I wrote seven words in my notebook on Monday. “You’re here, so have no regrets.”

I need to tell you what prompted it, because it was not a good mood. It was the opposite.

I am not on the telly at the moment. Not less than I used to be. Not at all. And some weeks that sits fine with me, and some weeks it goes for my ego like a dog for a postman. Monday was one of the second kind.

Let me tell you about the biggest no I have ever said.

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At the end of 2012 I was hosting Formula 1 for the BBC, and they offered me a new contract.

Four years. Formula 1. Match of the Day 2. The Olympics. The Commonwealth Games. The Euros. The World Cup. Sports Personality of the Year.

If you are a sports broadcaster, that is not a good contract. That is the list. That is the holy grail of British sport, handed over on one piece of paper, and it is almost word for word what I would have written down at fifteen years old when I decided I wanted to be on the television.

I said no.

I said no because of a conversation at our kitchen table. Harriet was pregnant with our first child, Florence. She looked at the list, and she did not tell me what to do, which is one of the many reasons I married her. She asked me one question.

“All of those things you’ve been offered. Which of those is happening in the UK?”

I went through it properly, out loud, one by one. Sports Personality moves around the UK. The Olympics, abroad. The Commonwealth Games, abroad. The Euros, the World Cups, abroad. Formula 1, abroad, twenty-odd times a year. Match of the Day 2, Manchester.

One out of seven.

You can do a lot of clever thinking about a career decision. That sum took about ninety seconds and it made the decision for me.

So we left. I went to BT Sport, and I walked into a production of five people. Five. I had left the oldest and most famous broadcaster in the world for a company you could fit round one table.

I want to be honest about how that felt at the time, because the version where it all works out is very easy to tell backwards. It felt mad. People in the industry told me it was mad, some of them kindly and some of them less so. I had swapped a guaranteed four years at the centre of British sport for a channel that did not yet exist, on the basis of a question my wife asked me over dinner. Written down like that it sounds tidier than it actually was. At the time it mostly felt like being unable to answer a fair question.

And I did not do a single one of those shows.

There is a version of the last thirteen years where I stayed, and did all seven of those things, and never once had to explain to anyone what I am working on now.

And I do not have to imagine that version, which is the part that gets you. Those programmes all still exist. They go out every year, to millions of people, and somebody stands in front of them and says the words. It is simply never me. I would not call that a wound. It is closer to a fact that turns up on a screen in the corner of whatever room I happen to be in.

I have turned that over more times than I would like to admit to you.

And I want to say something about how that actually shows up, because it is not dramatic. I do not sit in a dark room grieving a contract. It arrives sideways. It arrives when someone at a dinner asks what I am working on now. It arrives in the specific way people say “you used to be everywhere”, which they mean warmly, and which lands somewhere else entirely.

That is the thing about a regret you have decided not to have. It does not ask permission before turning up.

But that only tells one side of the story.

There is a whole field of psychology built on this, and the researcher most associated with it is Neal Roese, who has spent a career studying what is called counterfactual thinking. It is the mind’s habit of running the version of events that did not happen. The upward kind is the one that hurts: the better outcome, the road not taken, the parallel life getting on fine without you in it.

The finding that stopped me is not that we do it. Everybody knows we do it. It is that we only ever do it in one direction. We build the better version in forensic detail, the salary and the studio and the look on someone’s face, and we almost never build the worse one at all. The mind is not weighing two futures. It is writing one of them and calling it evidence.

That is exactly what I had been doing since 2012.

Because how do I know how that story plays out? How do I know that I am not in some horrible accident on the way to Manchester to host Match of the Day 2? How do I know that I do not carry on with Formula 1 and I get ill abroad, or I fall down a flight of stairs in a hotel I would never have been standing in if I had signed?

I do not know, and nobody else does either. That is the entire point.

I had written, in high definition, the version where I got everything. I had never once written the version where getting everything cost me something.

I call it the other half of the story. I think most of us are reading the first half over and over and calling it the truth.

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There is a reason it works this way, and it is not that you are ungrateful. The human brain has a negativity bias. It is built to scan for threat and for the thing that could have gone better, because for most of our history the person who did that survived and the person who did not, did not. It is very good at its job. It is just doing that job in a life where the threat is now a television contract from thirteen years ago.

So you cannot switch it off, and I have tried. What you can do is make it finish its work.

The first thing is to finish the counterfactual. Not stop it. Anyone who tells you to simply stop comparing your life to an imaginary one has never successfully done it. Just make it finish. If you are going to build the version where you took the job, you are obliged to build the version where the job took something. Same length. Same detail. The illness, the missed birthdays, the marriage that got thin, the version of you at fifty who is very successful and does not know his kids. Write it properly. It is remarkable how quickly the shine comes off the fantasy when you make yourself do equal work on both.

The second thing is to price the yes. Every no is a yes to something else, and we are hopeless at naming what the something else was. My no bought me a decade in the same country as my family. It bought bedtimes. It bought the pregnancy, and the birth, and every year after it. It bought a business I would never have had time to start. I did not get the list. I got the exact thing I said I wanted at that kitchen table when I was doing the sum out loud. Say what your no bought you, in plain words, to another person. Most people have never once done it.

The third one is the shortest and it is the one I keep coming back to. Say what you are still here for. Because I am still alive. I am still breathing. I am still working, I am still a dad, I am still a friend, I am still doing all of this. The list of things I did not get is finite, and I have read it a hundred times. The list of things I still have is far longer, and I read it almost never.

That imbalance is the whole problem. It is not that the losses are big. It is that we audit them and we do not audit anything else.

Do the sum properly and it looks different. In the years since that contract I have been at every first day of school. I started a business I could not have started while flying to twenty-odd races a year. I have been in the country for almost all of my children’s lives so far. Against that: a list of seven programmes with somebody else’s name on them.

I am not claiming that is a clean win. It is not meant to be. It is meant to be a full ledger instead of half of one, and I had been carrying half of one around for a decade.

I should be clear that this is not about being grateful. Gratitude is fine, and it is also the thing people reach for when they want you to stop talking about something that hurts. This is a different exercise. It is not “look on the bright side”. It is “you have only done half the arithmetic, and you have been presenting the half as the whole for years”.

You are allowed to want the thing you did not get. Want it. Just do not pretend you know what it would have cost, because you do not, and neither do I.

So I am not going to sit here and tell you that the opportunity did not pass you by. Maybe it did. Mine did, and I am the one who signed the paper that made sure of it.

And I am not going to tell you it would not have been incredible, because it might have been.

But it might also have been the very worst thing that ever happened to you, and I notice that nobody ever writes that version down.

You are here. Start the sum there.

Jake x

Last spring I was on a stage in London, nearing the end of a talk, doing the part I always enjoy most: opening the floor and finding out what people actually came to ask.

A man near the back put his hand up. He had a friendly face and wise eyes… the sort of bloke you would be glad to sit next to on a long train journey. This is what he said:

“When you started presenting Formula One, who was kind to you?”

I remember I stood there and said nothing for a good few seconds.

Fifteen years. Fifteen years of interviews and panels and green rooms and podcasts about that job, and nobody had ever asked me that.

It’s always:

How did you get to a level that you did?

Why are you ever nervous?

What’s it like to be in the paddock?

Not one person, in fifteen years, had asked who was kind to me.

Let me say something before I go any further. I hate the phrase ‘self-made man’. I have spent twenty years in rooms with some of the most successful people in this country and I have never met one. Not once.

What I have met is a lot of people who were carried at a moment when they could not carry themselves, and who either remember it clearly or have found it very convenient to forget.

When I got the BBC Formula One job I was thirty years old. The contract was twelve months so I knew precisely what I was to them… a risk. One bad hour on live television and I would lose the job, and, in that industry, quite possibly the career behind it.

Yet many people were kind to me: Niall, my boss, put his arm around me. Mark, the producer, handed over years of his own hard-won wisdom and never once made me feel small for needing it. David and Eddie, who had racing careers behind them, treated me on air as though I belonged shoulder to shoulder with them, which is about the most generous thing an expert can do for a novice. None of that was written into any of their job descriptions.

The obvious answer to the man’s question is my mum and dad, and I gave them their due in this newsletter a fortnight ago, so I will leave them out of it today. What his question actually shook loose was a much longer list than I expected. And one name near the top of it that I never got round to thanking.

A bar in Vienna, 2008

I was a wet behind-the-ears reporter for BBC Sport at the Euros, trying very hard to look like someone who had done this before. I remember one evening I found myself in a hotel bar and John Motson was in there.

Motty. The sheepskin coat, and the voice behind every football memory that mattered to me growing up.

He bought me a drink and we took a seat in the corner.

He did not talk about himself but rather he asked about me, about my career, about what I actually wanted to do with it, and he listened to the answers in a way that made me sit up straighter. Eventually I asked him for his one piece of advice.

“Work harder than you ever think you need to.”

Then he told me, almost in passing, that he had been over to the stadium that afternoon. The game was not until the following evening. He had been to hundreds of tournaments and thousands of matches, and he had gone across on his own simply to see what the view was like from the commentary position.

Then he showed me his notes.

I had never seen anything like it in my life. The planning, the preparation, the sheer volume of it. John was sixty-three at the time and he was preparing for that game as though it were his first one. He could have commentated on that game half asleep and nobody watching would have been any the wiser, and he had gone and stood in the empty stand anyway.

I asked him one more thing. His one mistake.

“Not enough time with my family and my son.”

I had no children then. I nodded like I understood. It took me another five years to have the faintest idea what he had just handed me.

What I actually owe him

Here is what I did not grasp that night in Vienna, and what I have only really understood since a stranger in London asked me his question.

Every time I got in from presenting a game at three in the morning and drove home rather than take the easy hotel room, that is Motty.

Every time I over-prepared for a podcast episode and end up with pages of notes I never once look at, that is Motty too.

And when I sit down with a broadcaster twenty years younger than me who is quietly trying to work out whether any of this is ever going to happen for them, I am just doing the thing John did for me when he had no reason in the world to bother.

