“The winds are changing in Türkiye” - were the words of one Turkish university admissions team.

Türkiye has set an ambitious target to grow international students to 500,000 by 2028, with the potential for it to exceed 1 million in the future.

International students are a key contributor to Turkish economy contributing over $3 billion to the economy with over 360,000 students now. Which reflects a trend worldwide of countries seeking to attract more long term residents such as nomadic visas.

Türkiye is a growing regional hub that students are choosing over other destionations in the middle east. Iran has previously had over 60,000 international students.

Turkiye also has cultural Turkic links with students in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan who have previously been choosing Russia.

More about studying in Turkiye

International Student Trends in China

International Students in China are prioritizing career opportunities - we asked 950+ students choosing China what and career opportunities were the most important factor in where to study, which was slightly higher with those with the highest budget.

Interestingly the majority of the international students also say that they are looking at other countries and this actually increases as they continue to later stages of the recruitment funnel.

The report is here.

Invisible Students

One thing I’ve noticed is that different results and reports I’ve seen in the international education industry tend to give quite different perspectives which often conflict with what I’m seeing.

Agent led surveys usually give one perspective - perhaps focusing more on countries that pay the most commission and missing out on students who are applying by themselves to other destinations.

Rankings companies might say that rankings are the most important part in how people choose a university. This isn’t just a hidden incentive but that they attract the kind of student who does care the most about rankings.

It’s like seeing they are measuring different parts of the elephant as the Indian proverb goes. One person who sees the trunk might say it’s a snake, one who sees the leg might say it’s a tree trunk, and the ear is quite different.

The entire study abroad market is not one market and is made of many smaller markets.

What I’m seeing is that students are increasingly invisible to universities, and there is a continual increase in ghost applications. Students who are doing all the research themselves and then appearing as a completed application, or not appearing at all and applying elsewhere.

This is because more tools are available for them, and they are often less likely to reach out.

This is why I think creating additional touch points like online webinars, online micro-courses, short term programs, to bridge the gap and carrying out interview research can help to see beyond the data to get a more full picture.

Gyms are the new nightclubs

Doomscrolling is the new cigarettes

Loneliness is the new obesity

Conversations are the new exercise.

Walking is the new sitting

Influencers are the new brands

Problems are the new jobs

Stocks are the new houses

Offline is the new online

LinkedIn is the new top hat

Substack is the new library

Subscribe now

Personal growth is the new dating

Sex is the new sugar

AI is the new foreign languages

Agency is the new IQ

Portfolio is the new CV

Manufacturing is the new services

Hardware is the new software

Drones are the new tanks

Engineers are the new navy

Africa is the new China

Middle powers are the new superpowers.

UAE is the new Switzerland

US is the new US.

Green is the new tithe

Diversity is the new tribute

Children are the new holidays

Fertility is the new GDP

Plain is the new Gucci

Tech is the new middleman

In-house is the new Outsourcing

Sunlight is the new oil

Space is the new ocean

SpaceX is the new East India Company

Writing is the new reading.

1. Working on the right thing in the right direction - often doing less or nothing until you do the right thing is the answer.

2. Persistence and Consistency - keep doing it.

3. The ability to work effectively

These all come down to focus - how well you can control your mind, decide what to focus on and apply yourself. Focus operates on two levels - the direction of that focus and the application of it.

Focus is the ability to direct and sustain your mind. But what you direct it at is only as good as your judgment about what’s worth directing it at.

Focus without judgment is powerful motion in a possibly-wrong direction. Judgment without focus is knowing the right way and never moving. You need both, and they’re not the same faculty - one is control, the other is discernment.

It’s funny that focus is not the same as working hard. You can work hard, you can put energy in, but that alone is not sustainable. You can get tired, burn out, get distracted. Focus is more calm and intentional.

It’s a higher level control that says - perhaps I don’t need to work hard at this at all. It’s about awareness, of yourself, of the landscape of the pieces. It often overrides hard work. It’s often harder to do than hard work.

It’s deceptively simple. It feels like its not important, it feels like working hard should solve everything. It feels like you shouldn’t need to work on your focus.

Focus is about resolving the inner battles you have with yourself each day.

The friction between the infinite choices we face, the friction between different parts of ourselves that pull in different direction.

It’s all about alignment.

About finding the alignment between what drives you, and putting the pieces together of your work, your life, your day.

It’s a big unlock to be incredibly focused, and most people aren’t, so how do you do it?

1. Decide that you want it - do you actually want to be focused? Your life can really change when you are focused

2. Picture what it looks like

3. Focus is all about doing the basics right - focus is a byproduct of your inputs - your diet, your information diet, your relationships, your sleep, your exercise, your environment, and it feeds itself. By being aligned, our focus grows.

4. Get bored! Focus is about being bored so that the boring becomes interesting.

5. Getting rid of everything that makes you unfocused.

There’s one simple reason.

The start - the first 20 lines of your article, are the most important.

I discovered this because I wrote articles that I’d expect to rank well elsewhere but they didn’t rank in Substack.

Writing more and better articles won’t fix it if the opening of your articles aren’t formatted right.

