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

Media

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

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

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

Open Tab Joanna Coles

Book

Thirst by John Robins

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

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

Ryan Holiday’s Reading List

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

Ryan Holiday’s reading list

Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moment of Zen

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

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

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

The Day-One Exit Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Broccoli Problem

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

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

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

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

The Cost of Standing Still

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

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

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

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

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

Small Is the New Big

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

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

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

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

What AI Can’t Do

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

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

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

What I Took From Our Chat

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

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

A few things worth stealing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reluctant optimist

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

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

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

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

Your sliding doors moments

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

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

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

Give this a try

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

The risk nobody counts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ve already taken the long road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold the mission tight, but the topics loose

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

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

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

Give this a go

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

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

Narrowed out of the fun

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

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

Get in the other lane occasionally.

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

Die on the Microphone

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

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

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

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

No Plan B (and an Ex-Husband)

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

Same Engine, New Bodywork

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

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

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

The Trap Nobody Names

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

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

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

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

Try This

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

The Maths

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

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

Subscribe now

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

Media Business: Kara Swisher on the State of the Business

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

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

Book: Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dust On Her Boots

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

Between Giants, by Anna Fifield

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

Documentary: Icarus

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

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

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

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

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

That’s July done.

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

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

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

But that’s also its ceiling.

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

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

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

How the faark does this help you?

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

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

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

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

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

Try this

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

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

That’s A Wrap

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

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

Build the thing. Then buy the round.

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

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

Guess what? I got better.

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

The trap explained

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

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

Competence is a comfort zone that can slow growth.

Why it gets harder as we get older

Two reasons.

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

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

Feeling uncomfortable? Good.

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

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

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

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

The big surprise

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

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

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

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

Try this

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

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

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

Wrap it all up

Competence is a real achievement. You earned it.

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

The trap isn’t being good at something.

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

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

Anna Fifield got made redundant in February. She turned fifty in March.

“It felt like the universe was telling me something,” she told me. Most people, handed that combination, go looking for the next salary. Anna thought about it, looked at other jobs, even wondered whether it was time to leave journalism. Then she did something far more interesting.

The Hastings kid who wanted the world

Anna grew up in Hastings, watching Cameron Bennett and Liam Jeory from Television New Zealand race around the Balkans on the news and deciding that was the job. Foreign correspondent. Far-flung places, real people, hard questions. She went to journalism school in Canterbury, started at the Whakatāne branch office of the Rotorua Daily Post, and won a three-month fellowship to the UK. A journalist she’d met once or twice, Rod Oram, made an introduction to the Financial Times.

She stayed thirteen years. Economics correspondent. Postings to Seoul, Tehran and Beirut. White House correspondent through the Obama years. Then Harvard, then the Washington Post, where she ran the Tokyo and Beijing bureaus and finished up as Asia editor. Somewhere in there she went to North Korea twelve times and wrote the book on Kim Jong-un. By anyone’s measure, a dream run.

Dust on boots

The reporting she loved most she calls “dust on boots.” Not the Washington briefing room (”not enough dust), but the ground itself. China, Iran, the edges of North Korea. Ordinary people under extraordinary regimes.

“These are ordinary people trying to do their best under a terrible system.”

That, she argues, is what we lose when foreign desks shut. Not the satellite imagery of China’s militarisation, which still gets done, but the texture of life in the places we’d rather caricature. The detention camps in Xinjiang. The North Koreans who’ve all seen the K-dramas and quietly know the whole thing is a lie. You only get that with someone on the ground.

The bloodbath

In February, the Washington Post closed almost its entire foreign desk. Anna was one of around 374 journalists who lost their jobs in what she calls the bloodbath. The book section went. The sports section went. The daily news podcast went.

She’s blunt about the bigger picture. Billionaires are buying up American media, and the old custodianship, the vanity project that bought a rich man a bit of mana, has curdled into something more pointed.

“They are no longer benign owners. They are ones with political motivations.”

She sees flickers of the same risk closer to home, in the way some New Zealand politicians talk about TVNZ and RNZ. Her warning is simple. Editorial independence is not something we can take for granted.

Between Giants

So here’s the leap. Rather than chase another masthead, Anna launched a Substack. It’s called Between Giants, and you can guess who the giants are. Spurred on by Bernard Hickey, the OG of New Zealand Substackery, she set out to bring decades of foreign reporting back home, through a New Zealand lens.

Three months in, she has three and a half thousand subscribers. There’s no paywall, yet nearly ten percent of them choose to pay anyway. People stop her in the street. She files a column for the Listener, a world bulletin for the Spinoff, and went to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, where she lobbed a pointed question at US defence secretary Pete Hegseth about who, exactly, counts as a freeloader. It made waves back in New Zealand.

She’s given herself a year. She’s working twice as hard, answering to no one, and, in her own words, having a blast.

“This is a moment in my life and in the world, and I’m going to give myself a year and see if I can make it work.”

A few things worth stealing

Redundancy and a milestone birthday are not a verdict. Anna read hers as a starting gun, not a full stop. The crunch point is only a crunch point until you decide what it’s for.

Your back catalogue is the business. She didn’t start from zero. She took thirty years of contacts and judgment and pointed them somewhere new. Whatever you’ve been doing, that’s your roller deck. Use it.

You don’t have to wait for permission. No masthead handed Anna an audience. She built her own, one piece at a time, and the hunger was already there.

Free can still pay. No paywall, and one reader in ten pays anyway, because they value the work. Generosity and a living aren’t mutually exclusive.

Anna spent a career explaining other people’s countries to the rest of us. Now she’s explaining the world to her own. The masthead’s gone. The reporter, it turns out, was the thing worth keeping all along.