In 2005 Martin Seligman and his colleagues at Pennsylvania tested a handful of different exercises to see which ones actually moved the needle on how happy people were. One of them was called the gratitude visit.

You write a letter to somebody who was kind to you and was never properly thanked, and then (this is the part people skip) you deliver it to them and read it out loud.

Of everything they tested, the gratitude visit produced the biggest immediate lift in wellbeing by a distance, and it was still showing up when they measured again a month later. One letter, read out once.

We spend a fortune trying to feel better by acquiring things for ourselves, and the most reliable result in the whole experiment came from telling somebody else that they mattered.

Thanks to John

So here is the idea I have been carrying around since that man put his hand up, and I have started calling it ‘Thanks to John’.

It goes like this:

Almost every habit you are quietly proud of has somebody’s name on it.

A person put it there. Someone showed you, usually without making any sort of performance of it, and you took it, and now it is simply how you do things.

The way you prepare. The way you speak to people who can do nothing at all for you. You did not invent a bit of it. You inherited it from someone who was decent to you at a point when they did not have to be.

Most of us have never gone looking for those names. We tell the story of our lives as though we assembled ourselves from parts, and then we wonder why success feels strangely hollow when it arrives, and I think this is a large part of why. If you built it alone, there is nobody to share it with.

The first thing I would do is answer the question properly. Sit with it the way I had to on that stage. Who was kind to you when you started? Kind, specifically, which is a warmer and less useful question than who advanced your career, and a far better one. The person who took the meeting they had nothing to gain from. The one who said your name out loud in a room you were not standing in. Whoever bought a nervous twenty-nine year old a drink and asked him what he actually wanted to do with his life. Write the names down. I got to eleven, and three of them surprised me.

The second thing is the one I got wrong with John, so take it from someone who is still annoyed with himself. Pick one name off that list and tell them, in words, what they did and what it turned into. A like on their post does not count. Neither does the warm thought you have about them while you are driving, which is the one I specialise in. It will feel excruciating for about four seconds and then it will not. Nobody in the history of the world has received one of these and thought less of the sender. And do it while they are here, because the natural moment you are waiting for does not exist, and one day you will be writing it as a tribute instead, which helps you and does nothing at all for them.

The third thing is where the whole thing actually pays. Be the corner seat for somebody else. There is always a version of you from twenty years ago in the room, trying to look like they have done this before and quietly terrified that everyone can tell. Buy them the drink, and ask what they want to do with it all rather than telling them what you did. Show them your notes. It costs you an hour you will not particularly miss and it can genuinely change the shape of somebody’s working life, and you will almost certainly never find out that it did.

That is the bit I want to be honest about. Motty had no idea. He bought a drink for a young reporter in Vienna, gave him ten minutes of proper attention, and went to bed. He never knew that a bloke he barely knew would still be organising his working life around that conversation eighteen years later, or would be sitting here writing about it now.

Which means the kindness you hand out is almost always invisible to you. You do not get the receipt. You do some small, slightly inconvenient thing for somebody who cannot repay you, and it disappears into their life and quietly rearranges it, and you carry on with your evening none the wiser.

I am fairly sure that is the whole point.

The smallest gesture from you can have the biggest impact on someone else’s life. I wrote that sentence about John three years ago and I did not fully believe it at the time. I do now.

So, the question, and I would love you to sit with it rather than skim past it, the way I could not on that stage in London.

Who was kind to you?

Go and tell them.

Jake x

A few days ago I put up a video. Just a list of plain sentences laid over the top of our recent family holiday (Can watch it here).

2027 is less than five months away. 2016 was ten years ago. Covid began over six years ago. 2007 is now further away than 2040. Kids born in 2010 are turning sixteen. The iPhone is nearly twenty years old. Another summer is already disappearing.

Then the line at the end… Time isn’t slowing down.

A post that brought alot of comments, so I sat down the other day to read them.

There were two kinds of replies I saw.

The first kind was what I had in mind when I made it.

Someone said they had asked the universe for a sign that morning and had decided this was it, and that a trip to New Zealand was now happening. Someone else said they were finally going to tell a particular person how they felt. Good! That was the whole idea.

The second kind": One person wrote that it was all true, and that it also stressed them out and made them sad about the time they had already wasted. Another said, more or less, that it is easy to talk about booking trips when you have money. Someone wanted to tell a person they were the one, and could not face being rejected. Someone said they loved it and would be sending it to themselves, because there was nobody else to send it to. Someone else pointed out that most of us spend the bulk of our lives at work, away from the people we would choose to be with, so willpower is hardly the issue.

One person had gone away and done the arithmetic on themselves and come back with a number of weekends they had left. Another, who told me they were seventy-two, just said that the years seem to be speeding up.

I read those a few times and they put a finger on what is wrong with almost every piece of content about time, mine included.

A video like that hands you urgency and hands you nothing to do with it. It tells you the clock is running. It says nothing about half past nine on a Tuesday night when you are knackered, skint, frightened of making the phone call, and now guilty on top of it. Urgency with nowhere to go curdles into shame, and shame is the worst fuel there is. Nobody has ever been shamed into living better.

So here is the other half.

I keep a quote from Seneca in my notebook, still doing the rounds two thousand years after he wrote it. “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.”

Everybody reads that as a warning about how little we get. Read it again, because he is saying something else entirely. He is not telling you life is short. He is telling you that you have got enough. Life is long enough. Everyone gets a lifetime, and a lifetime is plenty if you actually live it.

That flips the whole thing round. “Time isn’t slowing down” is a true sentence and a fairly useless one, because there is nothing you can do about it. “You have enough time” is also true, and you can act on it tonight.

The waste is the part that belongs to you. Seneca’s point is that our days get taken by distraction, by fear, by the comfort of routine, and by obligations that feed nobody. How much of your day is actually yours? How much of it goes on chasing approval from people whose opinion of you changes nothing? I ask because that is the portion you can genuinely win back, and the rest of it is already spoken for.

It never announces itself, either. Time slipping away does not scream on the way out. It leaves as a quiet whisper. Every morning another page has gone, and no supplement or gym session or breathing exercise buys those twenty four hours back.

Two psychologists, Tom Gilovich and Victoria Medvec, spent years asking people what they regret, and found something I have never been able to shake off. In the short term, people regret the things they did. The daft thing said at a party, the money spent on something they did not need. Ask the same people about their life as a whole, years later, and it has almost entirely reversed. What survives is the things they did not do. Regrets about action burn hot and then cool off, because the mind is good at building a case for a decision once it has been made. Regrets about inaction never really cool, because there is no case to build. There is only the empty space where the thing would have gone, and the mind fills it in with the best possible version.

Which tells me the person who is frightened to say how they feel is weighing the wrong risk. Rejection is an action regret. It is genuinely horrible, and it fades. Saying nothing is the other sort, and that one will still be sitting there in thirty years, in perfect condition.

I recorded something in my study a while back and said a phrase out loud that I have not been able to leave alone since. No more waiting, no more wasting.

Waiting is when you know exactly what you want and you are holding out for the conditions to be right. January. Monday. After the promotion, once the kids are a bit older, when things calm down. They never calm down. One day quietly becomes someday, and someday never arrives.

Wasting is the quieter one, and harder to catch, because none of it ever looks like a decision. It is the scrolling. It is the meeting that achieved nothing, followed by the meeting about that meeting. It is every low-grade obligation you agreed to because saying no felt awkward in the moment. It is the evenings given to people who would not give you one back. Nobody sits down and chooses to waste a decade. It goes in twenty minute pieces, and the twenty minute pieces never feel like they count.

Here is what I would actually do about both.

The first thing is to stop waiting to feel ready, because that feeling is not coming. Motivation does not turn up on a Monday morning and tap you on the shoulder. You are not unmotivated on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and then suddenly full of it at seven o’clock on Monday. It runs the other way round. Action leads to motivation. You take the first step feeling nothing at all, you get a bit of evidence back, you feel slightly better, and the motivation turns up afterwards to meet you. It is a snowball. I have also found that action reduces my anxiety, which matters if you are a catastrophiser like me, because a few steps in roughly the right direction settle me down far quicker than any amount of thinking about it ever has.

So do ten minutes of the thing today, badly, while unmotivated. That is the entire instruction.

The second thing is to write down what you would cut. People talk about being handed a diagnosis and completely changing how they live, and I find that one of the saddest ideas going, because you already have one. I have memento mori tattooed on my wrist for exactly this reason. So let me hand you the diagnosis now, and skip the fantasy half of the question, the half where you walk out of your job and travel the world, because neither of us is doing that. Ask the useful half instead. What would you stop doing? Which of the draining, poisonous things in your week would go immediately, this afternoon, without a second thought? Write those down. That list is worth more than any list of dreams, and unlike the dreams, you can act on it this week for nothing.

The third thing is for everyone who watched that video and thought, easy for him.

Look again at what it actually asked for. Book the trip. Make the move. Say how you feel. Call the person. Take the walk. Change the habit. Six things, and only one of them costs real money. Saying how you feel is free. Calling the person is free. The walk is free. Changing a habit is free. The trip is the one everybody fixes on, and it is the least important item on the list.

I want to be straight with you here, because I am aware of how I sound. I have hosted Champions League finals. I have hosted the Premier League match where Liverpool finally ended their wait, and the Grand Prix where Jenson Button became world champion. Nothing on that list comes close to standing on a touchline on a Sunday morning watching Sebastian play football, or at the side of a pitch on a Wednesday afternoon watching Florence play hockey. Nothing. And every one of those mornings is free.

I mean that as a plain finding after twenty-five years of chasing the other thing. The best hours of my life have cost me nothing beyond showing up for them, and I very nearly missed a lot of them, because everything around me kept insisting the other stuff mattered more.

So pick the free one. The one you have been putting off because it costs courage rather than money.

