough to repeat what was said in the room.

If you want to understand how the biggest story in the world is really being run, rather than how it looks on cable news, you should read this.

https://amzn.asia/d/083nWu6u

Podcast: Prof G Markets — Wall Street Is Pumping SpaceX, So Why Is It Falling?

Regular readers will know I have a soft spot for the Prof G Media stable, and this episode is a good example of why. Scott’s away, so Patrick Boyle fills in alongside Ed Elson. Boyle is a professor at King’s College London and a portfolio manager with twenty-plus years across hedge funds and investment banks, which means he can explain what’s actually going on without the usual finfluencer theatrics.

The pair dig into how SpaceX’s stock has traded over the past couple of weeks, pull apart the analyst price targets, and raise a concern worth hearing: the conflicts of interest baked into equity research. In other words, the people telling you to buy may not be neutral parties. They also cover why the crypto bros have quietly abandoned crypto for AI.

Here’s my prediction. When all this plays out, episodes like this one will look prescient, and people will still be saying “nobody saw this coming.”

Somebody did. They said it out loud, on a podcast, for free.

And when the music stops, it won’t be the guys who launched the IPOs or the backers and hypers who get hurt. They’ll have made their money and moved on. It’ll be retail investors left holding the bag, same as it ever was. Frankly, that pisses me off.

Dust On Her Boots

And while we’re on podcasts, allow me to blow my own horn for a second. If you didn’t catch my episode Dust On Her Boots with Anna Fifield, do yourself a favour and give it a listen. Anna has had the kind of career most journalists only daydream about. She reported from inside North Korea twelve times, covered the Obama White House for the Financial Times, and ran the Washington Post’s Beijing bureau. Then, in the space of a month, she was made redundant and turned fifty. Anna read this as a starting gun and launched her own Substack, Between Giants, bringing decades of foreign reporting home through a New Zealand lens. Three months in she’s got three and a half thousand subscribers. It’s exactly the sort of back-yourself-later-than-the-world-says story this whole newsletter exists for. You can sign up here.

Between Giants, by Anna Fifield

A newsletter about how New Zealand navigates a rapidly changing world.

Documentary: Icarus

With the Tour de France on this month, it felt like the right time to point you at Icarus.

Bryan Fogel started out making a film about doping in cycling. The plan was to dope himself under supervision and prove how easy it is to beat the tests. Then his adviser, a Russian scientist named Grigory Rodchenkov, turned out to be the man who ran Russia’s state doping programme, and the film stumbles into one of the biggest sporting scandals of the century. What begins as a stunt about amateur cycling ends with Rodchenkov fleeing to America as a whistleblower and Russia banned from competing under its own flag at the Olympics.

You could not script it, and nobody did. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary, and it’s the rare film that gets better as it loses control of its own premise.

Travel Recommendation from our woman in the field (aka Scarlett my daughter).

My recommendation for travel is the tiny old town of El Castell de Guadalest just outside of Alicante and stopping to have vermouth at the tiny bar Mick Jagger used to regularly visit you will spot it as his photos are all over the walls !

That’s July done.

If you’ve come across something worth sharing, send it my way. A podcast, a book, a documentary, a business move that made you think. The best recommendations in this newsletter come from readers, and I’d love to feature yours next month. Add yours in the comments or hit reply.

Every time a new AI model drops, you can sense people looking over their shoulders. Is this the one that comes for my job? Is this the one that eats my business for lunch?

And let’s be fair to the machine, it’s brilliant at exactly what you’d expect. Volume. Speed. Pattern-spotting. It can summarise a fifty-page report, draft a decent email, and knock out a passable blog post in the time it takes you to open your laptop. If your work is producing generic material at scale, then yes, a little nervousness is rational.

But that’s also its ceiling.

I could produce an article a day using AI. Hell, a hundred a day. But why would I, and more to the point, why would you read them? One of the things I’ve noticed, especially with the podcast, is how much people crave real stories from real people. Not content. Not output. A person telling you something true about their life that you can use in yours.

Here’s the test I keep coming back to. The machine can do many things, but it can’t buy a round for the book club. It can’t shout the morning break snacks at the business mastermind, turn up to the art appreciation club with a half-decent bottle of wine and cheese, or stand on a freezing sideline with the rest of the team. It can’t be a regular. It can’t be missed when it doesn’t show up. Community runs on exactly the things AI can’t fake: presence, consistency, and skin in the game.

The machine can optimise almost anything. It just can’t show up.

How the faark does this help you?

Every time you start a project, you probably ask who you’re trying to reach. Good. Now ask the better question: how do I bring those people together?