You can find Anna here Between Giants

I love getting recommendations from people. It’s a great way to discover new things, the kind you’d never come across if left to your own devices. Human recommendations are different from algorithm recommendations. The algorithm just feeds you more and more of the same until you disappear down a hole of homogenised content.

With that said, here are my recommendations for the month of June. And remember, if you’ve got anything you want to recommend, please send it my way.

Media: The creators took the beach at Cannes

Every June the advertising world flies to the south of France for Cannes Lions, a week-long festival where the industry hands out awards and pats itself on the back. This year the real story wasn't any single ad. It was a shift in who actually holds the power. One of the giant advertising conglomerates gave up the prime beachfront spot it had occupied for years, and an independent upstart moved in. The festival built a whole new programme dedicated to creators, and hundreds of them turned up, podcasters, YouTubers, newsletter founders, the lot. It also ran a dedicated sport programme for the first time, with its own stretch of beach and a steady parade of athletes who, just like the creators, are done waiting for a broadcaster or a sponsor to hand them an audience. They're building their own media and their own direct line to fans. One former footballer on stage put it plainly: the power is moving away from the broadcasters. The numbers back him up. Award entries were down 25 percent, and independents made up nearly a third of them. The attention is following the person, not the platform or the agency. People now arrive carrying their own audience, their own channel, their own style, and they don't need a big company to rent them a megaphone. We've talked about this before. Narrowcasting beats broadcasting, and owned beats rented. It's now becoming the whole game, and even Cannes can feel it.

Book: London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

If you’ve read Say Nothing or Empire of Pain, you already know Keefe is a fantastic journalist and writer. I listened to his new one on audio, and it’s the kind of book that makes you sit in the car after you’ve parked to continue listening. It starts with a 19-year-old named Zac Brettler going off a luxury balcony into the Thames in 2019, and the official line of “probably suicide” that his parents refused to swallow. What they found was that their son had been living a second life, posing as the son of a Russian oligarch, mixing with sham entrepreneurs and a genuinely frightening gangster. What shocked me most was how readily politicians and businesses looked the other way while Russian dark money poured into London. It’s really a book about parents, about how little we know the people we love most, and a city that closes ranks when money’s involved.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

Podcasts

This month I’ve got three podcasts for you, two of them from Substack’s Open Tab series. First up, a shout-out to the team at Substack for this series. It’s nicely produced and directed, and has so far had a really interesting roster of guests.

Kevin Kelly on Substack’s Open Tab

Kevin Kelly is the bloke who founded Wired and helped build the Whole Earth Catalog. If you’ve been on this ride with me for any length of time, you’ll surely have heard me bang on about his 1,000 True Fans essay from 2008, the one that underwrites everything people like me are trying to do here. So I was always going to listen. What I didn’t expect was how much of his conversation with Substack’s Hanne Winarsky, recorded in a cocktail bar that doubles as a museum to the next 10,000 years, would land as life advice rather than tech talk. His big idea is prototyping. Stop deciding what you’ll do for the rest of your life and start making rough drafts of it, build one to throw away, try it for a couple of years, move on. He calls his version of the future “protopia,” not utopia, just one percent better, then another one percent, forever. For a 45-plus audience told the big leap is the only valid move, that makes a lot of sense. Also optimism, he reckons, isn’t a mood. It’s a daily practice.

Watch: Kevin Kelly on Substack’s Open Tab

Lachlan Cartwright on catch and kill, and striking out alone

If you only know the Trump and Weinstein “catch and kill” saga from the headlines, this conversation is the version told over a dirty martini by the bloke who lived it. Lachlan Cartwright was the number two at the National Enquirer when he worked out his own paper was buying stories purely to bury them for powerful mates, and quietly became a source to blow the whole thing open while his visa hung in the balance. It’s a cracking yarn on its own. But what stuck with me is everything around it. His father dying of stomach cancer mid-scandal, and the last advice he gave him, go off and do something you love. Cartwright eventually did, walking away from legacy media to build Breaker, an independent newsletter he started at the same age his accountant dad had started his own practice. Now profitable, 40,000 subscribers, and he’s working harder than he ever has. For anyone over 45 wondering whether it’s too late to back themselves, this one’s for you. Be warned, the man swears like a trooper. Faark, we don’t care.

Watch: Lachlan Cartwright on Substack’s Open Tab, hosted by Hamish McKenzie

Liam Lawson on High Performance

I’ll admit the Faark, I Hope It’s Not Too Late connection to a 23-year-old racing driver isn’t obvious, but stick with me. Liam Lawson is the Kiwi who got handed the Red Bull seat, lost it after two races, and watched the world decide his story before he’d had a chance to write it himself. This is him taking it back. He’s honest about the phone call he never saw coming, the abuse that made him mute every F1 account, and the version of his mental state the press ran with that he says could not be further from the truth. What makes it worth your time isn’t the motorsport. It’s getting publicly written off and having to rebuild anyway. Being judged on your worst two weeks and refusing to accept the verdict is a feeling that doesn’t have an age limit.

Watch: Liam Lawson on High Performance, hosted by Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes

That’s June done.

The best recommendations in this newsletter come from you. So if you’ve read, watched, or listened to something that stuck with you this month, a book, a podcast, a documentary, a piece of media news that made you think, send it my way. Hit reply or drop it in the comments, and I might just feature it next month.

I’ve started a handful of blogs and set up a number of web pages. None really went anywhere, because of one simple thing.

I spent too much time on the how and not enough time on the point. WordPress, Kajabi, Blogspot, Beehiiv, Stan Store and Substack. Font size, logo size, colour palette. All of it, when it comes down to it, performative productivity.

