The core debates of our time in higher education?

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When you look at the words author and authority they are related.

“Authority” comes from the Latin auctoritas, which derives from auctor: the originator, the founder, the author.

Auctor in turn comes from augere, to increase or make grow.

An authority, in the root sense, is someone who has added something to the world that was not there before.

Origination precedes sovereignty.

You cannot have genuine authority over an idea, an institution or a body of code unless you authored it, or directly inherited the author’s mandate. The creator sets the rules, bounds and purpose of the work. Copyists and commentators operate inside someone else’s architecture.

Accountability is the licence to command.

Scribes, editors and administrators do not carry ultimate liability. The author owns the genesis of the work and bears the downside if it fails. That willingness to take structural responsibility is what gives the author legitimacy to decide.

Epistemic weight comes from contribution.

When we call someone “an authority” on a subject, we do not mean they read the syllabus. We mean they expanded the field. They augmented, augere again, what we collectively know.

The age of free commentary

The link between creation and authority has never mattered more, because we now live in an era of near-zero marginal cost commentary.

Anyone can summarise a book, generate an analysis or assemble a high-status aesthetic in seconds, without leaving their desk.

The signals we once relied on, fluent prose, broad coverage, the look of having done the reading, have come loose from the effort they used to prove. Synthetic opinion is abundant, and it drowns out substance by sheer volume.

This hits positional authority hardest. Much of it rested on gatekeeping. The professor, the editor, the analyst and the official held weight partly because they controlled access to knowledge and its interpretation. When interpretation is free, the gate stands in an open field.

What cannot be inherited, simulated or faked through curation is origination. There are three reasons why.

1. Creation forces collision with reality

Commentary can be wrong indefinitely at no cost. A take can be revised, reframed or quietly forgotten. A made thing cannot. The code runs or it doesn’t. The school fills its places or it doesn’t. The product finds users or it dies.

This is what makes creation epistemically different. Building something drags your model of the world into contact with the world, repeatedly, and reality corrects you in ways no reviewer ever will.

I spent nearly two decades building platforms that connect students with universities across China and beyond. Most of what I know about why students choose where to study came not from reports, but from being wrong, at scale, and having to adjust, and being right.

The commentator’s knowledge is second-order: knowledge about what others have found. The creator’s is first-order: scar tissue from the collision. Authority attaches to the first kind.

2. The asymmetry of risk and skin in the game

The commentator’s position is structurally cheap. If the thing they critique succeeds, they move on. If it fails, they were prescient. Either way, they risk very little.

The author faces the opposite. Their name, capital, time and reputation are attached to the outcome. If it fails, the failure is theirs, publicly and permanently.

This asymmetry is the moral basis of authority. We defer to people with skin in the game not because they are always right, but because they have paid to be wrong and kept going. The right to decide is bought with exposure to the consequences.

Institutions forget this. The administrator who inherits a university, a department or a state agency holds potestas without having authored anything, and bears little personal cost if it drifts.

Over time the organisation fills with people who manage an architecture they could not have built, and would not be ruined by its failure. That is how institutions lose legitimacy while keeping every one of their titles.

3. Creation as proof of work in an AI age

In cryptography, proof of work is a computation that is costly to produce and easy to verify. It makes forgery expensive. Created work now plays the same role for human judgement.

When polished output costs nothing, output alone proves nothing. What still proves something is work that is expensive to fake: a platform with real users, a dataset nobody else holds, a decade of relationships, predictions made in public before the outcome was known, a building that is still standing. These carry a history. They took time, and time is the one input AI cannot compress.

This reverses the old sequence. It used to be that you gained a position and then your words carried weight. Now your work carries weight, and positions follow: the board seat, the advisory role, the invitation to speak. Position becomes a lagging indicator of authority rather than its source.

Content still matters, but as a receipt, not a substitute. Writing is how private proof becomes public proof. The mistake is to issue the receipt without making the purchase.

What positions are for

Some positions gate things that should be gated. You should not sign off a bridge or prescribe a drug because you write well about them. In high-stakes domains, conferred authority exists because a society cannot verify everyone’s work from scratch.

So the useful question is not how to get the position. It is what you are making. Authority is not a seat you are shown to.

