Not advice. Not a framework. Just forty things I think I know, from forty years of paying attention. Some of these will be wrong. That's fine. The list will be different in ten years. It should be.
1. The best restaurants have the shortest menus. If they're trying to do everything, they're not doing anything well.
2. Nobody reads your strategy deck. They remember the one slide that made them feel something. Make that slide better and cut the rest.
3. Your taste at twenty-five is wrong but necessary. You have to like the wrong things passionately before you can like the right things quietly.
4. Hot chocolate is underrated. The entire productivity-hustle culture is built on coffee and I've built fourteen products without it.
5. The algorithm doesn't owe you anything. Make things good enough that people share them without being asked.
6. Having a kid doesn't end your creative life. It just moves it to 9pm.
7. Nottingham Forest taught me more about loyalty than any job ever did. You don't support a club because they win. You support them because they're yours.
8. The friend who sends you links is showing you love. Open the link.
9. Fonts matter more than people think. A product in the wrong typeface feels broken even when it works perfectly.
10. The gap between "I have an idea" and "I built the thing" used to be years. Now it's hours. This changes everything and most people haven't noticed yet.
11. Nobody ever regretted making something. Plenty of people regret not making something.
12. Print magazines taught me more about design than any course or tutorial. The weight of good paper is a lesson in quality that a screen can't replicate.
13. London's best quality is its food. Not the landmarks, not the culture, not the history. The fact that you can eat a different cuisine every night for a year and never repeat.
14. Ship it on a Tuesday night. Nobody notices the launch date. Everybody notices whether the thing exists or not.
15. Age is a liability in advertising and an asset in everything else. The industry is wrong about this, and it knows it.
16. The most interesting people I know are impossible to describe in one sentence. If your LinkedIn bio captures you perfectly, you might be too simple.
17. A walk solves more problems than a meeting. The movement does something that sitting in a room doesn't.
18. Japan understands detail in a way that makes the rest of the world look careless. Every trip there recalibrates my standards.
19. Your network is not your net worth. It's your taste reflected back at you. Curate it like you'd curate a bookshelf.
20. The best advertising doesn't feel like advertising. It feels like culture. The best products don't feel like products. They feel like someone understood you.
21. I've been in hundreds of meetings that should have been emails. I've never been in an email that should have been a meeting.
22. Nostalgia isn't weakness. It's pattern recognition. The things you miss often tell you what you should be building.
23. The Wieden+Kennedy era of advertising will never come back. But the principles - craft, bravery, taste - are more relevant than ever. They just apply to different outputs now.
24. Every parent is winging it. The ones who look like they have it figured out are just winging it more confidently.
25. The creaky floorboard outside your child's bedroom teaches you more about stealth than any video game.
26. Book people and link people are the same person. The collector instinct is the same whether the medium is physical or digital. The compulsion to gather and organise never goes away.
27. The safe career path isn't as safe as it looks. Every "safe" job I took led to a redundancy round eventually. The risky path at least has the benefit of being interesting.
28. Curation is a creative act. Choosing what to include and what to leave out is a skill. The internet forgot this when it decided everyone should be a creator.
29. A football match is the last shared experience. Eighty minutes where nobody checks their phone. Everything else has been fragmented. The 3pm Saturday kickoff remains intact.
30. Independent agencies are more fun than holding companies. Less money, more freedom, better parties. The trade-off is obvious and worth it.
31. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it. This applies to strategy, to products, and to explaining to a five-year-old why he can't have ice cream for breakfast.
32. Your first version should embarrass you slightly. If it doesn't, you spent too long on it.
33. The best compliment is "I didn't know you could do that." The surprise is the point. Exceed the expectation they had of you, not the expectation you set for yourself.
34. Twitter between 2010 and 2015 was the greatest media platform ever built. A real-time, chronological, link-driven culture machine. Nothing since has come close. I miss it every day.
35. Taste is the last unfair advantage. AI can write, design, and code. It can't decide what's worth making. That's still a human job, and it's the only one that matters.
36. Moving from Nottingham to London felt like turning the volume up on life. Everything got louder, more expensive, and more interesting. I'd do it again tomorrow.
37. The night is for building. The morning is for doubt. The afternoon is for fixing what the night got wrong. This is the cycle and it works.
38. Growing up without money teaches you resourcefulness. Building products without a budget teaches you the same thing. Constraints are education.
39. The people who told me to be realistic were protecting me from exactly the kind of risk that eventually made me interesting. Be unrealistic. Frequently.
40. At twenty I wanted to be successful. At thirty I wanted to be respected. At forty I just want to make things and have someone say "wait, you built this?" That's the whole ambition now. It's enough.
