I don’t think money automatically ruins people, I mean the other thing. The slow loss of wonder or the way comfort become expectation. The way people who once would have been amazed by a room start acting nonchalant, cool, expensive and unbothered?

What happens to your gratitude when your life starts giving you things your younger self would have prayed for?

I first felt this in Miami…

It’s 32 degrees and i’m walking into a hotel lobby looks somewhat spaceship like, part palace. Perhaps there’s a UNESCO world heritage sight sign somewhere?
In scanning for it I see the one sign I have come to recognise, four seasons.

Ah, this is one of those hotels.

I should explain why I’m here; I’m Steven Bartlett’s lead filmmaker and photographer. I film exceptional people, entrepreneurs, adventurers, people whose weeks are considerably more interesting than mine, and find the ordindary truth in that. For the last three and a half years, it’s meant very so often that job drops me somewhere ridiculously nice.

Like, fuck you money nice.

But I should caveat, I’m here for work. Someone else is paying, I’ve got a camera bag, a laptop, and a job to do. Which, it turns out, is the best possible seat for watching how people behave when they think they belong.

As I walk past the four seasons sign, I’m thinking only about one. Summer, it’s hot.
I’m a fucking mess, three cameras hanging off me and i’m drenched in sweat.

A woman walks out in front of me and says to her husband, “babe, it’s too humid.”
The weather has personally failed her.
A few seconds later, a butler opens a car door for another man.
But he doesn’t look at them.

This lobby is cold.
But this air con that smells like eucaply-
And, there’s marble everywhere… I look up and wonder if the chandeleir gol-

‘Oh sorry, apologies I didn’t see you’

I should look where i’m going.
Staff seem to spawn in around corners smiling. I’m handed a bottle of water that feels like it belongs in a museum and I sit down in the lobby.

Later that evening, I head to the restaurant. It was one of the few evenings where Steve was away and I got the chance to take my laptop, work quietly and just people watch.
The waiter is kind. We’re chatting for a second but I get the sense there’s about 17 other things they’re late for. Nonetheless, there’s a person in front of me.

Behind us, a group of men start clapping.
Clicking, ushering, tutting.
She turns around, they stop. They got what they wanted, her attention, and she’s reminded dessert hasn’t arrived yet. Disaster.

And I remember sitting there thinking: How does that become normal?
When does having ‘class’, make you lose it?

I’m about 3 bites in to a garlic butter bread she left at my table.
It’s perhaps the best thing i’ve ever had, the herbs are actually in the dough, wait, there’s salt crystals in the dou-

’is everything to your liking, sir?’

She catches me holding a piece of bread up to the light like a jeweller.
Mouth full. I try to answer her.
I cannot. It is so far to my liking that I am physically unable to tell her.
She smiles awkwardly, wondering if she should call someone.

A few minutes later, a woman by the window sends a plate back because her salad is “a bit cold”.
It’s a salad.
The waiter apologises, twice, for the temperature of a cold thing, in his second language, to someone who will not remember his face.

I can’t figure out why this bothers me so much.
It’s rude, but i’m also in amazement in some way. Curious?
For these people, when does the life you dreamed of become the life you feel you are owed?

The first time something nice happens to you, it feels like a gift.
The tenth time, it feels like a standard.
And the hundredth time, it feels like a right. Right?
And once something is your right, gratitude starts to look optional.

So how do you lose ‘it’…

How do you lose your class the moment you get class? Because I’ve been lucky enough over the last few years to see rooms I used to only see in James Bond films.
The private lounges.
The black SUV’s.
A shower that has more settings than my my parents first phone.
Rooms where everyone is pretending not to be impressed, which is usually the strongest sign that everyone is very impressed.

And the more I’ve been in those rooms, the more I’ve noticed something I didn’t expect.
They don’t always make people better.
Sometimes they make people worse, less human in a way.
Like, in a really small way.
A thank you disappears, or eye contact goes, the voice changes until eventually their tolerance for inconvenience collapses.
People become functions; waiters, drivers, receptionists, assistance.

Let me be clear, the danger isn’t having nice things. I like this garlic butter dough magic starter wahtever the fuck this i-
I’m getting distracted.

The danger is what repeated comfort does to your expectations of life.

Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation, saying humans are terrifyingly good at getting used to things they once prayed for.
Business class is unbelievable.
Then it’s nice.
Then economy feels offensive.

And listen, I’m not saying this from some morally pure place.
I’m sat here in this resturant as in awe as I am in fear.
What if I lose ‘it’ too?

I get access to one room and immediately notice the room above it.
I get one opportunity and start resenting the one you didn’t get.
I live a day your younger self would have framed, and told everyone about.
Then I catch myself tutting because I just got told the wifi on the plane is down and I can’t work.

Yikes…

And frankly, it doesn’t take a four seasons to lose class.
It starts with not saying thank you because you’re distracted.
It starts with being slightly embarrassed by your own excitement.
It ends with you pretending you belong by acting like nothing impresses you.

So you flatten yourself, and stop showing wonder at the fact your shower has warm water, your bath mat is dry and there’s clean clothes on the bed you’ll walk to afterwards?.

And slowly, the thing you worked so hard to reach becomes the thing that starts taking pieces from you.
Your awe.
Humour.
Patience.
Manners.
You?

That’s what scares me.
And that’s the trade I don’t want to make.
Because there’s nothing wrong with beautiful things.

The question is whether your standards can rise without your humanity falling.
Whether your life can expand without your gratitude shrinking.

Can it?
Can i?

I think it’s possible, I’ve seen it in Steve and the team who travel with him.
Human beings. Nice ones, who thank the waiter, who show the awe. It is possilbe, but everytime we’re somehwere obseen, I see the other side too in strangers.

Did they once wonder? Show awe? Photograph the steak? Look out the window?
And if they did, then what changed?
And what must I do, day by day, to avoid becoming that.

And I think the answer is simple and easy, the same way losing it is.
Say thank you properly, looking people in the eye.
Let beautiful things still be beautiful.
Appreciate comfort but don’t expect it
Let your younger self stay in the room with you.
Even if it feels fake at times. Like doing it for the sake of doing it, I’d rather force wonder than let entitlement become instinct.

Not because I want to stay naive.
Because I don’t want to become numb.

Because maybe the real fear isn’t becoming rich.
It’s becoming rich, and feeling less.

They want you to spend more time using them.

Because the perfect productivity system isn’t something you spend time on. It’s something that saves you time. And the reality is, with most of these things, you end up spending more time building, tweaking, adding database rows and polishing dashboards than you do actually doing the work.

I need to say this upfront: I hated Notion.

Not in a casual way. In a “my workspace is 400 unorganised pages and I resent all of them” way. In an “I’ve tried every template and somehow still forget everything” way.

Which is a strange confession from someone who now runs his entire life through it. In one notion database, I have every task, every opportunity, every content idea, every person I meet, tracked and stored.

So what changed? How does it run? And why are most systems engineered for you to fail, not become productive?

What my life looked like

For the last three years I’ve been the filmmaker scaling a Youtube channel called Behind The Diary. Last year, that meant 54 flights in 54 weeks. Alongside that I was building my own personal brand, writing talks, developing content, meeting people in green rooms and airport lounges who I genuinely wanted to stay in touch with…and losing almost all of it in the process.

FML.

Not because I wasn’t writing it down. I captured it all, just in 6 different places; ideas in my notes app, tasks in my head, follow-ups in DMs, half a system written out in a note book and another in Notion.

I’ve tried everything.
I typed out my entire calendar.
I built the dashboards, downloaded the templates, watched the setup videos.

But these things all die the same death, it became another thing to maintain. I has three tabs to tap through to remember toothpaste at the shops.
I wasn’t running a system, I was the system.

If your “system” only works when you spend time feeding it, you don’t have a system, you have a second job. Ask yourself honestly: how many hours a week do you spend organising your life instead of living/working/ building it?

My problem with templates

I’ve always had the same two complaints about productivity templates, and I’ll stand by them:

1. They’re not customisable. They’re someone else’s brain, now yours. The moment your life doesn’t match the template maker’s life, you’re bending yourself around their structure instead of the other way round.

2. They take too long to set up. By the time you’ve configured everything, you’ve spent your motivation on the setup.

Underneath both complaints was something simpler, and slightly embarrassing to admit: I didn’t want a template. I wanted something that understood me 😖🥺. Which is an almost hilarious thing to want from software. But it’s true. I wanted to be able to say a thought out loud, half-formed, in the back of a taxi or whilst walking through an airport and trust that it would end up in the right place without me doing anything else. I’ll deal with it later.

Eventually, one day, I just said, fuck this let me build what I need. I realised Notion has AI built in and so I built instructions for Notion to operate exactly how I wanted it to, based off my needs, a notion hub that gives me an overview of my life. It’s been a long process to get here in the last 2 years, but I think i’ve found my system.

I’m calling it LIFE OS.

This is how it works; it’s a Notion database, that has AI plugged into it and instructions that tell it how to act.

The AI system underneath it

The AI either remembers or recalls. Remember means I dump the thought with zero effort, voice or text ‘new task I need to get back t-’ and it puts it where it needs to be. Recall means the system surfaces it back to me exactly when I need it. ‘hey im onstage in 15 mins, the questions are around imposter syndrome, what’s that idea I wrote about in April la-’

Everything below is just that loop, applied to different corners of my life.

Capture and organisation are two different jobs. Most productivity systems only handle one so when you have that idea at 2am, you don’t have the energy to go into page 17 of your Notion and add your cotnent idea. Instead, just say or type it to the AI, it puts it where it neds to be an in the morning you develop it when you’re ready.

So here’s where it

I feel like i’m forgetting something?

That feeling? Not trusting your brain to hold it all. For me, what changed is that nothing lives in my head anymore. The anxiety of “I know there’s something I’m forgetting” is gone, because the cost of capturing is one sentence. My head is now for thinking, not storing.

The Vault: where ideas stop dying

This is the part I care most about, because ideas are my actual job. Every idea, quote, framework or observation goes into one place, my Creative Vault. But it doesn’t just sit there, when something goes in, the system connects it to related ideas I’ve already saved, and spins out angles I could develop it into: a cultural example, a historical one, a psychological one. These are called Story Branches

So instead of a graveyard of “notes I’ll never look at again,” I have a network. Old thoughts resurface next to new ones. A throwaway observation from eight months ago becomes the backbone of a talk.

