I’ve been thinking a lot about the ‘and.’ Possibly an unpopular pick. I had a moment earlier when I felt like I could lean into the ‘and.’ There’s been a beaten-up can of Coke in the back of our fridge for months. It’s always a tempting proposition, and our self-control to date has been noble.

I had a weak moment and went to grab it, and suddenly I remembered someone telling me that if you feel hungry and are wanting an apple, it’s possibly because you are actually thirsty. Not directly related. But directly relevant. The human mind is an awesome thing. As a result, I poured myself a pint glass worth of water, and I could no longer imagine myself drinking that can of Coke.

I thought it was interesting. Why does any of this matter?

I feel as though in our world we could benefit from ritualising leaning into the ‘and.’

This got me thinking about it in the context of something I’m particularly curious about. Communication.

A little while ago, I was challenged as to what communication really is. I couldn’t come up with an answer. It was then explained simply as stimulus and response. I’ve been noticing this since. I wonder what it could mean if we did the ‘and’ productively in this context.

For me, historically not a naturally gifted conversationalist, I’ve been considering ways of doing this. An ‘and’ ritual, you might say. I have two thoughts. I could pause and breathe (with particular emphasis on the out-breath), or I might respond with a relevant question or comment: ‘What makes you ask?’ or ‘I like that question.’

Maybe it’ll be useful.

What do you reckon? And where else could an ‘and’ ritual be valuable?

To immediately digress, the seven modern wonders of the world are:

• The Great Wall of China

• Petra in Jordan, an ancient city carved into pink sandstone cliffs

• The Colosseum in Italy

• Chichén Itzá in Mexico, a large, ruined ancient city built by the Maya civilisation

• Machu Picchu in Peru

• The Taj Mahal in India

• Christ the Redeemer in Brazil

Not a bad list.

Then there’s the unofficial eighth wonder of the world: compound interest. The quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein, although nobody has ever conclusively proven he said it. Warren Buffett has spent much of his career talking about the extraordinary power of compounding and how it has shaped both wealth and business success.

Most people understand compound interest at a basic level. It’s a simple idea. Small gains accumulate. Then they begin accumulating on themselves. As Benjamin Franklin put it, ‘Money makes money. And the money that money makes, makes money.’

But what about compound knowledge? And what else could be compounding?

I’ve just started reading Neale Daniher’s The Power of Choice and a segment in the introduction struck me.

‘I’m not pretending you can control everything. You can’t. None of us can. We don’t choose our starting point – some people are born into advantage, others into struggle. Life is part chance, part circumstance, part choice. But that’s where your agency lies. You don’t get to choose everything that happens to you, but you always get to choose who you become in response. Those choices, day by day, moment by moment, add up to a life. Your life.’

Sounds like compounding to me.

I also had another snippet resonate with me. It came from a Guy Kawasaki article titled Let Compounding Do the Heavy Lifting.

‘The magic isn’t the size of each improvement. It’s consistency multiplied by time. If you improve one-fifth of a per cent each day, after a year, you’d be twice as good. Let compounding do the heavy lifting.’

So, what does all this mean?

To quote Neale again, ‘Over time the choices you make become your story.’

Maybe it’s not the ninth wonder of the world. But I think it’s pretty wonderful.

The compounding of our choices. Every conversation. Every book. Every walk. On their own, they don’t look like much, but over months and years they become who we are.

I think when it’s tough, realising that we have a choice is a great place to start. What is the best choice for me in the next three seconds? And once we realise that, we can trust that making the right-est choices, consistently, will produce something pretty special over time.

Stay patient.

It got me thinking about something I recently heard regarding Artificial Intelligence, where AI ‘slop’ being produced was then being drawn on by the models to produce more AI ‘slop.’ Content creating content. Commentary creating commentary.

It made me think about feedback loops.

A negative feedback loop is a self-regulating system that detects change, then acts to reduce it and return to balance. Your body heating up on a run and producing sweat is a simple example. A positive feedback loop does the opposite. It amplifies what is already happening. You start running consistently, get fitter, enjoy it more, run even more, and keep getting fitter. The loop feeds itself.

