Building business, wealth, and family by design.
There’s a particular kind of person I’ve spent real time around, and the pattern is always the same: the harder they feel something, the more certain they become they’re right. The intensity alone is the proof, to them…JUST BECAUSE they feel it strongly — therefore to them, it’s real and true, therefore you owe them, … Read more
A couple of years back, I clipped a stranger with my bag once. An accident — I lifted it, it swung wider than I’d judged, and it caught the woman behind me, out of my blindspot. It’s my fault, and I should have checked before lifting my bag (though allow me to add also…not sure … Read more
Early in my career, a manager decided I should go. Not fired — pushed. Pressured to back down or get out. Around the same period of my life, joint ventures with a couple of friends flipped over, a few times. A business stint went sour. None of it gradual — the kind of news that … Read more
There are three of you. I learned this the expensive way. What I traded without noticing When I started building businesses in 2008, I went all in. Learning, refining, keeping things afloat. I told myself it was a season. The bill arrived in pieces. My body first. I went from a fit 75kg to an … Read more
Here’s an evening nobody ever chose. Get home. Eat. Sink into the couch or scroll into the phone. Three hours pass without registering — no memory of time, no awareness of thought, hand moving snacks to mouth on autopilot. I know this state personally. In my TV years I didn’t watch television so much as … Read more
Last week my son David — nine years old — started playing “Dumb Ways to Die” in this the show he’s watching. I knew it instantly. That song is from 2012 — an Australian train company made it to stop people walking in front of trains. I’d half-forgotten it existed. Fourteen years later it’s colonising … Read more
By every rule of the early-retirement genre, I’m doing this wrong. The genre says you build the assets, hit the number, and exit. The whole point of the machine is to stop needing to work. And yet here I am — past the point where work is compulsory, opening two new clinics this year, by … Read more
In 2019 I wrote a post about how to stop complaining. I just reread it, and the strangest thing in it is one word I used without noticing where I’d taken it from. I wrote that repeated negative thoughts become “strongholds” in your mind. That’s not a self-help word. It’s Paul’s word — and I … Read more
On a Friday night in March 2018, my wife and I were in a cab heading home from IKEA — a date night, because that’s the kind of exciting couple we are kakakakaka — and the driver started talking business. Not small talk. Advice. Unprompted, structured, and delivered with the confidence of a man who … Read more
In December 2019 I wrote a post about happiness with one genuinely good idea buried in it. Here’s the passage, lightly cleaned up — it was the most alive thing I wrote that whole year: If you have a toothache. You can watch a movie, buy a phone, hang out with someone — whatever — … Read more