Now, these Levels assume a few things:

- That I was playing the capitalism game. Most people I’ve met are.

- That I had a degree of agency and ability to make decisions and try to get things done.

- That I was interested in moving up a Level and not falling back down a Level.

You may disagree with or be offended by some of what I say here. You might think I’ve lost touch. You might think I’m lucky. You might think this is all impossible in the world these days. Maybe so. The below is just what I know to be true at this point in my life, and I’m sharing it not to boast or sell a course or a book, but in the hope that it might help someone.

Level 1 – Survival.

This one hurt. Each day I had less money than I needed to survive. In my case, I was very cold, hungry, and depressed, and it was all my fault. Luckily, I was only here for weeks as a twenty-one-year-old. I’ve seen some loved ones in this Level, crying because they didn’t know how to feed their family, but I’ve also seen them pull up their socks and work it out. I’ve also lived in an East African township for a year, surrounded by people who lived in much more hardship than I’ve ever experienced.

I think here is how to get out of Level 1, quickly:

- Don’t be afraid to ask for help from friends, your family, or a charity.

- If something is keeping you trapped here (like a substance addiction), this must be your priority to be free from.

- Find a job. Obviously simple, I know, but you’ll be amazed how fast you can find work if you suck up your ego, get semi-presentable, print out 30 CVs and go knocking on businesses’ doors. I’ve done this before at bars, orchards, farms, and even around my neighbourhood to do gardening jobs.

- If escaping your location will get you out, do that. (This is what I did when I was stuck in Level 1.)

Level 2 – Scraping By.

At Level 2, I made just enough money to cover the most basic expenses each month, like rent and food. There was nothing extra for weekend brunch, new clothes, or drinks at the pub. I was twenty-five when we (Kaitlin and I) spent a year here, and I’d found myself in this position after leaving a well-paid job to follow my passion. So, it was worth it despite the financial squeeze. One big shock (like a health issue or losing your job), and you are back in trouble.

How to get out of Level 2:

- Given you are living on the bare minimum, you don’t have any discretionary spending to cut. But you can try to find a better living situation (like moving out of temporary accommodation and into a share house with better rent) or finding a cheaper way to commute (buying a cheap bike!).

- But I find the two best approaches here are a) to rock it in your current job and create opportunities there by either winning commissions and bonuses (usually you must be in sales, so consider moving into that) or b) being promoted. My fastest promotion was from dishwasher to manager in four days. Or if your job is clearly a dead end, do what you can to keep it, while you find another one.

Level 3 – No Buffer.

I reckon a whole bunch of people are here (and unfortunately stay here). You have income and stable housing, and you make it through each month, but you have very little surplus. At Level 3 you struggle to save anything or get ahead. Your debt might be growing. Or your rent or mortgage keeps going up. We were here at thirty when everything we earned seemed to be gobbled up each month. This is the tough advice I’d give to my thirty-year-old self.

How to get out of Level 3:

- If you are honest with yourself, you might be overstretched here. You bought a car, or a house, or a holiday that cost too much. Or you are sending your kids to schools that are realistically too expensive. You are living a lifestyle that you can’t afford. You can stay stuck here and keep paying for all these things. You might be stuck here for the rest of your life if so (plenty of people are).

- The fastest approach is to cut here. Sit down, look at what you are spending, and cut what you don’t need. Removing a subscription here and there probably won’t help; you most likely have to sell the big things. It’s less about more income at this point, because if you are trapped in Level 3, you’ll spend the next pay rise you are lucky enough to receive. It’s tough love, but you need to live on less.

Level 4 – Starting to Save.

This felt good. We weren’t spending everything every month, and we could finally put money away. This served as a safety net that helped me through a tough time and start thinking about buying our own apartment. The advice here is the simplest of this whole post and I passed this Level when I was saving more than $1,000 a month.

- Put the money away automatically, meaning it comes out of your pay almost immediately.

- Set it up so it goes either into a low-risk savings account, or if you are feeling confident, into a boring, low-cost index fund (I like Vanguard).

- Keep getting better at understanding where your money goes each month with a budget (just do one up in Google Sheets; it’s better when you understand each line) and look for ways that you could easily spend less.

Level 5 – Saving a lot.

This felt even better. I started to see that my savings account grew in support of our goal to buy an apartment and not be trapped by rent. The big breakthrough here is that I stopped being an employee and became an entrepreneur (starting a business with an excellent co-founder). It took years to make real, but we started to get solid dividends each year from the business, big enough to see me start to pay down the mortgage in chunks and also meet scary expenses like IVF. I think you pass this Level when you are saving at least $100,000 a year. The advice to get there is also simple:

- I personally think that most people who can pass Level 5 become entrepreneurs. They launch a business (not necessarily a sexy one) that solves a problem and find people who are willing to pay for their products. If they haven’t found the product yet, they keep trying. They keep costs low in the business and they work incredibly hard to keep selling that product that people keep buying.

- The only people I know who manage to do this as employees either move into a partnership position where they start sharing a percentage of the business’s profits, or brilliant salespeople who bank big commissions every year. Both options usually mean working long hours.

Level 6 – Big Costs Gone, With a Big Surplus.

I got here at 40 (I started thinking about all this at 17). And I celebrated with an expensive bottle of champagne (Krug, and wowee it tasted good). This was the day I paid off all my debts and still had a good chunk of change I could put into boring index funds and future funds for my children. To pass this Level, I think you need no more debt and a runway of at least a year (which I explain below). The advice here:

- You need a good runway. Runway is simple to figure out. First, you need to know your burn-rate, which is what it costs to run YOU and your household each month. Let’s say it’s $10,000 (which is a real number if you have no debt; our burn-rate is usually lower than this). Then if you have $120,000 in the bank, your runway is twelve months, implying that even if you didn’t bring in $1, you’d still be OK for a year.

- Honestly, the only way I know how to do this (because it’s the only tactic I’ve taken) is to succeed as an entrepreneur. In my case, my co-founder and I sold our business. After more than a decade of hard work, we threaded the needle (few businesses sell).

Level 7 – Cashflow Covers Burn-Rate, with Surplus.

I’m here now, at 43. I only know three people who got here in their 40s.

I hope to never go down a Level.

I don’t have a big boat, a private jet, or multiple houses all over the world. I don’t want these things.

Currently, I’m travelling the world for 2026 with my family. We bring in cashflow through a blend of investment properties, renting out our own family home, and occasional injections of cash for work that I choose to do remotely (I’ll keep my brain active for my whole life!). This brings more than enough to cover our monthly expenses, with our savings building. Life is good, really good. My advice here is:

- Don’t let that burn rate creep up Aaron! Be careful to stay humble.

- Don’t bet the farm on a high-risk entrepreneurial venture because you think you are so smart.

- Enjoy the freedom.

Level 8 – A LOT of money.

I don’t know what this feels like. I’m also not striving for it. I have enough for me, for my family. If I choose to try for this Level one day, I’ll let you know what I learn if I make it there. In the meantime, I’ll be enjoying Level 7.