That compounding is the single biggest return I’ve had from any system, ever.

People: the follow-up actually happens

I meet a lot of people, and I used to lose most of them. Now: “Met Sarah from Spotify, she wants to talk podcasts in two weeks” is what I say to the AI and the system logs the person, the context we met in, and a follow-up task two weeks out. When I next talk to her, I can see the whole history in one place.

Or if I’m abotu to travel to a new country, I ask. ‘Who do I know in New York City?’ and it tells me!

Opportunities: nothing slips through the cracks

A brand mentions interest, a speaking gig comes up in a conversation, all of this. These used to live in whatever inbox they arrived in but now every lead becomes a row the moment it’s mentioned, with a stage and a next action, so my pipeline is something I look at rather than something I try to remember.

In truth, I don’t get more opportunities than I used to. I just stop losing the ones I get.

Content: from “post idea” to published

Every hook, angle and half-thought, “post about why templates fail,” said out loud, lands on one content board with a status. And because it’s connected to my Vault, every content idea arrives with its source material attached: the related ideas I’ve already saved on that theme. This very piece started as one line on that board, and the system had already gathered the receipts.

For me, sitting down and saying…. ‘uhmmm what do I post’ is no longer an issue, the idea i had at 2am randomly last week, is already on my content board. I just need to create it!

The point of all of this

I’m really passionate about things that get me out of my own way as a creative. If you’re like me you’re your own virtiaul assistant, speaking coach, co-founder, tech support, operator and assistant all in one. And in truth, i’m so proud of this product because it’s helped me. I suddenly feel type A.

The real return isn’t organisation. It’s that the anxious background hum of “what am I forgetting?” has gone quiet. That’s what I’d want for you, whatever system you use to get there.

And if you’re curious about the actual system, the one I’ve been describing,I’ve had so much interest that it’s now a product that over 25 creators, high performers and founders are already using. You sign up, it asks you questions and build it out custom, for you, to you, in your notion!

If you want it too let me know, leave a comment and I’ll send it over!

Sometimes you catch it and think, “wait, why am I rushing?”, but most of the time you don’t. You just carry a low feeling of being late, behind, or slightly overwhelmed, all day, every day.

I’ve spent three and a half years as Steven Bartlett’s lead filmmaker, editor and photographer. Seven days a week, in every meeting room, every decision, every moment. I watched the business go from 10 people in an office in Shoreditch to over 140 people and a podcast with 18 million subscribers.

And in all of that, one thing stood out above everything else: The busiest, most urgent man I know was never in a hurry.

Let me clarify, not slow, not relaxed, not worklife-balanced way. He will be the first to admit he is, urgent ,relentlessly, obsessively urgent, productive, hardworking… but somehow never hurried.

Let me explain what this looks like:

It’s 2023. We spent 48 hours at the WHOOP headquarters in Boston, sitting with their product design team, developing new products, trying the bands we were producing at the time. That afternoon we move to a co-working space where Steven has back-to-back meetings until the evening. As we work our way through an airport, literally we jump on a red-eye from Boston to London, then straight onto a small plane up to Aberdeen, where we’re due to meet Prince William that morning.

We land at 8am. Straight into a car, straight to a hotel, and Steven starts getting ready. Every slot has about a five-minute margin. The team is prepping clothes, logistics and in the gaps between all of it, he’s on calls and working. Everything was planned to the second, it felt chaos and as we’re running ten minutes late to meet His Royal Highness, i realise…

Steve was the only one of us not in a hurry.

Afterwards, as we drove from the event to a restaurant for lunch, the pressure landed on me: a thousand images, edited and online, in about an hour. There’s no formal declaration of the expectation, he didn’t rush me, he said:

Do this as quickly as you can, at whatever standard you can maintain throughout that pace.

It was calm, direct and useful. And over the last three and a half years I’ve watched this nature trickle down into some of the core members of his team. Things go wrong, houses get set on fire, and we have all just learned to solve it quickly, as fast as we can, without hurry.

It’s not as Devil Wears Prada as you expect these CEO teams to be.

These sorts of teams understand that urgency and hurry are not the same thing. Urgency speeds up the work, hurry speeds up the person.

Steve was urgent, he’d compress timelines but he didn’t compress me. The pressure sat on the job, not on my nervous system. Hurry does the opposite, it leaves the job exactly where it was and just winds you up. This is why you’re cooking at 1 million miles an hour.

For a long time I read Steve’s stillness as personality. Now I think it’s just that the priority was already decided. When you’ve genuinely settled what matters, there’s nothing left to be anxious about. You’re not still negotiating with yourself about whether this is the right thing to be doing, and that internal argument, should I be doing this, should I be doing something else, am I behind, is where almost all of the frantic energy lives.

Which is also why urgency has an off switch and hurry doesn’t. The second those images went live, the urgency was gone. Hurry doesn’t end when the task ends. It follows you into the car, into lunch, into the shower that night, into brushing your teeth for no reason at all.

So the question was never “am I going fast?” It’s “what’s actually going fast here, me or the work?” If it’s the work, you’re urgent. Go harder. If it’s just you, you’re hurrying, take a second.

Never once did I see Steve move fast at something that didn’t matter. He wasn’t going faster than everyone else across the board. He was refusing to spend a single unit of speed on the wrong thing.

Next time you notice you’re brushing your teeth like the house is on fire, don’t tell yourself to slow down. That’s not the fix, and it’s not what he did. He was never slow.

Instead, ask what you’re moving toward. If there’s a real answer, go, hard, obsessively, faster than feels comfortable. If there isn’t, the speed isn’t ambition. It’s just noise you’ve learned to mistake for it.

Be urgent about everything that matters. Be in a hurry about nothing.

Thanks for reading,

Will xxx

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A 17 year old walks toward the gate at Universal Studios. He’s wearing a a cheap suit, carrying a briefcase with nothing other than a sandwich and two chocolate bars inside.

He’s already been rejected 3 times by film school and his visitor’s pass expired yesterday. He’s got no job here or any permission to enter.

He walks through it anyway. Into an empty office. And in cheap plastic letters he sticks on himself, one at a time, he prints a name onto the door: Steven Spielberg

And this story, I think, the clearest example there is of what happens the moment you stop waiting for permission in chasing your dream

For the next two and a half months he showed up five days a week and sat in edit suits. He’d watch directors, ask question of their process until eventually, people just assumed someone else had said yes to him being around

Now, I know what you’re thinking. That’s impossible today? It was 1965, security was a joke and you’re right. But the gate was never the point. There’s a gate in your life, metaphorical. physical and you’re waiting for one thing before you walk through it.

Permission.

The question you should ask is where the confidence go ahead so without it comes from. It was one that Albert Bandura asked in 1977 too. He found four sources of confidence, and the weakest of them, by a long way, was the one we all reach for first, being told. Encouragement, pep talks from other people, they barely move the needle.

The strongest source, by a long way, was doing the thing. Stacking undeniable proof that you are the person that your mind whispers that it thinks it you are at 2am.

Bandura confirmed what Spielberg was living.
That confidence is the receipt to evidence you’ve collected and permission is the price you think you need to pay… you don’t

Three years after that summer, he made a short film called Amblin’ and got it in front of the one executive at Universal….

There’s a world in which Spielberg Spielberg walks past that empty office and keeps going. told himself he needed more time or more experience before going in. And you’ll spend a lifetime walking past your own ‘office’ too; past the idea, past the upload button, past the version of yourself you could become, waiting for a permission slip that is never arriving.

Spielberg didn’t wait and after showing that film, he walked out with a seven-year contract. He became the youngest director ever signed to a long-term deal at a major studio.

This time, the studio gave him the office.
The door has his name in letters he didn’t print.
And he no longer needed the suit…

He’d become the person he’d pretend to be all along.

The best person in the room rarely wins.

I don’t mean that reductively. I mean that time and again, excellence alone wasn’t enough. It was the one who replied within the hour, whose name surfaced first the moment something needed solving, the one everybody simply remembered. Talent opened the door, and then had little to do with who walked back through it.

Which has left me focused on what I think is the unspoken, untaught side of work that almost everyone neglects: being reliable, being responsive, and eventually, being remembered.

The finance bro you never texted back after the first date tried to tell you about this. He called it, with total sincerity, his “extensive interconnected network.” You called it narcissism. You weren’t wrong, but here’s the thing: if you can be the most gifted person in your field and still lose to someone half as good who was simply easier to think of, what do you actually focus on in your twenties?

1. You’ve been sold a lie

We’re told that the way to get ahead is to be good. This karmic, mostly untrue story where opportunities find he who worked hardest. The best surgeon and the remembered surgeon are not the same person, but still it’s the remembered one who gets the call?

So the questions I keep circling are:

• Where opportunity actually comes from, if it isn’t simply being the best.

• How you build any of this from 0, with no network of your own to offer yet.

• And how you do it, without slowly becoming into the finance bro you swore to ignore.

I recently realised the clearest example I have came from my grandmother’s favourite phrase. I grew up in a Spanish household with twenty-one first cousins, which, if you didn’t, means lunches and christenings and Sunday dinners run at a scale events companies would flinch at.

At the centre of all of it was my grandmother (CEO, COO, CRO and CTO of the whole operation) and a ginormous paella pan. Seriously… it’s about seven feet across, the sort of thing the Hulk might use as a dinner plate. This weapon of mass construction was wheeled out to feed a small standing army of relatives, and every time the guests outgrew even the pan, too many people, a marquee needed by Saturday, my grandmother would fold her arms, think for a second, and say the same four words.

I know a guy.

The guy was always, without fail, Uncle Oscar.

To put it plainly, he was the guy who knew the guy who knew the guy. A surgeon in a town with one traffic light and one bakery. A landlord with a venue going spare. A van, forty chairs, a marquee by morning. I’d watch hands get shaken at family parties, some man thanking him for the hundred lamb ribs and the coal he’d delivered last weekend. He’d wave it away, always, and a moment later you’d catch him stepping into another room with the phone already at his ear. Whatever she needed, the distance between the problem and the solution was however long it took Oscar to find the number.

2. Your network is your networth

Your network and reputation behave like no other asset you’ll own: they appreciate when you spend them. But where does a network’s value actually come from? To see that, you first have to know who’s even in it.