It is something you author, and keep authoring.

🖊

In some ways my grandparents are the most successful people I know, they got married at 18, had been married for 60+ years, and now I have a large family of 32 cousins. I owe so much to the opportunities I have had to them.

I was also able to get to know and spend significant time with them, because they got married young.

I think there is a danger that as a culture and a sector we are advising students in a way that is too one dimensional.

Nobody is paid to advise you to eat your vegetables, and everyone is paid to encourage you to seek greater freedom, delay, and keep spending on yourself.

I see many of our incentives actively eating into the family, and sometimes that is destructive and goes too far.

We should stop treating the delay as the default and family as the thing you fit in once everything else is done, and build societies and institutions where families can thrive.

Getting married and having families younger can give more years of overlap between generations which can strengthen the family structure, communities and societies.

It’s something that can’t be measured and often comes at great sacrifice but it is incredibly valuable.

You can also get huge growth and have a massive impact by responsibility, commitment and sacrifice, not just by greater independence and delay.

What does success mean to you?

There are lessons to learn from this in how university is priced and funded.

If we have perfect equality and equal willingness to pay then one standard price for everyone works best. But we know we don’t have perfect equality - especially in global markets.

In digital platforms - it makes more sense to segment the market - and to offer high value services to the small number who can pay a lot, and free, or heavily subsidised low cost services to the majority - that is because the market still benefits from the network effects, and captures the value in the high price point.

Charging a large number of lower priced customers small amounts is substantially harder than charging a small number of high budget students high amounts. Expectations are much higher - so it’s almost better and easier to not charge them at all.

How much should students pay for university tuition fees?

I think there are parallels in university pricing, and in my review of why UK universities are failing

The university model broke in many countries when university attendance increased to over 50% and new funding models were needed.

Choosing one fixed price for all students is not optimal pricing for the market because excludes those below that, and dis-prorportionally costs the middle - while leaving revenue on the table from higher earners.

One option is universities discriminating between those that can afford it and subsidising the others.

Or a university system divided into tiers with a higher private one with market prices, and a state subsidised university system.

But the difference between a tech platform and a modern university is that a platform can have near-zero marginal cost.

Therefore universities need to adapt the service for lower income students to offer near marginal lower cost, or find other ways to subsidise it - such as:

• through offering substantially higher prices and services to wealthier students

• creating a lower cost - delivery tier for lower income students

• private companies that recruit covering part of the training costs

• state subsidies to cover the added benefit that education gives to society

• a mixture of the above

In my opinion I think that the state should be the overriding architect of the system and substantially subsidise it, while also allowing free-market systems to develop along side it that should have no limit on pricing.

And the entire cost base of providing education can be reduced drastically with new technology there are many ways of reducing costs. There should also be a development of new and free education systems that are available online that can educate at near zero-marginal cost. Even without the use of advanced technology - there are many great and successful leaders in history who received an incredible education by reading books. Abraham Lincoln is one remarkable example. While this is true for those with extraordinary drive, it’s still necessary to have an education system that creates environments for others to thrive.

With the state as the competent architect and subisier, and allowing a free market - this has the best of both worlds - it satisfies those who can’t afford it, while also allowing greater dynamism, diversity and innovation in the market. The only problem would be that greater fees and funding in private universities might drain the state sector - which is what, it can be argued, happens in the secondary school private sector market. The solution is not to restrict the market to make it worse, but to make the state sector more competent.

Which is the idea of the platform state.

The whole idea is how do you solve services that have some part infrastructure and some part private market economy? Much of the failure in democracies is to argue about less or more state involvement rather than involvement in what.

The state restricts the market but cannot build or architect the system - so you get the worst aspects of a market and a state.

Lack of central direction and strategy, and market forces unable to find equilbrium or innovate.

Not to publish something that is perfect, a masterpiece, or totally defensible, but to publish and release.

Some of the best articles don’t have an end in mind, they are exploratory.

Montaigne's essayer, "to try";

Didion said she wrote to find out what she was thinking

But in some way volume is how you get good.

Writing 10,000 articles and you’ll have data - you’ll know what works and it will be much easier to publish one more time.

So in some way this blog is my workshop and I’ll refine and improve later.