Maybe that’s what’s happening more often than we realise. The media we consume shapes the conversations we have. Those conversations influence what we seek out next. AI learns from the internet, then adds to it, and the cycle continues. Before long, the loop has taken on a life of its own.

The question, then, isn’t whether we’re in feedback loops. We all are. It’s whether they’re leading somewhere worth going.

Because every habit, conversation and piece of content is either reinforcing the person you’re becoming, or nudging you towards becoming someone else.

And when you come up with an answer to that – what else would you do?

And then what else?

I was fortunate to attend an advisory board meeting where the facilitator used this prompt. She explained that questions like these help shift us into a more creative state while revealing blockages that sit in our thinking.

‘And then watch the eyes.’

She explained that when someone genuinely considers a question like this, their eyes start moving in all directions as they search for possibilities they hadn’t previously considered.

For me, it highlighted just how limited I can be by my own thinking and the paradigms I carry around without realising it.

I think there’s something deeply gratifying about permitting ourselves to genuinely consider what the bloody hell we really want or need.

Then physically writing it down. Or drawing it.

Then telling someone else.

I reckon when you do that, your subconscious mind gets to work.

I was also fortunate to recently meet Dr Steph Burns, whose work on the human brain I find incredibly empowering. The capability each of us has is difficult to fathom if we know how to access it. And if we choose to.

I’d say most of us want more for ourselves, but we’re often constrained by what we think is possible. Sometimes asking a question is enough to move past the blockage.

What do you think?

There are plenty of different questions we could ask ourselves too.

Maybe a first one could be, ‘What are the most valuable questions I could ask myself?’

‘What if …’

‘How could I …’

‘How could I not …’

Maybe you’ll try it, or maybe you won’t. I think all I need to say is this: whatever you think, you’re probably right.

So, if we deliberately thought bigger than we’ve ever thought before, what could that mean?

The weekend before, our amateur Aussie Rules side had experienced the opposite. We’d led for much of the afternoon before our opponents stormed home in the last quarter. The stakes weren’t quite as high, but there were still a few dropped heads.

Sport has a funny way of making us believe the scoreboard tells the whole story.

After Spain’s win, the commentators were full of praise.

‘(France) might have been the best team at the tournament. And Spain have beaten them and beaten them well.’

Results are the results. It reminded me of a line from The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: ‘You can know your commitments by your results, not by what you say your commitments are.’

It’s an uncomfortable idea because it leaves little room for excuses. If I say I’m committed to my fitness, my relationships or my work, then eventually, my results should reflect that. Not overnight, but over time. Everything becomes feedback.

That doesn’t mean every result is a fair reflection of a single day’s effort. Sometimes you play well and lose. Sometimes you get lucky and win. But over the long run, results have a habit of exposing where our real commitments lie.

It also reminded me of a teammate who recently had a boxing fight.

‘How’d you go?’ I asked.

‘I nearly won.’

I think there’s something strangely admirable about the answer. He didn’t win. But he did everything else. Trained, made weight, faced nerves and found out where he stood. Those are wins in themselves, even if they don’t appear on the record.

Then came the post-match analysis of France’s defeat.

The criticism started almost immediately. The manager was too defensive. There wasn’t a Plan B. They lacked creativity. He should step down. It’s remarkable how quick we can be to blame.

Contrast that with a favourite line from Ted Lasso:

‘For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves, on and off the field.’

Maybe it sounds a little cliché, but perhaps becoming the sort of person capable of winning is even more important than winning itself.

Showing up consistently. Preparing properly. Learning from mistakes. Supporting your teammates. Responding well when things don’t go your way.

Those are commitments.

And if those commitments remain long enough, the results usually catch up.

Ted Lasso has another line that captures it well: ‘The harder you work, the luckier you get.’

Maybe that’s the point.

You can’t always control whether you win.