It’s becuase the LCP - the load time of google when first looks at your page.

Speed of load is one critical factor, and if you have an image that loads slowly it degrades the experience.

Here’s what to do:

1. Check the first 20 lines of the article.

2. Check the hook - and rewrite it. Something that will likely attract the reader and promise a payoff.

3. Check the filetype of the first image - WebP is the best because fastest compression. You can use this converter. https://cloudconvert.com/png-to-webp

4. Check the file size - less than 200kb is better. (The above image is less than 20kb for example)

So, if you do anything on your next articles, or your articles that you expected to do well but they didn’t, focus on the start, the hook.

You can also go through your previous articles with the above in mind to improve them.

You can thank me later!

Share in the comments any articles you’ve written that you’re most proud of and I’ll take a look and comment.

This is one of the reasons China launched the CSCA - to better align international students entering universities in China with China’s level.

But why is China’s base level generally more advanced?

There are many reasons - teaching method, competition, sheer hours, but one big factor is the language. Learning to count is easier in Chinese (Chinese number words are regular (no elevens, and twenty, is one reason that students can count in China about a year earlier than in the west).

Another factor that is rarely mentioned is that in Chinese, the technical vocabulary explains itself.

But in English - they are written greek or latin, so for English speakers learning abstract words in maths (and other technical subjects) is handicapped because it’s like learning a foreign language at the same time.

For example:

Read more

Just take unreasonably massive action.

What were you planning to do?

Apply to 10-20 jobs?

Try to make that 100-200+

Planning to make 100 sales calls? Make 1000+.

It’s one surefire way to accelerate your growth much more, accelerate results, and accelerate your learning, and make success basicallly inevitable.

Especially if you aim it at the number one most important bottleneck you or your business has.

That’s what I’m planning to do this week.

Let’s go 📈🚀

There is something inside you that runs everything else.

It is hard to name, but easy to feel once you look for it.

A kind of centre, a dense, gathered point of awareness that sits in your brain, around your attention, your will, and your sense of yourself.

When it is strong, you feel clear, steady, and in command of where your mind goes.

When it is weak, you feel scattered, reactive, pulled in every direction at once - mushed, as if the thing that holds you together has gone soft and has no boundary, merging with everything else.

It’s like a a squash ball, almost: small, dense, resilient, but you can make it rock hard and powerful

It firms up when you use it well and goes slack and breaks apart when you neglect it. It’s like yourinner core, your centre, your sphere of awareness - the name matters less than the recognition.

If you had a VR glasses over your eyes and it showed the battery of your life or KPI like an engine, this is what would be one of the most important things you would monitor.

Once you notice it, you can’t un-notice it, and you begin to see that most of the difference between a good day and a lost one is simply whether this thing was strong or scattered.

The good news is that it can be trained.

Here is how it gets stronger.

Hold the idea itself

The first step is just this: knowing it exists and being aware of it. Most people never notice the core, so they never tend it - they let it get squashed all day without boundaries and wonder why they feel frayed. Carrying the idea in mind and going back to it changes things.

When you know there is a centre to protect, you start protecting it.

Awareness of the thing is half the work.

Feed It

Feed it by food, by content that inspires, by your own way of thinking, by sleeping, it gets stronger.

Sugar, energy levels are needed to maintain it and come out as a life force, otherwise the world breaks it down.

So does purpose, and alignment. It harnesses your life force and natural energy.

Meditate

Meditation is the most direct training there is, because it is literally the practice of gathering a scattered mind back into a single point. Every time you notice your attention has wandered and bring it back, you are compressing the core, firming it up.

Do this for a few minutes each day and the effect carries into the rest of your life - the centre holds longer, springs back faster, resists being pulled apart.

Move your body

Exercise - real, effortful movement that is uncomfortable feeds it because it exercise it. Pushing beyond whats comfortable helps to test it and harden it.

Not just because exercise helps with sleep.

Anything uncomfortable does.

Also a tired, sluggish body produces a soft, scattered mind. When you are physically strong and well-rested, the centre is dense and available; when you are depleted, it mushes at the slightest pressure. Exercise is not a separate from your inner life but as maintenance for it.

Use it

Like a muscle, the core strengthens through use. Every time you consciously direct your attention - choosing what to focus on, holding it there against the pull to drift - you build it. Deep, deliberate work is the gymnasium of the centre. The more you exercise your will on purpose, the more will you have. A day spent making real choices about where your mind goes leaves the core stronger than it started.

Guard it from distraction

And every time you let your attention be taken rather than given - the endless scroll, the reflexive check, the pull of every notification - the core gets mushed a little more.

Distraction is not neutral; it is the specific thing that softens the centre. You don’t have to live like a monk, but you do have to notice that a scattered day is a day spent letting the ball be squashed by a thousand small hands. Protect it. Say no to the pulls that don’t matter.

Step back

Finally, learn to step back and feel it. Several times a day, pause — stop the momentum, drop out of the rush, and simply notice the centre. Is it firm or soft? Gathered or scattered? This act of stepping back is itself restorative; it re-collects what the day has dispersed. The core is not something to defend in a constant, exhausting vigil. It is something to return to — a place you rest in, again and again, until returning becomes second nature.