And if you are reading this thinking about the years you have already lost, I would gently put that down. You cannot spend the next ten years grieving the last ten. That is more waste, dressed up as remorse. Seneca was not scolding anyone. He was setting a challenge, and a challenge only ever applies to the time you have left, which is all of it from here.

There is a line from George Bernard Shaw I have read out on a stage more than once. He wrote that life is no brief candle to him, that it is a splendid torch he has got hold of for the moment, and that he wants to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. That is the sentence. Used up, rather than carefully preserved.

Tomorrow morning I am going for a paddle lesson with my wife. Later on I am taking Sebastian to football training. Neither of those will ever make a video. Both of them are the point.

Jake

Melbourne, March 2009. Ten minutes before the BBC went live with its first Formula 1 broadcast in more than a decade, I walked away from everyone and stood alone in a nearly empty pit lane. I was 30 years old, on a twelve-month contract, and I had been told that the people in the sport and the fans at home would make their minds up about me within the first ten minutes of the show. There was no autocue. I stood there in ear defenders with six or seven voices talking at me, the PA counting down the minutes, trying to hold on to my opening lines while the voice inside my head explained, calmly and in some detail, exactly how I was about to throw it all away.

With about five minutes to go I couldn’t take it any more. I pulled out my earpiece and made a call, and when it was answered the only thing I managed to say was, “I’m scared, Dad.”

My parents were at their cottage in the Norfolk countryside, up in the dark to watch their son host live television on BBC One. A few years earlier, very little had been expected of that son. If they were frightened too, they hid it beautifully. What they did instead was paint me a picture. We’re having tea and toast, they said. It’s still dark here. The dog is curled up on the floor. Life here is exactly the same as it has always been, and you can always come home. Whatever happens today we love you, our door will never close, so go and enjoy yourself knowing that.

I put the earpiece back in, heard the minutes tick away, and went live to millions. My life had changed that morning, but life, the real one, the one with the dog on the floor, was exactly where I had left it, and the weight lifted. Here is the detail I didn’t admit for years: I kept making that call. Ringing my mum and dad in a mild panic became the last thing I did before most live F1 shows. A grown man with a prime-time job, standing in some of the most glamorous sporting venues on earth, phoning home to ask how the dog was. Every single time, the anxiety went.

At 16, I thought my parents would always be around. That is the sentence I keep coming back to. They were in their forties then, and their being there was like weather. It never crossed my mind that it could end. They are in their seventies now, and the thought of losing them has stopped being abstract. Time didn’t warn me about any of this. It just moved.

A couple of years ago, when my dad was 76, he sent me a message that made me sit down and count what he has actually done across my life. There are photos of him cuddling me when I was a few days old. He stood on roadsides cheering every weekend when I was quite possibly the worst club cyclist ever. He drove me to the doctor’s when my mental health fell apart in my twenties. He came down to London with me and talked me into being brave enough to buy my first flat. He was on the phone before every Grand Prix I hosted, telling me I would be OK, and when BT came to poach me his entire advice was two words: trust yourself. When I eventually left that job, he wrote me a long, encouraging email, the kind that takes a 76-year-old most of a morning. And then he taught himself Bluetooth, at 76, so he could listen to the things I was making.

My mum built the other half of it. She was a teacher, and the home she made had a quality I could only name once I had grown up and left it. It was a place where you could turn up having failed at something and never once feel that you yourself were the failure. In circumstances that were far from easy, she built a house where the door genuinely never closed. That, I think, is what I was really phoning from the pit lane. The tea and toast were details. The door was the point.

It turns out there is a name for what they gave me. John Bowlby, the psychologist who spent his career studying how children attach to their parents, concluded that what a child needs above all is “a secure base from which to explore”. His insight was that the base and the bravery are the same thing. A child who knows they can come back is precisely the child who dares to go. And he believed the need runs with us all the way through adult life, long after we stop being children. I was a 30-year-old man about to broadcast to millions, and I still needed to hear about the dog before I could jump. Years later I told my dad the truth of it in a message of my own: he was the safety net, and without the net I would never have found the courage.

Then I came across a chart I have never been able to unsee. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics runs a huge ongoing study called the American Time Use Survey, in which thousands of people record their day in detail, including who was with them for every hour of it. When Our World in Data plotted those results by age, the line for time spent with parents did something brutal. It peaks in childhood and the early teens, when your parents are simply the water you swim in. It drops off a cliff somewhere around 18 or 20, when most of us leave home. And then it stays down for the rest of the chart, a long, flat line running through your thirties and far beyond, and it never comes back up.

Read that shape honestly and it tells you something most of us have never let ourselves think. By the day you move out, the overwhelming majority of the hours you will ever spend with your parents are already behind you. What remains is a thin line of visits and phone calls stretched across the decades they have left. The height of that thin line is one of the few things on the whole chart you still control.

There is a part of that chart I find hard to sit with. For the whole towering section, the time was theirs, spent on me. They poured their evenings and weekends into a small boy who had nothing to offer back except need. My dad standing on a roadside watching me finish last, week after week, was a man spending his one life on his son. And at some point, without a letter arriving to announce it, the whole arrangement quietly inverts. They spent their best years on you. The years that are left are yours to spend on them.

I have started calling this holding the net. For the first half of your life, your parents hold the safety net under you, and every brave thing you ever do, every jump into a new job or a new city, is possible because somebody is holding it. Then the net changes hands. It happens gradually, somewhere in the years when their world starts to shrink while yours is still expanding, and most of us miss the moment entirely because we are busy. But there comes a day when you are the one holding the net, when you are the cottage in the dark and the calm voice on the phone, and the question stops being whether they will catch you and becomes whether you will show up to catch them.

So here is what holding the net has come to look like in my ordinary weeks, three habits I have been building since that message from my dad.

The first is a sum I would honestly rather not do. A while ago I worked out that if I am really, really lucky, I might get to take my parents away three or four more times in my life. Three or four. You can do the same arithmetic with visits. Count how many times you genuinely saw your parents last year, then multiply it by the number of years they might realistically have. If you see them four times a year and they have fifteen years, that is sixty visits. Sixty more afternoons with the people who taught you to walk. The number will frighten you, and it should, because once you can see the number you can change it. One extra visit a year, at that rate, buys you another fifteen. Almost nothing else in your diary pays anything like that.

The second habit costs nothing and takes seconds. Save their voice. My dad’s messages are among the most precious things I own, and I have stopped deleting any of them. Keep the voicemails, even the mundane ones about parcels and dentist appointments, because one day the mundane ones will be the treasure. Ask your questions by voice note instead of text, so the answers come back in their voice rather than in letters on a screen. And record the story you have heard a hundred times, the one they always tell at Christmas, while it can still be told. There will come a day when you would trade almost anything you own to hear it once more.

The third habit is one I wrote down after that message from my dad: ask the stories you never asked before. One question a visit, that is the whole practice. Every time I see my parents, I try to ask one thing I have somehow never asked in more than four decades of being their son. What were you like at my age? What do you remember about the day I was born? Who held the net for you when you were the one jumping? You will be amazed at what you don’t know about the people who made you, and every answer works twice. You learn the thing, and they get an hour of feeling that their story matters to somebody. Which it does, more than they know.

These days the calls mostly run the other way. My dad rings me about things his phone is doing that his phone should apparently never have done, and I talk him through it, and it takes eleven times longer than it needs to, and I have slowly understood that the eleven times longer is the point. He held the net for thirty years without once making me feel heavy. The least I can do is hold it now without making him feel slow.

Because one day, and I hate this sentence even as I write it, the phone will ring out. The cottage will be dark for a different reason, and the line on the chart will end, the way every line on that chart eventually does. Until then, though, the pen is in my hand, and every visit and every daft question lifts the line a little higher than it would otherwise have been. When my dad answers, some part of me still hears tea and toast and a dog curled on the floor, and a voice telling me the door will never close. Go and enjoy yourself, knowing that.

Then call home.

Jake

I was on a train when it happened, and nothing was necessarily wrong: an ordinary trip into London on an ordinary day, with my phone in my hand and some time to fill, so I opened YouTube. Instead of watching anything, I did the thing I suspect a lot of us do far more often than we would ever say out loud, and looked up someone else’s numbers. Another big podcast, to be precise, one that has grown into something enormous on YouTube, and I sat there in my seat scrolling through their view counts while the fields blurred past the window, before pulling up my own.

The gap did something to me, and I want to be honest about what. I have spent years sitting opposite people talking about perspective and gratitude, and there I was in a train seat, feeling my mood drop through the floor because another man’s videos had bigger numbers under them than mine. For a few minutes the carriage disappeared, and all that existed was the distance between his figures and my figures, and a strange, urgent feeling that I was behind.

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Behind whom, though, and behind what? When I looked up from the phone, every fact of my life was exactly as it had been ten minutes earlier. I make a show I love with my whole heart, and I have sat across from hundreds of the most interesting people alive while they told me things they had never said anywhere else. I married a woman I adore, and our children still, mostly, want to hang around with us. Twenty five years ago I would have crawled over broken glass for a single afternoon of the life I now get to live every day. And a set of numbers on a screen had just convinced me, for a few genuinely miserable minutes, that all of it added up to falling short.

I wrote a line in my notebook after that journey, and I have gone back to it more than almost anything else in there. It is a privilege to be tired from the things you once begged the universe for. That was what the train showed me: the tiredness I sometimes feel is the weight of prayers that were answered, and so is the pressure of a schedule that needs feeding every week. I had spent years begging for exactly this life, and comparison had somehow turned the answer into a debt.

Theodore Roosevelt usually gets the credit for the old line that comparison is the thief of joy, and I have quoted it for years, because it is true and because it is tidy. But I have come to think it lets comparison off lightly, because joy is only the first thing it takes. Give it long enough and it takes your focus too, because every minute you spend measuring someone else’s life is a minute you step away from building your own. On that train I was unhappy, and worse than that, I was absent. The countryside went past unseen, and Harriet’s message sat unanswered on my phone, while I ran a race in my head against a man who had no idea he was in one.