But you can always control whether you leave the field having honoured your commitments.

And over time, that may be the type of winning that produces the results everyone else notices. What do you think?

It was, however, a terrible day to be a dog.

The local Facebook community pages become their busiest of the year as dogs go missing left, right and centre. There must have been tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of fireworks lit across Alice Springs, at all hours of the day. The firefighters earned their keep too.

It got me thinking about culture.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics describes culture as the shared patterns of behaviour, values and ways of living that characterise a group of people. While traditions, objects and celebrations might represent a culture, it ultimately exists in people and the way they behave.

Alice Springs is a fascinating place to think about that. It is such a transient community, with people arriving from all over Australia and the world, alongside one of the country’s largest Aboriginal populations. You are constantly exposed to different ways of thinking, living and relating to others. In many ways, experiencing so many different cultures also helps you discover your own.

As a lifelong sports (and beer … and yoghurt) enthusiast, I think about it regularly.

I think about the golden era of Australian cricket in the early 2000s, the All Blacks, or Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. Their success wasn’t built on talent alone. Plenty of teams have talented players. What separated them was a culture where excellence was expected every day. The standards were so clear that players either lived up to them or didn’t last.

It makes me wonder where culture actually comes from.

Simon Sinek suggests a simple equation: culture = values + behaviour. I like that because it reminds us that values written on a wall mean very little unless they’re consistently lived out. Culture isn’t what we claim to believe. It’s what we repeatedly do.

Territory Day isn’t really about fireworks. They’re simply the expression of something deeper. The celebration reflects the Territory’s independent, adventurous and community-minded spirit. Every family, sporting club, workplace and town has its own version of Territory Day - the traditions, rituals and behaviours that quietly say, this is who we are.

Perhaps that’s the real measure of culture. It’s in the habits we practise often enough that they become part of our identity.

If someone spent a day in your workplace, your sporting club or your community, what would they say your culture is?

More importantly, would you agree with them?

One habit particularly caught my attention:

Ongoing employee input is collected to identify obstacles and opportunities.

What I hear is, everyone has something to offer, and we might benefit from making space to listen.

It’s an idea that almost feels too obvious. I imagine companies like Google, Apple and Nike have built cultures where ideas can come from anywhere. The person closest to the work often sees problems and opportunities before anyone else.

It also made me think more broadly about how good ideas can arrive. It made me think of Isaac Newton and the famous story that while watching apples fall in the garden at Woolsthorpe Manor, the 23-year-old began thinking about the force that would become his theory of universal gravitation. Whether every detail of the story is true or not, the point remains: insight often arrives when we’re paying attention.

I notice the same thing in my own life. I’ll often sit in a café to write, and ideas don’t seem to come from staring harder at the screen, but from looking up, watching people, and having a ponder.

The Rockefeller Habit turns this into a deliberate practice. It suggests senior leaders speak with one employee each week and ask a simple question:

‘What should the company start doing, stop doing, and keep doing?’

I like that. It creates a habit of holding space for ideas before they’re lost. It acknowledges the people. It also acknowledges that opportunities are often hidden in the observations, frustrations and suggestions.

Questions might just be what creates the space. What should we start, stop or keep doing? What if? Why? Why not? How could we make it happen? What would that do for us?

And when we create the space, we allow good ideas to surface.

Rich captured her recent achievement well in his podcast summary, ‘My guest today is Rachel Entrekin, and she just did something the sport is still trying to make sense of. At this year’s Cocodona 250, she didn’t just win the women’s race for the third year running. She won the whole thing. Beat every man out there, broke the course record by over an hour, and did it on 19 minutes of sleep across 56 hours. The clip of her coming into the finish, fresh-faced and grinning like she’d barely started, went everywhere.’

As a lot of stories of this nature go, she didn’t get picked for her high school cross-country team.