A lot of life is a set of games:

We start off as a child playing with toys. Board games, computer games - closed and protected games. We seek to optimise our exam results to get into university and our learning to become better good people - exams, university admissions, language learning. Dating games and sports. Status games, social media, Building a business and then graduating to investments.

Through each game we learn lessons and get rewards and benefits, it makes you better.

Some games are better than others the stakes are higher and the impact is bigger.

The quality of a game can be measured by its outcome, impact, and leverage.

A more difficult game makes you better, which can be demonstrated by if you move back down you are better at lower value games, and transferred to other bigger games.

The knowledge, in your bones, that you can master something difficult. You carry that into whatever you play next

Some games are traps - chasing novelty or dopamine, and some people get stuck.

A life spent only in low-leverage low-impact games is a smaller life.

Its better to play at higher games and we have a choice at which level we play - don’t get stuck in the wrong ones too long, realise what game you are playing, be open to moving up, learn about the other games, but beyond it all, whichever game you play, decide it consciously, intentionally, and courageously.

We choose our own games and that might be the ultimate game of all.

International tourist spending, generating nearly $30 billion annually from global visitors. Almost, the equivalent of what the UK earns from all the international students (at about 40 billion GBP).

Rooms with Burj Khalifa views can charge almost double the rent than those facing other directions.

The fountain display costing $218 million USD to build, plays 13 different songs throughout the evening and night, lighting up the Burj. The display is basically the equivalent of New Year celebrations elsewhere around the world.

Dubai without Burj Khalifa is not the same Dubai. Paris without the Eiffel Tower is not the same Paris. They define those cities.

A great building does something to the people around it - it attracts talent, and a certain type, it lifts the sense of what’s possible, gives a place a shared thing to be proud of, and raises everyone’s ambition.

Nine hundred years ago, a similar bet was made on a hill in England.

Between 1311 to 1549 the tallest building in the world was Lincoln Cathedral. It was the Burj Khalifa of its time.

Surpassing the Great Pyramids which were the tallest buildings for 3,800 Years.

Lincoln which was the center of the wool trade in England and one of the largest cities. The church had accumulated sufficient resources the ambition to push the technology of its time to signal to others that this was Lincoln.

What’s interesting is that Britain wasn’t the wealthy country and empire, that it later became. It was a medium power, dwarfed by the Islamic world and Chinese song Dynasty, but it was administratively well run, which is what is interesting and also a parallel with Dubai. England was the UAE of its time - small, but with real institutional ambition, even if it was dwarfed by the great powers of the age.

It was the institutional and organisational capacity of the church that built it.

And contrary to the myth of a democratic governance by the people that we would describe of Britains growth today, it was highly centralised following the Norman invasion.

Almost like an emerging version of a platform state.

The platform state is the idea that a successful state’s role is to manage the infrastructure layer of the economy, and to let the the dynamic layer thrive.

It’s also something I think we don’t measure as much now - we've stopped valuing how well-run things are because it’s not something we measure directly - the value doesn’t show on GDP.

Being wealthy is not the thing that matters most - competence and the will to build can matter more than raw riches.

A medium power that is well-run and builds ambitiously can outperform, over the long run, a richer one that isn't.

Wealth and power is overrated relative to competence and ambition.

China sees the world differently and maps in China place China at the center of the world. Different maps serve different goals.

None of them are perfect, they all have trade-offs, but the question is - is it useful? We accept these trade-offs in maps. The real world is complex and a simple model helps us to operate quickly some serve our goals better than others. The mistake is to forget that.

It’s not just maps where we see these simplifications - the entire field of economics is a set of maps and mental models with simplifications and trade-offs. Think it’s hard to map the world onto a flat piece of paper? It’s even more impossible to perfectly model the complicated nature of our economy onto a simple chart. We accept these simplifications and trade-offs so we can make quicker decisions and operate in a complex world. It makes everything easier. It is a mistake to forget that. It’s also a mistake to forget that sometimes the fundamental nature of the world and our economy changes, and our models become outdated. Like maps of the world, our economic maps and models are chosen largely to serve political goals, and have trade-offs and inaccuracies.