I hope this is helpful. Or challenging. Or catalysed a moment of reflection, the creation of an index fund account, the sale of something or the creation of a new budget. If you’d ever like to chat through the Level you are at, I’d be happy to try to help.

To freedom, living deliberately, and to you.

Aaron

Last week we watched Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform. This time with our two boys Finn and Atlas. And this time in an ancient Roman theatre in Pula, Croatia. He didn’t play the Ship Song, but that’s OK. We’ll hopefully see him again somewhere, someday, and he might play it then.

But they did play Bright Horses, which Kaitlin has come to call ‘the most beautiful song she’s ever heard.’

I’ve always loved it, but as we listened to it live once again, its lyrics burst out and struck me. (No doubt in a different way from what Nick Cave first intended, but hey, that’s the thrill of poetry.) Before I share the lyrics, maybe do yourself a favour, stop reading for a moment and listen to the song. Bright Horses. It’s 4 minutes and 52 seconds long. Hopefully you can spare the time.

Now for the lyrics:

The bright horses have broken free from the fields
They are horses of love, their manes full of fire
They are parting the cities, those bright burning horses
And everyone is hiding, no one makes a sound
And I’m by your side and I’m holding your hand
Bright horses of wonder springing from your burning hand

To me, the first verse is about those moments when you remember to see the wonder of it all. To realise how incredible it is that you are alive. That you have love in your life. That there is more to come.

And everyone has a heart and it’s calling for something
And we are all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are
Horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire
And the fields are just fields and there ain’t no Lord
And everyone is hidden and everyone is cruel
And there is no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools
And the little white shape dancing at the end of the hall
Is just a wish that time can’t dissolve at all

Again, perhaps only to me, the second verse is about how the world tells us to look away, to ignore, to not believe that the wonder is there. To get on with things, because it’s all a big fucking rush.

This world is plain to see
It don’t mean we can’t believe
In something and any way
My baby’s coming back now
On the next train
I can hear the whistle blowing
I can hear the mighty roar
I can hear the horses prancing
In the pastures of the Lord
Oh the train is coming
And I’m standing here to see
And it’s bringing my baby
Right back to me
Well there are some things
That are hard to explain
But my baby’s coming home now
On the 5.30 train

But in the third verse he leans back towards being open to witnessing the wonder of it all. His lover is coming home to him, and there is immense beauty and joy in the simplicity of that.

Thank you, Nick (and Warren Ellis). In that Pula coliseum, you reminded me to witness the wonder again. And happy anniversary, Kaitlin, my love. My bright horse.

* Also, if it’s been a while since you listened to the Ship Song, or you’ve never heard it, there may be no better time than now.

** Kenya was technically the first wedding to Kaitlin. Well, technically for a moment to someone else, but we fixed that.

Voracious and weird? Absent? Almost impossible to remember by the time you are drinking your morning coffee?

After years of my young kids stealing away my night’s dreams with their wakeups, mine have been coming back to me. At first, I was just enjoying them, excited by their return. Then I started to remember snippets, and they were weird, weird, weird.

My wife, Kaitlin, has a psychology degree and has always been a fan of Jungian dream analysis. But while we travel the world this year, Jungian Dream therapists have been hard to pin down, so inspired by my friend Naomi, who had done this before, I built a simple agent in Claude. The prompt was just:

‘Act as a Jungian dream analyst for me. I will enter what I can remember from my dreams. You are welcome to observe trends and patterns, but please rely on Jungian principles, and don’t make things up.’

I’ve done this with a dozen dreams now, all of them feeling fractured and nonsensical as I talked them into Claude. But what my Jungian analyst has found so far has been very interesting, and the trend is clear.

In all of the dreams I’ve started in an environment inspired by a real situation from my life, particularly the Navy and business. But I don’t want to be there. In early dreams, I was frustrated, sad, or scared by these environments, but in later dreams, I’ve found myself taking control, getting myself away from what I don’t want and stepping towards what I do. Last night the dream started with my old business partner (we are still great friends) and I planning a complex, Oceans 11 style heist. We were going to make a fortune and give it all to charity. But I then found myself at an old rickety theme park (a recurring image) with my son, Atlas. Eager to get back to executing the heist, I lost track of Atlas.

The message was clear. ‘You could go back and launch another business, and it would make a difference in the world, but you risk losing your son if you do.’

I’ve been searching for and finding the truest version of myself more and more these last few years. I’ve been living deliberately. Turns out my dreams are telling me to keep going.

What might your dreams be telling you?

(While I may be letting AI analyse my dreams, I am not letting it write for me. All the words are mine here. All mistakes and human fallibilities are therefore also mine.)

I grappled with every word.

Changed the tense of the entire book from past to present and then back to past, which means that I had to rework EVERY sentence. Twice.

When I felt like a bit was done, I would print it out, and then cover it with pen marks over the next hour as I sat in a chair and proofed. Chapters that I thought were brilliant, I tore up. I gave myself chills writing some pieces. Sometimes I cried. Sometimes I smiled from ear to ear. Thankfully, thousands have now read the book, and many have reached out telling me of their own tears or joys as they did. Of their wishes that there were more pages to sink into or for a sequel. Even without these moments of connection, if I’d never sold a copy but could go back to the beginning, I would do it all again. Because this little thing I’m preciously calling art was first of all created for me, the artist. That others have found beauty in it is just a bonus.

Last year, I was curious about how well AI could write. I played with Anthropic’s incredibly impressive Claude AI and found that with a little prompting, it could write very well. So well, in fact, that I decided that I would make a commitment to write without it.

I want to be deeply human in my writing. I want to deliberate over every word. Sometimes I want to dig down into my soul. Often, I want to create. I hope to one day write something that Ocean Vuong describes as “a new contribution to the species”.

I don’t even let Grammarly or Microsoft Word homogenise my sentences.

Nick Cave just wrote about the AI songs that are coming.

“Before long, they will be able to produce songs indistinguishable from those created by humans. And this is what grieves me. They will be identical in presentation, perhaps even superior, but entirely devoid of soul, cynically undermining the need for matters of the spirit, the sacred, the divine.”

It’s currently very easy to spot AI writing, and this month it seems to be popping up on every second post on Instagram or LinkedIN. The easiest giveaway is the mechanism of “its not ___, its ___.” So, for example, “it’s not just this season’s trend, it’s a revolution.” I get that not everyone wants to write like I do, but I think if you are pressing send on an AI written piece that you think is heartfelt and profound, many people may be reading it and sensing that it is anything but. If they read it at all beyond the first “it’s not ___, it’s ___.” I’d much prefer to read something real and raw and written by you.

This post took me ninety minutes. I wrote it after the kids went to bed. Checked it three times. Read it out loud twice. All the mistakes are mine. AI could have spat it out in 12 seconds. I’m OK with my personal investment in it, I enjoyed writing it, and maybe it might spark a thought for you. Around how you might use AI in your own life. We are already deciding what we want to let AI do for us, and of course the possibilities are many. But I wonder if the bravest choice for you and I is what we won’t let AI do. Would you let it write your mother’s obituary? A speech for your best friend’s wedding? Will you let it make a decision for you about who you should love? How you should live? As a professional, will you hand the client the 12-second version it spat out for you, or will you lean in and decide to present your best work?