And look, I know how this sounds. “Networking” has been so thoroughly ruined by LinkedIn, a thousand “let’s connect!”s in the costume of warmth, that it’s worth naming the difference between networking and nurturing. Networking does the introductions and the favours and the remembering with one eye on what it’s owed. Nurturing keeps the person and forgets the tab exists. Over months, the performance of warmth and the real thing drift visibly apart.

The first step would be to outline your network, who comes to mind? And in there, who are you nurturing? Because you can’t tend all of it. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar put a number on it: around a hundred and fifty people is the most any of us can hold as real relationships at once, and inside that the rings tighten, fifty you’d call close, fifteen you’d grieve, five you’d build a life around. Those numbers measure attention, which is finite and runs out.

So you sort, by function rather than affection, by what each ring is actually for. You find the rings less by scrolling your phone than by asking three things.

• Who would you drop everything for, and who’d drop everything for you?

• Who do you genuinely know but almost never speak to?

• And who do you wish you knew, sitting two introductions away?

3. Who sits where, who gets what?

Here’s where it turns strange, you’d assume the value sits in the inner circle, the people closest to you. But your inner circle read what you read, know who you know, have already heard about the same handful of openings. Mark Granovetter found that when people landed a job through someone they knew, it was usually an acquaintance rather than a close friend, someone they saw only rarely, because the loose tie was the one bridging into a world they couldn’t otherwise see. Your close ties give you support; your weak ties give you the future. And the richest position of all, as Ronald Burt showed, belongs to whoever stands in the gap between groups that don’t otherwise touch. The bridge gets the better ideas, the faster rise, the call, for the simple crime of being the only person standing in two rooms at once. The barbecue crowd, the surgeon, the landlord with the spare venue: worlds that never met until Oscar stood between them.

Which tells you how to spend yourself, ring by ring. The inner few you don’t manage at all; you love them, you show up, you keep no tab, and you’d be a monster to run a strategy on them. The middle ring is where nurturing actually lives. They’re the cheap, genuine, low-frequency touches. A note when their thing goes well, the fast reply, the habit of noticing. Five minutes with no ask attached. The edge is the strangers, the ones you wish you knew, and you don’t nurture those, because there’s nothing there yet to nurture, and pretending otherwise is the exact move that gets you filed under avoid. You earn your way to the edge instead, with work good enough to cross the gap without you, and the occasional honest reach out that wants nothing yet.

So if you’re at the start with nothing to trade, you already hold the only two things the whole system runs on: time, and the willingness to be useful before it pays you anything. Spend them. Become the reliable set of hands, the one who shows up and replies and treats small things as though they aren’t small, and keep doing it for years.

By thirty you’ll have quietly banked the two assets that compound into a career: the credibility of having done good work, and the credits of everyone who remembers you did it for them. Be responsive, be reliable, be remembered, and you stay lodged in the part of a person where decisions actually get made. You end up living rent-free in a few dozen heads, and when you reach out the door is already open, because you spent years quietly propping it.

And you won’t notice the day it turns but somewhere down the line, in a kitchen you’ll never stand in, someone will hit a shortfall with no idea who to call. They’ll fold their arms, think for a second, and say the four words my grandmother used to say over that pan.

Only this time, the person they think of for their problem is you.

That’s all any of this was ever for. Not to just be the best in the room but to be the one they remember when they leave it.

A woman named Anna Boch is about to pay $16 for something now worth $180 million. She’s walking through a gallery when she stops in front of a painting. The whole canvas has burning red and gold colours of a low sun; it looks to be a painting of workers bent over a vineyard.

Five hundred miles south, the man who made it is painting like he’s running out of time. He won’t stop to eat, and will finish a canvas almost every day.

His name is Vincent Van Gogh.
And he’s worked like this as an artist for the last ten years

In the gallery, Anna inspects the paint. She decides to buy it for Four hundred francs, the price of a meal at the time. Vincent will find via post sometime soon but it doesn’t matter, he loads up his brush and continues working.

The canvas she’s purchased, was the 1,901st piece Vincent van Gogh ever made across his ten years as an artist. It was the first time his work was ever sold.

It will also be the last during his lifetime, as four months later, he’s dead.

So how does this suffering artist, who died with one sale to his name, go on to become the most recognised, relished craftsman in history?

I think there’s two lessons in Van Gogh’s life-story.

You must pick a pursuit where the podium feels pointless. Where the pursuit and process itself IS the prize. Ten years, he worked for, with no recognition, no sale, no nothing. It’s hard to imagine such a level of obsession; he worked in total obscurity, was financially dependant on his brother Theo. By every reasonable account of success, he was not one. Yet still he continued.

If you only love the applause, the silence will kill you.
And okay, Van Gogh had done that, sure.
But… it still wasn’t enough.

You see, there’s the second side to this story that the world often forgets to mention. His fame didn’t just appear from suffering as an artist for years. The work we know, exists today because of one person - Van Gogh’s brother’s wife, Johanna. After they both died was left with everything; she was twenty-eight years old with a stack of letters and over two hundred paintings that nobody wanted.

She could’ve let them collect dust but instead she spent the rest of her life putting on shows. In 1914 she published Vincent’s letters where the world no longer just saw the paintings, they saw the artist.

She didn’t improve a single brushstroke but she supplied the one thing he never had:, recognition. And there’s the formula hiding underneath all of it, the formula to success, I call it.

S = (Q × V) × R
Success equals the quality of your work, times the volume you produce, times the recognition.

That bracket, (Q × V), is everything you control. How good the work is, multiplied by how much of it you make. And volume is just consistency times time, how reliably you show up, for how long. That’s the part you build alone, Like Van Gogh, in the dark, with no one watching.

Then there’s R, Recognition. Whether the world ever sees it and that’s the part you don’t fully control.

Van Gogh maxed out his quality and volume over ten years but his R was zero. And anything times zero is zero, that’s why a genius died thinking he was a failure.

Death didn’t change the quality of his work.
Johanna changed his recognition and because the bracket was already so enormous, the whole thing detonated.

So here’s why this matters, for you, chasing your own version of a dream.
We are all Vincent in the dark somewhere in out own right. There’s that thing you’re pouring yourself into with nobody noticing yet; the business, the product, the Substack.

All work that hasn’t ‘paid off’ yet.
You’re stacking your own (Q × V), alone, and no one seems to care… You need to do two things.

One: Pick a pursuit where the proces IS the podium. Is this something you would do even it it failed, if it took ten years? (Q x V) takes time, how long will you hold on?

Two: understand that your work being great is not the same as the work being known. Did you ever hear about the greatest piano player in the world, the one who only ever played alone, downstairs, for no one?

No. You didn’t. (Q × V) × 0R = 0.

Greatness in a basement isn’t greatness.
It’s a secret… and Vincent’s was very nearly buried with him.
So put the work in the room, be cringe, post the thing.
That was a choice Vincent never got to make.

But you’ll make it every single day, every day you decide whether your R stays at zero or not.

So ask yourself:
What are you building, would you do it regardless of the podium?
And whilst you’re there, who’s in the room to witness it?

Will xxx

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50,000 people, take decisions they previously made in private, public and stomp for 42km along the London roads.

And I used to think marathons we’re about running…
Stories about how fast, how far or who’s first.

But standing at the side of the road today, watching a stranger cry and another one clap for someone they had never met… I think I finally understood what this… all of this… is actually about.

And let me be clear… this, is not about running.

On the 6th of May, 1954, Roger Bannister stood on a cinder track at Oxford’s Iffley Road ground to attempt something the scientific community had declared physiologically impossible.

The 4 minute mile.

Doctors declared the human lungs would explode, the heart would arrest. And then, Roger Bannister, a medical student who ran on his lunch breaks, achieved the impossible.

Four laps of the track… in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. The sub 4 minute mile.

And stood here, on the side of the road. I see that same history being broken. The human body being asked, again, to do something it maybe shouldn’t be able to achieve.

Understand, truly, how crazy this is. A marathon is 42.2 kilometres.
Your body burns through roughly 2,500 to 3,500 calories.
Your joints absorb roughly 3 times your body weight across 40,000 steps.
Less than 1% of the global population will ever complete a marathon.
Your muscles deplete their glycogen stores completely and at around mile 20… you hit the wall….

….the moment your body has nothing left to burn and starts breaking down muscle tissue to fuel it’s-self.

And you can see it too; people hobbling, crying, cramping. Bodies that have simply said… nope, enough.

But it’s exactly at here that something strange happens. When the gels, glucose, gear, garmins are all gone… The wall of pain is replaced by one of noise.

1 Million strangers, screaming their hearts out. For absolute strangers and it’s just fucking contagious.

There’s a name for this; in 1912, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim was studying rituals; why did humans, across every culture and era, keep gathering in groups to witness the same events together?! Funerals. Harvests. Ceremonies. He found that something happens in a crowd that cannot happen alone. He called it collective effervescence.

The term describes that electric feeling of energy, joy, and belonging that a group of people experiences when they gather together for a shared purpose. In these moments, individual identities fade into a collective ‘we’ fostering deep emotional unity

A feeling of being part of something larger than the self.

Call it what you want but right here, stood at the side of this road watching strangers cheer strangers and humans beat biology, it just feels like this raw, human, energy.

But still I can’t shake that feeling… this isn’t about running.

Victor Frankl coined the term logotherapy. It’s this idea that humans don’t just need food and warmth and safety, they need a reason. ‘He who has a why to live can bear almost any how’ he famously said.

And I reference him because there comes a point, somewhere past mile 20, where the gels are gone and the glycogen is gone and the carbon shoes are redundant… and these people start running on something else.

I’m stood here watching a woman at mile 23 whose legs have completely given up, the whole street is screaming for her, she’s crying but she just keeps going. I don’t know her name or what she promised herself at 5am this morning when she sat and tied the laces to the shoes that are now scraping the floor at km 32… but I can see there’s something.

It’s a story. A private one, about someone they lost, or something they promised, or a version of them their trying to prove real.

You see everyone here is running from something, toward something, or for someone who can’t do either, anymore.

And this funny thing happens as I watch it unfold, I came here asking why. Why do they do it? How do you ask your body to do something it maybe shouldn’t be able to do. And somewhere around mile 23 the question was asked to me.

It stopped being why do they do it.

And became why can’t I?

There’s a bigger part to the Roger Bannister story that always gets left out of the history books. Within 46 days of setting that record, someone else ran it. Within three years, sixteen runners had done it. The human body didn’t evolve in 46 days andhe distance didn’t shrink. The only thing that moved was the belief. One person found their why, ran on it in front of the world, and sixteen others found theirs.