I’m terrible at design and would spend hours trying to resize photos on horrible backgrounds. All of that when I should have been asking myself: what is the point? Who is this for? What does it do? How does it help them?

The pyramid.

In our podcast, Phil Walters, the founder of Metalbird, talked about a system his business partner introduced him to. Jay Neely describes a pyramid that goes something like this: Vision - Strategy - Structure - Tactics.

The trick is to start from the top and work your way down. The temptation, particularly if you’ve come from a corporate environment, is to do the opposite.

That’s because someone else has already thought about the point for you. Vision was decided in a boardroom years before you arrived. Strategy was handed down. Structure was already in place. Your job was to execute tactics reliably and not ask too many uncomfortable questions. That’s not a criticism. That’s just how large organisations function. The pyramid was built. You just moved around inside it.

The problem is that this trains you to start from the bottom. You become expert at execution. You get good at choosing tools, building processes, optimising workflows. And when you eventually decide to build something of your own, you bring those same instincts with you, because they’re the only instincts you’ve ever needed.

So you open WordPress and start picking themes. You sign up to Kajabi and watch tutorials about funnels. You spend a Saturday afternoon arguing with yourself about where the CTA button should be and what colour. All of it feels productive. None of it is the point.

I’ve done this. Repeatedly. I didn’t fail on any of those platforms because I lacked the tools. I failed because I never clearly answered the question that should have come first. I was executing inside a structure I hadn’t actually built. There was no pyramid. Just a pile of tactics, dressed up as momentum.

What’s the vision.

Vision requires commitment. Commitment requires you to say “this is the thing.” And that means it can fail as that thing. Tactics don’t carry that risk. Nobody feels exposed choosing a font. Everybody feels exposed naming what they’re actually trying to build and admitting they don’t know if it’ll work. So we hide in the mechanics.

It’s not laziness. It’s fear in a productivity costume.

The actual question.

Not a mission statement. Not a brand purpose exercise. Something simpler: what does it look like when this works? Not the metrics. The feeling. Who’s reading it? What are they doing with it? What’s changed for them, and for you, because this exists? That picture, held clearly, is the point. Everything else arranges itself underneath it.

Try this.

Before you do one more tactical thing on your project, answer three questions:

1. What does it look like when this works (not the numbers, the actual picture)?

2. Why would someone choose this over doing nothing?

3. If nobody ever saw it, would you still think it was worth building?

If you can’t answer those, the tactics aren’t the problem.

Wrap.

The point isn’t a reward you unlock after the logo looks right and the email sequence is built and the website finally loads quickly on mobile. It doesn’t live at the end of the to-do list. It’s the thing that makes the to-do list worth having.

Busyness without direction isn’t progress. It’s just a more elaborate way of standing still.

You can be extraordinarily busy, posting, tweaking, optimising, A/B testing your subject lines, and still be going nowhere in particular.

Marcus Aurelius put it plainly in the Meditations: “People who labour all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time, even when hard at work.”

The pyramid works because it forces sequence. Vision first. Then strategy. Then structure. Then tactics. Each layer only makes sense in the context of the one above it. Tactics without structure are chaotic. Structure without strategy is bureaucracy. Strategy without vision is just clever movement in the wrong direction.

You don’t find the point on the way up. You start at the top. Uncomfortably, vulnerably, without the safety net of knowing whether it’ll work. And you build downwards from there.

That’s the harder thing. It’s also the only thing that works.

My handle online is Generalistalan. I’ve always worn it with a bit of pride and a bit of defensiveness, that nagging feeling that being spread across too many things means you’re not quite serious about any of them.

Then I sat down with James Russell, and felt considerably better about myself.

James is an Auckland-based author who has sold around 170,000 books across a dozen countries. He’s also a publisher, distributor, marketer, podcast host, and school tour organiser. He stores his New Zealand stock in his garage and ships it from his house. He built all of this because he was bored on a train.

Almost.

The real story: James was a journalist for twelve years, including a long stint at the New Zealand Herald. He started writing bedtime stories for his two sons on the commute. People who heard them said they should be books. He thought, why not, and printed 5,000 hardbacks out of his own pocket. No publishing deal. No idea what he was doing.

“I had 5,000 books in the garage. I could either sell them or be one of those guys who’s 70 years old going, you want a free book?”

So he started ringing bookstores. Every bookstore in New Zealand, on his lunch breaks from the Herald, sitting in a cafe across the road. Most said no. He rang Paper Plus eight times before they finally caved.

Then he got made redundant. A month later, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, the biggest in the world, was taking place in Italy. So he booked a ticket and went.

He had no appointments. Publishers were too busy to stop. Two and a half days went by without a single meeting. He sat down on a couch in the final couple of hours, not paying attention to whose stand he’d collapsed next to, and a woman sat down beside him. They got yarning. She turned out to be the head of Sourcebooks, one of the largest independent publishers in the US.

She asked to see the books. He handed one over. She looked at it for about thirty seconds.

“I’ll publish those. I want world rights.”

He came home with a deal covering all English-speaking markets outside New Zealand and a thirty-five thousand dollar advance. Combined with what was left of his redundancy, it was enough to keep going. Within the year, his first two junior novels both went to number one.

“When you don’t know an industry, I think it’s probably a strength. You don’t realise how hard it is.”

None of it was planned. James is pretty clear on that. He didn’t decide to be a journalist. He met a newspaper editor in a pub in Ireland, thought he seemed cool, and talked himself into a job. He didn’t decide to be an author. He wrote stories for his kids and someone said they were good. He didn’t decide to be a self-publisher. He just couldn’t afford to wait for someone else to do it.