There is a reason this happens to all of us, and it was worked out long before anybody owned a smartphone. In 1954 a psychologist called Leon Festinger published a paper called A Theory of Social Comparison Processes, and it describes what happened to me in that train seat with unnerving accuracy. Festinger argued that human beings carry a built-in drive to evaluate their own abilities, and that when no objective yardstick exists, we measure ourselves against other people instead. There is no official scale for how good a podcast is, or whether you are raising your children properly, so we glance sideways at whoever is nearest and mark ourselves against them.

Festinger found something else too, and this is the detail that explains why the glancing never settles anything. When it comes to abilities, the comparison has a tilt built into it, what he called a “unidirectional drive upward”. We compare up, picking people doing a bit better than us, and if we ever catch them, or convince ourselves we have, we simply select somebody higher and start again, so the finish line moves every time we approach it. Festinger worked all of this out by studying small groups in the early fifties, when the only lives you could measure yours against belonged to your neighbours and the people you worked with. Now the device in your pocket will serve you the single most successful person in any field on earth, on demand, with their best moments arranged in a neat row. Festinger described the engine. We went and built it a motorway.

And there is a second rigging in the game, which I can tell you about with some authority because I have worked in television my whole adult life. Everything that reaches you through a screen has been framed, lit, selected and polished long before you see it, and social media works exactly the same way. People post the win and they leave out the wobble, so the comparison is loaded twice over: your instinct points you upward, at people doing better, and the version of them you are shown is the highlight reel while you sit in the middle of your own behind-the-scenes, with the laundry piling up and the argument from breakfast still hanging in the air.

You will have your own version of my train moment, because the races in most lives are quieter than podcast numbers and every bit as consuming. There is the school WhatsApp group where someone’s child seems to be reading chapter books already, the friend whose kitchen extension makes your own house feel suddenly smaller, the couple who appear to sail through the exact stage of marriage you are finding hard, and the colleague who got made manager first, whose salary you think about more than you would ever admit. Every one of them can take an ordinary Tuesday and quietly turn it into evidence against you.

A while ago I put a question in a post that got a bigger response than I expected. What invisible race are you running? The longer I sit with that question, the more I think it holds the whole answer, so the Invisible Race is what I have come to call the idea underneath it. An invisible race is any contest you are somehow losing that you never actually entered. Nobody put that podcaster and me on a starting line together, and the whole event existed in my head, entry form and starting gun included. The feeling of being behind needs a race to exist, and comparison quietly invents one, complete with a field of runners and a finish line, without ever asking whether you wanted in.

Once you can see that, the practice is simple enough. Whenever the feeling of behind arrives, and it will keep arriving, name the race and ask who entered you in it and what the prize is supposed to be. Almost every time, the entry form comes back blank. Someone bought a bigger house and suddenly you were in a property race you never registered for. Someone’s child hit a milestone early and suddenly you were in a parenting race whose finish line keeps moving. A race you never entered is a race you are free to walk out of, at any point, without apologising to anyone. That one realisation has saved me more misery than almost anything else in this notebook.

A few small tools help me do the actual walking out, and they earn their keep in ordinary weeks, long after the sting of any single train journey has faded.

The first is the one-lane rule, and it asks one question the moment you catch yourself measuring against somebody: are we actually running in the same lane? Almost nobody is, because the person you are measuring against makes a different show for a different audience, at a different stage of a different life. The runner in the lane beside you trained for a different distance and is heading somewhere you may never have wanted to go in the first place. The one-lane rule says you get one lane, the one you are standing in, and everything happening in the other lanes is scenery.

The second is the scoreboard you actually chose, because comparison always hands you one you did not pick: view counts, salaries, square footage, the shine on someone else’s holiday. So sit down once, with a pen, and write your own, asking what you would count if nobody else could ever see the score. Mine has questions on it rather than numbers, borrowed from something I once wrote when I was trying to talk myself down. Am I a little braver than I was yesterday, a little kinder, a little more honest, a little more present with the people in my house? The only comparison that has ever done me any lasting good is with the man I was yesterday, and the whole aim is simply to prefer the one I see today.

The last one is the mute button, and it is the most practical thing here. Your feed is an input, the same as the food you eat and the sleep you get, and you are allowed to choose it. Look back through the accounts you have spent the last week with and notice, honestly, which ones reliably start a race in your head. The people behind them are usually decent, and the problem sits in what their posts set off in you. Mute them quietly, without announcing it to a soul, and unmute again whenever you like, because the world keeps turning while you are gone. I have muted people I genuinely admire, and I admire them even more now that their numbers no longer follow me onto trains.

I once shared some words that had been said to me a million times before they finally landed. You’re not ahead. You’re not behind. You’re exactly where you need to be. For years I heard that as a soft platitude, the kind of thing printed on a mug in a gift shop. I hear it differently now, as a plain statement of fact. Ahead and behind only exist on a track, and most of the tracks in our heads were laid by comparison in an idle moment, on a train, with a phone in hand and a little time to fill.

I still check numbers sometimes, because I am human, and the pull does not vanish simply because you have learned its name. But these days, when I feel the tug of somebody else’s dashboard starting up, I try to put the phone face down and look out of the window at the actual fields, in the actual life I once begged the universe for. The tiredness in my shoulders is the weight of answered prayers, and the only runner worth chasing is the man I was yesterday, who is catchable, every single day, by teatime.

Jake

Last September, Ricky Hatton passed away. He was one of the strongest men this country has ever produced, a warrior in the ring who became, in his later years, a genuinely powerful voice on mental health, because for a fighter to speak honestly about his own mind took courage of a different kind. I sat down and wrote about him the week he passed away, and of everything he said about his darkest period, one admission tells you almost the whole story of where men are. He was crying every day, and he would never have dreamed of telling his mates, because, in his words, “you just don’t do it”.

“You just don’t do it”. Five words, and the entire code of male friendship written out in full. Nobody teaches the rule and nobody writes it down, yet almost every man I know absorbed it somewhere between the playground and his first job. You can stand next to a mate at the football for twenty years, you can be godfather to his children, and you can still feel that telling him you cried this morning would somehow break the terms of the friendship. Here was a man who spent his working life walking towards people paid to hurt him, and the one thing that felt impossible was a sentence. When Ricky eventually spoke up it took real courage, and I wrote at the time that his honesty would have helped more men than he ever knew. The saddest part is that the rule feels like loyalty from the inside. You tell yourself you are sparing your mates, keeping the good times clear of your bad news, when what you are actually doing is carrying the heaviest thing you own up a hill alone, past a line of people who would gladly have taken a corner each. The rule Ricky broke is still out there, running quietly in millions of friendships, and it is the reason I wanted to write this piece.

When I wrote about Ricky, I put some hard numbers in the post, and I want to sit with them longer here, because a LinkedIn post moves too fast to carry their weight. Men take their own lives at almost three times the rate of women in this country. In England and Wales the male suicide rate reached its highest level in more than twenty years in 2023, and middle-aged men remain the most at risk. Underneath those headlines sits something quieter, something so ordinary it barely gets reported at all. Men are running out of friends.

I understand a small piece of this from the inside. Last year I wrote about a rough stretch, the sleepless nights and the sense of overwhelm I mostly kept to myself, and I said at the time that those seasons feel lonely even when you are surrounded by family and friends. I stand by that. The higher your standards and the stranger your path, the fewer people naturally “get” you, and the easier it becomes to perform being fine. There will be men in your life right now fighting battles in their heads they would be embarrassed to tell you about. I know, because I have been one of them.

That post ended with the sentence I would repeat to every man reading this. You must not think that you are struggling and everyone else is fine. What you don’t see is still there. Every man you compare yourself to is editing, the same way you are, and the only thing that ever sees past the edit is real human connection, actually knowing the people around you rather than admiring their highlights. Which sounds obvious until you ask yourself how many people truly know you, and how recently you gave any of them the chance.

Aristotle got to the heart of this a couple of thousand years before the researchers did. “The wish for friendship comes quickly, but friendship does not.” Wanting a close friend takes an afternoon. Having one takes years of turning up. He treated deep friendship as slow work, something you make rather than something you find, and somewhere in the last few decades I think men largely stopped doing the making. We kept the wish and dropped the work, and we assumed the friendships of our twenties would simply hold their shape while we attended to everything else.

Recession is exactly the right word, because almost no male friendship actually ends. It lapses. There is rarely a falling out or a slammed door, just a slow drift of missed calls and postponed plans. Work expands, children arrive, somebody moves for a job, and a friendship that once ran on its own momentum starts to need deliberate effort at precisely the stage of life when deliberate effort is the thing you have least of. The psychotherapist Robert Garfield says men “stash their friendships away”, coming back to them every couple of years and trusting they will pick up where they left off. And the strange thing is that you usually can pick up where you left off. The cost is everything that happened in between, all the days you carried something alone that a twenty minute phone call would have halved, because ringing out of the blue had started to feel like too big a gesture.

So here is the idea I keep coming back to. I call it the First Call. Everybody needs one person they can ring at their worst moment without tidying themselves up first, and everybody needs to be that person for somebody else. Both halves matter, and the second is the one we forget. It is one thing to know who you would ring at three in the morning. It is another to be certain that somebody out there would ring you, that when the worst night of a friend’s life arrives, yours is the number he reaches for. Ricky’s words haunt me because he plainly had mates he loved. What he felt he did not have was permission to arrive in front of them undone.

And a first call cannot be arranged inside the emergency. Nobody dials a number at their lowest unless thousands of unremarkable conversations came before it, the lifts and the calls about nothing, years of small deposits that mean the worst sentence of your life needs no explanation when you finally say it out loud. A first call is built in peacetime. Which tells you what the real work of friendship actually is. It is maintenance. The dull, repeated, diary-level upkeep that nobody posts about. We treat our fitness as maintenance and our careers as maintenance, and then we treat our friendships as luck. Luck got you your mates. Maintenance is the only thing that keeps them.