We are undergoing a economic transition right now as we move to a more digitised economy. I will introduce the ways our current model of the economy is inaccurate and increasingly outdated and some mental models to resolve this contradiction.

In Brief

The current tension in brief is that:

There are three core incentives that we have

1. GDP growth as a measure of economic growth

2. To minimise government debt to GDP

3. To minimise or cap the ability of the state

This has resulted in largely mortgage and asset led economic growth which we mistake for real growth, while at the same time having negative effects on raising costs and reducing productivity in the economy .

The solution is that we need to have a new map:

1. GDP growth is not an accurate measure of economic growth - we should consider a balance sheet including the future.

2. That all debt in the economy should be considered as one number.

3. The state should not be either bigger or smaller but act more like a platform building and maintaining the infrastructure for the dynamic market layer to function.

4. All growth is not good growth - we need to attract and direct the economy into productive areas and away from extractive areas. Away from property, into efficient equities, start-ups, education, healthcare innovation.
   

1) The Limits of GDP Led Growth

GDP is seen as the core measure of how fast our economy is growing but it has an increasing number of critics. It was never meant to be a target, but a measure. When we start measuring and seeking to optimise the number it changes how we act and our policies change. Goodhart’s law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. GDP incentivises borrowing - taking money from the future and using it now, and it doesn’t account for any value in the future - it’s a backward looking number. Saving? Not good for GDP. It doesn’t differentiate between good and bad growth - just activity. Years of education? Culture? Your actual strength? It optimises for maximising the return on current capital or institutions.

2) Limiting Government Debt

Government debt is seen as undesirable and many countries have fiscal rules to limit it. But private debt in the form of mortgages is seen as different. When a government defaults, it can trigger a currency crisis, freeze the state's ability to function, and take down the banking system that holds its bonds. But when a mortgage defaults, they can just take the house and sell it.

Because in a credit-based economy, new lending creates new money and spending, so debt growth tends to drive GDP growth - more credit means more transactions, more activity, a higher number. This mismatch between government debt being limited and seen as undesirable and mortgage growth being seen as more benign has resulted in a rapid increase in mortgage debt.

What the growth figures don’t capture is that credit flowing into a fixed asset like land doesn’t expand output - it just bids up the price. And rising asset prices act as a drag: they divert household income into mortgages and rent, and they pull capital away from productive investment and toward speculation on land. The economy looks like it’s growing, but it’s inflating, not producing.

• Higher housing costs divert income into servicing mortgages and rent - money that goes to existing asset-holders and lenders rather than into productive spending or investment.

• Capital that could have funded productive investment (businesses, R&D, capacity) instead chases land, because land appreciation is the easier return.

• High house prices reduce labour mobility (people can't move to where the productive jobs are), lowering aggregate productivity.

3) Limiting the Power of the State

Another unusual thing that has happened in western democracies is that as state has been getting bigger in terms of spending its productive capacity and willingness to invest and build shrank.

In the 1970s there was stagflation as the economy become slower from a large post-war state. The result was to turn to the free market.

There was Milton Friedman's monetarism and the broader free-market revival. Reagan and Thatcher are downstream of this: the old model broke, and they offered the replacement.

Thatcher sold off , and a similar thing happened in US.

The ideological enemy was a state-planned economy - the Soviet Union. This gave "more state = the road to tyranny/inefficiency" enormous rhetorical and emotional force.

But the correction overshot. It didn’t just make the state smaller - it made it unable to decide or build. The state was loaded with veto points: layers of process, consultation, legal challenge, and permitting that let almost anyone block an action, while no one retained the power to drive one. The result is a state that is strong at saying no and weak at saying yes - able to obstruct, unable to build. That’s why, when housing and infrastructure were needed, the state couldn’t provide them itself, and private credit rushed in to fill the gap.

The Solutions

The solution is to basically counter each of the above issues, but when we dig into each of these issues, we realise that there are other interconnected issues.

If we want to fix the property markets, for example, we need to create other attractive investments and liberalise and incentivise capital markets, and do it slowly to protect pensions.