What he did do, every single time, was take the next step without needing to see the whole staircase first.

Try this

Think about something you’ve been putting off because the timing isn’t right. Now flip it: what’s the actual cost of not doing it? James was made redundant and immediately spent money he didn’t have on a flight to Italy. That sounds reckless. But doing nothing wasn’t a neutral option. It was just a slower way of ending up in the same place.

What’s the flight you keep not booking?

The community he’s built around the books is worth noting. He visits forty to fifty schools a year. He launched his first book by hiding thirty papier-mâché dragon eggs across Auckland hillsides, with clues on his website so kids could track them down. He built an augmented reality app so readers could point their phones at certain pages and watch 3D dragons appear. He started a podcast, Mad Surf Stories, specifically to reach readers for his adult surf thrillers, because that community rewards showing up consistently over time.

“If you make good stuff, it’s always been about word of mouth.”

That’s not accidental. That’s someone who worked out, somewhere between the garage and the Bologna Book Fair, that community outlasts campaigns, relationships outlast algorithms, and the only way to keep selling a book from 2012 is to keep showing up and reading it.

James’s new book, Marlin Foundling and the Circus of Lost Children, launches June 15th. He’s driving from Invercargill to Matakana to do it. In his own car.

Of course he is.

Find him at dragonbrothersbooks.com

Download James’s self publishing guide

Publishing In New Zealand

5.41MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Most of the early issues of this newsletter were terrible. Not “needs work” terrible. Genuinely, objectively bad. The writing was uneven, the thinking half-baked. The structure wandered. I knew it at the time, and I cringed at every send. But I sent them anyway. Looking back, I realise those early issues were the price of admission. They weren’t mistakes. They were the rough cut.

Reversioning vs. Reinvention (see previous article)

When we talk about midlife pivots, we often frame them as “reinvention” (a complete overhaul, a new identity, a fresh start from scratch). But that’s rarely what actually happens. What actually happens is reversioning. You identify a core thread that’s always been there. You strip away the accumulated obligations and formats that no longer serve you, and put that thread in a new container. As journalist and author Sonya Wilson put it on the podcast: “It’s like going back to something that you loved in the past and putting it in a different package.” Not starting over. Returning.

The Rough Cut Explained

The rough cut is the phase between deciding to reversion and having something of value. It starts when you know your thread, you know your new container, you’ve made the decision, and you’ve started the work. But it’s not good yet. Your writing is uneven. Your podcast sounds amateurish. Your LinkedIn profile looks like you’re having a midlife wobble. Because you are. This is where most people stop. They look at what they’ve made and think: this isn’t ready. I should wait until it’s better. And they never ship it.

Why the Rough Cut Is So Hard

The difficulty isn’t the work itself. It’s the collision between two versions of yourself. For decades, you’ve been competent. You’ve built expertise, earned credibility, and internalised one instinct above all: don’t share it until it’s polished. Don’t publish until it’s ready. That instinct kept you safe and professional. It kept you from embarrassing yourself. But now you’re a beginner again. And that decades-old instinct is screaming at you to wait. Listening to that instinct is the mistake. The rough cut isn’t the problem. Waiting for perfection is.

The rough cut isn’t the problem. Waiting for perfection is.

The Only Way Through It

There’s only one way through: you publish and be damned. You publish the imperfect version, watch what lands and what doesn’t, fix what doesn’t work, and ship again. Each iteration teaches you something the last one didn’t. Each version is better not because you waited longer, but because you actually did the work in public. The people whose work you admire? They have deleted drafts, failed early businesses, abandoned projects. Lots of them. The difference between them and everyone else isn’t that they skipped the rough cut. It’s that they didn’t let the rough cut be the reason to stop. Journalist and filmmaker Emma Keeling described this in our podcast interview: “So much of what’s come before is almost accidental, and we then become deliberate and go to what we really wanted to do if we’re fortunate.” That shift from accidental to deliberate, that’s what the rough cut enables. It’s the bridge between the old version of yourself and the new one.

That shift from accidental to deliberate. That’s what the rough cut enables.

Try This

Name the rough cut out loud to someone you trust. Not as a confession. Just name it: “I’m in the rough cut phase right now.” It’s a description, not a failure. Then find the smallest possible version of your reversioning project. Not the finished version, not even the good version. The smallest version that actually exists right now. Ship it today. Call it a work in progress if you need to. That’s honest, and it’s true. The rough cut only gets better through contact with the world. Not through more planning. Through doing.

Wrap It Up

A stronger cut only exists because someone was willing to release the rough one first. Reversioning doesn’t happen in the planning. It happens in the act of starting before you’re ready. The rough cut is not the problem. It is the work.

Every month I pull together the things worth your time across newsletters, podcasts, books, film, and the occasional detour. No fluff. No affiliate deals. Just stuff I’ve actually consumed and think you should too.

Media Business News: The Bulwark

Cast your mind back to late 2018. The Weekly Standard, one of America’s most respected conservative magazines, gets killed off by its owner for being insufficiently pro-Trump. Staff out of work, weeks before Christmas.

Into that mess stepped Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who’d already had enough of watching her party fold, and who’d been quietly building a little news aggregator on the side. She called it The Bulwark. Nobody gave it much chance. In the beginning they didn’t even ask for money. Readers just started sending it anyway, unsolicited, because they could see what was being built and wanted to be part of it.

Seven years on, The Bulwark has crossed one million subscribers, a newsroom of more than 40 people, chart-topping podcasts, and live events across the US and Canada.

“Independent media doesn’t need a corporate parent or a venture cheque. It needs a point of view, the courage to hold it, and an audience that believes you mean it.”