The encouraging part is that the maintenance is far smaller than you would guess. The first tool I would hand any man is the eight minute call. Ring a friend and tell him at the start that you have eight minutes, because a short call with a stated end is easy to offer and easy to accept, and it removes the dread of an open-ended catch-up that neither of you has the evening for. If ringing cold feels strange after all this time, send the text first: got eight minutes tomorrow? Nobody on earth is too busy for eight minutes, which is exactly what makes the usual excuse fall apart. And eight minutes of an actual voice does more for a friendship than six months of liking each other’s posts.

The second tool is the calendar test, and I will warn you now that it stings. Open your diary and look at the next thirty days. If a man you would describe as a close friend appears nowhere in them, be honest with yourself about what that means. Right now he is a memory you are fond of rather than a friendship you are in. The test doubles as the fix, because the moment you spot the gap you can close it. Book something. A walk counts, and so does a curry on a weeknight. What lives in the calendar is real, and “we must sort something out soon” is weather. I check this one on myself a few times a year, and I have never once enjoyed the first look.

The third tool belongs to the other side of the silence, and it is simply to ask twice. The first “how are you?” gets the performance, because every man keeps a “yeah, good, mate, busy” loaded by the door. So take the answer, leave a beat, and ask again. How are you really, though? Ricky told us precisely how strong the pull of “you just don’t do it” is, and in my experience a second question is often the only permission a man needs to put something heavy down. The worst case is thirty seconds of awkwardness. The best case is a conversation he replays for years.

I want to be careful here, because tools can make this sound simpler than it is. An eight-minute call will feel forced the first time. The calendar test will surface friendships that have quietly become memories, and some of them will stay that way, because seasons of life are real and some drift is honest. The aim is smaller and more serious than saving every friendship you have ever had. The aim is to make sure that somewhere in your week there are two or three men who know the unperformed version of you, and that the gap between “fine” and the truth stays small enough to speak across.

When I wrote about Ricky, I ended with a hope, that his legacy would be action, and that the men reading would reach out to the men in their lives. Ten months on I believe that more strongly, and this spring I wrote about men again and said that what we need most is better friendships, and spaces where honesty is allowed without shame. Every man I know needs a space like that, and most of the men I know are quietly hoping somebody else will build it. So build it. Send the text this week, and ask the second question when the answer comes back too quickly and too bright. And if you are lucky enough to already have a first call, ring it for no reason at all, while it is still just a phone call, and the voice at the other end is simply a voice you love.

Jake

There is a voice note on my phone that I must have played fifty times by now. It lasts about four seconds. Florence, out of breath, half talking and half shouting: “Guess what, I came first place and I’m going to nationals!” You can hear the competition still going on somewhere behind her, and you can tell she pressed record before she knew what she wanted to say, because the joy would not wait for a sentence to be organised. I played it, then played it again, and for the rest of that day everything else quietly rearranged itself around my daughter’s dancing.

The next morning I sat down and filmed one of my Instagram Reel vidoes about it, and the phrase that came out of my mouth was “the golden blink”. That is what this stretch of life is. These are the years when your children still send you a voice note the second something good happens, when the news does not feel completely real to them until you have heard it. It is golden, and it is a blink, and I filmed the video because for once I could feel both halves of that sentence at exactly the same time.

Then a quieter thought arrived, the kind that tends to turn up once the glow has settled. There will be a day when I pick up Florence from Dance for the last time. That is the strange thing about the last time you do anything with your children. It never announces itself it just simply stops. You find out afterwards (if you ever find out at all) there was a number attached to it all along, some finite count of times I would lift a sleeping child out of the back seat and up the stairs, and I spent almost all of that number assuming it was endless.

I have a habit of doing this sort of arithmetic in public. Last autumn I worked out on LinkedIn that at 46 I had lived roughly 2,400 of my 4,000 weeks. In January I wrote that I turn 48 this year, and that if I am lucky I have about 25 opportunities to welcome in a new year left, and if I am really lucky my kids might be with me for 15 of them, and if I am really, really lucky my parents might still be raising a glass at midnight for a few of them too. Every time I post something like that, a handful of people tell me it reads as bleak. I understand the reaction, and I have come to believe the exact opposite. Doing the sum is what lets me see the years clearly while I am still inside them. The thought is clarifying, and clarity is a gift, even when it arrives with a lump in your throat. The line from those posts that seems to land hardest is the plainest one, that we have finite summers with our kids and finite chances to go on holiday with our parents. People save it and send it to each other, which tells me the counting touches something most of us carry around quietly and hardly ever say out loud.

The writer Oliver Burkeman built a whole book on this called Four Thousand Weeks, and he opens it with the observation that the average human lifespan is “absurdly, insultingly brief”. Live to eighty and you get around four thousand weeks, and that is the good outcome, the one we all quietly assume is ours. I have written before that four thousand weeks sounds like forever until you realise you are already halfway through, and I am, comfortably, with a decent chunk of what remains already spoken for by sleep and the general administration of being alive. What Burkeman understood is that most of us manage the discomfort of that number by refusing to look at it, and that the refusing costs us far more than the looking ever would. We protect ourselves from a moment of vertigo and pay for it with decades of drift.

A few years before Burkeman’s book, a writer called Tim Urban did the looking with a calendar. In a 2015 essay called The Tail End, he counted, in the plainest way possible, how much time he actually had left with the people he loved. I want to be straight about what this was, because it often gets quoted as a study. It was one man sitting down with realistic assumptions about visits and holidays and doing the arithmetic honestly. What it produced is the most quietly devastating number I have ever come across. By the time he finished school at eighteen, he worked out, he had already used up around 93 per cent of the in person time he would ever spend with his parents. The small slice that remained was scattered across the rest of his life in visits and Christmases. Nearly all of it had happened while he was a child, folded invisibly into the ordinary daily texture of home, and nobody had thought to count it while it was being spent.

I read that as a son and felt one kind of ache. Then I read it again as a father and felt a different one entirely, because the sum flips. If Urban’s 93 per cent was true of him and his parents, then something like it is being spent right now between me and my children, at my kitchen table and in the back of my car, on evenings when nothing much appears to be happening. The tail end that essay describes is a long way off for them. Which means I am living inside the rich part of the curve at this precise moment, and the voice note about nationals is what the rich part sounds like.

I have started calling this practice the honest sum.

The honest sum is the deliberate act of counting the thing you would prefer to leave vague. Most of us run a different calculation by default, the comforting one, the one that rounds everything up to plenty and files everything precious under one day. The honest sum replaces all of that with real numbers: your age and theirs, and how often the thing actually happens in the life you lead now, rather than the life you keep meaning to lead once things calm down. It borrows its spirit from Burkeman and its method from Urban, and the reason I trust it is simple. Every time I have done it, the answer has changed how I behaved within the week.

There are three parts to it, at least in the way I practise it, and none of them takes longer than a cup of tea.

The first is to do one honest sum. Just one, done properly, because one real number lands harder than a hundred vague intentions. Pick one person you love and one thing you share, and count how many more times it will realistically happen. Say your parents are in their mid seventies and you see them twice a year, once in the summer and once at Christmas. If they have ten good years left, and we all hope for more while knowing the averages, that is twenty more visits. Twenty. You own shirts you have worn more than twenty times. The whole point of the exercise is that small jolt, the moment a comfortable forever collapses into a number you could count on your fingers and toes.

The second part is to choose your unit, because the unit does the emotional work. Weeks are accurate and mean almost nothing; nobody has ever welled up over a week. So count in the unit that carries the feeling. For me it is summers, because childhood runs on them, and because a childhood only contains eighteen or so before the person you built it for packs a bag and takes their summers elsewhere. By the time a child starts secondary school, most of those are already behind you. And I am aware, writing this in the third week of July, that one of them is being spent right now. Whatever else this month holds for you, a school summer is currently passing through your hands, and it will have gone by September. Sunday lunches work too. Bedtime stories work almost too well, and I would counsel you to do that particular sum sitting down. Whatever you choose, make it the unit of the thing you would genuinely miss, the one whose absence you can already half imagine when the house is quiet.

The third part is the rule that makes the first two worth doing: book the next one. An honest sum that winds you at ten o’clock at night has usually evaporated by breakfast, because the mind is world class at filing uncomfortable numbers somewhere it never looks. So I give every sum a deadline of a day. Within 24 hours, the number has to turn into something with a date on it. Book the trip. Make the call. I have written those exact words on LinkedIn more than once, and I keep writing them because they keep being the entire answer. A number you act on becomes a memory. A number you merely feel becomes a mood, and moods pass, and then you are back inside the comfortable lie of plenty.

People sometimes assume that living like this must make a person morbid, that walking around with these numbers in your head must drain the colour out of things. My experience has been the reverse. The counting is what puts the colour in. Once you know, roughly and honestly, how many summers or Sunday lunches are left, you stop attending them with half of yourself while the other half answers emails in its head. You start noticing the texture of them while they are still in your hands. The unexamined years are the ones that blur. The counted ones stay sharp, because you met them knowing what they were worth.

And I should say clearly that all of this arithmetic is, underneath everything, about attention. The numbers were always there, whether I looked or refused to look, ticking down at exactly the same speed either way. All the honest sum changes is what I do inside them. It gets me to the dance competitions and to my mum and dad’s kitchen while those places still have me in their numbers, and it makes me strangely grateful on the very ordinary evenings, the ones that would otherwise vanish without a trace, because I now understand that they were always the ones being counted.

So yes, Florence is going to nationals, and I already know precisely where I will be when she dances, because that is one of the fixtures the sum will never let me trade away. And one of these evenings, on a drive home that will look like every other drive home, she will fall asleep in the back of the car, and I will lift her out and carry her up the stairs, and it may be the last time I ever do it. I will have no way of knowing. Nobody ever does. All I can control is this: because I have done the counting, I take those stairs slowly now. If it turns out to be the final carry, I want to have been paying attention all the way up.

Jake

I have been sacked exactly once in my life, and it was by McDonald’s.

I was a teenager, and it was already the worst year I had known.