What came out of the story was more than that, though. Rich also wrote, ‘Ask Rachel, and she’ll tell you the win isn’t the interesting part. A few years back, she crossed that same line flat and sad, negative, with nothing left in the tank. Then she watched the second-place woman come in glowing and grateful, everything Rachel wanted to be – that wasn’t who she’d been when things got hard. So, she changed the whole goal. No placement, no time. Just find the joy.’

Powerful. Something that did stand out to me about Rachel was her energy. Wonderfully bright and warm.

Rich drew out a few key messages from the podcast that I thought were worth sharing:

1. Let go of the outcome. Focus your attention on the process. The outcome will take care of itself, and you’ll get what you deserve. Rather than chasing an outcome, chase joy

2. The power of (delusional) self-belief shone through. Rachel talked about asking, in the context of winning the race, ‘Why not me?’

3. All we can control is our mindset and response. We CAN control these things.

We probably know these things, but I find it fun to explore them through this perspective. How could they be applied to you?

It was a timely reminder.

The Stoics had three important implications:

1. We are connected to other people

2. We are connected to nature

3. We are connected to events beyond ourselves

Most of the time, we live as though our struggles exist in isolation. The article put it well: ‘We tend to think of our inner life as sealed off from everything else. My anger is mine. My grief is mine. My restlessness before the meeting is a private malfunction. But Sympatheia suggests otherwise.’

So, what does that mean when something goes wrong? When someone pisses me off? When life chooses not to go as planned?

The Stoic response is simple: remember that you’re a part of the whole, not separate from it. The Stoics’ advice is to acknowledge that I’m a part of this, not apart from it. We might then begin to ask things like, ‘How might I respond knowing I’m part of something larger than myself?’

It reminds me of something often said in agriculture: a farm reflects its owner. Working in Central Australia, I’d probably take it a step further and say a property reflects the family. The land, the livestock, the business, the relationships – they all influence one another. Nothing exists in isolation.

Anthony Albanese appeared on Santo Cilauro and Ed Kavalee’s Cup Fever this week and spoke about how, with the state of the world, bringing people together through the world’s game is just what the doctor ordered. I think I agree. It’s the first World Cup I’ve followed, and it blows my mind the enormity that entire nations can feel when a ball crosses a line between two posts.

Yet perhaps that’s exactly the point. Deep down, we’re wired for connection.

The Stoics believed suffering often becomes heavier when we see ourselves as isolated individuals carrying our burdens alone. Sympatheia offers a different perspective. It reminds us that we are connected – to other people, to nature, and to something much larger than ourselves.

And sometimes the first step through suffering is simply remembering that.

With the AFL in town, the place was crawling with caffeine enthusiasts, and while I sat there trying to avoid making awkward eye contact with the table of GWS Giants players, the café owner brought me out a free coffee: ‘We had a spare.’

I believe I was the lucky recipient,

because she recognised the lonely regular in all the chaos.

The experience made me draw a comparison. I am a huge admirer of Patagonia, and I believe that ‘the ethical company’ has amazing business philosophies. I visited their Brisbane store recently and got to talking with an employee who spoke proudly of his workplace and the empowerment he has in his role. One of Patagonia’s values is quality. They aim to ‘… build the best product, provide the best service and constantly improve everything (they) do.’

What struck me is that both Patagonia and Page 27 seem to understand the same thing. They both embody this value.

A smile matters. The conversation matters. The product matters. People remember how they feel.

Perhaps that’s the value of becoming a local. Not the occasional free coffee, but the relationships that develop along the way. In a world increasingly driven by convenience, genuine connection remains a powerful competitive advantage.

In the long run, people rarely remember the transaction. They remember how they felt. Where are you a local?

At the end of the day, the result of a game doesn’t at all matter. But, at the same time, it matters more than anything. How is that?

Maybe it’s that humans seem to crave belonging, meaning and shared experience.

The scoreboard is almost secondary.

What people are really gathering around is identity.

Queenslanders aren’t just barracking for a football team. They’re barracking for a story about who they are. The same is true when a community turns out to watch football in Alice Springs. People aren’t only watching a game. They’re participating in something bigger than themselves.