The Bulwark

Podcast: Substack Presents Open Tab

Part of a new series Substack are running where they interview newsletter founders. It’s shot in a bar, with the kind of cinematography that makes it feel more like a late-night TV interview than a podcast. The first episode features Emily Sundberg from the Feed Me newsletter. It’s a solid conversation about what it actually takes to put out a daily newsletter, and how backing yourself and just running with an idea is sometimes all it takes.

Substack Presents Open Tab

Book: Small Things Like These

Weird thing about this recommendation: I kept seeing it suggested everywhere, went and bought it, got a couple of pages in, and realised I’d already read it. Anyway. It’s a quick read and worth doing again.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is barely 120 pages, and it will quietly wreck you. Set in a small Irish town in 1985, it follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant who stumbles across something he can’t unsee at the local convent. It’s about conscience. About the cost of decency in a place where silence is the easier option. About how the small things you do, or don’t do, end up being the measure of you.

Small Things Like These

Documentary: Martin Short: Life Is Short

There have been quite a few documentaries on comics lately, and if you’re a comedy nerd like me you’ve probably watched all of them. What makes this one different is that Marty Short isn’t a tragic figure like Chevy Chase, Gary Shandling, or George Carlin. He’s a guy who has sure known tragedy. But the film isn’t built around it.

It’s also just refreshing to watch a documentary about somebody who is, well, nice. It’s sometimes said you can tell the quality of a person by the people around them. If that’s true, Marty Short’s a hell of a guy.

Warning: if you haven’t gotten over Catherine O’Hara’s death, you’re probably in for a shock.

Moment of Zen

If you know me, you know I’m a fan of Rich Roll. This one’s mostly a message to myself. Sometimes when I see other people’s projects growing, I catch myself getting a bit jealous, and I need to keep this front of mind.

“The hare always loses.”

Try this: Next time you catch yourself measuring your progress against someone else’s highlight reel, come back to this.

The Hare and the Tortoise

Travel: From Our Foreign Correspondent (aka my daughter, in London)

Natural History Museum

Today I took my role as the mate who’s never had a 9-5 and somehow has a “little break” from 9am to 3pm very seriously, and decided to experience some of London’s culture. Apparently culture here extends beyond drinking a pint on the street in the middle of the day.

After a couple of inevitable delays (someone had trespassed on the railway tracks), I arrived at the Natural History Museum. A seemingly large building, though not heaps bigger than the Auckland Museum. Do I really care for museums? Not particularly. It’s kind of like travelling and going to churches: you just do it to do it.

Then I saw the sign for Earthquakes and Volcanoes and immediately had to check if they had a volcano house (if you know, you know). Going through the displays, many of them featuring the 2011 earthquake in Japan, I found myself thinking back to that whole period: Pike River, November 2010. The Christchurch earthquake three months later. Then the devastating earthquake in Japan the month after that. It genuinely felt like the world had entered its rough patch era. Looking back now it almost feels like a weird trailer for 2020, when the world actually did shut down.

Then, to lighten the mood, I remembered I once hosted a bake sale for Christchurch earthquake victims. I think that still qualifies as my peak humanitarian work. (I was 10.)

The earthquake simulator sign is ahead of me - it’s supposed to imitate what it would have been like in a Japanese corner shop (dairy) during that earthquake. The sign says it’s down for maintenance.

I realise there are disruptions on my train line to get home and like most 25-year-olds in London the option to eat lunch out in South Kensington would require taking out a small loan, so I race to the train, hop on the district line and start the journey.

Overall no I wouldn’t rate the London Natural History Museum over the Auckland Museum but will say that is absolutely because of the lack of Volcano simulator. I’ll return one day for a fairer review, likely on another weekday while everyone with actual jobs is in meetings.

That said, there was an extremely cool elevator (photo inserted) which honestly carried the experience.

Your 25-year-old mate who’s never had a normal job “mind the gap between the train and the platform”

That’s a wrap.

That’s it for this month’s recommendations. As always, if you’ve got anything worth sharing, send it my way.

I’ve known Phil Walters for years. If you live in New Zealand and haven’t noticed one of his steel birds hammered into a tree or a fence post somewhere, you just haven’t looked up. Phil started cutting them in his backyard shed in Ponsonby in 2009, nailing them into lamp posts and power poles around the neighbourhood to amuse his kids and the locals.

Fifteen years later, Metal Bird has sold over two million birds across nine countries. Their best year was $35 million in online sales in the US alone. There are nine warehouses around the world and a call centre in the Philippines.

When we sat down to record, I expected to spend most of our time on scaling and marketing, the mechanics of building something from a shed into a global operation. And we did. But the part that stayed with me came about three-quarters of the way through.

I asked Phil what he thought was actually stopping people from taking the kinds of risks he’d taken.

“I think it’s risk aversion. And I think that’s a really important thing to know about yourself.”

He talked about a Venn diagram he’s drawn for his kids over the years. Three circles: what can you do, what do you love to do, and where’s the money. The goal is to land in the middle.

The thing that moved him wasn’t a book or a business insight or a conversation with a mentor. It was losing his wife.

She died in 2012, from lymphoma. She’d been the one who sparked the whole creative direction in the first place. A prolific photographer, always exhibiting. Phil had felt the pressure to make something of his own. She was initially sceptical Metal Bird would go anywhere.

Phil didn’t dwell on it. But what he said was one of the most honest things I’ve heard anyone say in one of these conversations.

“When you watch somebody just fade away... with it totally beyond her control. If you’re not that person, it just makes you go: I’m not being a passenger in my own life.”

“I’m not being a passenger in my own life.”