I said at the start this isn’t about running. It’s a story about why. That’s what’s actually happening on this road.

Strangers, cheering strangers, chasing their why. And the strangest thing about watching someone fight for theirs… is how quickly you might becomes yours.

I came here asking why they do it. I’m leaving asking why I haven’t.

Will xxx

The first shows up after something goes wrong. You make a mistake, a relationship ends, a shot you took lands nowhere. The feeling sits deep in your chest and whispers: That was you. All of it. You should’ve known. You should’ve seen it coming.

The second arrives when you win. The phone rings with good news, the thing works out, the bet pays off, and the same voice screams: That was you too. Every late night. Every sacrifice. You’re that guy.

In the first version, it feels like accountability. In the other, confidence. But here’s the thing nobody told me: they’re the same feeling making the same claim with one fatal flaw. An assumption… That everything that happened, good or bad, was determined entirely by you.

But success is a stool, a three-legged one.
Let me take you back to where this concept re-wired my brain.

It was sometime in July 2019. I’m 18 at the time.

The astroturf is so hot from the sun I can feel the studs heating through the sole of my rugby boot. My knee is on fire too. I’d thought it was the astro but I soon realise I’ve left the top layer of my calve and shin on the halfway line in the last tackle.

My backs coach is to my right. We’d hardly known each other but over the last six days of the England camp, it felt like he’d been waiting for me my whole life. He was quiet, stern, focused. He’d been watching us train our arses off for the last couple of days.

‘This is dogshit.’

He was honest too. We’d spent the last 35 minutes in our own half being drilled back by Northern England. We were Southern England, and the scoreboard was south too, 25 points down. We watched on from the sidelines as fifteen and eighteen year olds hoping to put on the performance of their lives to represent their national team, fell apart on a field of astroturf.

‘What’s happening out there?’ he asked me.

He’d made me captain a few days earlier. So I felt I owed him some attempt at an comprehensive understanding of the game…

‘Gameplan might be wrong. Don’t know, there’s no talk, feels like we’re down and we know it. We’re in a spiral, everyone’s feeling sorry for themselves out th...’

‘You’re doing the thing again.’

It felt like an interruption, but really, he was shutting me up.

We’d spoken about this before. Rewind a few days to a different game but a worse loss. The worst I’d played in a while and afterwards I’m in the training room, packing my kit, when he walked in.

‘How you feeling?’

‘I could’ve done better, the yellow card was stupid, I should’ve...’

‘How are you feeling?’

I stopped packing to turn around.

‘It’s not all about you,’ he said bluntly.

I waited for him to soften it but he didn’t. I assumed I’d been arrogant and started another spiel. He cut me off again.

‘No. I mean it. It’s not just about you… In the good and the bad. It’s not just up to you.’

He told me what he’d learned across every win and every defeat he could remember. Success was never caused by one thing. It was three factors, every time.

What you do.

What others do.

Luck. Timing. ‘

The bounce of the ball,’ he called it. All of these factors we’re hte foundation to the three-legged stool. To sit on the feeling of success you must recognise all three legs that contributed. That was the line that shattered something I’d built my whole identity on. I thought it was all just down to me. If I worked more, woke up earlier, if I just convinced myself to do more, then maybe, just maybe the ‘bounce of the ball’ could start to obey me.

But when you believe you built the whole stool yourself, you also believe you break it yourself too. Every win becomes proof you’re special and every loss becomes evidence that you’re not.

And I come back to that conversation at least once a week. Here’s why you should too.

When things go right and the stool is steady, sit on it. But look down first and see what’s actually keeping it steady. Your work is one leg. But there’s a person who said yes, there’s someone who helped or a moment that arrived at exactly the right time. You didn’t build those so don’t forget they’re there, contributing to it too.

And when a stool wobbles, you fail, it goes wrong, you lose. Check each leg the same way. Is it yours? What did you do, what could you have done differently. Who showed up, who didn’t. Or was it simply the bounce of the ball? The floor was uneven, the timing was off, the universe just said no.

Most of the time when something falls apart, you’ll find at least two legs weren’t yours to begin with. So don’t carry them as though they are.

The only question worth sitting with, in the good and the bad, is whether you did everything you could with the one leg that was always yours.

I still think about that training room. The half-packed kit bag an him standing in the doorway, not softening it as he reminded me.

It’s not all about you.

For a long time I thought that was an ego check. Now I see it as the most empowering and relieving reminder I could have ever been given.

Most of the credit we take and weight we burden ourselves was never ours to hold.
Focus on what you can control, your leg, on the three legged stool of success.

Will xxx

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It was the night before the iPod would launch to the press. The devices were already boxed, ready to be handed out the following morning. Steve Jobs picked one up, plugged in a pair of headphones and admired the device.

Then he did it again…
Unplugging the jack and plugging it back in.
And again…

Hmmm, the headphone jack worked. By any reasonable definition, it was fine. But there was one fatal flaw.

It didn’t click.

This was not acceptable. The click made the experience worthwhile. For the customer, the click was a subconscious detail that would determine their perception of Apple as a whole company.

So he asked the engineers to stay behind. Every single one of them. People from marketing sticking screens, finance team members, all assisting on the assembly line.

Over the course of night, over one thousand apple employee’s spent the night dismantling every iPod, replacing every headphone jack with one that made a satisfying click when you pushed the headphones in.

By the morning, they’d repackaged every device… All 1,300 of them.

There’s a lot you could say about Jobs and, plenty of writers have; maniacal, egotistical founders who care little for anything that there own opinion. But I keep coming back to this story, because I think it’s the clearest window into what actually separates the greats from everyone else. It comes down to one simple truth.

If you won’t out-care your competition, don’t expect to outlast them.

To quote Steve himself, let’s ’connect the dots backwards’… His father, Paul, was a mechanic and carpenter. It’s told that he had such an appreciation for craftsmanship, he’d finish both the front and back of every cabinet he built. Yes… even the side against the wall, the side no one would ever see.

Young Steve once asked him why.

“You’ll know,” Paul said.

And then there’s Steve, in 2001, inspecting the Ipod pre-launch with that sentence echoing in his head. It became the philosophy for everything Apple ever made.

When Steve Jobs was building the original Macintosh, he insisted the circuit board inside the machine be beautiful. Engineers thought he’d lost the plot but Jobs disagreed:

“Great artists sign their work.” he told them.

Okay okay, this might be a bit esoteric… you, the reader, me the writer, we’re not designing circuit boards. So why the fuck care? In fact, why care THIS much? If none of these details rationally matter, if nobody is going to notice whether the headphone jack clicks or the circuit board is perfect or the back of the cabinet is finished, then what is the point? And why does the work of people who obsess over them feel so fundamentally different from everything else?

I did some digging… it turns out it comes down to how we judge effort as humans.

In 2004, a group of researchers ran a study on poetry. They asked two groups to review the same set of poems: how good were they, should they be published, how much were they worth? One group was told the poet had spent four hours writing them, the other group was told eighteen. Across every variation of the experiment they found that the eighteen-hour group rated the poems higher and valued them more, consistently, across every measure.

Wild, right? They we’re just told it was harder to do and they assumed it was better. This 2004 study revealed that as humans, we use effort as a proxy for quality. Okay so, maybe go and tell everyone the website you built took centuries? Or the Etsy art you made you did blindfolded? Or the edit you made took a month? Well, there’s a catch, you can’t (realistically) and even so, customers don’t know, and they don’t care. The making of the thing is invisible to them.

So the harder question is: what happens when nobody tells you how long something took? When the only signal you have is the thing itself, the final product? The answer is that we sense care anyway, not in any single choice, but in the accumulation of them. No individual decision is consciously detectable but the total is always felt.

Jony Ive, Jobs’s right hand and the brain behind Apple’s design philosophy, articulates it better than anyone:

“What we make testifies to who we are. People can sense care and carelessness. It relates to respect for other people, and carelessness is personally offensive. Products are a form of communication, they demonstrate your value system, what you care about.”

His team shot the butterfly and flower animations for the original Apple Watch using real butterflies and real flowers. One flower alone took 285 hours of shooting and over 24,000 individual photos. Most people glance at it for half a second without registering what they’re seeing.

There’s something about Apple products that tells you they care. The fingerprints of craft are everywhere, even when you can’t name them. Ive calls it perceived simplicity: the sense that something just feels right, without the user being able to explain why. Like the butterflies, you don’t know why, but you feel it.

And the beauty is, caring more than everyone else costs you nothing but time. Which means every excuse for not doing it sits squarely with you. You should be personally offended by anything good enough that carries your name. There’s no excuse to your excellence here. The thing being made matters less than the standard you set for making it. You, after reading this, will decide:

Will I care more (unreasonably so), than my competition?

The hard part is the delay. Most of this work will happen in private, with no reward or praise. You finish the back of the cabinet, replace the jack, shoot the butterfly for the 24,000th time and none of it pays you back today. And for what? Nobody noticed last time, nobody will notice this time. You’re losing sleep over a headphone jack!? You’re a perfectionist. You’re obsessivem frankly, a little delusional. What is the fucking point?!

Until one day, you look up.

And realise the work you did in private, the thousand quiet decisions nobody saw you make, has compounded into something nobody can contemplate copying. Not for lack of talent. Because they stopped caring long before you did.

And eventually, after caring quietly for long enough, the whole thing just…

Clicks…

If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts.

This has always baffled me. Surely… fill it with idiots?? People who look smart but then fail at the first hurdle. What would happen if we filled it with imposters?

People like us?

For me, it started when I was a kid, watching my sisters graduate Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge. In in a room of young adults with ‘real’ jobs and adult degrees, I was holding a plastic cube with 65 buttons and a glass sphere at the end, trying to look at though I belong…

O_o: me.

Imposter syndrome feels like being the plus-one at a party you didn’t even want to go to. Where, you’re holding a drink you didn’t choose, laughing half a second late to a joke you didn’t understand and waiting for the host to clock you and go:

‘Sorry… who are you?’

At the party, you stand there trying to figure out what formation to assemble your hands that suddenly feel like limbs you’re training for the first time.

But professionally, imposter syndrome doesn’t ask you where to put your hands.

It asks you where to put your name: Maybe on the deck? Surely not, it’s not really my place Or should I CC in this email thread?

It asks you if you understand: When you’re sitting in the meeting, doodling like you understand the acronym everyone keeps repeating.