Not just talking to you. Talking to each other. An audience that only faces the front is a mailing list. An audience that turns to face each other is a community, and a community is the one asset no algorithm change, platform collapse, or shiny new model can take off you. The comments section, the monthly call, the small group chat that develops its own in-jokes. That’s the moat.

I have a friend who runs a coaching business helping people lose or gain weight and live healthier. On paper, an AI coach could do his job. It could track meals and workouts and serve up feedback all day without a lunch break. What it can’t do is real accountability. It’s easy to ignore a notification. It’s much harder to ignore a human being who knows your name, knows your excuses, and is expecting you on Tuesday. His clients don’t pay for information. Information is free. They pay for someone who notices.

It’s easy to ignore a notification. It’s much harder to ignore someone who’s expecting you on Tuesday.

That’s the bit worth stealing. Whatever you’re building, wire the human accountability in on purpose. A check-in call. A small cohort. A buddy system. A reply from you, personally, that proves someone is actually home.

Try this

Before you start the next project, or as an audit of the current one, answer a single question: what’s the human angle here? What can I add that the machine can’t?

Then pick one mechanism and build it in from day one. A monthly live call. Comments you genuinely answer. A small group where members are introduced to each other, not just to you. One is enough. Presence compounds.

That’s A Wrap

My real-life audience, the people who read this newsletter and listen to the podcast, keep telling me the same thing without quite saying it. They want other people. People to swap ideas with, people to learn from, people to share the wins and the faceplants with, and real humans to keep them honest when motivation runs out.

AI will keep getting better at making things. It won’t get better at being someone.

Build the thing. Then buy the round.

I signed up for an Ironman when I could barely swim a length of the pool. The race required 3.8km in open water, which is a long way to fake it.

So I got a coach. I got lessons. And I was terrible. A grown man floundering in the shallow end while teenagers cruised past. I felt like a fool.

Guess what? I got better.

Same story with this newsletter. I was scared to hit publish. Same with the podcast. I was scared to ask people to be guests. In every case the unlock was the same: being willing to be a beginner again. There was no other option. As author Ryan Holiday puts it, the obstacle is the way.

The trap explained

Being good at something can be a trap, and it’s difficult to spot and harder to escape. You’ve spent years, decades even, working and studying to become good at your thing. Great, maybe. You’ve invested so much in that competence that appearing anything less feels like a threat to your very core.

So you quietly stop doing things you might be bad at. Which, when you think about it, is most things. You may not even notice it happening.

Competence is a comfort zone that can slow growth.

Why it gets harder as we get older

Two reasons.

The first is the fear above. The more senior you get, the further the fall from expert to beginner feels, and the more people you imagine watching you land.

The second is elasticity. Stepping outside your comfort zone is a muscle. Work it and it strengthens. Ignore it and it stiffens. Most of us, without noticing, stop giving it anything to do. Same job, same routes, same restaurants, same opinions. Every year the list of things that feel “not for me” quietly grows. Not because you can’t. Because you’re out of practice at being new at things.

Feeling uncomfortable? Good.

A sure sign you’re doing the right thing is feeling uncomfortable.

Not the dread that tells you something is actually wrong. The awkward, slightly embarrassed, “I don’t fully know what I’m doing” kind. That’s not a warning light. That’s the muscle working again.

Jane Dent told me on the podcast that after a career spanning broadcasting, the All Blacks and academia, she still wrestles with imposter syndrome. Still feels she made it up as she went along. Her mantra, borrowed from an old boss: fake it till you make it. The feeling never fully leaves. You just stop letting it vote.

Discomfort isn’t a warning light. It’s the green light to carry on.

The big surprise

Here’s the bit nobody tells you: people want you to succeed.

Set out on something new, a career, a business, a ridiculous mid-life triathlon, and people will go out of their way to help. My swim coach never once made me feel like the slowest person in the pool, which I was. The podcast guests I nervously approached said yes, and then some of them suggested other guests.

We assume the world is watching, waiting for us to fail. It isn’t. Mostly it isn’t watching at all, and when it does notice, it tends to cheer. Something about seeing a person have an honest crack brings out the best in people.

All you have to do is ask. That’s the whole trick. The competent version of you hates asking, because asking admits you don’t know. Ask anyway.

Try this

Write down the last time you were a proper beginner at something. Not new-project-at-work new. Bad at it, no idea, might-embarrass-yourself new.

If you can’t remember, that’s the trap, sprung.

Then pick one small thing to be bad at this month, and tell one person you’re doing it. The telling matters. It gets you past the looking-foolish part, and there’s a decent chance they’ll offer to help.

Wrap it all up

Competence is a real achievement. You earned it.

But somewhere along the way it stops being a reward and starts being a cage.

The trap isn’t being good at something.

It’s never being willing to be bad at anything again.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
​— Anaïs Nin