He said something else that’s been rattling around since. In his studio, there’s an unofficial motto: “We’re not going to die not knowing.” When a new idea comes up, when something feels uncertain, the answer isn’t to wait for more clarity. It’s to have a crack.

He also said something about failure I’d never quite heard framed this way. Failure isn’t binary. You don’t win or lose. You don’t go on or off. Success and failure are, in his words, “sweaty bedfellows.” One can’t exist without the other. You don’t really understand what success feels like until you’ve genuinely felt failure, and vice versa. It took him, he reckoned, about 59 years to fully believe that.

“Failure is a continuum, not binary. You don’t either win or lose. They’re sweaty bedfellows.”

He also has a phrase he gives to design students when he talks about getting started: FIIDI. Fuck it, I’m doing it. The point isn’t recklessness. It’s removing the imaginary catastrophe from the equation. Because the actual worst case, most of the time, is that you try something, it doesn’t work, and you find out something genuinely useful.

What I keep thinking about is this: most of us wait for conditions to improve before doing the thing. More certainty, more capital, more confidence, more runway. Phil’s point, gently made, is that the conditions don’t shift on their own. What changes is you. And sometimes what changes you is the thing you’d never have chosen.

That’s not a comfortable idea. But it’s an honest one.

Try this

Write down the thing you’ve been putting off. Then write down the actual worst case if it doesn’t work. Not the vague dread. The specific, concrete thing. What would you actually do? How would you actually recover?

Most people find the risk they’ve been carrying is smaller than it felt. And the risk of doing nothing, of just staying exactly where you are, is bigger than they’d counted.

Phil Walters is the founder of Metal Bird. You can find them putting native birds back into trees, one fence post at a time, in nine countries.

This is a slightly weird tangent. Stick with me, I’ll get there eventually.

On the weekend I went and saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 with some friends. Last week I watched a documentary called The New Yorker at 100. What struck me about both was quality and craftsmanship.

In The Devil Wears Prada 2, the quality was in the clothing, the styling, the visual display. But underneath all of that was a subtext worth paying attention to: some things are still worth obsessing over. Worth the extreme care.

In The New Yorker at 100, I saw a masterclass in production and intentionality. The New Yorker is so establishment it’s now punk rock. They understand that things need to be done well, and that is genuinely counterintuitive right now. In a world of AI, quick turnarounds and click-chasing, that kind of care stands out. People are drawn to it even when they can’t articulate why.

What the hell does this have to do with me?

This is what separates us from the machines. Not raw output. Not speed. Not volume.

Quality, taste and nuance.

The machines can produce. They cannot obsess.

Quality

Quality is the thing you obsess over because it has to be right. Not because someone’s watching or because there’s a brief or a deadline. Because you personally cannot let it be less than it should be.

For me it’s building Faark, I Hope It’s Not Too Late. Every sentence, every episode, every piece of design. I fuss over it. I rewrite things nobody will notice. I do it because the alternative (just getting it out, done, shipped) feels like a betrayal of the whole point.

What’s your version of that? What do you return to, refine, and argue with yourself over because it genuinely matters to you?

That obsession is not a personality flaw. It’s a signal. Follow it.

Try this: Write down the last thing you spent more time on than anyone asked you to. Not because you were being paid extra. Not because anyone would notice. Just because it had to be better. That’s your quality. That’s your edge.

Taste

Taste is knowing what good looks like. It’s the curatorial instinct: the ability to look at a hundred things and say with confidence, “that one.”

You’re the person your friends ask before they watch something, buy something, or hire someone. You’ve developed a filter through years of paying attention, and it shows.

AI can process enormous amounts of content. It cannot tell you whether something is actually worth your time. That requires judgement built from experience, context, and a genuine point of view. Which is to say, it requires a human who has lived.

The New Yorker has been refining its taste for a century. That’s not something you replicate with a prompt.

Taste is built over years. It cannot be downloaded.

Nuance

Nuance is the ability to see behind the thing. To hold complexity without needing to flatten it into a take.

It’s being able to say “yes, but also...” without losing the thread. It’s the journalist who hears what’s not being said in the interview. The executive who reads the room before the room knows what it’s saying. The creative who understands that the brief is never really the brief.

AI is getting very good at summarising. It’s nowhere near as good at sitting with contradiction, reading subtext, or knowing when the obvious answer is wrong.

That’s the work only you can do.

QTN is the job now

Quality, taste and nuance aren’t soft skills. They’re not nice-to-haves. In a world flooded with generated content and automated output, they are the actual competitive advantage.

The machines can produce at scale. They can answer questions, draft copy, and churn out the functional stuff. What they cannot do is care. They cannot obsess over whether something is genuinely good. They cannot develop a real point of view from a life lived. They cannot see behind the surface of things.

You can. Most people won’t bother.

The question isn’t whether AI is going to eat into the work. Some of it, it will. The real question is what’s left when it does. And what’s left is the work that requires a human who gives a damn.

That’s a pretty good place to be.

For most of my career, I carried a quiet suspicion that I wasn’t quite the real thing.

The real things were lawyers. Accountants. Engineers. People who’d done the years of training, passed the exams, earned the letters after their name. They had a thing — a defined, legible, serious thing. When someone asked what they did, the answer took about four seconds and left no room for follow-up questions.

I never had that. And for a long time, I took it to mean I didn’t have serious value. That I was somehow winging it in rooms where other people actually belonged.

Which made a certain question, asked more than once by people I actually respect, land harder than it should have.

“But what are you, exactly?”

And I’d do that thing where you start listing stuff (media, journalism , content, strategy, communications) and watch their eyes glaze over. Because in a world that wants you to fit in a box, “all of the above” sounds suspiciously like you just haven’t figured it out yet.