There’s no right or wrong answer, I just have this growing feeling that the smartest and most creative people will use it very deliberately.

I’m in Costa Rica, a long way from hot cross buns, easter egg hunts and that feeling of maladaiscal joy in Australia that we manage to get such a long break so soon after summer. I miss it all.

I unashamedly love these little annual holidays. Christmas. Easter. Thanksgiving. I enthusiastically cook the dishes. Set the table. Try to bring people together.

This started when I was 18, when my first Christmas as an adult was spent in the Persian Gulf with the military, and I was pining for home.

“I cut the ship’s cake with the Captain on Christmas Day, fulfilling tradition as the youngest member of the crew. As we posed for a photo, the alarm sounded for the boarding team to move out on yet another mission, cutting our conversation short. “Merry Christmas,” he’d said with what looked like an apologetic smile as I’d excused myself.”

As a traveller, I’ve been away from family for so many of these days, which just makes them all the sweeter when I do get to experience them.

So this easter, if you live in a place and a family where easter is celebrated, maybe this is an invitation to enjoy it, unashamedly, perhaps a little more than you ever have. Have an extra hot cross bun and maybe fill it with a thick slice of cold butter, like everyone seems to be doing this year. Buy a few extra eggs for the kids to find during their hunt (as expensive as they are). When a moment of boredom arrives across the four days, lean into it, and head out for a walk, or bake something, or bring out a puzzle. These are all precious moments in life, perhaps some of the most. Enjoy them.

Except they kind of weren’t.

Sure, we all lined up, had our tickets scanned, walked up the steps, watched a ship going through the canal and were then guided towards an IMAX theatre for a Morgan Freeman-narrated documentary. Wonderful. But as we waited the five or so minutes before the lights went down and the show started, I would estimate that 180 of those 200 people had their phones out, no longer talking to the people right next to them. They were rapidly scrolling through social media, or pinching their fingers to crop their pictures of the canal to send out to the internet. It was like their bodies were at the Panama Canal, but their minds were elsewhere. Perhaps they were wondering what others in the world were up to. Or hoping for others’ approval of how great it was to be in Panama!

Similarly, on a beach in Rio a few months ago, my son Finn and I counted how many people were on their phones. Of the 100 people we quickly looked at, 70 of them were looking at their devices. Again, rather than being in the moment, on one of the most astounding beaches on earth, they were somewhere else.

This is a new phenomenon, and I mostly blame smartphones. Because twenty years ago, if you were on a beach in Rio, other than sending a postcard to someone (two weeks to arrive) or taking some photos (which you might show a small group of friends or family across the coming years), there was not much of a reason to have your mind elsewhere.

I don’t have this all worked out myself just yet. I often find myself thinking about the past rather than the now (don’t we all). Or looking ahead, rather than being present in the now. Or thinking about someplace else, rather than the place I’m in right now. This is all fine, but I’ve been realising how little time I truly spend in the HERE and the NOW. So I’ve been experimenting. Trying to be more deliberate about being in the HERE (place) and NOW (time).

Kaitlin has three little dots (…) tattooed on one of her fingers, which she says stands for Be Here Now. She’s better at it than I am.

If you want to play with it too, it’s quite easy.

Just whenever you remember to, ask yourself, am I in the HERE and NOW, or am I someplace else, in some other time?

…

I stopped watching digital pornography three years ago.

In my late thirties.

I suspect my sexual journey to that point was like that of most men of my generation. As a teenager, the most erotic things in my house were the bra section of the Target catalogue, a few bikini photos in the surfing magazines I’d save up to buy, or the one naughty VCR in our family collection; a scratchy recording of the steamy thriller Body Heat with clear instructions in capital letters, ‘AO – DO NOT WATCH!’. The first and only Playboy I saw in my childhood was one my brother and I found down in a creek, stuffed into a mildewy suitcase.

Leaving home at 17 opened up a whole new world for a good boy from the suburbs. At my first job, shift workers would watch porno videos in the break room, and magazines were traded like finished newspapers. People talked openly about their favourite pornstars. My home was near Sydney’s Kings Cross and its many strip joints, and on international work trips, there were regular group outings to those spots where the best strippers and prostitutes could be found.

But then, around the start of the 2010s, something else arrived.

Something no one really spoke about.

No, this was a private thing.

Digital pornography.

By which, in the interests of being specific, I mean websites such as pornhub, RedTube and xvideos. Websites where anyone with access to the internet can scroll through a seemingly endless supply of pornographic videos. Websites that, up to this point in the history of technology (an industry I’ve worked in), I would suggest, might represent one of the most addictive, brain-warping creations humanity has ever seen. Why do I think that?

Well, I’ll speak to my experience.

While I’m happily married and have been exclusively committed to one person for more than two decades, I can still admit that diversity interests me. Walking along the beach as a teenager, I’d see girls and women in bikinis and be amazed by so many of them. As a backpacker, I saw beautiful women all over the world. So when I opened up a pornographic website in my early twenties, I was stunned that there would be 30 beautiful women on the screen. I could click any video and imagine myself having sex with any one of them, and then with one scroll, there were 30 more. Below them, another 30 more! It was completely, overwhelmingly, and incredibly indulgent. And it was also free.

I found that over time, my brain struggled to tell the difference between a digital experience on a website and a real-life sexual encounter. Scrolling through websites like this is what I imagine walking through a nightclub might feel like if that nightclub were engineered to present bodies as endlessly willing, interchangeable, and on demand. I could step into that club, select my perfect sexual encounter from a smorgasbord of opportunities, and then an hour later, walk back in and see that the buffet has been refreshed with a whole new room of women. In fact, if I just swiped my index finger up, the crowd could change every five seconds. I’ll admit, this began to feel more fun and easier than most real-world sexual experiences.

But three years ago, on a beach holiday, my wife and I were chatting. It was late in the afternoon, we were salty, sun-drenched, and a few drinks in. I brought up something that felt hard to raise, and that I’d kept quiet for years - that our sexual appetites were misaligned. Or to be clear, I usually wanted sex more often than she did.

The conversation felt important.

Mature.

Emotionally intelligent.

I learned from her (it only took me almost two decades) that while she could feel incredibly aroused at some moments of the month, it was the complete opposite at others. Often, for her, it was more of a timing thing than a lack of desire for me as a lover that I should take offence to. Enjoying all the honesty, and with some Dutch courage from the drinks, I told her that I watched digital pornography. When she asked how often I went to these sites, I said sometimes every day, more when I was away on a work trip. I told her, defensively, that probably every guy she knew had been to these sites too, and that those who said they didn’t were probably lying. She is an open-minded, well-travelled and very intelligent person, but she was shocked - we’d been together for 15 years by then (so I’d kept it a pretty good secret). As the conversation progressed, I started to wonder how good this habit was for me.