None of this is complicated. Know it exists. Meditate. Move. Use it deliberately. Guard it from distraction. Step back and feel it. Do these, and the centre grows dense and resilient - and with it, so does your capacity to meet whatever the day brings without being scattered by it.

The strength of everything you do flows from the strength of this one small thing. Tend it.

If you want to be a great Politician, study Law.

Like Margaret Thatcher, Lee Kuan Yew, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton.

Politics is, underneath, the business of making, contesting, and enforcing rules - and law is the discipline that teaches how rules actually work: how they're drafted, where they bend, how power is constrained and exercised through them, how to argue a position and anticipate the counter.

A politician who only knows campaigning knows the surface (winning attention); one who knows law knows the machinery (how to actually move legislation, survive scrutiny, and wield procedure). That's why so many heads of state were lawyers firs

If you want to be a great Lawyer, study logic, and rhetoric.

A lawyer who knows law + rhetoric + how humans actually decide is unstoppable

If you want to be a great writer, study people.

If you want be a great businessman, study Engineering.

If you want to be a great manager, study gardening.

It teaches you that you don’t control outcomes directly, you create conditions and then work with a living system that has its own momentum.

You learn principles such as pruning a tree to help it grow.

If you want to be a great engineer, study physics.

If you want to be a great scientist, study philosophy

If you want to be a great teacher, study psychology

If you want to be a great leader, study history

If you want to be a great chef, study chemistry

If you want to be a great architect, study materials

Study the underlying layer beneath it - the thing your field is secretly an application of.

The underlying layer of emergence, because that's where the rules that constrain and govern, your field actually live.

Going multiple layers deep, and adjacent, gives you the ultimate advantage.

Because the best preparation is always indirect

There are four essential parts to high achievement, and here are some of the lessons I’ve learnt from them.

The four pillars are:

1. The long term vision that pulls you forward.

2. The medium term plan of how to get there.

3. The daily attention and self improvement.

4. The feedback loop

It’s essential to have a long term goal and vision that pulls you forward. It should be ambitious, that stretches and excites you and gives you direction about where you are going and what to, and not to, focus on. For me this is building the worlds best online admissions platform.

The medium term plan is basically the pathway to achieving it. The sales calls each day, the roadmap of hiring and building a team, and sharpening your skills, and when to review it. The schedule.

The daily attention and application is one of the most overlooked and important parts. This is the part where you focus on winning each day, improving your energy, attention and relationships, having clear work spaces.

Feedback and self improvement cycle is the one that reviews and identifies the bottlenecks. Something like once a week. Identify where you are off and on course and how to adjust the vision, plan or daily parts. You can build feedback loops in multiple ways, introspection and review is one part. Surrounding with the right people can act as another.

What I’ve learnt

I’ve learnt the importance of these pillars over time.

- The long term goal and vision should be grand and big and optimistic, and exciting but the quicker you can set goals and visions, the faster you can get into feedback loops and improve and learn how to adjust. Making it too long or far away means you get far fewer feedback loops. You can only really do 4-5 x 10 year visions in your life, and if you miss one, you are down to 3. That’s why setting shorter or breaking a grant vision down into smaller ones that are achievable quicker is great training, because great achievement is done by a great vision that meets and navigates reality and the more cycles we have the better we can improve at that.

- The medium term plan should be aggressive and this is where the lessons come from. The vision is achieved from these steps. This is what can be controlled. The daily sales calls, the reviews.

- The daily attention is the one that people often miss. We often focus on the medium term plan, but if the medium term plan is reaching a bottleneck, the cap is often something within ourselves and our own psychology. Waking up with abundant energy vs tired creates such different outcomes, and it’s an easy lever because its something that you control nearly 100%. Just meditating each day and reading and controlling your attention and being around great people who are ambitious and close to the vision is just going to accelerate your progress so much.

- The feedback and improvement loop is the essential part that should be done weekly or periodically. This is where you identify where the bottleneck is in your work and yourself, and then set up a plan to fix it. I’ve learnt so many valuable things about the reality - how leverage can help you, how things work from this constant review and learning.

I think a lot of this isn’t that complicated and can be taught with the right mentors and relationships. Common traps, I’ve seen people and I have sometimes set less ambitious or vague goals, not had a clear plan and reviewed the plan to get there, got derailed and distracted on the day to day level and not honestly reviewed the progress with review cycles.

Most things in life improve as a byproduct.

Relationships and love don’t become better by trying to make them better directly, they become better by being financially secure, by having a vision, by giving value, by listening and caring.

Happiness is not something you can achieve and can’t be pursued as a goal, it’s emergent from having meaning, goals, treating others well, of progress and self improvement.

A business doesn’t thrive by force, you can’t will it. It thrives by creating a great product that satisfies an unmet market and delivering satisfactory service or product. It’s a formula.

Trying too hard and pushing things away is evident of this.

The pursuit of pleasure can make you less happy.

You can’t change the scoreboard, you can only change how you play the game.

That’s why it’s best to seek goals that are controllable.