Here’s what I’ve come to think: they’re asking the wrong question. And for a long time, I was trying to answer it.

Specialisation was yesterday’s hedge

The assumption baked into “what are you?” is that your value is your specialisation. Pick a lane. Go deep. Get very, very good at one thing and stay there. That model made sense when the world changed slowly. It makes a lot less sense now.

The people genuinely thriving in this mess aren’t necessarily the deepest specialists in their field. They’re the ones who can read across disciplines, translate between silos, spot what the data is missing. They’ve been around long enough to know the difference between a crisis and a situation that feels like a crisis at 11pm.

That’s not a soft skill. That’s the whole game.

The problem is that most of us with 20-odd years of experience are still leading with our job titles, the boxes we used to fit in, rather than the actual thing we’ve accumulated: judgment. You’ve seen how boardroom decisions ripple three levels down the organisation. You can talk to the tech team and the finance team and the creative team and actually understand all three. That translation ability used to be undervalued. Right now, it’s quietly becoming rare.

What the machine keeps missing

Then there’s AI, which everyone’s anxious about and nobody quite knows what to do with.

The fear is that it’s coming for everyone’s jobs. Partly true. But the jobs it’s best at replacing are narrow, repetitive, deep-in-one-lane jobs. AI is extraordinary at the how. It can out-calculate, out-process, and out-code a specialist on a specific task, every time.

What it can’t do is care. It has no skin in the game. No reputation at stake when the project goes sideways. It can optimise your route without once asking whether you actually want to end up there. It’ll give you the technically correct answer to the wrong question and never notice.

And it can’t build community. It can fill a Slack channel and personalise an email subject line, but the thing that makes people actually stay, that makes them forward something to a friend, show up for the live event, or keep paying a subscription, is trust. Trust is built by humans, over time, through consistently showing up and genuinely giving a damn about the outcome. That’s not automatable. It’s barely even teachable. It’s something you accumulate through years of actual relationships with actual people who remember what you did when things went sideways.

That gap, between what the machine can do and what it can’t, is where the generalist lives. Not as the person who does everything, but as the person with the judgment to know what to ask, and the experience to know when the answer is wrong. That’s not being replaced. If anything, it’s a promotion.

So what?

So what do you actually do with this?

Stop looking at your career as a job title. Start looking at it as a set of assets you’ve been quietly accumulating. The ability to spot a structural problem from a smoke signal. The instinct to know which expert to call and what question to ask them. The hard-won fluency in how organisations actually work, as opposed to how they claim to work on an org chart.

None of that goes on a LinkedIn profile very neatly. But it’s what people actually pay for when they hire someone who’s been around.

Try this.

Think of three moments in your career where you were the person who could see the full picture when everyone else was stuck in their own lane. What did you actually do in those moments? That’s your real pitch. Not your job title.

One more thing

There’s a word worth rescuing here. “Amateur” comes from the Latin amator, someone who does something for love ( I Googled that). It’s used as an insult now, but the original meaning is closer to what a good generalist actually is: someone who hasn’t let one narrow lane kill their curiosity about the rest of the road.

Midlife reinvention isn’t a sign you failed at the first act. It just means the first act wasn’t the whole story.

The world is chaotic right now, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But for people who’ve spent two decades learning to navigate complex systems with imperfect information? That’s not a threat. That’s a familiar feeling.

You’ve been here before

Recommendation Week: April

Published: April 2026

The media theme. Old and new.

I saw a guy holding a sign the other day. It said “Where this months recommendation article”. I thought: right, better get on with it.

So here we are. This month’s recommendations have a theme running through them: media, old and new. What’s dying, what’s thriving, and what’s worth your time across all of it.

Moves in the Media Business

Here’s the thing about media right now: it’s not dying, it’s just refusing to play by the old rules anymore. The gatekeepers are losing their grip, and the people actually making interesting stuff are building their own platforms.

Crooked Media just launched SANEtv on Amazon Prime Video. That’s a podcast network moving into streaming. Netflix is also circling around podcasting. These aren’t random moves. They’re signals that independent media has figured out something the legacy players are scrambling to copy: lower production costs, loyal audiences, and the ability to move fast.

The advantage isn’t just financial. It’s structural. When you’re not answering to shareholders or legacy business models, you can take risks. You can be weird. You can actually care about your audience instead of just monetising them.

What to Read, Watch and Listen To

Newsletter. Between Giants by Anna Fifield (Substack) is a newsletter that treats New Zealand’s global position with the nuance it deserves. Fifield’s a former foreign correspondent with the The Washington Post, and it shows. She doesn’t oversimplify. If you’re interested in geopolitics without the hot-take nonsense, this is it. A possible podcast interview at some point if I can convince her.

Book. Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life by Nicholas Kristof is a memoir that shouldn’t work. It’s about covering the world’s worst problems for decades. But Kristof writes about enduring optimism the way other people write about despair. It’s a reminder that paying attention to hard things doesn’t have to break you.

Podcast. Every Second Counts. Blowing my own trumpet here. This is my conversation with Charlotte Glennie about her book of the same name, a memoir about her years as a correspondent in Asia. Worth it.

Documentary. The New Yorker At 100 proves legacy media can still innovate. It’s not nostalgia. It’s a masterclass in craftsmanship. Watch it if you want to remember why good editing matters.

Your Turn

If you’ve found something worth sharing, something that’s shifted how you think about work, media, or what comes next, send it my way.

The best recommendations in this newsletter come from readers. Hit reply or drop it in the comments

You know the story. Someone quits their job, sells their house, moves to Bali, and launches a seven-figure business. It’s the narrative we’re sold. It’s also bollocks.

