May 23 2024
- Burnout, Mindset, Productivity
June 29, 2026
As I stumble my way through life, collect experience, experience hardship, overcome obstacles, I find the pool of people I would truly call “friends” becomes smaller and smaller.
I still have plenty of acquaintances, peers, colleagues, etc.
But the people we truly connect with is usually based on some shared commonality:
The deeper and more personal the shared commonality, and the degree to which we are open about it, tends to influence the depth of our relationship.
Over time, friends fall away. This is only natural;
After all, you no longer go to the same school, and your interests quickly diverge. Maybe you lose a few more when you move town, and even close friends can fall away each time you go through major changes like starting a business, having a child, moving. The overlap in your daily experience becomes smaller and smaller. And of course, life’s responsibilities grow and grow and relationships are often left till last and neglected.
For some it’s easy to just go out and find new friends to replace your old school friends;
After all, there’s plenty more people with common interests.
But so many folk go to school, or perhaps college or maybe even university, then they graduate and say to themselves “Now my education is done. Now I find a job”.
And most do. They find a job or a career and meet people in that line of work, or with similar hobbies….
But what happens if you don’t?
It’s presumed that education ends in your early twenties, when you are a barely formed person with almost no life experience. I was probably an insufferable knob in my twenties. I’d hate to think I was still that naïve young man. Education is growth. Changing your thinking changes your behaviour. So if you stop learning, you stop changing and you stop growing.
If you commit yourself to self growth and growing a little bit everyday then it also holds true that in a short time, perhaps as little as a few years, you may be a very different person.
Since few people can commit themselves to constant growth (it’s fucking exhausting, and the distractions grow more plentiful, and more addictive every day) it also stands to reason that the pool of people you can actually connect with becomes smaller and smaller.
If you work in a specialist field, then it’s even smaller still:
There’s a baseline of knowledge required just to discuss things like marketing, funnels, offers, value staircases. This can narrow the pool of people who can participate in any meaningful discussion about a work topic, unless they also work in that field.
Ie. Talking to Doctors about Doctoring is incomprehensible, unless you’re also Doctor:
“OMG today I had x2 Post-op day 2’s; both with creatinine’s bumped, lactate’s normalized, but still tachy with a soft pressure, so I’m thinking prerenal AKI versus early sepsis.”
“oh man, I would deffo’s trend the CBC, repeat cultures if he spikes, hold the ACE, give a cautious bolus, and keep him NPO, let the surgeons deal with that mess, LOL ROFLCOPTERS”
Running a business has it’s own raft of challenges that only business owners will understand. Similarly, self-improvement, and lifestyle design has it’s own lexicon, reading list, baseline of understanding required to talk about it deeply.
So suddenly the pool of people you can make friends with has shrunk:
“everyone in my school”
↓
“everyone in my school who went on to study architecture”
↓
“everyone why left architecture to start their own business”
↓
“everyone who started their own business and have kids”
↓
“everyone who started their own business and have kids and is obsessed with lifestyle design”
It’s easy to be limited to banal small-talk with most people you meet;
Many people aren’t ready for an expanded perspective, they haven’t read the books you’ve read, they have no experience of the challenges you’ve faced, have no interest in starting their own business.
Self growth is lonely
– Dan Koe, The Art of Focus
But don’t worry about this:
I’ve come to believe it comes down to the depth of conversation and a harmony in the level of thinking. I realise this may sound pretentious and elitist;
“I’ve read a few books, now I am a thinker”
So when someone does something self-centred, or narrow minded,
or gives in to their emotions instead of logic…
when I want to shake them and say
“Can’t you see yourself? are you a child?!”
instead, I try to remind myself I behave like that at times too.
I try to remind myself everyone is doing the best they can with the level of awareness they have, and the knowledge and tools at their disposal.
But people behave based on their own experiences, and do what they can with the knowledge they have.
This isn’t some race to a goal that you have determined for yourself.
If people aren’t ready or interested in pursuing self-growth it’s not your job to educate them or push them to it; That would be a quick route to being a pretentious twat.
On a fundamental level, we all have the same problems with different contexts or flavours.
It’s entirely possible to deeply connect with someone over these shared, universal, challenges of life. But still, it’s easy to become estranged as your pool of people with similar life experiences shrinks.
Age, income, religion, etc doesn’t seem to matter much as a gauge for connection:
Sometimes spending mere minutes with some people my own age seems like an eternity, covering banal topics, the latest Netflix shows and gossip yet I can spend hours with our retired neighbours in engaged conversation that flies by in minutes
When you can find someone on the same level of thinking,
who have experienced the same challenges,
or hold the same values,
you connect deeply.
It may seem like friends are melting away, your social circle is shrinking…
But think quality over quantity.
What’s left is the enriched version of your community.
The purpose of life is to find purpose in life.
June 27, 2026Be ready for disappointment today.
And be ready to adapt and move on.
It’s much easier to change your mindset, than to try and change the world around you.
Illness, lack of sleep, stressful travel, flight delays, terrible toddlers…
Yesterday I had the most exhausting 24 hours I can remember in a while, which stretched me to the edge of my endurance.