But some things are not like that. The outcomes you can’t grab directly, you reach through their causes - but the causes themselves you can work on head-on. Your attention. Your discipline. These improve by working them directly, because they aren’t outcomes downstream of anything. They are root faculties.

We often spend too much time focusing on the scoreboard, and not enough time on improving our root faculties, because the results the success, the relationship are all downstream of that.

Sleep is another example. You can’t force yourself to sleep, but you can set the conditions for it to happen by exercise, diet, and routine.

The great thing is that most root faculties can be improved substantially, especially from an untrained baseline. If working on it for the first time we can see huge gains.

But they all have limits - biological, diminishing returns, and trade-offs - opportunity costs.

It works like a bottleneck in a business. Sales aren’t growing - but the real cause is upstream: you can’t manufacture enough. And that’s because you’re spread across too many businesses without enough talent; and there isn’t enough talent because there isn’t enough time; and there isn’t enough time because you can’t focus. So don’t push harder on sales, improve your focus.

But sometimes it might be because an ad isn’t working, or a salesman is making a simple error in sales calls.

That’s why, like unlocking a bottleneck in a business, it’s essential to identify where along the chain of root faculty to scoreboard the bottleneck is.

Don’t spread yourself thin and try to improve everything at once.

Because any effort spent working on the wrong thing on anything that isn’t the bottleneck, is wasted effort.

Fix the bottleneck, and everything downstream moves.

So like theory of constraints in business, how do you identify where your constraint is?

The bottleneck is the point where, if you improved it, the whole downstream chain would move - and everything you improve other than the bottleneck produces no gain.

What's the one thing that, if fixed, unlocks the most?

Where is the failure point? It’s downstream of that.

Where is there a build up, where are thing stuck.

Notice what everything else keeps waiting on.

Test it - improve the suspected bottleneck and watch if downstream moves.

Try improving root faculties anyway and see how much they can be improved.

Ask what the one thing is that, if fixed, would unlock the most.

Often it can improve multiple recurring bottlenecks.

So let yourself be comfortable working on yourself rather than trying to change the scoreboard. It doesn’t feel intuitive. It feels like you are working on the wrong thing.

Try it.

The first order of man is mastery of the torch that is attention.

Most of us are seeing through other peoples torches, or we are wearing a helmet torch and not aware that we can take it off and illuminate in any direction.

We spend whole lives illuminating only what falls in front of us by accident.

But the torch can be taken in both hands.

It can be aimed.

When you control your attention you realise that what you were looking at is a very small part of the bigger picture.

It was never the world.

It was only where the light happened to fall.

The world is completely different for the man who can direct the light, and gets progressively better at it.

The frustration, the boredom, the difficulty, it all changes when you control your attention.

When you learn to expand your attention beam, brighten the light, to be able to grip it with both hands and point it on the way.

Your world expands and so do you.

This is done by practice. By Stepping back. You train the muscle that holds it, so it doesn't drift the moment you stop attending. You sit still - meditate -until you feel your hand on the torch again. And then, the whole discipline in one act: you choose where the light goes, and you keep it there.

Exercise, endurance and goals, are ways to sharpen and improve your attention.

The world exists as a training ground to improve our attention.

When you learn to aim the torch, you are no longer a man watching what happens to be lit. You are the one illuminating the world.

You become free.

After getting 3 mistaken for many times in Dubai, I’ve just started saying “do” for two which is how it’s pronounced in Hindustani (the spoken language in India and Pakistan) written दो in Hindi, دو in Urdu.

English and Hindustani pronounce th differently, so “three” often sounds closer to “tree”. The English th sound is quite rare across the world’s languages, and most European ones don’t have it either.

Funnily enough, “two” and “do” aren’t just similar-sounding. They’re the same word.

English and Hindustani both descend from a common ancestor spoken several thousand years ago, which was pronounced dwoh and the number words are among the most stable vocabulary we have. Two, do, Persian do, Russian dva, Latin duo - all the same root, worn down differently over a very long time.

You can see it in other everyday words:

Mother — माता mātā
Father — पिता pitā
New — नया nayā
Name — नाम nām
Door — द्वार dwaar

English picked up a second set from Latin and Greek much later: duo, duet, dual, duplicate, deuce, doubt (two minds), diploma (a document folded in two). So English ended up with the same ancient word twice - once inherited, once borrowed.

So by giving up and saying “do” instead of two, we’re speaking the same language as our ancestors!

English has doublets everywhere in the language where the original language arrived through germanic and latin.

Examples such as:

• Paternal / Father

• Tooth and dental,

• Foot and pedal,

• heart and cordial,

• two and dual.

There are a bunch of words in English that come from Hindustani, But these are more recent.

• Shampoo - चाँपो chā̃po (from चाँपना chā̃pnā, to press or massage)

• Pyjamas - पायजामा pāyjāmā

• Bungalow - बंगला banglā

• Pundit - पंडित paṇḍit

• Bandanna - बांधना bāndhnā (to tie) / बंधनी bandhnī (tie-dye cloth)

• Cummerbund - कमरबंद kamarband

• Dinghy - डोंगी ḍoṅgī

• Dungarees - डूंगरी ḍūṅgrī

Sales is all about

• Numbers - reaching out to X amount each day, consistently

• Improving each time

• Follow ups in a way that’s interesting

• Giving value at every interaction

• Renewals

Mindset - Daily Energy and Effectiveness & Productivity is all about:

• Knowing what it is to do the day before - setting top 1 and top 3 things you will do

• Doing the most important thing first

• Time boxing things that would otherwise overrun

• Knowing when you are stopping

• Sleeping well

• Improving your attention by exercising and meditating, avoiding social media, reading long form.