My friends had finished school and gone travelling, sending word back from the other side of the world, while I stayed in Norwich to redo the year I had failed. The job was supposed to be the one thing going right, a bit of money and somewhere to be. Then I lost that as well. So there I was, the boy repeating school while everyone else moved on, and now also the boy who could not even keep a job at McDonald’s.

The strange part was the smallest job I have ever had, and I have worked in some remarkable places since, yet I can still recall the feeling of being told I was not wanted more sharply than plenty of moments that were supposed to matter far more. A person at work made a decision about me, and I carried it out of the building and into everything else going wrong that year. Nobody warns you about that part, that the decision takes a minute and you wear it for months.

I have been thinking about bosses lately, because when you ask people about their working lives, they hardly ever talk about the work. They talk about a person. The manager who believed in them years before they believed in themselves, or the one who made them feel small in a meeting a decade ago and, in some quiet corner of their head, still does. A while back I wrote a short Instagram post that began: “A bad boss can break you. A great boss can change your life.” It travelled further than almost anything I have written, and what struck me most about the response was how quickly people began tagging some of their favourite bosses. We describe careers as if they are built out of decisions and opportunities. Mostly they are built out of bosses.

It took me years to see that, because it is never how we choose jobs. We choose the title and the salary, and maybe the company name our parents will recognise. The person we will actually answer to every day barely enters the decision, and yet that person will shape the daily experience of the job more than everything else on the contract put together.

Do the sums on an ordinary week and you can see why. If you work full time, you are awake for around sixteen hours a day, and for eight or nine of them you are inside a mood that one person has an enormous hand in setting. On a normal weekday, plenty of us spend more waking hours with our boss than with the people we love most. We would never accept that arithmetic anywhere else in life. We agonise for months over where to live, then hand the biggest single share of our waking attention to whoever happened to be on the interview panel.

And a boss does not stay at work. That is the part we all politely pretend about. The boss comes home with you. They are there in the way you check your phone at the dinner table, because a message from them can still reach you at seven o’clock. They are there in the shortness with your kids that you cannot quite explain on a Tuesday evening, and in the flatness your partner has learned to read before you have taken your coat off. My children have never met the people I have worked for but they have lived with every single one of them.

The American writer Studs Terkel spent years interviewing ordinary people about their jobs for his book Working, and he came away convinced that work is a search for “daily meaning as well as daily bread”. I keep going back to that line, because the bread is fixed on the day you sign the contract. The meaning is decided again every day afterwards, and the person with the most power over it is whoever manages you. Same wage, same desk, and under one manager the job feels like a place where you matter, while under another it becomes somewhere you slowly go missing.

For a long time I would have called all of this a feeling rather than a fact. Then I came across a Swedish study that made it physical. Researchers led by Anna Nyberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm followed more than three thousand working men for around a decade, having first asked them to rate their managers on ordinary behaviour, things like whether they explained what was expected and whether they showed consideration for the person in front of them. The men who rated their bosses well went on to develop markedly less heart disease. The men who rated them poorly developed more of it, and the gap widened with every additional year spent under the same management. The quality of a person’s boss showed up, years later, in the condition of their heart.

So here is how I have come to define the job itself. A boss is the person who decides what your evenings feel like. Everything else on the job description is detail next to that. I think of it as the Front Door Rule: you can measure any boss, including yourself if you happen to be one, by the state of the person who walks through their front door at the end of the day. When a boss is doing the job well, the person who comes home still has something left for the people who matter, and can talk about tomorrow without their shoulders rising. When a boss is doing it badly, the person who comes home is a reduced version of the one who left that morning, and everyone in the house absorbs the difference. If the second description has been true of your house for months, the job is failing at the only level that really counts, whatever the payslip says.

None of this is much use unless you can act on it, so let me offer the three small things I would actually do, whichever side of the desk you sit on.

The first is the Sunday night test. For the next four Sundays, somewhere around eight o’clock, write one honest line about how you feel about the morning. Any job produces the odd Sunday of dread; that is normal working life. What you are looking for is the pattern. Four heavy Sundays in a row is your body handing you a report you have been refusing to read, and it is remarkable how differently you treat a feeling once it exists in your own handwriting instead of swimming around your chest at midnight.

The second is the one good boss list. Think of the best boss you ever had. Most people can name theirs in about two seconds, which tells you how rare they are. Now write down what that person actually did, and keep it to behaviour you could copy. They asked what you thought before offering what they thought. They said thank you for specific things rather than in general. They defended you in rooms you were never in, and they told you the difficult thing early instead of kindly and far too late. A list like that has two uses. If you are looking for work, it becomes the standard you quietly interview your next manager against, because you are allowed to be choosing them too. And if even one person answers to you, it becomes your actual job description, since you already know from your own life that these behaviours are the ones that change people. Do the things on your list.

The third is what I think of as the real payslip. Every job pays you and every job charges you, and only one side of that arrives in an envelope. So write the other side yourself. On one half of a page, list what the job genuinely gives you, the money and the people you would miss. On the other half, list what it takes, starting with your sleep and ending with the version of you your family gets in the evenings. Look at it honestly every month. A hard job that is paying you in growth can be worth an expensive season, and I have had a few of those. But when the charging column has grown for three straight months while the giving column has stayed exactly where it was, you are in a bad trade, and the wisest move available is to start planning your exit while you still have the energy to plan one.

If you are on the other side of this, and somebody’s evenings are yours to shape, I would not wait for a leadership course to tell you what to do about it. Most of the power sits in behaviour so small it never gets written down. It lives in whether you ask a question before giving an instruction, and in whether people leave a conversation with you feeling taller or shorter than when it started. You do not need a big title for any of it. The supervisor of a teenage shift worker is quietly setting the tone of somebody’s whole year.

I know how much the small versions of this matter because of what happened after McDonald’s let me go. Months later I turned up at a tiny cable channel I had found through a letter pinned up at school, and I asked for work experience, honest about the fact that my last employer had sacked me. Somebody there decided that a teenager with nothing on his CV was worth five pounds and a weekend of their patience. That was the whole transaction, one small decision by someone with a little power over someone with none, and every good thing in my working life has grown from it. The people who ran that place could never have seen the edges of what they set in motion. That is the real deal you sign when you become a boss of any size. Your influence stops being measurable, and it goes home in other people’s cars.

Which brings me back to the sacking, because in the end even that one obeyed the rule. For years I told the story as a humiliation. These days I tell it as the shove that sent me through a better door, and I genuinely live by the idea that things happen for me rather than to me. I can only say that because the story eventually turned, and I know that if you are inside the middle of your own version right now, dreading Sundays and going home quieter than you left, the turning feels impossible to picture. So I will simply tell you what I wish someone had told me back then. One manager’s verdict is mostly a fact about them and the place they run. Bosses decide a great deal, your evenings and your Sundays, and for a while they can even decide your confidence. Your worth was never on their desk.

Jake

The O2 is a long way from where we live. Three hours from our bit of Norwich, give or take, and then three hours back, with the evening in between. By the time we turned onto our own road that night we had been in that car together, the two of us, for the best part of eight hours.

That is the part I keep coming back to. We talked the whole way. Not about anything that mattered. The children. Something a friend had said that we could not stop chewing over. A holiday we keep half planning and will probably never book. It was one long, wandering, mostly pointless conversation that started somewhere near the ring road and never really stopped. Eight hours of it. And when we finally pulled up outside the house, I noticed something that genuinely surprised me. I had not once, in all that time, wished it was over.

We met in a nightclub in Norwich in 1999. I was not much to look at back then and I had even less to offer, and by any sensible measure she should have finished her drink and kept walking. She did not. Almost everything good in my life traces back, in one way or another, to that room and that night. But the version of us I love most is not the big one. It is not the wedding, or the moving in, or any of the milestones you are supposed to frame and put on a wall. It is the ordinary one. It is the two of us in a car for eight hours, talking about nothing, in no rush at all for it to end.

There is a line from Nietzsche that I never expected to be the most romantic thing I would ever read. He said that when you are choosing who to marry, you should ask yourself one question above all the others. Will I still enjoy talking to this person when we are old? Everything else, he reckoned, is passing. Looks fade, passion cools, circumstances change. But the vast majority of the hours you spend with someone across a whole life are spent in conversation, and so the thing you are really choosing, underneath the romance of it, is the person you are going to be talking to until the end. Marriage, he wrote, is one long conversation.

I read that years ago and it has quietly rearranged how I think about the whole thing. We are sold marriage as a series of peaks. The proposal, the day, the honeymoon, the first house. Nobody sells you the eight hours in the car. Nobody puts the Tuesday-night debrief about nothing on the highlight reel. But that ordinary talk is the actual substance of it. That is what a marriage is mostly made of, the long unremarkable conversation that runs underneath everything else, and as far as I can tell the couples who keep that conversation alive are the ones who go the distance.

And I want to be honest about what the eight hours actually contained, because it would be easy to make it sound more profound than it was. We did not solve anything. We spent a good twenty minutes on whether one of the kids’ teachers is secretly brilliant or secretly useless. We argued gently about the fastest way round the M25. We laughed about people we have not seen in fifteen years. If you had recorded it and played it back, you would have found almost nothing worth keeping. And that is the point I keep missing and then relearning. The value was never in the content. It was in the fact that after all this time we still wanted to be the one the other one was telling it to.

For a long time I thought love was the grand gesture. The surprise, the trip, the big romantic swing. I am fairly sure now that it is the small gesture, repeated. It is whether you actually turn towards the person when they say something to you, or whether you half-hear it and let it drift past. And it turns out someone has spent thirty years proving exactly that in a laboratory.

There is a psychologist called John Gottman who watches couples talk, and then waits to see who is still together years later. He found that all day long, people in a relationship are making tiny, easy-to-miss requests for attention. He calls them bids. A comment about a bird on the fence. A sigh. Reading something out loud from a phone. Each one is a small invitation that really means, are you there, are you with me. And every time, the other person can either turn towards it or turn away. The couples who were still happily together years later had turned towards those little bids the overwhelming majority of the time, while the couples who came apart had mostly turned away. It was not the big arguments that predicted the ending. It was the thousands of tiny moments where one person reached out and the other one did, or did not, reach back.