The anthropologist and author Yuval Noah Harari argues that one of humanity’s great strengths is our ability to believe in shared stories. Nations, religions, companies and sporting clubs all exist because groups of people collectively agree that they matter.

Sport might be one of the purest examples of this.

A football game is, objectively, a fairly strange thing. Twenty-two people chase a ball around a small and oddly shaped paddock, while thousands watch. Yet it can create joy, heartbreak, hope, disappointment, pride and connection.

Perhaps, because the game itself isn’t the point.

The game is simply the vehicle.

The real value lies in what it creates: conversations on Monday morning, generations sitting together, rivalries, memories, community and belonging.

You might have also heard it a lot from your parents, and for me, I’m sure it will sink in one day! As a regular subscriber to the adage, ‘it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,’ I tend to be impatient. I have become a big fan of the work of Rick Rubin, the highly regarded music producer, and he wrote a piece this week titled, Slow Down a Simple Act - with his focus on patience.

He wrote, ‘Consider how different your experience of the world might be if you engaged in every activity with all of yourself. Patience is required for the nuanced development of your craft. Patience is required for taking in information in the most faithful way possible. Patience is required for crafting a work that contains all that we have to offer.’

I got to wondering how this might look in my own work and life, and thought of ex-Navy SEAL Jocko Willink’s book Extreme Ownership, and to quote the Ballad of a Frogman, ‘Anything in life worth doing, is worth overdoing.’ As I was writing this, while sitting in a Café I had two friends (said loosely) wander past, and have a quick chat. With it front of mind, I was curious how it might be if I were to experiment with ‘engaging with all of myself.’ I don’t think I have ever regretted having the intention of doing something well, and that was the case in these interactions.

Another line in the Ballad of the Frogman states, ‘Moderation is for cowards.’ Somewhat of a tangent from patience, but stick with me! Where my thoughts go is to how it could be if we deliberately gave the necessary time to the necessary things. Maybe seeking forgiveness instead of permission is about doing the thing that needs doing, and doing it in such a way that forgiveness is a given.

I believe ‘being busy’ could be a common excuse for this, and I believe it is a choice we’ve made. And if it isn’t a choice, we’ve chosen not to have a choice. I wonder how each day could be if we gave all that we have to offer to the work that we choose to do?

Rick Rubin also wrote, ‘Patience is not about wasting time, but about aligning with natural rhythms. This can lead to better quality work and, paradoxically, sometimes faster results.

It sounds to me like slow is fast and patience really is a virtue!

The school sat opposite the store, and I found myself watching a game of Aussie Rules football unfold. It looked a little different to the PE lessons I remembered. No shoes, no uniforms, and no lush green oval; just the golden remnants of couch grass after good summer rain. The class seemed small, too, with kids of different ages all playing together.

It made me think back to school and all the things we somehow found reason to complain about. Wearing hats. Formal uniform days. The little frustrations that felt important at the time.

I’ve been reading Ben Crowe’s book Where the Light Gets In, where he writes about his work with Ash Barty. Following her Wimbledon win, Barty was asked how she stayed calm while others around her smashed racquets and unravelled under pressure. She reflected on one of her earliest sporting memories: ‘Remembering how you felt as a kid … there was enjoyment ... there was the freedom just to go out there and play without consequence.’

Watching those kids running around, their enjoyment and freedom seemed abundant.

For all the contrasts, what struck me most was not the differences, but the familiarity. The same joy appears whenever people come together and play. We had it pretty great at school; we just didn’t know it yet. Funny how perspective works like that. We often only recognise the richness of a moment long after it has passed.

Crowe also writes, ‘If the opposite of pressure is freedom, the opposite of fear is play.’

With so much pressure and fear in the world today, that feels worth paying attention to.

Standing in a Yuendumu store car park, watching a PE lesson unfold on a dusty oval, I was reminded of something I’d probably forgotten. Before sport became about performance, expectation and outcomes, it was simply play.