• Getting around smart people

• Doing scalable high leverage things each day like

  • Reaching out to 20 sales prospects per day

  • Creating content each day

  • Exercising

  • Deleting things

  • Reading

  • Developing relationships

• Ask for the close

• Weekly reviews and building feedback loops

• Setting high and ambitious goals

The industry is going through a period of accelerated change - AI is impacting students and universities and multiple ways.

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learnt and the pain that has reminded me of them.

1. Everything in your life is there to help you grow. Challenges are presented to you for you to overcome. Embrace those challenges. Its easy to fall into negative thinking or think in suboptimal ways without realising it, which can be very destructive because you don’t know what you are missing out on.

2. Mindset is everything. Visualise big goals and think positive and be optimistic and grateful. It changes the world and your experience with it. You can just try it and see how it changes your world. These are some lessons I’ve always known but sometimes forgotten when I’m busy or focused on something else.

3. Be More Uncomfortable - Do things that make you uncomfortable and push through it like running, or cold showers, or saying hello, and post what you think. I think sometimes we can just get stuck, or we naturally tend towards being comfortable which is why we need to constantly expand our comfort zones. When you do those things, you look back and see how it wasn’t that hard - what was I thinking before? and you’ve also grown.

4. Don’t Forget to Create and Expand - Create content, meet people - sometimes it feels like its not high value or there is something more important that you should be working on - helping a customer, or sending something, but creating and expanding your network compounds and brings advantages and opportunities that you never know about.

5. Set Big Goals that are yours - Listen to what interests you and you feel a pull towards, that you can do when you’re tired (writing, building, and a lot of things does that for me) - there’s some greater intelligence in there, and it gives you something others don’t have - rather than what you’ve been doing and think you should be doing.

6. I’m motivated to create something incredible. I can invest and I’m good at it, but it can’t take my creative builder energy.

7. Sleep is key to grow and perform at best. I’m reminded of that daily if I stay awake late and push through the day, Vs when I rest well and power through it with a completely different mindset. It’s worth the investment.

8. Exercise is so important - it helps with energy and positivity and thinking bigger, helps strengthen the mind, and sleep. It’s necessary to exercise everyday and it provides such a great return.

9. This stuff is not rocket science. None of these things are that hard if you do it enough times and just keep improving each time. Same with building a product - everything is just about trying, learning, applying the lessons, improving, knowing what to focus on, and doing what works repeatedly. I’m reminded of this lesson when I speak, meet or hear people who have done incredible things, which is why getting around these kind of people can be so empowering.

10. What you choose to work on is far more important than how hard you work. Don’t work hard in the wrong direction, and many directions are a waste especially now we have leverage - AI and content. I’ve learnt this when I’ve worked really hard, on something, and then found out there was an easier way. This is often hard to know without hindsight which is why being around talented people is so valuable.

11. Do less, but really well, is much better - because doing something at the highest level, if done well, is far more than enough. I’ve learnt this by working on many different things, and then learning which ways work the best and focusing on them. Simple is better just because it enables you to do more of the thing.

12. Attention is more important than effort, because if you focus on the right point, you can use leverage, you can unlock the bottleneck, you can find an easier solution.

13. Working with talented people is so important. If you hire someone and continually need to manage them then it’s a waste and the cost increases as you scale. The best management is no management - when people say they did it all themselves. It’s better to do it well yourself first then hand it over and build the right systems, find someone incredibly talented in the right position.

14. Have courage - don’t be afraid to fail, to take risks, to go for it. It’s why doing less is better, it’s why thinking more positively and exercising is important.

15. Listen to yourself, you often have greater information and wisdom, (while still listening to others too). I’ve learnt this through experience.

Your life can really change in a few months of the right actions.

I’m currently applying the above lessons and setting a 90-day goal with a singular target of reaching out to new 20+ new partners each day.

Your mind is not fixed it can be changed.

Start with exercise daily - it raises your energy.

Listen to motivational content - it gives you new material.

And improve your thought processes

Think positive,

but accurate.

Open your mind and see the options and choose the pathway for you.

Listen to the energy and go after it.

Set big goals.

And go after them with an aggression.

And protect your mindset and vision.

Don’t let others small ideas stop you. Listen to yourself.

Every challenge, setback, or barrier is there to help you, to improve.

And create - what you give out, comes back to you.

Because what you see in front of you is not real - it’s a an illusion.

What you see in your mind is as real as the world you see in front of you.

Believe, imagine, think bigger.

From the UK to China, all around the world, demand for studying the humanities and languages is dropping and universities are reducing programs.

The funny thing is that in the age of AI, the value of humanities is becoming far more important - judgement, taste, critical thinking, being able to write and think, the cultural understanding. And humanities, history, debate, are all essential for a functioning society.