Rising Above GDP Growth - a Vision and Indicators

GDP growth is not an accurate measure of economic growth - we should consider a balance sheet including the future, but not even to really consider it as more than one indicator among many. A state should set a vision that is powerful and then has a set of indicators. The indicators that matter would change depending on the goal, for example, the amount of savings or net wealth each person would have is a good goal for individuals and therefore the country to have because it gives people security and options but it directly competes with GDP which incentivises consumer spending and debt.

The reason that they don’t is that many leaders are limited by how long they are in power. It is not natural to think longer than 4 years when the average leader is less than that. Undertaking the big meaningful changes that are long term in nature might never be attempted.

Attract the Most Talented

Some options are to increase pay for those in power to attract more talented people that are in line with the private sector - a more competitive , and longer terms. This model could be learnt from singapore.

Improving Media & Education

At the same time to increase the quality of debate and education so people understand the issues better. Scial media is having the negative impact of creating echo chambers and tribalism, and competes for attention away from media outlets. The incentives of modern media 0 attention monetisation, algorithmic optimisation for engagement, continuous volume - reward alarm and outrage in a way that's historically distinctive, whatever the baseline was. which turns things into a short term tug of war and popularity contest rather than collectively working together to go in the best direction.

A solution to this could be better discussion groups and podcasts about the core issues that is a mixture of podcasts and house of commons - for example getting multiple people in the room together to discuss.

Reducing Mortgage Debt

If we were to look at the economy away from GDP we could see that mortgage debt causes assets to rise which decreases the ability for young people to buy houses. It’s actually undesirable to have more expenses houses - cheaper, abundant houses would be more desirable.

Imagine if was as easy to get a startup loan as it was a mortgage. Startups employ others, and create activity, experiments, innovation and learning and are far more desirable than increasing property prices.

Experimental Zones

One thing I’ve learnt from China, UAE, and technology companies is the value of micro experiments. China will often test new policies in certain zones to see the effect before rolling it out to the rest of the country. This is smart as a way to accelerate learning. If multiple people have different solutions, why not try them out? Those that like certain policies can even move to those zones. Which brings me onto the resolution of the power of the state.

The Platform State

The platform state is the idea that it’s not about the state being bigger or smaller, but about what it does and doesn’t do. It’s role is to be a platform for the economy to flourish on top of it. Like the garden - creating the environment and infrastructure for the flowers - businesses, families, people to flourish.

The state should create the infrastructure and regulations and guide the market.

When we look at much of the increase prices in the economy has been because the state has not adequately set up the conditions for that to thrive - it’s a platform failure.

Infrastructure is anything needed for society to function. By that definition healthcare, education, roads, transport, energy and housing are all forms of infrastructure. Failure in those areas or the prices increasing are a result of the state not performing its role. It doesn’t adequately provide the infrastructure, and limits the ability of the private sector to provide it.

Directing the Economy

All growth is not good growth - we need to attract and direct the economy into productive areas and away from extractive areas. Away from property, into efficient equities, start-ups, education, healthcare innovation. This is entirely a platform state idea - for the platform state to provide it or to enable the free market to provide it and not limit the ability.

The Limits of The Mortgage-Growth Economy

Governments want growth but also want to cut spending - so they lean on cheap credit instead of investment in infrastructure. Cheap credit flows into land and housing, because that's what banks lend against. The result is real GDP growth that's largely mortgage- and asset-price-led rather than productivity-led. That kind of growth is extractive, not generative: it inflates the price of a fixed asset, transfers wealth to incumbents, crowds out productive investment, and loads the economy with debt and fragility. We've been mistaking asset inflation for prosperity.

The New Low Cost Productive Abundant Economy

A new abundant economy is one where price of the essential needs fall, while the overall economy grows, and people become better off. There is abundant low cost housing, and infrastructure, high quality education and healthcare. That frees up people and capital to flow into innovation and startups thrive. This gives that economy a major global competitive advantage of being well-run. This is the ultimate economic advantage. The ability to outproduce, outcompete others.

Why not?

The reason it hasn't happened isn't that no one thought of it; it's that the incumbents benefiting from the current arrangement are exactly the ones with the power to block the change. Retirees benefit from having a house that increases with inflation, so does much of the economy from the current set up.

Also between here and there is not an easy road, it takes time and would likely have economic challenges as the economy shifts. It would need to take 5-10 years to restructure an economy like this.