For us.

I bought a book on my Kindle that afternoon - ‘Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction’ by Gary Wilson. I finished it later that night, and while I didn’t fully seize on every sentence, I was moved enough to believe that my ten-year-long habit of visiting free pornographic websites was probably more of an addiction than I would have first admitted. Another very strong feeling that emerged was an overwhelming feeling that I’d been tricked.

Manipulated.

I began to see how persuasive design, convenience, and my own willingness to avoid real-world experiences had quietly shaped my behaviour over time.

My generation.

Me.

It was an intellectual decision, taken with the same spirit that many people have when they think of companies like Facebook or Instagram stealing their time. The ick felt stronger when I learned that 95% of the world’s most-watched pornographic websites, the ones I visited, were owned by the same company. I imagined teams of engineers thinking about how they could keep me hooked.

I like to think I’m clever. I have a bunch of degrees from some fancy universities, and I’ve succeeded in business. But when I started to learn more about all this, I felt silly.

So I wondered if I could experiment with not looking at these sites for a bit.

I wondered how long I would last.

It’s coming up on four years now, and I’ve never gone back to them.

I’ve never had to use a website blocker or go to rehab. The thought of typing RedTube into my laptop or phone feels empty. Like overindulging a half dozen donuts from a gas station, something that hints at immediate satisfaction but leaves very little behind. We have children of our own, and while my wife and I aren’t yet sure how we’ll support them through their teenage years and their encounters with addictive platforms – sexual or otherwise – it’s something we are already thinking about. With AI, VR, and whatever comes next, we’re not hopeful these platforms will become any less addictive.

I’ve brought this up with my mates, not to preach, but to share my own journey. One said that if he admitted to his wife that he watched online pornography, she would divorce him. Another changed the subject very quickly. I’ve never written about this publicly until now, and maybe my doing so will ruffle some feathers or even anger some people. I’ve realised that this is my own experience, and my own boundary. I don’t mean to come across as anti-porn and don’t feel like I am on any sort of crusade. I also know that there are some people who are working to create ethical pornography - I wish them all the best. But for me, since making the personal decision to no longer visit the digital pornography websites that I’ve spoken about, I know that intimacy with my wife is better than it’s been in years. My own body works better, too, which is a thrill.

As humans, we all have needs and desires for sexual expression, and there are so many brilliant, healthy ways we can embrace this. I still have room in my life for eroticism, fantasy and beauty. A burlesque show in Paris with my wife. Erotic photography by a skilled artist. A sexy European film on Mubi.

There just isn’t room for RedTube anymore.

Aaron Tait is a writer and the author of the memoir Far Horizons - A journey from war to peace. This article first ran in a shorter form in Moi Magazine Issue 4.

When I was a toddler, my parents packed two bags, two sleeping bags and my brother and me onto a flight from Auckland to Sydney. So began an on-off affair with Australia, a place that has brought much luck to my life.

At 20, I cycled to the student travel bureau, bought a one-way flight to Barcelona and met Kaitlin, my wife, six weeks later. We now have two boys, who, if not for that flight, wouldn’t exist.

At 25, I called Qantas with 37,000 carefully saved-up frequent flyer miles. 30 minutes later, I’d booked a one-way flight to Nairobi, Kenya, setting in motion a decade of adventure and purpose, and the most fulfilling years of my working life so far.

Now at 42, Kaitlin and I, along with our two boys, Finn (8) and Atlas (5), have recently taken a one-way flight from Brisbane to Montevideo, Uruguay. We hope to journey for a year, most likely returning to Australia in 2027. We don’t know just yet how this journey may change our lives, but we feel that something is coming. How fantastically exciting.

I have a few theories on why one-way flights are so great.

For one, there is the obvious - if you have a confirmed flight home, there is a clear end. A time when you will be back to the comfort and regularity of home. If the journey is not great, you can count down the days. Or if it is great, you have that looming sense that it will soon end. With a one-way flight, it’s less about the calendar; you are just living.

One-way flights also give you a particular kind of mindset. It feels like you are setting out on a journey and are far from sure how it will play out. You know there will be peaks and valleys with moments of struggle and resilience and instances of pure joy and wonder. You are also perhaps more likely to learn a local language, to truly meet people, or commit to finding work or a new way of living and thinking.

They also leave you magically open for spontaneity. Without a set date and place of return, you can sail where life, opportunity and inspiration take you. What rare liberty is this?

How have one-way flights changed your life? Or, far more challenging a question, what courage, boldness or madness would it take for you to leave your job, your lease, your current life, and book a one-way flight somewhere yourself?

In the heady excitement of a fresh year, I can convince myself that this is the time to be fitter than I have been in a decade, finally achieve that big goal or make a life-changing shift. With a few clicks, I can sign up for a new gym membership, buy a masterclass subscription, or start journaling with renewed energy.

I often start well.

I get to the gym every day for those first few weeks. I spend a few hours a day improving myself. I get to work on those important projects.

But these new habits die hard.

My gym memberships are often used much more in early January than by the middle of the month (when winter keeps me inside or summer pops up a party every few days!). My self-development and those big projects trail off as the realities of work, life, and the daily alarm clock chip away at them.

In recent years, I’ve stopped making New Year’s resolutions and instead have been making end-of-year resolutions. Quite simply, I decide where I want to be by the end of the year.

In January, I decided by Christmas 2025 that I wanted to:

- Weigh a certain amount.

- Have published my new book.

- Be at the beginning of a one-year trip around the world.

In January, I blew out that target weight with Nicaraguan rum, too much wine and lying on the beach. But I completed a copy edit of my book and booked a one-way flight for the family to Uruguay.

By July, I was sitting consistently at my target weight, had found a publisher, and had planned the flights and places for the first five months of the trip.

By Christmas, I was still at my target weight, the book was on its second print, and I was in Uruguay.

I’m setting my end-of-year resolutions for 2026 this week. I know January will be a lost cause because I’m in holiday mode, but I’ll begin to put in place the habits that will power me towards 2026.

For you, I wish you a happy New Year. If you choose to set some end-of-year resolutions, all the best with them. If it feels good to share them with me (it’s sometimes nice to have some accountability), send them my way, and I’ll cheer you on!

Best,

Aaron

The bottom of the Pacific Ocean. My knees sunk into the murky silt of its floor.

Absolute darkness. I held my hand in front of my mask but couldn’t see a thing.

“Your fingers are your eyes now,” Chief Timms barked at us on the first night of the diving course when a fellow recruit asked for a torch. Then he’d issued the punishment: his slow, torturous version of one hundred push-ups, his tattooed biceps rippling as he glared at us with contempt, moving through his with ease. The first push-up took ten minutes.

And the recruit was now long gone, a marked man from that first hint of weakness. We’d all learned not to ask questions because questions equalled punishments, and we didn’t need any more of those.

I was bone tired. Bitterly cold. My fingers were always the first part of my body to go numb. They barely felt like they were part of me during these long, cold weeks. I kneaded them together in a futile attempt at warmth; the thick calluses on my palms (from the countless push-ups and chin-ups) scraped roughly against each other.