But in modern life we so rarely suffer seriously:
And so we don’t often have the chance to practice being uncomfortable, or to learn to tolerate pain.
You can use suffering as an opportunity to practice your grit and fortitude and a positive mindset.
When experiencing illness.
You have two choices available:
You can experience the suffering,
and wallow in it, thereby experiencing more suffering by giving it your entire focus.
Or your can accept the suffering.
Yes, its shit; Your tired, or sore or hungry or uncomfortable. But there’s nothing more you can do about it.
And you can still experience positive things amongst the suffering.
Even if those things are small, you can focus your attention on appreciating things which are good, thereby reducing your moment to moment suffering.
June 1, 2026
Why should the goal be to remove all manual effort and discomfort from our lives?
Since having a child, I am bombarded daily with special pillows to support walking, sitting, and crawling.
There are a myriad of noise machines, lights, oils, and scents that promise to solve the problem of babies not sleeping.
But are fake solutions to real problems.
The only solution to lack of sleep for parents, is “be tired for a few months”.
Lack of sleep is a real problem.
But even worse than fake solutions is the industry for fake problems, producing plastic novelty products to solve “problems” that don’t exist.
An endless parade of mass manufactured plastic tat has invaded our lives, masquerading as a “problem to be solved”, destroying our planet for a product with a shelf life of days, or even hours for the sake of a £5 transaction and next day shipping:
Banana cases, egg peelers, electric can openers, belly button cleaners.
I couldn’t live without some things:
The time pressure of modern life are simply too much.
My marriage probably wouldn’t survive without a dishwasher.
A certain amount of automation is a good thing.
But as much as possible,
I should try to avoid the temptation to remove micro efforts from my life.
It’s these little movements that keep a body healthy and strong in later life.
Don’t automate all the little things that make up a rich, balanced life.
I’d just add this quote from James Clear, which summaries this so much better than I did:
February 25, 2026The modern world is optimized for convenience, not improvement.
The default path is usually the more convenient path. But the body and mind only grow when placed under a stimulus. If you want improvement, you have to choose something different than convenience
It can be lovely to have a day where you do not push yourself, but it rarely works out well if you have a life where you do not push yourself.
Sometimes It feels like we just cant win.
It seems like every year, we put more & more in, but get less and less back out.
Maybe the world is against us.
Maybe the game is rigged.
But we can choose how we lose.
And we can choose how we play, too.
The opponents may be cheating, The umpire may be biased, but we can still play fair.
As people become pinched at both ends
We often see the worst qualities of humanity come out.
People start putting themselves first.
They start taking more, and giving less, hoarding what they have.
They pull down others to push themselves up, then brag about their success on social media.
But even when margins are tight, We can find enough to survive & still live a good life.
Don’t join zero sum thinking or “dog eat dog” mentality.
We can still treat others with kindness, and be helpful.
The worse things get, the more important it becomes to do good & provide value where we can.
Being good ‘despite of’ is it’s own form of winning.
Choose carefully.
In a world of convenience, and virtual living,
money and success are the only goals deemed to be important.
We are kept in an endless ratrace for more money,
and we sacrifice ever more time in the pursuit of success.
But there’s a sense of control that can be found
in possessing the ability to fix your own problems
Pick up the practical skills we’ve lost,
that let you survive in the world were the cost of living is crushing us.
June 23, 2025Self sufficiency is a free source of wealth and power
Everyday we are teased on social with FOMO for the lives we could have led.
Our culture would have us believe we can have it all.
We are permanently dissatisfied with where we are and what we have.
This paradox of choice didn’t exist just a generation ago.
You picked a career for life,
rewarded if your worked hard.
People had fewer options.
Options are good.
But only when you can take action.
Too many options leads to
paralysis and dissatisfaction.
Which = anxiety.
The answer is to learn to be happy with the life you already have.
yes, you could pivot into a new life.
But it doesn’t mean you should.
June 23, 2025If the grass always looks greener on the other side…
tend your own grass before you jump the fence.
After getting into an argument on linkedin recently,
I immediately regretted some stuff I said online.
I said I didn’t care much about world events because I don’t watch the news, which promptly earned me the label of “privileged”.
Maybe they were right, it was a poor choice of words and there’s a lot of suffering out there.
It’s not that I don’t care.
It’s that I only have so much attention to give,
and I’m not willing to give it up to a news cycle focussed on negative hyperbole.
So I then learned about a concept I wished I’d known sooner that would have saved me some trouble…
“Hitchens razer”, named for an author, states that:
Anything asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence
This has since saved me from many pointless arguments online.
I don’t need to engage with everything I see.
How many hours have I lost crafting arguments online?
Or wasting my best energy on imagined comebacks to arguments that have already faded into the past?
Or spent all day stressing about news I can do nothing about?
The thing is I should know better!
In fact,I’ve already written about this myself
In life by design ep40 I was talking about cultivating an information diet of selective ignorance,
Which massively improved my wellbeing AND gave me improved ability to focus.
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