It asks you if you belong?

I’ve had all three. And over the last few years I’ve found a way to deal with it that doesn’t require you to “be more confident”, or whatever people say when they believe our actions are simply a product of our words.

Imposter syndrome has a funny way or viewing the world from your brain. It will tell you…

Wow, this is great.

And in the same breath ask…

But are you?

With my sisters, I remember feeling proud of them, and then immediately feeling ridiculous for making it about me. One second you’re just watching the people you love win, and the next your brain has started ranking everyone in the room, including you.

At 16, I was shooting my school’s marketing images. I’d tell my friends I couldn’t play football because I had “meetings.” Not because I was trying to sound important but because I didn’t know how else to explain that I felt more useful behind a camera.

Then I started shooting weddings. The bride would come and ask me:

’Hey when does the photographer arrive!’

‘It’s me… hello.’

She realises then that she’s hired 12 year old looking 16 year old to shoot the most important day of her life.
Her heart hits the floor.
My pride follows shortly after.

’But fear not’ I reassure her

…as I strap up my velcro geox, put away my spiderman wallet away and slap my ben ten watch into sport mode…

‘I’ll get to work!’

She wasn’t being rude, she was just asking. But those are the moments where your brain starts doing maths you didn’t ask it to do, and somehow you end up smaller than you were five seconds ago.

Professionally, the pattern get’s louder.

I dropped out of university, moved to London, and suddenly found myself in rooms full of the most exceptional creatives, and some of the smartest heads in investment and marketing. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be sat in investor meetings with some of the most talented people in the world as a 21 year old, let me tell you.

It’s an inspiring and lonely place. Inspiring because you’re close to real capability. Lonely because you’re close to it without having any proof you deserve to be there.

So yes, I know imposter syndrome. I knew it well.

But somewhere along the way, this once-foe became something I could use. Not in a cringe “I’m grateful for my suffering” way. More like: I stopped treating it like a sign to step back, and started treating it like information.

So, if any of what I’ve written so far resonates, here’s what’s helped me over the last 5 years.

1) Realise your inexperience is your opportunity

When you feel like an imposter, the instinct is to interpret the feeling as a warning sign. As the host has just walked over and gone.

’Sorry, why are you at my party?’

Inexperience feels like a threat, because you don’t have the usual armour we bind our self worth or status too. No track record to point at, no accolades or reputation. No ‘as per my last email’ to reference or no ‘last time’ to copy.

But having watched some of the most successful creatives and entrepreneurs, I realise now that naivety forces you to do something experienced people can quietly avoid once they have patterns: it forces you to create from a new place.

If you’re naive, you can’t rely on dogma, you can’t hide behind tradition.

The common wording of Henry Forde’s quote is: “if I wanted to sabotage my competition, I would fill their company with experts.”

Experts know so many reasons why something can’t be done, it remains undone. It can turn into a room full of people who know the rules so well they stop making anything new. So, nothing gets risked and slowly the work becomes a copy of a copy of a copy.

Do you copy? Great, let’s keep going.

That usually feels like embarrassment. But it also means you’re not trapped inside the same patterns everyone else is repeating.

2) As you get older, you start living at the boundary of your potential, don’t.

There’s a quiet trap that comes with competence.

You stop acting at the limit of your potential, and you start acting at the boundary of it. The edge where you still feel like “yourself.” The edge where you can perform without having to risk your identity, risk failure.

Here, you stick to what you know works, how you “should” do it. You start defending a version of yourself that is coherent and capable and recognisable.

We think the cost here is failure, obviously, right? But the invisible cost is higher. It’s the price you pay for avoiding the weird, original stuff that only appears when you go past the boundary.

So if you feel naive, if you feel behind, it might be proof you’re out of your depth. Fantastic. Let’s acknowledge that right now you’re exactly where you need to be.

3) It won’t feel like a superpower at first

***Caveat *** that sounds great, but it won’t feel it. Because when you’re in it, naivety feels like being exposed.

You’re going to get things wrong. Again. And then again. You’ll have that thought:

Surely this time they’ll fire me.

And even when nobody says it out loud, you can feel it in your own head, as if it’s being narrated over the room. That voice is what uncertainty sounds like when you haven’t built any evidence yet.

4) Wear shoes that don’t fit

One of the best practical rules I’ve found is simple: find places that pay you to work where the shoe doesn’t fit. Somewhere it’s painful. Somewhere you get blisters.

Then, over time, grow into them.

Wear them in, walk some miles. Learn. Develop. Get it wrong in ways that don’t kill you. And just as the shoe starts to fit, just as you become an ‘expert’, find ways to keep them big.

5) Evidence is the antidote to inexperience

If you feel like an imposter, you are probably trying to argue your way into safety. But certainty is not the entry fee, evidence is.

That bride didn’t stop doubting me because I said the right thing, she stopped doubting me because I did the job; the photos arrived. I gave her evidence. I gave myself evidence too.

That is the whole game; collecting evidence.

This is why, “just think differently” never lands when you are stood in the room with your name on the deck and your stomach doing backflips. The old story in your head is not being stubborn, it is being logical. It is asking for proof.

Imagine you’re brain being logical for a second.

Have you jumped out this plane before?
No.
Okay here’s cold sweats, nausea and a minor heart attack.

You may not be jumping out of planes. But maybe this is the loop you’re in.

The feeling shows up. You do the quick scan. You start building a case for why you do not belong. You fire little bullets at yourself all day: They hired the wrong person. You are behind. You do not understand. Someone is going to notice.

Evidence is the silencer. It is the email you sent that did not get you exposed. It is the meeting you survived or the work that arrived.

And slowly, without a big Marty Supreme moment, the pattern changes. New evidence creates a new belief. The new belief creates a new action. The new action creates more evidence.

That is why I keep saying imposter syndrome is a compass. If you want growth, that feeling is often proof you are exactly where you need to be.

But if you want progress, you need movement. Keep moving. Keep executing. Keep collecting evidence.

And maybe soon enough, you become the ‘expert’ you always dreamed of being ; )

Speak soon,

Will xxx

In 2023, I was a third-year film student in Edinburgh when an opportunity came up to film Steven Bartlett’s real life. Be inevery boardroom, flight, and stage or podcast. I thought I’d blown the call. I was in the wrong city at thewrong timing. So I spent four hours writing a hail mary text to get the job. Not a showreel, just an honesty pitch saying I could start asap to try and get an unconditional yes.

Wednesday I sent the text. The following Wednesday I got offer and the Wednesday after, I dropped out.

What that taught me, and what two years of shooting 54 flights across 54 weeks, 10+M views in 50 episodes has reinforced….is that creative careers don’t work the way most people think.

When I started out, I thought being the best editor would make me irreplaceable.If I could cut sharper, be more cinematic, push my craft further than anyone else, then I’d be the one people needed.

But here’s what I learned, The industry is full of “genius” editors; fast, technical, crazy transitions and super cool animations, the whole she-bang. And yet… most of them don’t last. Because the ones who stay aren’t always the most talented.

They’re the ones who know how to take a note without taking it personally.
Who know when a vague line like “make it pop” means “add contrast”… and when it means “start over.”
Who know when someone’s too busy to push and when the right push will change everything.

Bad editors are like Daddy Long Legs… hear me out.
You’ve probably heard the myth: “most poisonous venom in the world, but no fangs to deliver it.”

It’s bad biology, but it’s perfect career advice.

Your technical skill is your venom.
Your EQ, your ability to listen, read the room, and translate, their your fangs.

Without both, you’re poison to work with.

The magic isn’t in being the most talented person in the room.
It’s in being the one who makes everyone else’s talent deliver.

That’s the lesson I wish I’d known earlier.

You can be all venom with no bite…
or you can be the person people actually want to work with.

Principle 1: Focus only on the big and small things. Nothing in between.

In 2023 I noticed something I won’t forget. We we’re in in Australia, Sydney this time. We’re about two weeks into the Business and Life Tour Steve was doing across Australia and New Zealand.

Before every show, he had a meet and greet; 250 people, photos, handshakes, stories. After this one, he rushed into his greenroom. After waiting for a few moments to consider if I should enter, I risked it. Slowly, I poked myself through the door.

It was redundant, Steve was in his own world, staring into his palm covered in black lines. I said nothing, just focused on documenting.

He’d met these people for five minutes, now live onstage he was remembering their names to weave their stories into a keynote he’d delivered dozens of times, just so a few strangers in the crowd would feel seen. He scribbled them on his hand and began rehearsing it backstage.

I remember standing there, thinking: this is the busiest person I know. And he’s using the last fifteen minutes before stage to memorise a fan’s name.

You see, CEOs work on the macro, strategy, investment, innovation, culture. That part makes sense. But their impact also lives in the smallest details. Remembering a name. Tailoring a story. Making someone feel like they were the only person in the room.

The admin, the back-and-forth, the “sort of important” tasks that fill most people’s days? They don’t touch it, it’s where time disappears.

This is the Pareto principle in action. 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. The problem is most people spend their days drowning in the 80% that barely moves the needle. Focus your hours on the areas where you yield the highest impact or return. Ignore everything else.

Two: Compress cycle times.

If something can be done faster, it will be. Email chains become phone calls, meetings become memos, conversations become voice notes.

The question isn’t “how long will this take?” It’s “what’s the fastest path to a decision?”

Most people let tasks fill the time they give them. Entrepreneurs ask a different question: why is this taking this long, and is that reason actually important?

Usually, it isn’t.

Three: Stop waiting.

Sorry I didd’t get back to your email, I was missing:
- 10 hours
- Room Temp Water
- Matching Socks
- Keto Breakfast
- Coffee
- Stanley Cup
- Ice Water
- Coke Zero
- Stars in Alignment

If I just called you out, I’m sorry. Exaggerated point of a reality we all create for ourselves. You think you need the right desk, the quiet morning or the clear calendar.

That’s not focus. That’s procrastination and preparation. I’ve watched more deep work happen at 35,000 feet than in any office. On planes, in cars, in airport lounges, in greenroom hallways. No Wi-Fi, no interruptions, no excuses.

The work happens, full stop. Where is irrelevant. You’re not lacking time, you’re lacking pressure and focus. Spend you’re time executing or losing time while waiting for perfect conditions that don’t exist. The wait is where your hours disappear.

Stop waiting, start moving. Momentum creates focus, not the other way around.

Four: Your time has a job description.