An icy stab of ocean crept in through the thin, rubber neck seal of my black wetsuit, chilling my spine. My mind drifted, and I tried my latest distraction technique of tricking myself into believing that I wasn’t ten metres underwater in the dark of night: that, instead, I was curled up in a warm bed in the family home I’d left the year before. But that night it didn’t work. The water was too cold. I shivered uncontrollably, and my teeth made a rubbery squeak on the scuba mouthpiece that would bring me a short injection of air and an unwelcome chaser of salt water with each breath. My heavy diving cylinder dug into my ribs; after adjusting it, I reached into my wetsuit sleeve, pulled out a dull yellow glowstick and, using the tiny cloud of light it emitted, checked my air gauge. I had another forty minutes left on this dive, a search with our hands along the piers of an old timber wharf to clear it of explosives. Forty freezing minutes. The only good news was that tonight the bombs weren’t real, just training devices. So rather than being blown up, the only threat was that if we couldn’t find them all on this sweep, we’d be punished by being kept in the water for another few hours and made to repeat the test.

It was the final night of my navy diving course. I’d been selected from the seventy officers on basic training as a possible candidate for Special Forces, and this was the first step.

One of my best mates, Luke, or “Apples”, so nicknamed because he came from the apple-growing state of Tasmania, had also been shortlisted, but he’d been deployed up close to Indonesia to help stem the illegal immigrants arriving by boat. The course started three weeks ago, with sixteen candidates, including my other mate, Kel, a six-foot lifeguard, surfer and all-round waterman who grew up on the East Coast beaches. My nickname was “Spud”, a play on my surname, Tait, which sounds like the second syllable in potato. The three of us had bonded quickly in basic training and had been inseparable ever since. We were the fittest in our class, fiercely competitive and always determined to be the best: to show we had the right stuff. And the best way to do that was to become clearance divers, who then went operational in a real war. Most nights, on officers’ course, we would sneak out of our rooms after lights out and creep down to the ocean through the bush like special operatives, for hours of push-ups, running, swimming and breath holds where we would run along the ocean floor in the pitch black with heavy boulders cradled in our arms to hold us down. Apples was resentful that he’d been deployed north and that Kel and I would be taking the first diver selection step before him. But we all knew, like only young men can, that we’d be friends for life.

The three-week course was simple. Learn how to scuba dive, prove you were tough enough to go to the next stage and don’t get injured. Of the original sixteen, eight were now gone. A mix of blown eardrums, strained backs, destroyed knees and, for some guys, it was all just too hard. Too cold. Too painful. Some had been bullied off course as the instructors successfully manipulated us to do their dirty work for them and we turned, like a mob, on the weakest. When one recruit had lagged on a run, they made us carry him five humiliating miles back to base. He quit within the hour. At the end of the day, it hadn’t mattered what excuse any of the quitters had. The word next to their name was the same: FAIL. According to Chief Timms, no matter how hurt you were or how hard things got, it was always your choice. You could grit your teeth, put up with everything they threw at you and take another step towards becoming a qualified Special Forces operative. Or you could fail.

So, we were down to eight men.

Well, seven men and one boy. I was only seventeen.

A sharp tug on the rope around my waist shook me back to my senses, secured with the bowline knot that we could tie, by then, with one hand behind our backs, underwater and in the dark.

We spoke through the rope, using a series of tugs and pulls to communicate, and it was our only connection to anyone beyond our cold, lonely part of the ocean. This message was a signal to stop, that a diver had found a mine and that we’d be here for a few minutes while we waited for orders from the surface. I peered into the black, looking for the dark smudge of another diver, but nothing was clear, so I wrapped my arms around my chest for warmth, closed my eyes and waited for a message. I thought about the friends I’d said goodbye to at high-school graduation the year before. None of them had joined the military with me, so their mothers had likely cooked them dinner tonight. They probably all enjoyed long, hot showers. In fact, very little about their day would have been anywhere near as challenging as what I’d willingly volunteered for, signing up to fight for my country. Lucky bastards. I knew it was probably best not to think about their lives, their easy university schedules and cruisy part-time jobs. My reality was that this was the seventh long dive of the day. I’d been in the ocean for ten hours already. My eyes stung with the salt water that had been leaking into the faulty mask that I had drawn the short straw on at five o’clock that morning. My knee was stiff and dull with the ache of a strain I picked up on the second week but kept running through; an injury that would remain with me for the rest of my life. My head was pounding with the agony of a wisdom tooth that had earlier decided to burst its way sideways through my gum.

But it was my ears that were the worst. They’d never really been great, beaten up by years of surfing and scuba diving as a teenager, but this was a new level of bad. When I descended underwater, my eardrums ached with a sharp stab I’d been grimacing through ever since black blood and mucus started leaking out of my nose a week earlier. I’d had to make a habit of apologising to the guys when I surfaced slower than them, and Kel had been surfacing alongside me so it didn’t look as bad, and I wouldn’t get failed. If Chief Timms found out how bad my ears were, he would have told me that I was “fucking weak” and sent me to the on-duty nurse. I’d be off diving course in a heartbeat. She would recommend that I get warm. Wrap a blanket around me, make me a cup of tea and recommend some bedrest. Every instinct screamed that this was a great idea.

However, there was a major downside. If I quit now, I’d be a laughing-stock. Both among the seventy classmates I’d just spent basic training with, convincing how tough I was, and worse, among the qualified divers who would laugh at me for a very short moment and then simply forget me. Since the British Navy of the 1800s, those holding the rank of midshipman have been labelled “snotties”, as they were said to be so sickly and scared at sea that they wiped their tears and snotty noses on their coat sleeves. Not me, though. I was determined to not be seen as a snotty. And I was not going to fail. I might have been the lightest recruit by twenty pounds, but I could run and swim faster than most of them. I would pass this course and hurdle over this first step on my way to being one of the toughest fighting men in the world. A Clearance Diver in the Royal Australian Navy.

A member of a formidable fighting unit that can hold its own with the US Navy SEALs and the British SAS. Things had started well. Four weeks earlier, on my first day at dive school, I had finished third out of thirty men in a two-mile swim, where we lay on our backs and kicked through the water with long fins on our feet. The sinewy, grey-haired lieutenant commander of the diving school had given me a wink of approval as I climbed out of the water, barking, “You might just have what it takes, Mid”, and slapping me hard on the back, rattling my boyish frame to the core. I’d thrust my chest out proudly when I walked away from him. He was right, and I’d been doing all I could since to keep showing them all that I did have the right stuff. But after a few punishments designed to “weed out the snotties”, I’d also learned that the best way to survive was to be a grey man and not draw too much attention to myself.

Finish every run in the middle of the pack. Complete each dive well, but do not excel; otherwise, there was a long way to fall if you started screwing up. So far, I’d withstood the sleep deprivation, the endless runs and the swims back and forth across the bay. I’d been told that I was a fucking disgrace, that I was pathetic and that there was no chance I’d pass. I’d been pissed on by the instructors, held underwater until I almost drowned and pushed off a boat going so fast it felt like I was hitting concrete when I met the water. It wasn’t just me being targeted.