Maybe there’s something in that for all of us. To remember how it felt as kids: to run, compete, laugh and enjoy things for no reason other than because we can.

Does he have a point?

In Ted Lasso, Ted greets his boss, Rebecca Welton, the Richmond CEO, with homemade biscuits neatly packed in a delicate pink cardboard box. It’s a small act, but it shapes their relationship. And in the end, Ted benefits from that. For me, there’s a certain positive feeling when you buy the coffee or a round of drinks. What other examples might there be? And what does this mean?

Ben Crowe, speaking on a podcast with The Imperfects, challenged the idea of ‘survival of the fittest.’ His view was that it’s closer to survival of the kindest. The species that survived weren’t just the strongest, but the ones that learned to work together. What might that look like for us?

I recently had a mentor explain to me that if we can’t define what something is for ourselves, then we can’t have it because it doesn’t exist. A profound thought. The Cambridge Dictionary describes kindness as the quality of being generous, helpful, and caring toward other people, or an act that shows this quality. I wonder if this definition doesn’t capture what kindness could be when we show it to ourselves?

The neuroscience of kindness shows that it triggers a biochemical cascade that improves mental and physical health for both parties. How cool. I’ve followed Wim Hoff for a while, and the idea of doing something hard first thing in the morning, like taking an ice bath, sets us up for our day, as everything else we do will feel comparatively easy. I wonder if we start the day by doing something kind, what might that do for us?

So, is it selfish? Selfish is defined as caring only about what you want or need without any thought for the needs or wishes of other people. I think you might need to have thought about others' needs or wishes to show kindness in many examples.

What about self-kindness? Is that inherently selfish? According to the above definition, it might be. But what if being kind to ourselves benefits the others in our lives? When you’re better, you tend to be better for others.

I have a theory. Kindness isn’t selfish; it’s necessary. Ultimately, it’s survival of the kindest, and the more you give, the more you get.

What could that look like for each of us today?

They say the music you grow up with becomes wired into your brain during those formative years, creating what’s called a “reminiscence bump.” It helps shape your identity, emotional baseline, and your tastes for life. It also becomes a kind of anchor - tying together memories, feelings, and meaning - often without you even realising it.

Spotify has a clever way of reminding me of that album every so often, and each time it does, I almost find myself almost in tears. There are a few lines that get me:

Standin’ proud and tall even though it’s small.
Our world is in this street, with them, I have it all.
And now, when I’m away, I yearn every day.
For home, home. Home, home.

Written out, it probably loses something. But for me, it brings everything back at once - family holidays, a younger version of myself, and a feeling of home that’s hard to describe. It’s not just memory, it’s something deeper, and it’s pretty special.

What strikes me is how something so small - a few lines in a song - can carry that kind of weight years later. It makes me think about the work I now do. As an extension officer, the job is often framed around information, knowledge, and decisions. But underneath that, it’s really about people. Connection. Understanding what matters to someone, and why.

If a few vibrations of sound can move someone to tears, what does that say about the potential in how we show up with others? The way we listen, the questions we ask, the moments we create - they might matter more than we think. Not always immediately, and not always obviously, but over time.

Maybe the point isn’t to try to manufacture those moments. It’s to stay curious to them. To pay attention to what resonates - in ourselves and in others - and to be willing to explore it.

Because you never quite know what might stick.

I was especially drawn to the SEAL Snipers - the most elite of the elite; not just physically, but mentally. I still remember the concerned look on Mum’s face when I asked for Brandon Webb’s book, The Killing School, for Christmas. I promise it wasn’t the gory title that drew me in, but the extraordinary standard of the people behind it.

This week, a simple question came up from the voice of an ex-Navy SEAL. What is the difference between quitting and giving up?

The SEALs know. They draw a clear line that quitting is momentary, often emotional, and often a response to difficulty. In comparison, giving up is permanent. It’s a decision to stop altogether.