This is perhaps less applicable for us everyday folk, but take what you will here.
You’re not busy, you’re just doing the wrong work.

Bring in the right people. Not to help you. To replace you, on the things that don’t require you.

Things don’t stop needing to be done. As you scale, they stop needing to be done by you. Really, your job is your 20%, the work only you can do. Everything else? Delegate or delete. This is what I’ve seen Steve master over the last three years.

This sounds obvious until you audit your actual week. Most people spend 80% of their time on tasks someone else could do better. They protect their calendar but not their focus.

Delegation doesn’t give you freedom, it gives you time on your most important asset - your 20%.

Five: Spend time in the clouds.

Most people schedule time to work, few schedule time to think.

Steve Jobs used to talk about this… the importance of unstructured time. Time to wander. Time to let ideas collide without a deadline. He believed the best thinking happened when you weren’t trying to think.

I’ve seen this firsthand, 30 mins blocked just to read, learn. No calls. No messages.
At first it looked like nothing was happening. Then I realised, that was the point.

The big moves in life, strategy, innovation, the ideas that change everything, don’t come from checking tasks off a list. Uninterrupted hours where your brain has room to connect dots you didn’t know existed.

So maybe, the lack of work, IS the work at times.

So all this is to say, I think about time differently. Maybe you do too now?

Before this job, I thought being productive meant being busy. I thought working harder was the answer. I thought if I just found a few more hours, I’d finally feel like I was getting somewhere.

Now I know the truth: you don’t find time. You protect it. You compress it. You refuse to let it leak into things that don’t matter. The busiest person I know doesn’t have more hours than you. He just knows exactly what his are worth, where they go and where they must not.

That’s the real competitive advantage. Just principles, applied ruthlessly, every single day.

So I’ll leave you with a question I asked myself this week.

If I audited my last week honestly, not the story I tell myself, but the actual hours, how much of it was spent on my 20%? How much was spent waiting for perfect conditions? How much leaked into the middle, the “sort of important,” the tasks that made me feel busy but didn’t move anything forward?

The answer is usually uncomfortable. yikes.

In that discomfort is the gap between where your time goes and where it should go.
You don’t need more time. You need to stop bleeding the hours you already have.

Will x

Worth noting ***
The secret here isn’t, just work the same amount of hours.
Your life may be vastly different, being able to work that hard, that long is a privilege into it’s self. Engineering your life that way is a choice

If you’re new here, welcome.

I’m Will. I’m 24. I run a YouTube channel called Behind The Diary that documents Steven Bartlett’s life in real time, boardrooms, flights, the whole thing. We operate under a simple premise.

If you could have watched exactly how Meta, Tesla, Apple, Disney we’re built in real time, every meeting or moment - would you?

Last year we did 54 flights in 54 weeks, published 41 episodes, and crossed 10 million views. As a result, I’m learning a sh** ton on scaling creativity and content, building a team and more.

But that’s not why I’m writing this… I’m writing because a few years ago, none of that existed. And more importantly, what I’ve learned that might actually be useful to you (so I hope).

So, if you’re still here, let me tell you a story.
Mine in fact.

February 2023, I was asked a question.

Pero tú estás loco o qué?

Spanish for, are you fucking crazy, or what?!
I’d just told my Spanish mum I was dropping out of university; I’d accepted a job offer in London. Her response makes a bit more sense when you realise all my older sisters are Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard Graduates.

So perhaps, a fair question…
One my silent response also assumed was rhetorical.

It’s not the first time I’d been asked it too.
Let’s go further back,

At secondary school, I was editing photos under my desk in Design Tech in secret until a teacher confiscated my phone. (I’d recently stolen my dad’s camera off him, I felt this was a good time to edit some of the photos I’d taken on it). The end of the lesson rolls around. Mr Williams stood there with my phone out in his hand, my tail between my between my legs.

‘Will…’

Here we go I thought…

‘Who took this photograph?’

5 minutes later I walked out that room with a photography assignment and importantly, no detention. That teacher changed my life. It kickstarted a hobby. I’d spend weekends shooting anything, skateboards on fire, friends covered in flour, wine glasses I’d shatter with a homemade blowgun to capture high-speed photography.

My mum found the dents in the fridge in my many attempts.

Pero tú estás loco o qué?!

By 17 I was charging for shoots. At 19 I had a freelance company. At university, I worked as a gardener during the day to re-invest into equipment and opportunities. This sounds like the perfect university prospectus student, and it’s true, I was looking ahead at my carrer full of questions!!!

Are we all fucked as creatives?
How on earth will we make money?!
Surely this can’t be it?!?!

So I spent 2 years doing all I could to have an opportunity to gain experience, shoots on shoots. I went to Gymshark to see if they’d hire me - got to the final two before rejection, tried AYBL, rejected, tried google, rejected. Eventually ended up being contacted by a CEO running ultramarathons, 14 of them in 7 days in fact - sounded like a cool story, so I joined him. We spent 2 weeks not sleeping shooting his journey, became the lead for content in their business, it was awesome.

One year later that CEO texted me on a Wednesday morning: ‘I’m going to have to fire you. But I promise it’s for a good reason. You’ll get a call from someone called Jack.’ Jack was (another CEO) Steven Bartlett’s lead producer.

They needed someone to shoot, edit, and produce a new channel.

The call went fine, maybe, I couldn’t tell. But I had a gut feeling this was exactly what I wanted - I also had a gut feeling I had no chance of getting it. So moments after the call, I spent a few hours crafting a hail mary text. This was half of it:

Jack, It was great to chat. I’ve looked into the deferral paperwork, I can get it done. Basically: I’m all in. This opportunity is far more valuable to me than my degree. I would happily move to London in the next few weeks. My priority is to get started as soon as possible.

That was a Wednesday.
Job offer by the following Wednesday.
Dropped out by Friday.
In London, filming seven days a week, by the Friday after that.

I was sat there, scratching my head in my little London apartment launching a YouTube channel wondering.

Have I just made the worst decision of my life? If so, what a great story to tell

That was three years ago. A lot has happened since, a lot of it good, most of it hard, all of it useful.

And that’s how I ended up here, telling you, that you might take value from in this little substack I’m building. So hello, I see you, welcome. I’m Will, here’s what I believe.

1. Creativity dies when execution stop: too much of the creative advice I see is delivered from the sidelines or in hindsight. I want to build from what i’m learning in real time. How do you scale a channel? How do you hit 1M subscribers? How will my team scale? I don’t know yet, we’ll figure it out together.

2. Evidence changes behavior, behaviour changes identity: you do not become confident by being told you are good. You become confident by proving it to yourself, quietly, repeatedly to the point of mastery

3. Being under-qualified is not a flaw. It is the point: every meaningful opportunity I have had put me in shoes that did not fit yet. Pressure forces growth. Comfort delays it.

4. Pressure does not change who you are. It reveals it first: when things speed up, what remains is what you actually value and who you are. Not what you say you value.

3. Complacency begins the moment you think you understand: the second you assume you have someone, a craft, or a system figured out, you stop seeing. And storytelling dies the moment observation stops.

That’s what I write about here and these are my thoughts out loud.
What it feels like to build something in real time. When often you feel like you’re in the thick of it, asking yourself…

Pero tú estás loco o qué?

Maybe.
But that has turned out to be a useful place to start.

Will x

Let me explain.

Most of us live our lives governed by Identity Contracts we never actually signed. We tell ourselves: “I’m not a math person,’ or “I’m not a ‘creative.’” We wait for permission; a degree, a job title, a course from experts or a bro-course from a self proclaimed one… before we allow ourselves to try.

What you actually need is the audacity to start collecting evidence.

Last year I took up roller skating, to film. This is evidence being collected:

Hypothesis: pavement is hard.
Conclusion: correct

Why? Well, I needed to film Steven running. I tried chasing him on foot in 25-degree Dubai heat, horrendous.
Then I borrowed a kid’s bike and filmed one-handed through Swedish woods, horrendous(ly) (dangerous).

So I walked into a skate shop on Pancras Road, London and bought roller blades.

I had no right to be on wheels. I’d never skated. But I showed up at a park, strapped on eight plastic wheels, and started shuffling forward like a broken shopping trolley.

After a few months of paying the cringe/ embarrassment tax in full, I was learning two things.

1. How to skate.

2. That skating was never the real gain.
   

I learnt the biggest skills here I was collecting evidence: evidence that i can be someone who won’t accept constraints.
Then I did it again with music production.

We use a lot of music for BTD. My version of doom scrolling becomes searching Artist for hours looking for the perfect track. It always involves a compromise; time or quality.

Surely I could create custom tracks I thought?
Maybe this could save me time?

Embarrassingly, I opened Garage Band, software I had zero right to touch and started clicking buttons like a toddler with a soundboard. Hours of garbage. But I kept going because I wasn’t trying to become a producer, I was trying to update the file that said “Oh. I guess we do this now.” P.S a track I made for a section of Steve in the edit is here, let me know what you think…

This made me think about Ray Dalio’s book Principles. He talks about people like Elon Dalio says Shapers ask a simpler, quieter question: is it knowable?

If it is, the task changes. It stops being about talent or permission and starts being about exposure.(time spent close to the thing, being bad at the thing (my expertise) , letting your brain watch you try.

That’s the part people miss. Nothing dramatic happens in the moment. No lightning bolt. Just small actions that force an internal update. You are not proving anything to the world here (Hans Zimmer is safe from my garage band attempt). The real change happens as you feed your own nervous system new data.

And slowly, annoyingly slowly, the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are starts to break. Not because you changed your mind, but because the evidence no longer agrees with it

There’s actual science behind this. Psychologists call it Self-Perception Theory: we don’t discover who we are by looking inward. We watch our own actions and reverse-engineer our identity from the evidence. Researchers like Daryl Bem have argued that our internal states are actually quite weak and ambiguous. We don't have a direct connection to who we are; instead, we are like detectives at a crime scene, looking for clues to explain our own behavior….

Think about that… your brain is sitting in the dark, watching you from the outside, judging you and then assigning you beliefs from that.

When it sees me clicking buttons in Garage Band for the fifth night in a row, after a few rounds of laughing, maybe it decides to re-write the code for my initial belief.
Maybe it just keeps laughing, idk, you get the point.

Every time you suck at something new, you’re just submitting evidence. You are performing a structural renovation on your own personality by feeding your nervous system data that contradicts your old, “Identity Contract.”