The instructors had been democratic and everyone had received roughly the same horrific treatment. But I was still here. For those last few hours of the diving course, I needed some divine help. Despite growing up in the Pentecostal Christian church, I hadn’t prayed for a while, and my adolescent faith had been quickly pushed aside by the harsh realities of life in the navy.

But I mustered up the small semblances that were left of my spirituality and brought my hands together to make a shivering double fist. In my mind I uttered a short prayer, asking for help to get through this last dive.

God acted quickly.

Boom!

A loud, muffled thump broke through the night ocean, like a baseball bat hitting a pillow, and a flash of too-bright white light pierced through the abyss. Then darkness re-enveloped all. I peered again into the black, small flashes of lightning sparking across my eyes from the gone-too-soon light. Nothing.

The only sound was of bubbles, keeping me alive for a breath before ascending with each exhale, thirty feet above to the real world. I took my regulator out of my mouth and listened. Silence.

But then there was a strong tug on the rope around my waist. Someone was passing a message through the line. Another tug.

Then three more. Five in total. Five tugs meant “emergency”, and we needed to surface immediately. That matched up with the bright white light and loud bang, meaning it wasn’t God, in fact, but a diver recall device, an underwater flare that meant something was wrong. They’d told us what emergencies this might signal: a shark, an enemy inbound or a dead diver.

I kicked hard to the surface and furrowed my brow to push through the sharp needles that stabbed into my sinuses as I returned to the real world – Sydney Harbour on a frigid and still September night. The navy base looked like most military installations do: dark, mysterious and ominous, but in the hills around it, the city’s mansions twinkled like jewels, modern castles that working-class kids like me could only dream of living in. My ears filled with water as usual, my whole head pulsing to recover from the agony I’d just pushed it through again.

Through my blocked ear canals, I made out the muffled yells of Chief Timms for us to “get out of the fucking water now!”. The water splashed effervescently as eight divers churned towards the ladder, Kel just ahead of me. With our fins in our teeth, we hauled our tired bodies and our heavy diving gear upwards; then we ran along the old timber wharf that had speared splinters into our hands during many rounds of push-up punishments. We ran past the cold shower we rinsed under each night, which felt warm to our chilled bodies. Past the timber beams, where we had quickly figured out how to execute twenty perfect overhand chin-ups so we could eat. Past the tables where they would serve our food and where they’d once encouraged us to eat triple rations, as “you may not be eating again for a while”, before putting us on the most intense run of the course, most of us throwing up everything we’d just tried to get down. Past “the Lizard”, a twenty-foot beam of slippery wood extending out over the water that we’d been forced to hang off by our fingertips for hours. “Fuck you, Mr Lizard,” I said under my breath, and Kel laughed. I didn’t know what we were running towards, but my guess was soft sand sprints in wetsuits or swimming laps of the harbour until sunrise. Or maybe Chief Timms had one final torturous tactic in mind to get a few more of us to quit on the last night.

But I was wrong. We ran into the sick bay. Inside was the on-duty nurse, rugged up in a thick navy-issue blue jacket, a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. She didn’t even look up at us; her eyes were fixed on the television. We crowded into the old room – built when the world was last at war in 1942 and barely changed since then – water from our wetsuits dripping into puddles on the chipped concrete floor.

The banner at the bottom of the screen was brutal in its simplicity: America Under Attack. A tall building had smoke pouring out of its upper floors. Then “Whoooafuckwhatthehellholyshit!” came out of us, a chorus of disbelief as we watched a plane fly into a second tower. Someone backed into me by accident, like the blast had hit them too. We stood silently, still shivering from the cold, and watched the TV, struggling to grasp what we were seeing. The first to speak was Chief Timms. “Shit, men,” he said, rubbing his scarred, shaved head with his big bear-paw of a hand. “We’re all about to go to war.”

And he was right. We would come armed, we would come angry and we would come to bring Iraq to its knees.

Want to read more? Buy a copy here.

I'm 42 years old. Which I'm thrilled about, because I have a sneaking suspicion that the year ahead will be the best one yet.

Today I'll head out to my favourite spot, with Kaitlin, my favourite person. We'll enjoy a long lunch and maybe a few too many glasses of wine. We'll take a swim at Wategos, my favourite beach in the world. I'll also have the indulgence of answering the birthday questions—an annual reflection on how I'm living my one wild and precious life.

While they change a little every year, here are the birthday questions in 2025:

"Look back a year. Who were you then? Who are you now?"

"What single moment from this year will stay with you forever?"

"How did you live beyond yourself?"

"What was your deepest valley this year? Your highest peak? What did you learn in each place?"

"Who held the light for you?"

"Who are you becoming in this next year?"

When your birthday comes around, happy birthday. If it flows to try these questions, please indulge yourself (it's your day). If other questions bubble up, please share them with me; I'd love to learn from you.

———————————————————————————

If you are curious, here are my answers to this year's birthday questions.

"Look back a year. Who were you then? Who are you now?"

While it was diminishing, I was still letting go of the story of myself as an entrepreneur after selling a business I had co-founded. I had the clothes I'd worn during that time, the bag I'd travel with, the hotels I'd stay in on work trips, the work habits that had defined me. But this year that version of me has faded into the past almost entirely. I feel like I'm an author now, which has taken time to evolve. I try to live that out each day and the sense of being an imposter in that space is going. This version of me has different clothes. He has a different bag when he travels and stays in different hotels. He spends his days differently. It's a different chapter of my life.

"What single moment from this year will stay with you forever?"

A night in Granada, Nicaragua where we took a small boat out on the lake to a tiny island. We had a simple dinner as a family, just the four of us in a lakeside hut. The light was perfect. I loved you all so much.

"How did you live beyond yourself?"

Booking a one-way flight for the four of us to Uruguay on December 20th for a year-long around-the-world journey in 2026 required a level of guts and a spirit of adventure that I hadn't felt since we booked a one-way flight to Kenya in 2007. It was scary for a moment, then it was very quickly just incredibly exciting.

"What was your deepest valley this year? Your highest peak? What did each teach you?"

I finished my book Far Horizons this year, which took more than a decade. Then I got to work trying to find an agent and a publisher. I reached out to more than a hundred and didn't hear back from 95 of them. Four sent me templated emails back with my name pasted in at the top. One wrote me a personal email, said he couldn't help me, but told me to keep going. I think my 110th email was the one that secured me the publisher that is releasing the book next month, which will be the peak moment. I learned down in the valley that rejection is the price of admission. I'm learning at the peak that it was all worth it.

"Who held the light for you?"

Interestingly, these were people with whom I spent quality time this year. Friends where we had more time than just a short catch-up, and instead spent many hours by the water or over long dinners we cooked together. Courtney and Michael Adamo hosted us at their beautiful home on the East Coast of Australia and, in turn, inspired us to travel the world for all of 2026. Banks and Lisa Benitez spent four nights with us in Granada, Nicaragua and inspired me to strive for excellence this year, and not settle for anything less. Thank you, friends.