Their advice is simple: ‘Quit tomorrow.’ Get through this moment and decide later. Quitting a task might actually be necessary. Plans change. Direction shifts. But giving up on the goal is something else entirely. That’s what SEAL training is built to test. Through the rigours of ‘Hell Week,’ they identify those who refuse to give up.

In Alice Springs, there is an event known as the West Mac Monster. Trail running enthusiasts travel from all over the world to take on a 231km ‘Monster,’ traversing the entire Larapinta Trail. The course is advertised as ‘An intimidating, yet alluring test of physical and mental endurance in a non-stop format with a sixty-hour cut-off.’ Up to sixty hours convincing yourself not to give up!

The SEALs talk about the 40% rule. They believe that when your mind tells you you’re done, you’re not; you’re only 40% of your way there. In that moment, deciding to quit tomorrow is what could keep you in the fight. It holds off a decision that doesn’t need to be made yet.

Quitting is always an option. In the SEALs’ training, it’s as simple as ringing a bell three times. But that bell might represent this bigger idea of giving in, not just in that moment, but in how you approach anything difficult in life.

In life, quitting has a place. Changing direction, stepping back, adjusting a plan – they’re all forms of quitting in the short term. Sometimes they’re necessary.

Giving up is different. It’s letting go of the vision and of belief. The challenge is knowing the difference. The moment where everything feels like too much might not be the moment to decide anything at all.

If the SEALs are right, then the instinct to stop is just that – an instinct. Not a need.

In life, that matters. It’s a long game. There are times to quit something – to adjust, to reset, to try a different approach. But giving up on the bigger goal is something else entirely.

The skill is knowing when to quit and when to keep going. Just long enough to see whether tomorrow looks different.

What do we need to quit? Where do we need to not give up?

Horse training is built on pressure and release. You apply pressure to ask for something, and the moment you get the right response, you let it go. That’s how the horse learns - not from the pressure itself, but from the release. It’s got me thinking about where else that might apply in our lives.

Ben Crowe excellently captures something in Where the Light Gets In. He explains that expectation used to be defined as something we could control one hundred per cent. Now it’s something we can’t fully control, and yet we still expect it anyway. That shift, he argues, mirrors our definition of pressure. As he puts it, ‘The definition of pressure is our new definition of expectation.’ And William Shakespeare, not surprisingly, said it a long time ago: ‘Expectation is the root of all heartache.’

Jill Rigney of The Right Mind mentioned this week that my generation is exposed to more expectations than any before. I can see what she meant; it shows up in everything – career ambition, relationships, health, finances, and social norms. She went on to add that it might also be less necessary than ever before. With a smile, she said, ‘When you work that one out, let me know.’

I haven’t worked it out yet, but it got me thinking.

If expectation has become our modern version of pressure, maybe what we’re missing isn’t more control or higher productivity — but the release.

Through Low Stress Stockhandling, I’ve seen the same principle play out with livestock. They’re not responding to the pressure itself, but to the moment it comes off. That’s where desirable and sustainable movement happens. And it makes me wonder how that might show up in our own lives.

It is easy to end up living with constant pressure - deadlines, performance, comparison. For me, sport has always been a form of release. But even there, I’ve noticed how easily expectation might creep in.

During the Low Stress Stockhandling school, it is said simply that stress is pressure without end.

Maybe that’s the point. Not that we carry too much pressure, but that there’s no end. No Release.

Because the release, in our own lives, isn’t about lowering the bar or giving up. It’s about creating space – to step back and to see clearly. And that will look different for everyone.

Pressure isn’t the problem – it’s pressure without release. When expectations never lift, it becomes stress. Maybe what we need isn’t less expectation, but our own way to step out of it.

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the wisdom in Ben Crowe’s book Where the Light Gets In. One piece particularly caught my attention. Crowe writes about a 2002 BBC interview with Sir Michael Caine, who recalled a rehearsal from early in his career. In the scene, he was entering through a door, but a chair had been thrown in the way. Naturally, he hesitated, which prompted the director to advise him, ‘Use the difficulty.’ What he meant was that, if it were a comedy, he could fall over the chair. If it were a drama, he could pick it up and smash it. The underlying message was simple: use the difficulty to your advantage. Keep going.

