Month: October 2025

Someone recently told me a remarkable story.

A startup founder they knew had been working on an idea. Their startup got acquired. Ten days later, the acquiring company itself was bought – for billions. Overnight, this hopeful founder went from years of uncertainty to tens of millions in net worth.

Every so often, we hear these stories. They’re intoxicating. But, every time I hear them, I remind myself that they’re also the exception, not the rule.

For the rest of us, the path is far less glamorous. It’s long, often messy, and built the old-fashioned way – through thoughtful choices, strategic thinking, relentless hard work, and yes, the occasional dollop of luck.

The key, IMHO, is not to expect windfalls.

Expect the grind. Anything else is just a bonus.

A good friend recently shared a story that moved me deeply.

She’d met a former colleague after several years. During their conversation, this colleague revealed that back when they worked together, she had been going through an incredibly dark time – so dark that she was suicidal.

One day, she had decided that was it; she was going to end her life at the end of the day.

At work on that day, this friend took a moment to express a heartfelt thank you – telling her how much she was appreciated and how lucky the team was to have her.

It turns out that simple act of appreciation changed her mind. She proceeded to turn her life around and get to a much better place.

Meeting again years later, she finally shared the impact those words had on her.

My friend was moved to tears. And I was blown away.

We rarely know the impact we’re having on someone else. A kind word, a small gesture, can mean more than we ever realize.

As the saying goes, it’s more important to be kind than to be clever. This story showed me just how true – and how powerful – that can be.

There’s a great bit in Modern Family with Phil Dunphy and his longtime rival – a fellow geek who always seemed cooler.

In one episode, Phil pretends Gloria (Sofía Vergara) is his wife. This old rival looks at him and says: “Wait… I thought you married Claire. I was always so jealous. I thought you were the luckiest guy on the planet.”

And that’s when it hits Phil – and us.

We spend so much time looking at others, wishing we had a piece of their life. But the truth is, more often than not, they’re looking back at us thinking the same.

It’s played for laughs, but like the best humor, it lands with a powerful truth: we are often luckier than we realize.

One of the biggest challenges of our uber-connected lives is remembering this simple truth: the only business worth focusing on is our own.

That means not counting someone else’s money.

Not chasing someone else’s milestone.

Not wishing we had their vacation, their house, or their version of “success.”

The only sustainable path to a life well lived is to focus on the sequence of steps in our journey – and tune out the rest. Everything else is noise.

“Mind your own business” might have once sounded like a harsh takedown.

Today, it might just be the most valuable piece of feedback we could ever receive.

“Dance like nobody’s watching… but text, email, and post like it will be read in court someday.”

A lawyer I know shared this twist on a classic saying.

Funny and true.

A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to speak with middle and high school students. It’s always hard to know what will resonate at that age, but I shared these three reflections:

1. There is no one path. Careers don’t follow a straight line – they zig and zag in unexpected ways. Most importantly, everyone’s journey looks different, and that’s okay. The real work is in being curious, figuring out the path you want to take, and making sure you take the best next step.

2. Hard work is just the entrance ticket. Hard work doesn’t guarantee success, but without it, your chances drop dramatically. Opportunities have a way of showing up after you put in the work.

3. A healthy body and a calm mind are the foundation. No matter what career you pursue, everything rests on your physical and mental health. Your energy, sleep, fitness, and peace of mind are the foundation on which you build your career and impact over the long run.

Given their age, it felt too early to talk choosing your life partner. That would be #1 on my list. Great partners are like great teammates – they complement us and make 1+1 > 2. That choice shapes more of your life – and your career – than you might imagine.

We watched the one and only Sir David Attenborough’s Oceans on Netflix recently. It was both sobering and awe-inspiring. 5 reflections:

1. Industrial fishing is devastating. There is a segment in the documentary where you just follow a trawler/dredger under the ocean. These vessels and their equipment don’t just harvest fish, they bulldoze entire ecosystems, tearing up sea beds and discarding huge amounts of life.

“Overfishing” feels too mild a term for the scale of destruction. It has made me think differently about seafood.

2. Phytoplankton absorb more carbon than all the world’s forests combined and generate about half the oxygen we breathe. Yet only ~2–3% of the ocean is effectively protected, far short of the 30% global goal by 2030. Protecting the ocean is about climate balance as much as biodiversity.

3. Oceans have magical powers of recovery and protection leads to spillover gains. While the section on industrial fishing definitely evokes feelings of despair, Sir David Attenborough goes onto show examples where protection of marine ecosystems has enabled marine life to rebound.

Sanctuaries in Hawaii, Scotland, and the Channel Islands demonstrate the “spillover effect” – when ecosystems recover inside marine reserves, life spills outward, strengthening surrounding waters too.

4. Inspiration can drive real change. Greece just announced two National Marine Parks covering ~27,500 km² (about the size of Belgium). Bottom trawling will be banned there, and Prime Minister Mitsotakis explicitly cited Oceans as inspiration. It’s a reminder that stories and images can catalyze policy.

5. The ocean’s fate is humanity’s fate. The health of our oceans shapes global weather systems, food security, and planetary stability. I appreciated that Sir David Attenborough didn’t sugarcoat the destruction – he shows it plainly, alongside beauty and hope. The message is clear: the next few years are critical. Bold action now can still bend the curve toward recovery.

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Watching Oceans left me shuddering at the destruction but also hopeful about the possibility of renewal. Sir David Attenborough makes the main takeaway plain and simple – the ocean is not just something we protect, it is what protects us.

There’s a lot of talk about AI hype. I don’t know enough about the financial bubble aspect of this (though I thought Azeem’s framework was helpful). But, as far as its impact on the products we use go, it is understandable to see it dismissed as hype because it feels just like a technology wave we’ve seen in the past two decades – like mobile or cloud.

But I think there’s a difference. Mobile and cloud changed what was built. They didn’t fundamentally change how software was built.

The internet, on the other hand, changed both what was built and how it was built. Software built for the web was fundamentally different than software built for Desktop applications.

The AI wave, to me, feels closer to the internet wave. We’ll see new kinds of products and new ways of building.

When you combine those shifts and remember that the scale of this wave builds on the scale of the mobile internet, it becomes easy to imagine just how much disruption lies ahead.

It’ll take a while to play out. But play out, it will.

I was speaking with a professional fighter the other day, and we drew a parallel between making it to the highest levels of professional fighting and building something new.

The stats are brutal – the odds of success are impossibly low. If you believed only the stats, you’d never step into the ring, or start building at all.

At the same time, the stats are useful. They help set realistic expectations, so you don’t hold yourself to an impossibly high bar or confuse difficulty with failure.

But stats are only one piece of the story. The rest of the story is written by those willing to take the shot.

Richard Feynman once said: “You must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

We don’t set out to fool ourselves. But we do it all the time by telling stories that explain where we are and why. Over time, with enough repetition, we start believing those stories, whether or not they’re true.

Maybe the biggest lesson here is to periodically audit the stories we tell ourselves. Are they rooted in truth, or just in comfort?