"Who are you becoming in this next year?"

Two things. An author, confident in my voice and story and how I turn up each day. And an adventurer who will find himself back in South American villages and African savannahs.

When Parker Posey's Victoria Ratliff delivered those now-iconic words with her southern drawl in the latest season of The White Lotus, they struck a chord for many viewers. Including me.

Truth be told, I live a pretty damn comfortable life. My home stays perfectly climate-controlled thanks to a sleek digital interface in my bedroom. Groceries, films, songs, information, and almost any product I can imagine arrive at my door with a few laptop clicks. My smartphone contains more computing power than NASA had when it landed astronauts on the moon. Life is undeniably good.

Yet despite all the perks of living in this time and place, I've had a growing realisation I can't shake:

Life has become too easy.

Before you swipe away in righteous indignation, let me explain. I know very well, with deep personal witnessing, that while life might be easy for me, it's brutally hard for others enduring war, famine, poverty, or discrimination. Closer to home, I know grocery bills and fuel costs have never been higher. I know interest rates have been punishing those of us with mortgages. But despite all that, if you're reading this, chances are you also live with considerable ease.

I'm 41 years old. Looking back on my teenage years and twenties, life wasn’t always easy. I regularly found myself in situations where things got difficult—where I was cold or exhausted, where I didn't always play it safe, where I needed determination, quick thinking, or something deeper just to get through. But throughout my thirties, things gradually shifted. I encountered that kind of hardship less and less. As I raised my children, climbed the corporate ladder at work, and began enjoying airline lounges, higher-floor hotel rooms, and expensed dinners, the seductive allure of the good life took hold.

I brought up this nagging feeling with my old military buddy, Luke Baker, over lunch in San Francisco a few months ago. He told me to read Michael Easter's book The Comfort Crisis. After its instant delivery to my Kindle, I settled into the crisp white sheets of my hotel bed that night and read about how our existence has become progressively "sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, under-challenged, safety-netted." Easter argued this was limiting how fully we experience what poet Mary Oliver called our "one wild and precious life." He referenced Harvard professor David Levari's research on "prevalence induced concept change"—scientific backing for what we might dismiss as 'first world problems.' Essentially, as genuine hardships decrease, we humans still perceive challenges everywhere. They just become increasingly trivial.

The antidote?

Do hard things again.

Or if you prefer the trendy term: do a misogi.

Traditionally, misogi is a Japanese Shinto practice that involves immersion in freezing water, often beneath a waterfall. (And no, I'm not about to preach about ice baths.) Today, the term has evolved—some might say been culturally appropriated—to describe any deliberately chosen, significant challenge that pushes us beyond our perceived limits. A proper misogi should scare you a little, with a real chance of failure. Ideally, you shouldn't make a big production of it either—it's a private challenge, not Instagram content.

I completed a solo misogi last week.

I won't share the details—that's for me—but I was cold and exhausted for much of it. Success felt genuinely uncertain. In the days after returning home, my body ached as it recovered. I also felt proud of what I'd accomplished, and sensed my boys were proud of me too. That first hot shower, climbing into a warm bed, savouring a perfect cup of coffee—everything felt a little sweeter. The week's problems suddenly seemed manageable. I loved my misogi. You'll probably love yours too.

So, get out there. Get uncomfortable. And the next time you hear someone say, "I just don't think at this age I'm meant to live an uncomfortable life," just yell "Nooooo, Piper, nooooo!"

Your misogi awaits.

It's only a four-minute drive to the bakery, enough time to listen to one song. And for me, it’s the same one every Saturday morning: "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams. Yes, it's very white/dad/cringe of me, but I don't care. Because I'm alone, I turn it up loud, and as it’s only the cows I might wake, the windows are down too.

My one difference with Bryan in what I believe to be an otherwise perfect pop song comes when he sings that 1969 "were the best days of my life." Because when I'm driving to the bakery every Saturday, these feel like the best days of my life (so far).

After a short chat with the baker, I set for home with a brown paper bag holding two warm donuts for the boys and two croissants for Kaitlin and I.. Often, I'll press repeat on the song and feel both joy and a pang of nostalgia for the present. Because I know this little ritual will be a fond memory one day. I know I'll miss it.

Everyone's usually up by the time I walk back through the door. The boys never remember to thank me; Kaitlin asks them to. I take my "driver’s tax"—a bite of their donut and a hug from them—then get the strawberry jam from the fridge while Kaitlin starts on the coffee.

Heaven.

The following week, I got to work building out a list of my dream literary agents and started sending emails. For months, I heard nothing, and then the occasional templated rejection letter came back with my name pasted into the first sentence. It was humbling. Embarrassing. Many nights, as I was trying to sleep, I wondered if the writing simply wasn't good enough.

During this time, I found myself at a writer's festival where the author Richard Flanagan was speaking. He is the winner of the prestigious Booker literary prize, and he is astounding. If you've seen the new series 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' with superstar Jacob Elordi, that's Flanagan's work. He is a man with an arresting intensity who rarely minces words.

After his speech, I lined up patiently for a moment with him, a copy of his book 'Question 7' in hand. When it was my turn, he took the book from me, a pen at the ready. While he signed the inside cover, I thanked him for his writing and told him I was a writer myself. I quickly shared the overview of my book – that it starts on September 11, 2001, when, as a boy, I left for war, and finishes seven years later in East Africa, when I was trying to be a man of peace.

He looked up at me from his desk, right into my eyes, and for a moment, the hundreds of other people at that event seemed to fade into the shadows. He didn't speak for an age, then simply said, “That book is very important. You must keep going.”

So, I did. I kept sending more emails. I saw every ‘no’ as one step closer to a ‘yes’. And today, I signed a book deal with Hardie Grant, a brilliant publisher. God, it feels good. This 'important' book of mine will be out in September this year.

I kept going.

If you’re working on something important right now, perhaps this brief note is timely.

You must keep going too.

It’s this habit that has been the biggest driver of any success I’ve had since then.

So today, I’d like to share it with you in a few simple steps. (I’ll even be vulnerable and share some of my own goals. Tease and judge my dreams all you want, but then make sure to think about your own.)

Step 1. Get a blank piece of paper (or open up a document on your computer, or a note on your phone).

2. At the top, write down what you’d like people to say about you at your funeral. Just a couple of sentences. Here is what I wrote over a decade ago.

3. Below that, divide the page into three columns.

4. In the left column, write down what you want to have achieved ten years from now. All of these things need to take you closer to what you wrote at the top of the page. They also need to be super tangible and real. I’ve shared my goals in my thirties.

5. In the middle column, next to each goal you put in the left column, write down what you need to have achieved by the end of this year to take you closer to that end-of-decade goal. I’ve shared what one year looked like in my thirties.

6. In the right column, next to each goal in the middle column, write down what you need to have achieved by the end of this year to take you closer to that end-of-year goal. Again, I’ve shared a busy week for me in my thirties.