So here’s what I’ve learned across rollerskating, running, and music production: confidence is a feeling; evidence is its receipt. Once you collect enough receipts, doubt doesn’t disappear, but it loses its power to negotiate.

So have the audacity to ask: why the fuck not?

Stop waiting for the permission slip.

Be more audacious.

Start collecting the evidence.

And watch your beliefs and actions change for you.

Will xxx

I was four at the time. He was in his sixties.
It wasn’t exactly the perfect first introduction.

He lived five or six doors down from us on my road. Over the years we’d pass each other briefly and exchange a smile. It was a part apology part avoidance smile…

The kind you’d give someone you once vomited on in public.

Then, during lockdown, I knocked on his door. I am still not totally sure why. Barry opened the door with the same warm, bouncing energy I remembered.

I asked if he needed any food shopping. After a few rounds of gratitude and exchanged lists, he asked where I’d been.

“Just out running.”

His face lit up. “How amazing. God, I’d love to do that.”

“Well, let’s go,” I said.

He laughed and immediately began pointing at himself. Knees. Hips. Back. Ankles. A full inventory of the reasons this was a terrible idea. We were both laughing…. him at the humor of it, me with excitement.

“Bollocks,” I said. “Of course you can. Tell you what. Meet me halfway. We’ll go for a walk.”

And for a while, we did. We had a 5k loop from our door, to a bench, to a view and to home. And after a few walsk each week, we developed a rule:

‘no limits.’

No limits on what we could talk about. Ideas, memories, fears, half-formed thoughts, horrendous dating stories and night out. It didn’t matter that there was a sixty-year gap between us. We would talk with no limits.

Then life did what it does.
I got busy. Too busy for walks. Too scattered for letters.

I found myself on a treadmill of “doing.” Every week became a sprint for progress, and patience started to feel like failure. I’d mean to write, to slow down, to reconnect, but by the time I’d made sense of my own world, the day was gone.

The letters from Barry kept coming. Eventually, they were only one way.
This year, I reached back out, in response to a letter from him. I offered my explanation for the silence…

I also don’t think you really need an explanation , I trust that what we have is the kind of friendship that endures quietly, even in silence. And I must express how grateful I am for the messages you send, the letters you write. They bring such a smile to me. But I suppose I owe it to both of us to try and understand what’s been going on!

Things are okay, really, they are. In fact great in many areas. But it’s an interesting chapter. I’m learning a lot, and probably growing in ways I don’t yet recognise. It feels like a time where I’m trying to figure out what I value most, and how to stay connected to it when life moves so fast. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, actually. You’ve always had a way of seeing things clearly, without overcomplicating them.

Tell me how you’ve been, what’s been keeping you busy, what’s been inspiring you lately. I miss hearing about the small details of your world, they always seemed to hold so much meaning.

His response was golden, as always. He reassured me that the silence was no problem and as always we endure. More importantly, he told me everything going on.

I saw him again this Christmas.

He and his wife have moved into an elderly people’s home. The flat itself felt the sam,e , decorated with photos of trips and signs of a life properly lived. As I walked in I ducked under two washing lines that the length of the hallway. They we’re heavy with cards, genuinely hundreds of them.

Thank you’s, well wishes, happy birthdays, hello’s, goodbye’s. It might be the most beautiful marker of a successful life I’ve ever seen.

We sat for two hours and caught up on the local gossip.

• The other local home charging £100 for Christmas dinner.

• Their gardener was proving to be increasingly rude.

• The nativity display downstairs missing the baby Jesus; (we concluded he left as it was too ironic for a baby to be born in an old peoples home.)

And time passed, we talked and gradually, the reality of the last few years dawned on me. Barry couldn’t get comfortable. Over those two hours, he must have moved positions a hundred times. He shifted, leaned, adjusted, his legs aching beneath him. He told me about the various problems, the hospital visits, the times his legs had simply given out.

I listened, in my mind realising how much time had passed since I last saw him.

Watching someone you love move a little less each year is a strange kind of heartbreak. It’s hard to describe, but I guess it feels like witnessing a slow-motion theft. You’re sitting there, watching the things we all take for granted, the ability to stand without wincing, to walk to the kitchen, to just be comfortable, be stolen in broad daylight.

As I watched him shift for the hundredth time, trying to find a second of peace, I thought about my own life.

Our walks were no longer about reaching our favorite bench. The five Km loop was now just a faint memory, replaced by the struggle for comfort. I thought about the New Year’s resolutions I was already drafting. The rules. The constraints. The “I have to’s.” i’d prepared recently.

I have to hit the gym.
I have to move more.
What rule will ensure none of these actions are missed?!?!?!

I wanted to ask him a question, maybe selfishly, maybe he could share his usual wisdom.

“How do you deal with a body that doesn’t do what you want it to anymore?”

He didn’t rush to answer. In fact, I think this was the first time he sat truly still. He thought for a while.

“If you’re less defined by what you do physically,” he said, “you can be more satisfied with who you are emotionally. I suppose if I was a rugby player, it would hurt more. Of course, it frustrates me. But I can still think, I can still speak, I can still see.”

I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot lately, especially with the New Year looming. We’re about to enter the season of “The Rule.” The time where we set strict, punishing constraints for how we must improve. I have to sleep eight hours (the list continues).

This time of year, we treat our lives like a project to be managed, setting limits on our happiness based on whether we hit a target. But as he explained his aches and pains, Barry quietly dismantled all of that for me. Suddenly there we’re limits to our conversation and time together.

He reminded me that life will eventually impose its own limits on you. Your world will eventually shrink to the size of a hallway with two washing lines. Your marathon becomes one walked from a seat to a kitchen counter.

I tried explaining strava to him.
He was baffled.

Amongst his frustration, we laughed and thought; he remained mostly positive. Which made me leave asking myself, why are we so intent on imposing limits on ourselves now?

I started imagining myself at 84, sitting in a chair, unable to get comfortable. What would that version of me wish for? What would he give to have my knees, and my ability to run… just for one afternoon?

The answer is everything.

So, this year, I’m dropping the “have-to’s.”
There’s nothing I have to do this year…

Stop treating your body like a machine that needs fixing and start treating it like a gift that is currently functioning.

Don’t do it because you have to, or because it’s a resolution.

Do it because today, you still get to.

He looked over and asked, “Remind me how old you are?”
“Twenty-four.”
He nodded. “Then be short-term impatient, long-term patient. Short term, chase every detail. Bend the world out of your way. Long term, trust that you can’t see it all. It’s slow, then it’s fast.”

I think about that a lot. Because everything in our wiring pushes for now. For 99% of human history, patience got you killed. The ones who waited starved. The ones who chased the fruit now survived. But today, we live in abundance and still operate on scarcity. Our wiring pulls us toward immediacy, yet meaning lives on the long, winding, unclear road.

And I’ve felt that conflict.
When we hit 100K subscribers, I felt nothing.

The comments poured in, the praise, the congratulations, and all I felt was emptiness. I remember thinking about that feeling for a long time. Surely that milestone was the whole point? A good signal of future checkpoint to come?

If the good feeling didn’t come now? When would it?

At first, I thought I needed to separate my self-worth from my work.

Then a freind asked what I’d do if I took time off. I said, “Make films. Shoot footage. Find a story, idk.”
They smiled. “So you’d still create?”
I laughed. “Of course. I’m not going to sit still.”

That’s when I realised, the goal isn’t to detach from the work.
It’s to love the work enough that even without the reward, you’d still do it.

Because when you strip away the reward, what’s left is who you are. The path itself becomes the point. And the strange thing was… I did. I loved creating. I was just focused on the wrong thing.

This re-frame has totally changed how I approach my work as a creative. It’s no longer a rollercoaster, it’s a calm pursuit that embraces the ups and downs for what they are - the whole point.

Here’s why: Failure or achievement give you the same ingredients: challenge, stress, growth, discomfort. The only difference is the outcome.

So if you knew the ending wouldn’t go your way, would you still pick this path? Would you still pick the challenge, the long nights, the team, the version of you that grows along the way?

If the answer’s no, you’re gambling your happiness on luck.
If the answer’s yes, you’ve already won.

I’m not optimising for success anymore. I’m optimising for story. For experience,. Hardship. Growth. Fun.
And… if ‘success’ shows up along the way, great, I win twice.

Because when you’re clear on what you want your days to feel like, you can forget what the future might be like.

P.S - if you liked this one… stick around for more by hitting this button right here!

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It looks great in the picture.
The showroom sold you a vision.
The manual they included (for all the regular, simple humans who follow it) looked cute.
So you throw it to the side, feeling confident in this battle.

6 million years of human evolution
Vs
Swedish Ply Board.

You’re hot out the gate, confident, things are going well.
Then your partner walks in and points out you’ve drilled into the wrong wall.
Half the pieces don’t fit.
’I swear I had that screw just he-’
And suddenly, it’s dark outside.

The weight of human evolution slips off your shoulders.
Natural selection whispers doubt in your ear…

Surely you won’t be defeated?

I have a theory… and it’s that the creative process, creation its-self, is much like Ikea furniture. A flat-pack that looks simple from the outside but in assembly, almost breaks you.

This last video we made, was this point personified.

Ever since I first started as a creative, I dreamt of having a YouTube video hit 1,000,000 views.

Today, it happened… but I realise at the milestone, that it was nothing like I expected.

For context, I run a YouTube channel that tells story of Steven Bartlett and his life as an entrepreneur: we’re the blueprint to modern ambition. It’s called Behind The Diary, we’ve done about 10M+ views in 40 videos to an audience of 350,000subscribers.

Every episode takes usually weeks of iteration, detail, and obsession to get right.
This was one of those projects, I took notes during those three weeks:

Week 1: Monday, 7:49pm, Worship Street
I sent an edit version earlier today. Just got the Frame link back… 50+ comments.
“Cut this section.” “Story feels backwards.” “Not clear what we’re learning here.”
The hardest part, not the feeedback, but the fact the feedback is true…

I’ve been staring at the timeline for hours trying to decide what to keep.
We soooort of have to start over.
I dragged everything into a new sequence and renamed it ‘Rebuild_v1’.
Feels like tearing down a house you just finished painting.

We also want to add more animation, I’ll have to figure out how to do that. Not really the strongest animator but sure I can learn.

We’re on version 5 now.

Week 2: 2:49pm, Office

I’m deep in these animation, got a good flow but my laptop is about to explode.
Almost there.