The honest version of every story sounds far less cinematic. It usually goes something like: “I just started doing this small thing on the side, and then one day I looked up and it had become my actual job.” No drama. Just a series of quiet experiments that eventually pointed somewhere worth going.

This is what a small bet actually is.

Why We Get This Wrong

We’re obsessed with the dramatic pivot. The decisive moment. The all-in bet that changes everything. It feels like the only way to justify a career change, especially if you’re midway through one that’s already paid for your mortgage and your kids’ school fees.

So we wait. We plan. We tell ourselves we’ll make the leap when the conditions are perfect, when we’ve saved enough, when the market is right, when we’ve got permission from someone who matters. And we never do.

The pivot wasn’t a leap. It was a series of small, low-stakes bets that compounded quietly until the evidence was impossible to ignore.

“The pivot wasn’t a leap. It was a series of small, low-stakes bets that compounded quietly until the evidence was impossible to ignore.”

What a Small Bet Actually Looks Like

A small bet isn’t a hobby. It’s a genuine test of a hypothesis about your future. It’s offering a single workshop. Writing one article. Recording a podcast episode. Taking on a small client. Teaching a class. Building something and putting it out there.

The point is to gather real data about a real question: does this actually work, and do I actually want to do it?

You’re not betting the house. You’re betting an afternoon. Or a weekend. Or three months of Tuesday evenings. The commitment is small enough that you can actually do it without upending your life. The risk is minimal. The information you get back is invaluable.

The Quiet Part

Here’s what makes small bets work: nobody is watching.

Nobody is watching, which means nobody is judging, which means you’re free to find out the truth rather than perform a version of yourself you’ve decided to become. You can fail quietly. You can learn without an audience. You can discover what you actually want instead of what you think you should want.

The Math

If a small bet works, you’ve got momentum. You’ve got something to build on.

And if it doesn’t work, which is entirely possible, you’ve lost very little. You’ve gained information. Which, in the business of figuring out your next chapter, is the most valuable thing there is.

Information beats certainty every time. Certainty is a myth anyway. But information? Information is actionable. It’s the difference between guessing and knowing.

Try This

Write down the thing you keep saying you’d do “if only.” Now ask yourself: what is the smallest possible version of that thing I could actually do in the next two weeks?

Not the full version. Not the ready version. The embarrassingly small, nobody-needs-to-know version.

Start there.

That’s your small bet. That’s how big lives actually get built.

There’s a moment in Charlotte’s story that stays with you. She’s standing on a cliff in her twenties, invincible in the way young people are, and then she falls. The accident reshapes her, not into someone less brave, but into someone brave in different ways. It’s the kind of turning point that makes you reconsider what courage actually means.

I caught up with Charlotte recently to talk about her new memoir, which spans 30 years of her life as a journalist across Asia and beyond. What struck me most wasn’t the dramatic moments, though there are plenty. It was how she talks about the people she’s met: the mother in Sichuan who shared her last handful of rice after an earthquake that killed 88,000 people. The Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh who offered Coca-Cola from homes so flimsy you could blow them over. The Tiananmen mothers who’ve spent decades under surveillance, still signing petitions for accountability.

“People who have the least to give are often the most generous,” she told me. And it’s true, we see it everywhere if we’re paying attention.

What’s changed most, though, is the world she was reporting on. Charlotte spent years covering China as it opened up before the 2008 Olympics. There was optimism then. Space for conversation. Artists pushing boundaries. Online chat that took the censors time to catch up with in a country of 1.3 billion people. Now? The surveillance is so sophisticated and pervasive that driving through a city means being photographed every ten seconds. Facial recognition means you don’t need a ticket to board a train, they know who you are the moment you step through the barrier.

The technology that’s democratising media in other parts of the world is being weaponised there to close it down.

This is where I think Charlotte’s book matters most. Many of the people she interviewed, Tibetans, Uyghurs, dissidents, can’t speak openly anymore. Their voices have been silenced. But she’s put them on the record. That’s what the book is really about: preserving the stories of people who no longer have a platform to tell them.

We talked about how independent media has transformed journalism, and what it’s lost. Yes, there are more voices than ever. More perspectives. More access to interesting thinking. But there’s a cost: it’s expensive to have boots on the ground. To actually sit across from someone and understand not just what they’re saying, but who they are. To see the full picture, not just a fragment.

“It’s always people at the centre of every story,” Charlotte said. And she’s right. Even the political stories, the economic stories, they’re all about people and how they’re coping, what they’re experiencing. Without that human connection, it’s hard to relate. Hard to care.

What I found most moving was how she talked about the people who shaped her along the way. She didn’t want to write the book at first. She’s not comfortable talking about herself. But she realised that if she was going to tell stories about her work, the personal had to be part of it. Journalists spend their careers relying on others to tell their stories. It was her turn to be vulnerable.

She pushed herself beyond her comfort zone, as she has her whole life. Writing courses. Masterclass subscriptions. Reading everything. Experimenting. Failing. Trying again. At 53, she’s still flexible, still curious, still willing to be a beginner.

“The brain is an amazing thing,” she said. “You use it or you lose it.”

That’s the real lesson here. Not the cliff, not the accident, not even the extraordinary places she’s been. It’s the willingness to keep learning, keep growing, keep pushing into discomfort. Every second counts because we don’t know how many we have. And the people we meet, the stories we hear, the generosity we witness, those shape us in ways we might not understand until years later.

Charlotte’s book is a record of that. A testament to the people who mattered.

Buy here Every Second Counts by Charlotte Glenn or wherever you buy your books.