That’s it for the template.

Once you’ve filled yours out, it’s time to live it. Here is how you do that.

• Every Monday add up your score from the week before of the number of weekly goals you achieved.

• Then fill out the right column every with your new goals.

• Finally, send an email to one chosen person who has committed to doing this with you, using a very simple script.

Subject: __% achieved (what percentage of your weekly goals you hit)

Body: A short update on what you learned, if you didn’t hit 100%, and anything else on your mind.

Attachment: Your new goals.

You don’t need to have a huge list every week, you just need to take a small step towards that year goal (which helps towards the decade goal, which helps towards the life goal). Try to make the goals in your control. Do it every week.

When I started this approach I wasn’t married to Kaitlin. I had no kids. I was working in a bar. I had no money. I’d never written a book, and had impacted no lives with any ideas I’d started. I hit all my ‘by 40 goals’, and now I have new ones to hit by 50.

Best of effort with yours (we make our own luck).

Which is weird.

Because I think I’m right-handed.

This morning I tested my hunch at the gym, and yes, it was clear. My left hand is at least 20% stronger than my right.

I searched for why this might be the case, and the most likely answer is clear.

I’m actually, more than likely, left-handed.

But at some point, probably around grade one, a teacher, a friend, or my mum told me that writing with my left hand was silly and that writing with my right hand was better (90% of the world apparently believes they are right-handed).

Society told me and taught me to write a certain way. I unlearned what was natural (you’re not left-handed, silly) and learned what was normal (right-hand, that’s better).

I saw something similar with my son Atlas. When he was two he was convinced he could see ‘bees’ flying around the house and would look over our shoulders and point them out to us. We couldn’t see what he was seeing, so we told him it wasn't true.

I wonder what else I’ve unlearned because society told me it was silly. What have I just gone along with because it's the ‘way things are’?

And I think this funny little reckoning goes right to the heart of this idea of ‘living deliberately’.

If I don’t choose to make deliberate decisions about my life, there are plenty of others who will decide for me how I should spend my one precious life, the house I live in, the car I drive, what success looks like, and even the hand I write with.

Speaking of which, I’ll give it a go this week. Left-handed Aaron. Wish me luck.

'So if we are going to do this,' I started, 'and travel around the world for a year, when’s the best time?'

She thought about it momentarily, cast aside just a few of the many shells she was carrying for Finn, and responded confidently. ‘2026. Atlas would start school a year later, and we'd teach Finn on the road.' I love this woman.

Later that afternoon, we opened a bottle of wine and started playing with a rough itinerary. We asked our friends Michael and Courtney for the lessons they'd picked up when they took their own year-long odyssey as a family.

And for the next two weeks, it was an idea worm we couldn't get out of our heads. We went to the library and checked out twenty Lonely Planet Guides (yes, they still print them). Our route around the world changed daily. We even did a little trial pack of what clothes we'd bring.

Then we committed and locked it in by booking a one-way flight to Uruguay, leaving Christmas Eve this year. Then we booked a non-refundable Airbnb for a month in Jose Ignacio.

In the month or so since I've had some nights where doubts have crept into my head. Doubts that may have been strong enough to see me lean back from the idea.

But those one-way flights were non-refundable. We are committed now. It's happening. And we'll figure it all out as we go. Like we have with everything other brave decision we've ever made, and pinching ourselves about how lucky we are to make choices like this.

What's the brave commitment you want to make this month? Is it asking that certain someone out on a date? Or booking that meeting with your boss? Or maybe it's time to book a one one way flight somewhere ;)

*PS. We are all ears for your favourite places on the planet, so please send them on through to aaronjtait@gmail.com.

It made me change course.

I thought I’d share it.

Just Beyond Yourself - David Whyte

Just beyond

yourself.

It's where

you need

to be.

Half a step

into

self-forgetting

and the rest

restored

by what

you'll meet.

There is a road

always beckoning.

When you see

the two sides

of it

closing together

at that far

horizon

and deep in

the foundations

of your own

heart

at exactly

the same

time,

that's how

you know

it's the road

you have

to follow.

That's how

you know

it's where

you

have

to go.

That's how

you know

you have

to go.

That's

how you know.

Just beyond

yourself,

it's

where you

need to be.

David Whyte

Poems, essays and commentaries as well as insights from my Three Sundays Series.

However, chats with two particular sets of friends have left a lasting impression on me. The first, with Lisa and Banks* around a long table in Granada. The second, on Courtney** and Michael's wooden porch.

These stuck out, because I call these people Possibility Artists, which in my definition means that they:

• make bold, life-altering decisions (such as leaving a business they founded or selling a cherished home)

• fearlessly embrace the unknown (like uprooting their lives to travel the world)

• are willing to humbly start from scratch as amateurs (such as committing to actually learning a new language or starting to surf as an adult).

Perhaps, most crucially, they don't appear to be threatened, jealous, or unsupportive when their friends make daring choices, venture into the unknown, or humbly attempt to learn something new. Instead, they enthusiastically say, "Hell yes, you should do that!". They pump up the tyres on other people’s dreams. They practice the art of possibility. This mindset is something my parents, Iain and Ingrid, have always embodied, which may explain why I find it so appealing.

(nb. drawing is not one of my dreams)

These conversations with these Possibility Artists have inspired Kaitlin and I to make some significant, courageous decisions in recent weeks. We're about to step into the unknown and humbly pursue some new dreams. I'll share more details about what that looks like soon.

But for now, I'd like to ask you: Do you have enough Possibility Artists in your life? If someone comes to mind, consider sending them this post and letting them know that their name came to mind. If you can't think of any, is it worth making it a challenge for 2025 to seek some out?

*Banks shares great insights in his monthly newsletter.

**Courtney has a fantastic Substack here.

I walked into the cabin with a box of food, some wine, a manuscript and a few hundred comments from my editor.

I walked out four days later with the memoir as good as I’ll ever get it and a different man after digging into things I’d always been too scared to explore fully.

I also walked out with a conflicted feeling I’d not felt before - that this was the best thing I’d ever write, and that in the same breath, I didn’t know if it was any good. I felt euphoric that is was done, but also sad for that. A melancholy that I wouldn’t have access to those heady highs I’d so indulged in when I was alone, and writing, and so very inspired. I didn’t know how to express this to anyone else. It felt silly and self-important.

But just this morning I heard a wonderful (and far more established) artist talk about this same thing:

‘It all feels really alive. The writing of the record is like the thrill ride for me, it’s the scary part. As a songwriter, you always feel like you’re on the brink of your last good idea. I always get depressed and anxious, there are these big highs of ‘this is so surreal, we are making this thing that I’m so excited about and everything’s just fallen completely into place and then there’s these inexplicable lows of fear and anxiety and sadness that the work that gives me life and my sense of purpose, is done for now.’

—Waxahatchee

This feeling - it’s alive. It’s joyful. It’s sad. It’s life.

I hope for such a feeling for you in 2025.

Best,

Aaron