Version 6-seconds-until-my-laptop-dies

Week 2: 12:04am, Home

Another Frame link. 50-plus amends again.
I don’t think I’m the animation guy I thought I was… lol.
The kind of stuff no one will ever notice, but it matters.

More importantly, I’m learning now to ask who, not how.
We’re going to bring in an animator, way better.
Time to figure out how that slots into the process.
Version 7 now.

Week 3: 2:01am

Bought in a guy called Andrew to the team. He’s an animation wizard. It’s starting to flow. I’m more focused on what I can do best, story arc, the main edit.
There’s movement!
I think it makes sense?!

Version 9

You know, there are so many other steps, reviews, small edits, re-exports, and midnight amends but you get the point. I learnt that this, process, much like that flat-pack furniture, taught me a few things.

1. Your Relationship with Feedback Determines Your Partnership with Success

A lot of people take feedback personally. Like an assault on their excellence. But in truth, feedback is not about what they say. It’s what you choose to hear.

The worst thing your boss could do? Say “yeah, that looks fine.”
Because fine is where potential goes to die.
Fine is creative purgatory.
Fine is the enemy of exceptional.

The best thing Steve ever did for us was refuse fine.

But this creates a special kind of tension. When someone believes in your potential more than you do, it’s uncomfortable. It forces you to confront the gap between great and genius.

The Tension Of High Standards
There’s no greater privilege than to be held to high standards. To have someone say, “this is not good enough, but you can make it good enough, now show me.” Because when you’re focused on getting better, this IS the process.

It’s the becoming. The refining. The relentless pursuit of something more.

The amends
The Amends_v2
The Amends_final_v3
The Final_Iswearfinal_Amends_v3_jfsags

All of this is the becoming. That refining. that relentless pursuit of something more, is the process.

*insert link to mindset course for sale*

2. Creativity + tension x resilience = good work.

Good content creation requires a healthy tension. It’s the space between satisfaction and hunger. Between confidence and humility. Between protecting your vision and being open to evolution. This tension isn’t comfortable. It’s not supposed to be. It’s the creative equivalent of muscle tension during a workout - the discomfort that signals growth.

When potential knocks at the door of your ego, it’s not asking for permission. It’s demanding more: more courage, more vulnerability, more willingness to be wrong in service of eventually being right.

Eventually, we hit publish on the video and to our relief, it came out strong.
Within hours, comments started rolling in, people saying it hit differently, that it felt different. As I sit here writing this, the video has just crossed 1,000,000 views.
Something I used to dream about as a kid.

My flat-pack IKEA edit, the one that nearly broke me, just hit that milestone.
And I wish I could tell younger me what I feel right in writing this.

That I was wrong in thinking I was building a video.
Because somewhere between the missing screws, the wrong walls, and the endless rebuilding…
I realised the project was building me.

The confusion, the frustration, the starting over, that was the process.
So if the process is the product.
Your relationship with it determines the outcome.

*sponsored by Ikea?
**maybe?
***sadly not.

Will xxx

I’m 23. I work inside one of the most-watched brands on YouTube. I sit in rooms with people who’ve ‘made it’…

(They must’ve all just swiped up on the pyramid guru’s instagram story or something idk).

But somewhere along the way, between being shown dinosaur eggs by a billionaire in his living room and walking into apartments with enough zeros to crash a calculator, I stopped asking what success looks like, and started asking something else:

How the hell it actually happens?

Now, I can’t tell you what success looks like for you,

Personally, I’m not really in my dinosaur egg era just yet….
But for me, in my 20’s, success would mean gaining as much fucking experience and an immense sense of challenge. Producing high quality work that I feel autonomous over.

Your relationship with work in your 20’s should resemble that of a toxic partner with daddy issues. If it’s easy, run away, if it’s challenging, stay, revel in it, enjoy it.

And in my eyes, that’s what in the long run causes this success guy to appear in your life? Right?
I feel like o grew up with the belife that:

The harder you work, the harder the universe works for you.

Even in when I used to play rugby, much of my strategy was not based on skill.
I vowed to just outwork someone, for longer.
If they ran 1 shuttle, I’ll run 2.

I used to believe it could have been this that got me captaincy at England at U18’s.
(At the time I thought there must’ve been some tremendous mistake.)

But, through interacting with and observing ‘sucess’, I’ve realised something else is going on….What if not about becoming visionary, but instead, visible…

Enter, Albert-László Barabás

A network scientist who studies… success.
He looks at why some people succeed and others don’t.
And from that, Albert has concluded a formula…

…a formula for success…
Now if you’re a chronically online tech bro, you likely just got an erection.

Except Albert formulae isn’t found on instagram ads selling courses or investing formulas.
He argues that…

Success = Q x R.

Where Q = Quality of your work
And R = Recognition - It’s context, the rooms you’re in, who see’s you working, audience.

Albert ran a study on Wikipedia editors.
Two people. Same platform. Same skills. Same quality of work.
One was randomly given an “Editor of the Week” badge, a small nod of recognition.

12% of those without the badge earned future awards.
But with the badge? 25% did more than double.

The only difference being who got seen first.

And suddenly I’m back on that rugby pitch.
Realising, now, that all that running laps gave me was visibility.

Now before you get smart and say,

Cool, I’ll just do average work and make noise.

Silence. Shush. Thank you. Please. :)

There is no easy way out here.
Mediocre performance multiplied with recognition still does not mean success.

Success ≠ (Low quality Q) x R

But in hearing this you should feel some weight coming off your shoulders.
Because what if this whole time, becoming better was only half the game

Did you hear about the world’s greatest musician who only played alone in their room?
No, you didn’t.And no one else did either.

That’s the point. Success is not merely a metric of your quality. You should also be optimising for recognition, environment, people.

So what are your 20s actually for?

They’re about deliberately putting yourself in high-friction environments where your work gets seen, sharpened, and stretched.

That means:

• Work with people who make you feel under-qualified.

• Get in rooms where you might embarrass yourself.

• Do your 10,000 hours

So if you’re reading this perfecting your craft and building something or yourself in the shadows right now, I’d ask…

What are you building? And….who’s in the room to witness it?’

The plate hits the table. The bride walks down the aisle. The sky turns pink. The baby takes her first breath.

We reach for a phone…

Every time. It’s all documented.

Last weekend, I was at a wedding. My cousin, glowing in her white dress, walked down the same aisle her grandmother did 70 years ago.

I was sitting near the front. The music started. I looked over at my grandma.

Tears in her eyes. Overcome with joy. She reached for her phone, tapped the oversized camera icon and snapped 500 photos.

200 of the floor, sure. But the rest? A blurry, beautiful archive of her granddaughter’s moment.

I wondered… has tik tok brain rot phone addiction even reached my 82 25 year old young grandma!?

Or, was it something more human?

A fear? Fear that she might forget.

Psychologists call it terror management theory: the idea that we document, preserve, and create to cope with the fact that nothing lasts forever.

The way I see it…
My grandmas photos were a cry for both joy and help.

A quiet protest against time. A way of saying:

Please, I want this to last.

So next time you see 1000 phones at a concert and comments saying , ‘not a phone in sight’, smile. Maybe it’s 1000 people trying to hold on?

A quiet hope that whatever they’re feeling right then and there, won’t disappear.

We know it will…but we’ll still try.

Because nostalgia is proof you lived a life worth remembering. And every photo is a timestamp on something that mattered.

So take the photo. We can pretend it’ll last. And for a second, it almost does.

See you tomorrow.

A few months ago. I bought a pair of roller blades death shoes
And took up skating. Face planting.

You see, I film Steven every day right, and a few months ago he started running.
So, the equation goes:

Steve, run
Will, chase

I did this in various mediums at first:

1) By foot in 25 degree sun in Dubai. Literally running behind him: horrendous.

2) Via a strangers kids bike (borrowed not stolen, long story). Cycling with a gimbal filming one handed filming backwards through the woods in Sweden: horrendous(ly) (dangerous)

We got the shot. But I learnt that bikes don’t really bike down stairs. Nor steer themselves. And that’s how I ended up here.

119 Pancras Road, ‘Double Threat Skates.’
Stood opposite another human, stood opposite another human, who just asked me what I need roller-skates for…

‘baking a cake.’ I said,

But the joke was soon on me…

‘Shall we try these on?’ he says.

I am then stood on 6 circular pieces of rubber, trying to look like I wasn’t about to disolate four joints and 6 shelves behind me.

Physics is personally offended by my presence.
As I try to act nonchalant on wheels. He asks

‘Does the axel feel like flexing when you learn forward?’

‘Who’s axel?’ I said smartly.

It went over his head. This was not a time for games..
And there I am 10 minute later, back on the roadside, this time with a pair of death sleds in a bag.

There’s something weirdly beautiful and hilarious about showing up at a random local park to try something new.

I sat there strapping on my Air Jordan ‘hit the floors’, thinking…

I wonder how many parks have watched this same moment unfold.
The first throw. The first fall.
Kids crashing off bikes.
Teens landing first kickflips.
Adults running off hangovers.

I tighten the last of 537 straps.

It sees humans, over and over, quietly telling themselves they can.

I start shuffling forward.
too stubborn for tutorials - I chose trial by fire.

I wonder if it believes them?

I think I heard the park laugh…
But I was hopeful. I began to skate.

I feel like I’m getting too meta.
This isn’t about rollerblading. Or romanticising local parks.

It’s about doing something you have no right or real reason to do, except that you wanted to.

And then the second part, that comes when…

You roll down a curb , hunched over with your hands out like a statue, rolling into traffic while three cars wait for you to get your shit together.
You can’t.

Or you try and go into Tesco and take the fruit and veg isle out with you.

You act nonchalant.
Roll walk it off…

But if you’ve started, you’ll pay the embarrassment tax.
Looking like an idiot in public.
Standing out.

And IF you stay with it, if you can sit in that discomfort long enough, something shifts.It stops being humiliating. You learn to laugh at yourself.
You loosen your grip.

You see, I thought I was just trying to keep up with Steven.
But somewhere between the bruised ego, the dodgy bike, and the Tesco fruit aisle incident… I found something else.

A little proof that you can start from scratch, look ridiculous, and still get somewhere, if you just stick with it long enough.

So no, this isn’t about rollerblades. Or parks.
It’s a warning…
If life comes to ask you

‘Are you wheely sure?’

Say yes, or no, but
Start regardless.

yes, I’ll faceplant in tesco. Subscribe.