When I read that, I thought about the car. Eight hours of bids, back and forth, none of them important, every one of them answered. That is what the drive home actually was. It was not a conversation about anything. It was two people turning towards each other, again and again, for eight hours, out of nothing more than habit and the fact that we still genuinely like each other’s company. And I have started to think that the habit, far more than the romance, is the thing that has held us together.

Because the conversation changes over twenty five years, and that is the part I did not understand when I was twenty two. The talk we had at the start was electric and it was also mostly performance, both of us trying to be the most interesting version of ourselves. The talk we have now is nothing like that. It is shorthand and old jokes and half sentences that the other one finishes. It is duller, if you were listening in from outside, and it is also immeasurably better, because it is real. I notice it most in the silences now. You can drive for twenty minutes without a word and it is not empty, it is comfortable, two people who do not need to perform for each other any more. But you only ever earn the good silence by putting in the thousands of hours of ordinary talk first.

Here is what quietly frightens me, the more I sit with it. The conversation is not guaranteed. It is not a fixed feature of a marriage that stays switched on by itself once you have signed the papers. It is a fire, and fires go out if nobody feeds them. I have watched it happen to people I know. Two people who clearly once had the eight-hour drive in them, sitting across a restaurant table with nothing left to say, not because they hate each other but because somewhere along the line they stopped turning towards the small things, and the conversation slowly starved. Nobody decided it. Nobody had the row. It just stopped being fed, one unanswered bid at a time.

So I have started treating the conversation as the actual work of the marriage, and I have given it a name, because naming a thing makes you protect it. I call it the long conversation. The idea is simple. If a marriage is one continuous talk that runs from the nightclub to the last drive, then staying married is mostly the job of not letting that talk stop. Not deepening it, not making it more profound, just refusing to let it go quiet. That is a smaller and far kinder job than the one we usually set ourselves, and it turns out there are only three things you really have to do to keep it going.

The first is to find your car. Most couples do not lose the conversation in a crisis. They lose it in the admin, in the schedules and the school runs and the who is picking up what, until the only sentences left in a day are logistics, and logistics is not connection. So you have to ring-fence a pocket of talk that is not about running anything. The car worked for us because a car traps you. There is nowhere to go and nothing to scroll. Everyone has a version of the car if they look for it.

The second is to turn towards the small bids. This is the Gottman finding made practical, and it is almost embarrassingly simple. When your partner says something minor, some throwaway observation about a neighbour or a headline or a thing the dog just did, that is a bid. Answer it. Look up, put the phone down, say something back. You will get dozens of these a day and most of the time you will be tired and busy, and the marriage is quietly built out of how often you manage to reach back anyway.

The third I only do occasionally, and it is the one that keeps me honest. Every so often I ask myself Nietzsche’s question, do I still enjoy talking to this person, and then I make myself ask the harder half he left out, am I still someone worth talking to. Because the long conversation has two people in it, and the surest way to keep the other one turning towards you is to be interesting, and kind, and present enough that turning towards you is easy.

None of this is a guarantee. Nothing keeps a marriage safe, and I would not trust anyone who told you otherwise. But the couples I most admire, the ones who still have the eight-hour drive in them after decades, are almost never the ones who got the grand gestures right. They are the ones who never let the small conversation stop.

One day, a long way off I hope, one of us is going to be in a car without the other. That is the deal you sign up for at the start and there is no clever way around it. And I do not think the one left behind will sit there wishing they had thrown a bigger wedding, or booked a better honeymoon, or framed more of the peaks. I think they will wish for one more ordinary drive. Three hours up and three hours back, talking about nothing that matters, in no hurry at all for it to end.

That is the thing I have right now, tonight, still. And I am trying very hard to notice it while it is still mine to notice.

Jake

The plan, when Harriet asked me on the Thursday night what we were actually going to do up there, was: nothing. Uno. Manhunt round the pool. A hack around a pitch and putt course where nobody in our family would break 50. That was it. That was the whole itinerary.

I want to be honest about something. For the first few hours after we arrived, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I am not naturally good at stopping. I have a notes app that looks like the inside of an anxious mind. I check my phone the way some people check a door is locked. There is always something pulling. A message to reply to. An idea to capture. A thread to follow. Even on holiday, there’s a version of me that can’t quite switch off the broadcast.

So the first morning at Gleneagles, I sat on the edge of the bed at seven o’clock and I just waited. No agenda. No optimised morning routine. Just the light coming in through the curtains and the sound of the kids already arguing about something downstairs, and Harriet telling them to keep their voices down.

By Saturday afternoon, something had shifted.

We were on the pitch and putt. I say ‘pitch and putt’. It was more of a mutual comedy show. Florence was playing with a putter that came up to her shoulder. My son was treating every hole like it was the Masters. We were laughing so hard at one point that I had to stop walking. I couldn’t tell you what the score was. I don’t think anyone was counting.

That evening, after dinner, Florence did cartwheels and handstands on the grass with the Scottish Highlands behind her. In a way that didn’t quite look real. The sky was that particular shade you only get in Scotland, where the light seems to take longer to leave, and she was just spinning in it, completely unconscious of how it looked, completely unself-conscious, completely herself.

I stood and watched her and thought: this is it. This is the whole thing.

Not any one particular big moment. Not a planned memory. Just this.

There’s a poet called William Martin. He wrote a book called The Parent’s Tao Te Ching, and there is one passage I come back to more than any other. He writes: ‘Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life.’

I read that for the first time a few years ago and I remember feeling slightly defensive. My whole career has been built around extraordinary lives. Four hundred conversations with the world’s best performers. Books about high performance. And yet when I read those lines, something in me recognised them as true in a way that was uncomfortable.

The extraordinary is not what I will remember.

I will remember Florence doing cartwheels in the fading Scottish light. I will remember my son’s face when he finally holed a putt he’d been attempting for about seven minutes. I will remember sitting with Harriet that evening, talking about nothing in particular, and feeling like I hadn’t felt in months.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what made people genuinely happy. His finding was this: the best experiences in life are not the ones we plan. They are the ones that absorb us completely. The ones where we forget to measure them. He called it flow. What I am describing at Gleneagles is, I think, something similar. Not flow in the sports science sense. Flow in the simpler sense of just letting the day go where it goes, without steering it.

Csikszentmihalyi found that people consistently overestimated how happy a planned experience would make them, and underestimated the happiness available in ordinary, unstructured time. We are, as a species, not very good at predicting where our best moments will come from.

Gleneagles confirmed this for me.

I had been to places before that cost more and delivered less. I have sat in exactly the right restaurant and felt vaguely anxious. I have ticked off the thing on the list and felt the list get longer. The optimised holiday, the perfectly curated long weekend, the experience that was supposed to be the memory, these things tend to create a different kind of exhaustion.

What we had in Scotland was something else. We had three days of Uno and bad golf and too much food and eight consecutive hours of sleep and conversations that went nowhere and arrived somewhere anyway. It was a whole lot of nothing. And at the same time, it was a whole lot of everything.

I have been thinking since about the phrase ‘recreation.’ We use it to mean leisure. A break from work. But the word itself means something more literal: re-creation. The making of yourself again. Which implies that somewhere in the doing of nothing, something is being built.

The climate of a childhood is not set by the extraordinary moments. It is not set by the trip abroad or the special occasion or the planned experience that will make a great photograph. It is set, day by day and weekend by weekend, by the accumulated temperature of ordinary time. By whether the house is warm. By whether the game of Uno is taken seriously or treated as an inconvenience. By whether you are present in the small moments, because the small moments are the only moments there actually are.

Florence does not know that I watched her do cartwheels on the grass. She was not performing for me. She was just being eight, in Scotland, in the fading light, with the mountains behind her.

That is the thing I want to hold onto. Not the photograph. The actual moment. The one that didn’t cost anything and can’t be planned for and will not appear on any itinerary.

We drove home on Sunday. Eight hours in the car, there and back. Harriet and I talked almost the entire time. The kids argued, fell asleep, woke up again. At some point, somewhere south of Edinburgh, I looked across at her and thought: this is also it. This, too, is the whole thing.

Not the destination. Not the hotel. Not the pitch and putt. The car, and the conversation, and the fact that we were going home.

The nothing plan: three tools from a weekend with no agenda

It is a whole lot of nothing. And at the same time, it is a whole lot of everything.

That line came to me standing on the grass at Gleneagles, watching Florence do cartwheels with the Highlands behind her. It sounds simple. But the more I sit with it, the more I think it is the most useful reframe I have found for the question of how to actually spend your time.

We are conditioned to fill. To plan. To arrive somewhere so that we can say we arrived. And in doing so, we systematically underweight the thing that actually creates the life we are trying to build: ordinary, unstructured, low-stakes time with the people we love.

These are three tools that came from that weekend and from the thinking that followed it.

The Nothing Plan. Book one ‘do nothing’ day per quarter as deliberately as you book anything else. No agenda. No activities. The only rule: if it needs a ticket, a booking, or a screen, it does not count.

The simplest one is also the hardest. Block one day per quarter in your calendar that has no agenda. No plans, no optimised morning routine, no activities. If the day needs a booking, it does not qualify. The point is not rest, exactly. It is receptivity. The capacity to let the day show you what it has, rather than showing the day what you want from it.

When I did this at Gleneagles, the first few hours were uncomfortable. There is a version of me that equates being still with falling behind. But by Saturday afternoon, something had changed. The discomfort had passed, and what was underneath it was better than anything I had planned.

Start smaller than you think. It does not need to be a weekend in Scotland. It can be a Sunday with no plans in Norwich. The geography is not the point.

The Climate Vote. Every interaction you have with your child today is a vote for the temperature of their childhood. Ask yourself at the end of each day: what did I vote for?