It’s the humanities degree as a credential that is becoming less valuable.

I think there are two things happening, and it says more about the degree than it does about the humanities.

- The degree as a credential is shifting
- The changing labour market

Like, restaurants aren’t in the food business, they’re in the hospitality business. Food is cheap at home, but you can’t get that restaurant experience - where you can relax and someone does it for you, the environment, the people, the fun, the connection.

Universities aren’t just places of education, they’re currently a combination of education, credentials, community, research, immigration, tourism for short term programs, applied learning, experience, and becoming an adult.

It’s the humanities-credential that has shifted

because the work itself is the credential.

You can now assess someones ability in the humanities more by reading their articles on substack, by watching their showreel on Youtube, or by having a conversation in a foreign language than you can by a degree certificate.

This is quite different to a medical degree.

At the same time the labour market has shifted.

There is no longer a big mass job market, but a long tail of opportunities.

Translation for the masses can now be done by AI or soon-to-be AI glasses or earpieces. What can’t be done by AI is translating between Polish and Chinese and building connections in the supply chain between those countries, and applying cultural insights and empathy to business strategy.

That’s why I think for students, everyone needs to study the humanities but also combine it with other subjects - technology and science and apply it, like at the University of Texas at Austin.

And students should be doing, building, creating and publishing work online, and universities encouraging students as creators.

With content creation and real-world building, the feedback is almost instant and, it attracts opportunities and builds the university brand.

For universities the core product is moving away
- from single degree program, towards multi disciplinary programs
- 4 year degree, to 1 year full time + 3-5 year part time combining work experience with learning, and lifelong learning.
- applying it to work and projects - students as creators and builders

Combining two or more fields enables people to combine the rigor of STEM with humanities and finding opportunities at the intersections. I talk about this more in the Superhuman curriculum.

Applied learning helps to apply it to fast moving fields, and learning is now a lifelong process.

By what I’m seeing all around we’re entering a new renaissance period for the humanities and potentially for universities.

The old world four year mass translation and one size fits all jobs and degrees are fading.

The new world with unique, creative, interdisciplinary doer-thinkers is here.

The humanities aren’t in decline, they’re more important. It’s the four year humanities degree and university experience that is evolving.

It wasn’t always this way.

Britain was one of the most competent builders in the world in Victorian times. In 1863 it built the world’s first underground railway.

It built a national rail network from nothing, a sewer system that still serves London today, and the largest navy the world had ever seen. That competence didn’t stop with the Victorians - it showed up again in the mobilisation of the Second World War, and again in the years right after it, when a shattered economy still managed to build millions of homes and stand up the NHS in a matter of years.

Then something changed under Thatcher.

The twentieth century had just shown the world the devastating effect of what an over-mighty state could do.

And one of the clearest ways to define who we are is by who are not, and that was the totalitarian regimes.

So Britain made a choice: shrink the state, trust the market, keep power dispersed and checked.

A smaller state and a free market were the safeguard against that danger.

It was a reasonable response.

But we didn’t stop at a smaller state - we built a state so afraid of its own competence that it can no longer function.

Every layer of sign-off, every veto point, every review-of-the-review exists because someone, somewhere, was afraid of what a state that could actually act might do.

China didn’t make that choice.

Whatever else you think of the model, it succeeded because it could build. That’s the real difference - not talent, not resources, but which fear each country chose to organise itself around.

That’s the idea behind the Platform State: government’s core job is to build and manage the infrastructure layer competently enough that business, family life, and innovation can thrive on top of it. Every economy has two layers - the infrastructure layer (roads, housing, energy, universities, the rules themselves) and the dynamic market layer built on top of it. Britain spent the last forty years opening up the dynamic layer. It never rebuilt the infrastructure layer underneath.

Let’s get building again, so we can thrive.

theplatformstate.com

When you look at - what students are evaluating, choosing and paying for, and what universities are promoting, selling, and providing - education is rarely the major part - it is one part of a bundle.

And education is commoditising.

University is a bundle between:

• Credential

• Tourism and

• Immigration

• Community

• Education

• Real estate

Every student is choosing a unique combination - a bundle.

And there is a difference between what they say they are buying and what they are actually buying - we don’t openly discuss it this way.

And the nature of the market is changing.

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For short term or summer students, they are buying some combination such as: 30% tourism, 10% housing, 10% visa / immigration, and 10% credential, 10% community and 20% education.

For bachelor’s students, they might be buying 0% tourism, 0% immigration, 40% credential, 20% community, and 40% education.

Some international students they may be 0% tourism, 10% housing, 40% immigration, 10% credential, 20% community, and 20% education, but another, perhaps from a wealthier country, may be 25% tourism, 0% immigration, 0% housing, 25% credential, 25% community, and 25% education.

This matters for universities, when they are positioning their products, and also when we discuss the purpose of universities, because each market and each student is quite different.

It also matters because a great deal of the power of universities is the fact that they are bundled together. They’re like a meal in a restaurant. You pay for the location, the environment, a space for community, and the food together.