An economy with low infrastructure costs would have a massive competitive advantage over others, but that advantage is long term and compounding, while the benefits of the existing arrangement are immediate.

A big spender with more debt may have actually have an advantage before the debt becomes due. The question is whether that’s being spent on the right things.

Questions

Spending on housing, healthcare, education is the economy - so if it falls, won’t the economy hollow out and shrink?

Part of why it feels like the economy would shrink is that GDP counts the waste as output. Overpriced rent, bloated healthcare admin, credential inflation — these all show up as GDP right now. So if you strip out the extraction, measured GDP might even fall in those categories, and by the GDP map it would look like loss.

But that's precisely the map being wrong - you'd be removing activity that was extractive, not generative. The economy would be better off (people richer in real terms, more productive investment) while the number that miscounts waste as value might not reflect it.

Money spent on inflated rent or an overpriced degree isn't creating value equal to its price - a large chunk of it is transfer (going to a landowner, an incumbent) and deadweight (pure waste from the distortion). When that spending falls, that value doesn't vanish from the economy. It gets released to go somewhere else.

The economy becomes made of whatever people actually want once they're not forced to overpay for the basics - which historically is: more innovation, more services, more culture, more leisure, more new business formation, higher-quality versions of everything.

It also attracts talent, companies to be based there.

I can’t believe that people can operate for so long without it.

Agency - the sense that you are the one responsible for making things happen.

Self-direction - ability to identify what needs to be done and do it without being told.

Intrinsic motivation - driven from the inside rather than needing external prompts or rewards.

Proactiveness - acting in anticipation of what’s needed rather than reacting to instructions.

In psychology it’s often talked about as internal locus of control - the belief that outcomes are determined by your own actions rather than by external forces or other people. People with an external locus of control tend to wait, blame circumstances, and need direction. People with an internal one take ownership and move.

In terms of rough population splits most research suggests something like:

• Strongly internal — maybe 15-20%

• Moderately internal — another 20-25%

• Moderately external — around 30%

• Strongly external — 25-30%

Hiring density of high agency people as the single most important early decision. Because a few low agency people in a small team drags everything disproportionately.

How to teach high agency:

The foundation gets set early.

By the time someone is in their mid-20s the pattern is deeply ingrained. You can nudge it at the margins but you can’t rewire someone’s fundamental relationship with responsibility in a work setting.

What develops high agency in children:

Letting them face consequences. Not shielding them from failure, frustration, or disappointment. A child who never experiences a problem they had to solve themselves never builds the belief that they can solve problems.

Asking instead of telling. Parents who constantly ask “what do you think we should do?” rather than just directing everything raise kids who develop the habit of forming their own views.

Unstructured time. Kids who are bored and have to figure out how to fill that time develop creativity and self-direction. Heavily scheduled children — activity to activity, always supervised - never build that muscle because they never need to.

Giving real responsibility early. Actual stakes, not fake ones. A chore with consequences if it doesn’t happen. A decision that actually affects the family. Something they own genuinely.

Praising effort and initiative over compliance. If a child is only rewarded for following rules and getting the right answer, they optimise for that. If they’re rewarded for trying things, proposing ideas, taking initiative - they optimise for that instead.

What kills it:

Helicopter parenting is probably the biggest one. Solving every problem for them, intervening before they struggle, over-explaining everything.

Rigid schooling that punishes deviation and rewards only compliance.

Overprotection from failure - the participation trophy culture.

The deeper point:

High agency adults almost always had some combination of early responsibility, exposure to consequences, and an environment that expected them to figure things out. Many also had some adversity - not trauma, but genuine difficulty they had to navigate themselves.

How to test for it in hiring:

Give them an open problem before the interview No instructions, no format, just “here’s a situation we’re facing, come back with your thinking.” You’re not evaluating the answer - you’re evaluating whether they define the problem themselves, make assumptions explicit, and come with a point of view. Low agency people either don’t do it or produce something generic and safe.

Ask about things they built or started unprompted Not “tell me about a challenge you overcame” - that’s too coached. Ask “what’s something you did that nobody asked you to do?” or “what have you built or started from scratch?” The answer reveals a lot fast.