The climate of a childhood is not determined by the big events. It is determined by the accumulated weight of ordinary moments. The game of Uno you played properly. The Saturday morning you were present.

Each interaction is a vote. Not a deciding vote. Just one vote. The score adds up.

You do not need to get every moment right. You need to be paying attention to what you are voting for, more days than not.

At the end of the day, ask yourself one question: what did I vote for today? Not what did I achieve. Not what did I produce. What was the temperature of my home today, and what did I do to set it?

The Cartwheel Test. When your child is doing something entirely for its own sake, no audience, no purpose, no reward, you have done your job. Notice it. Stay in it.

Florence was not doing cartwheels for me. She did not know I was watching. She was doing them because she is eight years old and the grass was wide and the day had no plan and there was no reason not to.

That is the test. Not whether they say they enjoyed themselves. Not whether the holiday felt like a holiday. Whether there is a moment, any moment, where your child is doing something entirely for its own sake, unselfconsciously, without an audience.

When that happens, your job is not to document it. Not to call attention to it. Not to make it into a memory. Your job is to be in the same room as it, quietly, and to know that this is what a good weekend looks like.

The cartwheel test is not something you engineer. You just have to create the conditions. Which is what the Nothing Plan is for.

Nothing that happened at Gleneagles was remarkable. That is exactly the point.

The remarkable thing was that we stopped trying to make it remarkable. And in the gap where the agenda used to be, the weekend put the thing we were actually looking for.

Jake

The plane got in mid-morning and I had a few hours to kill before the event, so I dropped my bag at the hotel and went for a walk. The city was cold and bright in the way Dublin can be in the spring, the light bouncing off the Liffey, everything looking like it had just been freshly painted. I had no plan. I just walked.

I had been carrying Eddie Jordan with me all year. EJ had died a few months earlier, and I had said the things you say when someone you love dies. I had spoken at the tributes. I had nodded along to the highlight reels. I had told the Schumacher story and the Damon story and the story about him on the bagpipes. But somewhere underneath all of that public remembering, I had not actually let myself sit with him being gone.

The thing that broke the seal was a film Whisper had made. A short, beautifully shot obituary, and Bono had given a line in it that I could not get out of my head. He called Eddie a soul bubbling in Dublin. That was the phrase. A soul bubbling in Dublin, who then moved to Bray and helped invent modern Formula One in the process.

I stood on a bridge over the river and I let myself miss him. Not the F1 paddock version. Not the TV character with the loud shirts. The man.

What I kept thinking about, standing there, was how EJ used to walk into a room. He did not arrive. He arrived. Doors opened slightly differently when he came through them. Conversation tilted towards him before he had said anything. He was not loud, that is the wrong word, although he could be very loud when he wanted to be. He was warm. The air was a degree or two higher around him, and you noticed it immediately. You felt yourself sit up a little. You felt yourself become slightly more interesting.

I have spent more than twenty years interviewing people for a living. In radio studios. In F1 garages. In podcast studios. At events. In green rooms. In the back of cars between hotel and venue. The F1 paddock is a particularly good classroom for this, because it is small and intense and the same people see each other every fortnight for thirty weekends a year. You cannot fake yourself in that environment. Whatever you actually are, the other ten people in the catering tent at Spa already know.

You learn very quickly that there are two types of people in any room. There are people who walk in and read the temperature. And there are people who walk in and set the temperature.

Most of us are thermometers. We come in, we sense the energy in the room, we adjust to it. If the room is flat, we go flat. If the room is anxious, we go anxious. If the room is excited, we ride the wave. We are mirrors with legs. We tell ourselves this is being sensitive, being attuned, being a good reader of people. Sometimes it really is. Often, if I am honest with myself, it is just absorbing whatever weather is already in the room and then calling that absorption our personality.

A small number of people are thermostats. They walk in and the room changes around them. Not because they perform. Performers are exhausting, and we can smell them at fifty paces. Thermostats just have a settled internal climate, and they bring it through the door with them. They are not louder than anyone else. They are not always the most senior person in the room. Sometimes they are the quietest person there. But everyone else’s nervous system finds them and tunes to them. EJ was a thermostat. Damian Hughes is one. Sven-Goran Eriksson was one, in his own very quiet way. My eldest, Florence, is increasingly one, which is interesting to watch from a few feet away.

Here is what the research says about this, and it is wilder than I expected when I first went looking for it.

In 1993, three psychologists called Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson published the foundational paper on what they called emotional contagion. The headline finding is that human beings automatically and unconsciously mimic the facial expressions, vocal tone and body posture of the people we are near, and that this small mimicry actually causes us to feel the emotions of those people in our own bodies. We are not metaphorically catching each other’s moods. We are literally catching them. Through tiny muscle movements that happen below the level of awareness, faster than thought.

What that means for a room is something most of us have never properly absorbed. Whoever has the strongest, clearest, most settled emotional signal in the room is, in effect, the broadcaster. Everyone else is tuning to that signal whether they want to or not.

If you walk into your kitchen at six o’clock in the evening, tired and short and quietly furious about an email from earlier in the day, your children’s nervous systems are not making a calm and rational judgement about whether to match you. They are just matching you. By dinner the whole house feels tense, and nobody can tell you why. You can.

If you walk into a meeting room jangled and rushed, the meeting will be jangled and rushed. The agenda did not do that. You did.

This is uncomfortable to write down, because it removes a lot of the excuses I have made over the years for being a thermometer at home. It was a long day. The traffic was bad. The kids were already winding each other up before I got in. All of that may be true. None of it makes me less of a broadcaster. The signal I am putting out is not optional. The only thing that is optional is whether I am paying attention to what I am broadcasting.

The 2,500-year-old version of this idea comes from Heraclitus, who said that character is destiny. I think for any room, character is climate. The character of whoever has the biggest emotional footprint becomes, very quickly, the weather everyone else lives in. Kids included. Partners included. Colleagues included. You.

Which means the question we all carry around, half-consciously, is not really how am I feeling. The question is what am I broadcasting. They are not the same question. You can feel a lot of things and still choose what you put into the room. That choice is the whole job.

Standing on that bridge in Dublin, watching the river, I realised that the thing I missed most about EJ was not the F1 wins, or the stories, or the laugh, big as that laugh was. It was that you were warmer when he was around. Not metaphorically. Actually. You felt better about yourself in his presence. You felt more interesting, because he was being interested in you. He set a climate of curiosity and warmth and mischief, and so for the length of time you were near him, you became a slightly more curious, warmer, more mischievous version of yourself. He gave you a version of yourself back that you preferred.

That is the legacy. Not the trophies. Not the wins. The temperature.

I think about that a lot now when I walk into our house at the end of a day. I think about it before I press join on a meeting. I think about it before I step out on a stage. Who needs me to be the thermostat in here. What climate do I want to set. What is the temperature already in the room, and is matching it actually what is needed, or is matching it just easier than choosing.

There is a version of this question I now ask myself in the car before I get home. Not what kind of day have I had. Not what mood am I bringing in. Just: what climate do my family need me to set tonight. Some nights the answer is calm. Some nights it is playful. Some nights it is firm. Almost never is the answer the mood I happen to have arrived home in. That mood is information. It is not an instruction.

It is a small question. It changes everything.

Be the spark of light in the room. Not the brightest. Not the loudest. The warmest. The one who, when they leave, leaves the temperature a little higher than they found it. That is what Dublin gave me back. That is what I still take from EJ. And that, I think, is the only version of legacy that actually lasts. Long after the wins are forgotten and the obituary clips have stopped circulating, what people remember is what it felt like to be in a room with you.

Jake

If you want to do something with this, the Room Audit. Three questions, two minutes total. Save it, screenshot it, leave it in the kitchen if it helps.

Pre-Room Check. Mid-Room Reset. Post-Room Reflection.

Welcome!

For the last twenty five years I’ve had a front row seat to some of the world’s most fascinating people, and I’ve learned a huge amount from them along the way.

Sportspeople operating under enormous pressure. Founders carrying responsibility most of us never see. Entertainers trying to stay grounded in strange environments. People who, from the outside, looked like they had everything sorted.

But the most valuable things I’ve taken from those conversations are rarely the polished answers. It’s usually the throwaway comment after the interview, or the thing someone admits once the cameras are off. I’ve been writing those moments down for years, and this Substack is my attempt to make sense of them.

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Some of it will come from conversations I’ve had. Some from mistakes I’ve made myself. Some from trying to navigate the same things most of us are navigating: ambition, marriage, parenting, pressure, balance, identity, purpose. All of it unfiltered.

If you’ve found me through Instagram recently, you’ll recognise the tone already. The conversations around fatherhood, relationships, emotional control, modern life, success, and what actually matters underneath all of it. That’s what this space is about.

It’s separate from High Performance. I love the podcast, and a lot of what I’ve learned has come through those interviews, but this is more personal. Less “host asking questions”, more “here’s something I’ve genuinely been thinking about”.

Every Tuesday I’ll publish a new piece rooted in a real moment from my own life: a conversation, a mistake, or a shift in perspective that’s stuck with me. The aim isn’t to preach or pretend I’ve got it all worked out. It’s to share ideas that might help you look at your own life a little differently.

The first part of each Tuesday piece is free to everyone. If you subscribe, you’ll get the rest: the practical part at the bottom, where I take the same idea and turn it into something you can actually use, with the frameworks and exercises I lean on myself.

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And once a month I’ll go live with paid subscribers. I’ll talk through whichever idea has struck a chord that month, then open the floor and answer your questions directly. It’s the closest thing to sitting across the table from me, and it’s the part I’m most looking forward to.

I’ll also post regularly in Notes: short thoughts, things I’m reading, ideas I’m still mulling over.

The older I get, the less interested I am in people pretending to have all the answers. What matters to me now is honest conversation, useful ideas, and trying to build a good life without losing yourself in the process. That’s what I want this space to be.

If that sounds like something you’d like to be part of, please subscribe.

Glad you’re here.

Jake

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