The Last Line of Defence
Most capable people are not short of ability. They are short of a point of no return. Why seeing yourself as the last line of defence changes how you work, and how to get there without destroying your life.
Shorter thinking on life, principles, leadership, and the art of building, written as it comes.
Looking for the rigorous work? The whitepapers and industry reports live in Insights.
Most capable people are not short of ability. They are short of a point of no return. Why seeing yourself as the last line of defence changes how you work, and how to get there without destroying your life.
A bride says he chased her for five years. The groom says she was not easy to get. Both meant it kindly, and strangers still invented two people out of it — because a gap in a story never stays empty. Say too much and you hand people a canvas to finish without you.
A Harvard professor once had about four minutes to live before help found him. His research afterward taught me more about the word success than years of chasing it ever did: it isn't one thing, it's four, and they don't travel together.
There's a real distribution strategy behind a lot of the 'watch me make $50,000' videos on YouTube. Almost none of them teach it. What they sell you instead, and why $499 is the wrong price for something that already worked.
What the shadow ledger actually is: a revenue-share distribution partnership with content creators, older than YouTube. Where I run it, and the three changes that keep it from becoming the con it resembles.
A friend asks, you handle it badly, and the friendship dies with the question. Ten years later you are scrolling your phone looking for somebody to call.
The barrier to owning something that pays you was never talent. It was a toll — capital, or years of skill. Both are gone now, which leaves the harder question.
I ran for things in school, and kept meeting the same wall: a good idea on one side of the desk, and the authority to approve it on the other.
The sons of the prophets didn't just spot a problem and bring a plan — they asked Elisha to come with them, and that one request is why the crisis that followed was over before it started.
Wealth, contentment, and ambition aren't points on the same line — and conflating them is what makes hitting a goal feel like nothing happened at all.
Three things I believe should be in place the moment someone is newly born again — starting with what a boy in a temple needed someone else to teach him first.
On a Sunday morning with two passages that turned out to be the same instruction — one a promise, the other a specification — for what it takes to be ready when the people with real problems come looking for you.
Kunle Elebute turned down a string of better-paying offers across a forty-year career. What he kept instead was harder to put a number on.
You are a spirit, you have a soul, you live in a body. Your purpose is not a sentence you can hand somebody at a party.