What could that mean for us in agriculture?

In Great Lies We Live By, Steph Burns alludes to a simple but confronting thought: What if what we’ve been led to believe is wrong? She alludes to phrases like ‘I’m too old to learn,’ and ‘I have a lousy memory,’ both of which she has been able to disprove.

I wonder if that same thinking can creep into agriculture. Could it be our assumptions about what’s possible, what works, or why things have always been done subtly shape the decisions we make? And, in an environment that’s constantly shifting, could it be that those assumptions are the biggest thing holding us back?

With the global instability shaping the oil markets, diesel at $3 a litre might begin to feel normal. Or at $2 a litre, it might feel cheap. This shift alone says something about the world and environment we’re operating in. But maybe more importantly, it says something about how quickly we could adjust our perspective.

It’s understandable to view cost pressure, uncertainty, and volatility as barriers – things to be endured or waited out. But what if they’re something else entirely?

Opportunities rarely arrive labelled as such. More often, they show up disguised as pressure. A spike in diesel prices might force sharper thinking around efficiency, understanding gross margins, or challenging the status quo. A tough season might lead to better decision-making, stronger systems, or new ways of working together. The difficulty might just become a catalyst for something positive.

Agriculture has never stood still. It has always been shaped by people responding to change, often without perfect information and rarely under ideal conditions. It can’t be about controlling the season or the markets. Maybe it’s about making better decisions within them. Conditions are never perfect. The skill is in adjusting, not waiting.

Maybe it is difficult. But maybe that could be useful.

Because in the end, progress doesn’t come from avoiding the chair in the doorway. It comes from picking it up – and doing something with it.

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Stepping out of the Peloton

During the week, something caught my attention while watching the Volta a Catalunya, a pro cycling race in the north-east of Spain. The commentators noted the ever-increasing speed of the peloton - the tightly bunched group of riders, driven by constant gains in technology, training, and teamwork. The pace keeps lifting.

It resonated with something else I’d heard that week during training on using AI, which is becoming increasingly common in the workforce. The trainer referenced a Harvard article titled ‘AI Doesn’t Reduce Work – It Intensifies It.’ I found it fascinating. People worry about AI taking jobs, but I wonder if the real shift is different – not less work, just more outputs per time unit.

There’s something in that which reflects human nature. We’re ambitious. If we can achieve more, we will. If we’re given the option to do more, some will take it, others will follow, and before long, doing more becomes the norm. We all know how often life is described as ‘busy,’ and technologies like AI may only add fuel to that.

I remember hearing someone say how much they appreciate Australia’s seasons. With the extremes, from 40 degrees to below zero, it can be hard to see why. But there’s a rhythm to it. In the summer months, as plants senesce and harvest wraps up, the landscape rests. Production pauses.

That isn’t the case everywhere. I was fortunate to visit farms in Central Tasmania recently, where many producers have invested in centre pivots to maximise production. It’s impressive, but it makes me wonder if there’s an unseen cost to removing that pause – for both the land and the people managing it. Maybe rest isn’t a failure of production, but a key part of how the system works.

So, what is the cost?

As humans, we need rest – physically and mentally. If we want to learn, formulate sound opinions, and develop clarity, we need time to think and to be. To read, write, and have conversations that aren’t rushed. In his highly respected book ‘Why People Fail,’ Siimon Reynolds lists ‘not enough thinking’ as a core mistake, describing busyness as today’s epidemic – something we even praise. Multi-tasking, reacting, and constantly doing are increasingly bad habits, according to Reynolds.

Without space, we risk becoming highly productive but not necessarily thoughtful. Capable of doing more, but less certain about why we’re doing it.

The landscape isn’t productive all year. It pauses, resets, and in doing so sustains itself.

Maybe we need to learn from that – and find a way to step out of the peloton, even if only for a moment.