Now we’ve deconstructed the value of universities, we can better understand their value, and reconstruct around them.

The interesting thing is that the value of education is commoditising - people can learn more and more with AI or on YouTube. But verified learning is still valuable (which is the credential), which competes with proof of work and other sources of verification.

Immigration is policy-dependent and volatile and the one universities have least or even no control over.

They are becoming more important as centers of community.

The components have wildly different margins and disruption curves, so the bundle is a cross-subsidy.

Sometimes the components work well together. Elite universities are highly synergistic.

Sometimes the components compete with each other, and make the bundle more expensive - low ranked universities and many programs the bundle do not complement each other, and is not optimum.

• Education wants to be cheap, and expand to help the greatest number.

• Community wants to be physical, local, synchronous, scarce.

• Credential wants to be trusted, narrow, verifiable.
  These have been forced into one four-year campus product because historically you couldn’t separate them. You now can.

There are new opportunities in community + credential + education without the campus, or with temporary campuses.

It would be interesting to see more innovations in the 3-4 year bachelor’s degree model.

Such as 1 year residential + work + lifelong community memberships.

Now that we have the internet, we can learn and connect from anywhere, the only reason we continue the 3-4 bachelor’s degree is because that’s how it’s always been. For specific hard subjects such as science, but for more practical programs, such as software, or business, more and more learning can be done whilst working.

Modern dating culture is a minefield, and most young men walk straight into it with their eyes closed.

The traps are everywhere: chasing validation, wasting time dating around, orbiting women who aren’t interested, losing months or years of your life in situationships or relationships, investing your most precious resource - your time and attention

The Dating Trap

But here’s the truth: women are often a distraction. That’s not a criticism of women - it’s just reality. When you’re obsessed with a girl, you waste yourself, your business doesn’t get built, your body doesn’t get trained, your skills don’t get sharpened.

The man who understands this doesn’t hate women. He simply refuses to let romantic pursuit become the organizing principle of his life.

Instead, he subscribes to substack (like this one) that make him better.

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And the funny thing is that by doing that, by seeking a higher purpose, they become abundant.

The Self-Improvement Loop

The irony is that the moment you stop making women the centre of your world, everything changes.

Self-improvement is a compounding loop: you train harder, you earn more, you develop discipline, you become more grounded - and as a direct result, you become more attractive. Not through tricks or manipulation, but because you’ve actually become someone worth being around.

This is how you get what you want indirectly. You don’t chase. You build. The right things - and the right people - follow naturally from becoming the best version of yourself.

The War of Wits (And Why It’s a Good Thing)

Men and women have always been trying to outsmart each other.

She’s reading his signals. He’s reading hers. She tests his resolve. He tests her character. This ancient push and pull isn’t toxic - it’s the engine of evolution. The tension between the sexes has driven human beings to develop intelligence, ambition, social skill, humour, and beauty for thousands of years. Don’t resent the game. Learn it. Respect it. Play it well and use it as fuel

Your Fuel

When I was young and going through my last breakup, I didn’t expect what came next. The morning after, I laced up my trainers and ran. Then I ran the next day. And the next. The emotional energy that had nowhere to go found an outlet - and within a few months I was in the best physical shape of my life.

Breakups, and relationships can be painful, but that is fuel.

Every man who has been through one knows that specific restless, electric misery that needs somewhere to go. Send it to the gym. Send it to your business. Send it to the track. Heartbreak, channelled correctly, is one of the greatest performance-enhancing substances known to man. It doesn’t last forever - so use it while it burns.

Money First. Full Stop.

Here is the financial reality: no money, no honey.

This is brutal, and it’s true. Financial dependency, financial anxiety, financial mediocrity - all of these undermine your confidence, your options, and your attractiveness. A broke man is a man at the mercy of circumstances. A financially free man operates from a position of choice.

Prioritise income. Prioritise assets. Understand investing, savings, and how money compounds over time. You don’t need to be a millionaire to be financially disciplined, but you do need to understand that getting your money right is not optional — it’s the foundation everything else is built on. Your time, your lifestyle, your romantic life, your family: all of it is easier with financial stability underneath it.

Should You Get Married?

This is the most consequential decision a man will make, so it deserves serious thought rather than cultural autopilot. Marriage, done right - with the right person, at the right time, with aligned values and genuine partnership - is one of the most powerful structures a man can build his life around.

Done wrong, it’s financially and emotionally ruinous.

The question isn’t simply “should I get married?” It’s: are you ready to lead a family? Have you built enough - financially, emotionally, in terms of character - to be the kind of man a good woman would thrive with? Marriage is not a finish line. It is a responsibility. Take it seriously, or don’t take it at all.

It’s not about finding the right woman, it’s first about becoming the right man.

But at the same time, you can also build yourself together, with the right woman.

Lead. Be the Best. Leave a Legacy.

Men are at their best when they are leading - themselves first, then others. Leading yourself means holding yourself to standards when no one is watching.

It means having a vision for your life and pursuing it with consistency. It means being someone that others can rely on.

Being the best is not about arrogance. It is about relentless improvement.

There is always a higher standard to reach.

Men who commit to that pursuit are rare, and rarity is always rewarded.

What’s a house for?

In Britain today, and you get two contradictory answers depending on who you ask: a place to live, and a store of wealth for a decent pension that should appreciate for decades.

We have never resolved which of those two things housing actually is - and that unresolved contradiction is the single biggest reason Britain can’t build enough of it.

Net property wealth makes up 40% of total household wealth in Great Britain - the single largest component of wealth.

For most UK households, property and pensions together make up over 80% of everything they own.

It means a large majority of the electorate has a direct, personal financial interest in house prices continuing to rise - which means a direct financial interest in there not being too many new homes built nearby.

Zoom out from household wealth to the whole economy, and the picture gets starker.

McKinsey Global Institute, studying ten major economies including the UK, found that real estate now makes up roughly two-thirds of all global net worth, while infrastructure, machinery, R&D, and technology combined make up only about a fifth.

McKinsey’s own researchers ask the question this raises: are we storing wealth productively?

Their answer points toward capital going into productive investment instead of passive property appreciation as one of the only ways to unwind this without a crisis.

Capital that could be funding new businesses, R&D, equipment, or productive infrastructure is instead parked in existing homes, chasing appreciation on land that already has a house built on it.

We’re taught not to put money under the mattress, to invest it, to use it productively, but that’s exactly what we are doing, except worse, because it also makes the same asset harder for the next generation to buy and raises costs on the whole economy.

The Town & Country Act 1947

The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 nationalised the right to develop land, replacing a system closer to zoning - build automatically if you meet the rules - with a discretionary one, where every project needs individual, case-by-case permission that can be reopened and contested on subjective grounds almost indefinitely.

Every reform since has tinkered with the paperwork around that decision. None has touched the decision itself.

That mechanism interacts directly with the wealth concentration above, and the two together explain why “build more homes” polls well in the abstract and keeps losing at the specific planning meeting. A discretionary system lets existing residents - who have a direct financial stake in scarcity - object to a specific, named project, while the people who’d benefit from it (the graduate who’d have bought that home, the family priced out of the area) don’t exist yet in any form the system can hear from.

It’s not that nobody wants more housing. It’s that the person defending the specific project standing in a specific field is always outnumbered by the people already living around it, and that asymmetry repeats at every single planning decision, for as long as more people in a constituency already own a home than are trying to buy their first one.

Why the damage compounds

Because housing sits inside almost every other part of the economy, this isn’t a housing-specific problem - it inflates everywhere at once.

A housing shortage raises rents, which raises the cost of hiring in productive cities, which pushes businesses toward cheaper, less productive locations (offshore) which lowers national output.

It shows up in graduate underemployment, in the affordability of starting a family, in the cost of care, in wage demands that outpace productivity because take-home pay increasingly has to cover housing costs first.

It shows up most starkly in the choice young people are making not to have children.

Fertility isn’t something you fix by throwing money at it - it’s a signal, an indicator of whether people believe they have enough resources, enough space, and enough optimism about the future to bring another person into it.

When young people spend their most fertile years commuting long distances, renting, or saving for a deposit that keeps receding, the right time to start a family never quite arrives - or arrives too late to have more than one or two children instead of the number they might have wanted.

That effect, once it’s played out across a generation, is largely irreversible.

Britain’s response to the labour shortage has so far been immigration. A short term fix rather than solving the actual root cause.

They let the illusion of economic growth continue without anyone having to take the short-term pain of admitting that a large share of Britain’s household wealth is built on artificially restricted supply.

Britain’s core economic incentive is GDP growth, and GDP growth is mostly a measure of spending - not of whether that spending reflects anything sustainable or anyone actually being better off.

Rising house prices let people borrow against their homes and spend more.

Higher household debt and lower savings show up as higher GDP growth, regardless of whether the underlying position of the country has actually improved.

Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

GDP became the target; housing-driven debt became one of the easiest ways to hit it; and the fact that this comes at the cost of future capacity - fewer children, a hollowed-out productive base, young adults locked out of ownership - simply doesn’t show up in the number we’re all optimising for.

Also Britain treats public debt as something to be feared and constrained, while private mortgage debt of the same scale, built on the same restricted supply of housing, is treated as perfectly normal- even as the foundation of a “healthy” property-owning economy.

Housing As Infrastructure

Housing should be treated as infrastructure, not a place to grow money.

The definition of infrastructure is the foundational structure a society needs to function - and by that definition, housing belongs in the same category as roads and energy, not in the same category as shares and pensions.

Like a road, a home should be judged by whether it lets someone get somewhere - into a stable life, a career, a family - not by whether it’s worth more this year than last, and how it helps society to flourish.

Nobody argues we should grow the economy by raising tolls on roads.

If Britain built abundant housing and let capital that’s currently parked in property flow into genuinely productive investment instead, it would produce a real and sustainable economic expansion.

That window is still open, but it’s closing.

While we wait, we all pay the cost.

And a talented, educated generation, quietly fades away into old age, families have fewer kids and talent moves overseas.

Every year it stays unaddressed, it gets narrower, and some of its costs - the households that were never formed, the children who were never had - don’t come back once the window closes.

Tell me where this is wrong.