Look for specificity in past examples High agency people tell stories where they are the subject — “I noticed, I decided, I built, I pushed.” Low agency people tell stories where circumstances or other people are the subject — “we were told to, the team decided, my manager asked me to.”

Give them something to do during the process A small real task. Not a test — actual work. See if they ask clarifying questions or just wait. See if they deliver early or on the last second. See how much initiative they show in how they approach it.

Notice how they handle not knowing Ask something they won’t know the answer to. High agency people say “I don’t know but here’s how I’d figure it out.” Low agency people just say “I don’t know” and stop.

It’s a practice of visualising the outcome you want rather than how you currently feel.

Something you can do in every domain and then your life drastically changes.

A big unlock is realising that life is not coming at you, but coming from you.

Wake up Neo.

You have a choice.

You are the creator.

So before you do any task, before you start any day, get intentional about what the outcome you want to create is.

Reherse it in your mind.

Running also feeds and resets your brain.

It produces a protein that acts as a fertiliser for your brain which supports neuroplasticity - encouraging new connections and pathways which makes you younger, quicker, smarter, more ideas and just generally better.

While also resetting the dopamine levels of your brain - encouraging your brain to make more dopamine receptors.

So unlike mindless scrolling where you don’t need to do any effort to get dopamine.

It incentivises you to want to do hard stuff to make you feel good.

You become more motivated.

While also making you feel good.

So doing hard stuff just becomes easier.

Go back to work and making 100 outbound calls, or tackling hard problems, or dealing with a relationship issue is so much easier.

Are the main issues in your life actually issues? Or just magnified out of proportion.

If relationship issues are your biggest problem, you’re not pushing yourself enough.

It trains you to create clearly defined goals, to visualise more.

The big unlock is to deserve whatever you want.

Ask yourself - who else deserves what you want more than you?

The left - right axis comes from France in 1789 during the french revolution.

France’s newly formed National Assembly was debating how much power the king should keep in the new constitution - above all, whether he’d have an absolute veto over legislation.

When the vote on the royal veto came up, the deputies who supported the king and the veto gathered to the right of the presiding officer’s chair, and those who opposed it - the supporters of revolution and popular sovereignty - gathered to the left.

But as the state has grown, the left right axis has become so overloaded - one axis carrying so many unrelated conflicts, it’s lost resolution and collapsed into team-signaling.

And also the main issues of our time are not on the left right axis anymore.

7 prime ministers in 10 years in the UK is because of the misalignment and that people no longer map onto the left right axis.

The same pattern happened in 1922-1924 after four different prime ministers when the electorate changed - women and a greater voting participation no longer mapped onto the main parties.

One core argument is should the state be bigger or smaller?

It’s arguing about the wrong thing - quantity of state rather than quality of state.

We’ve become so afraid of a competent state - learning certain lessons of the 20th century that we’ve overshot and made it incompetent.

And we’ve made things so tribal that the conversation has turned into a short term tug of war rather than a discussion of what’s in the best long term interests of the group.

The right answer is that the economy should be divided into two layers, like a garden - the infrastructure and the dynamic layer.

Much of the failure is the handoff between the two - energy, housing, infrastructure, healthcare.

That’s where the platform state comes in

China can build miles of roads and buildings. UAE can build roads and the world’s tallest building, and even hires British people to do some of it.

Yet, Britain, home to some of the best universities in the world, talented people, used to be one of the most competent states in the world, is stuck.

Is it not possible for a mid-size democracy to have a functional state that is competent?

I believe it is possible, and not only possible, but essential.

Don’t mistake the slow nature of this problem to one that might be fixed.

The nature of declining civilisations is not sudden, it’s a slow burn, where the old, educated, ambitious, talented people - the David Starkeys, the David Attenboroughs, they age quietly.

The young educated leave for better opportunities elsewhere, or they have fewer children, they have their income absorbed by rising costs and inefficiencies rather than invested in growth and education.

Look at Istanbul or Rome now, and it’s clearly far from it’s Zenth.

It’s not too late for London and Britain.

From the country that invented economics, it needs a rethink.

It’s my belief that Britain’s best days are ahead of it.

Why Britain Can’t Build

After WW2 Britain had no money left. It had exhausted resources to defeat Nazi Germany, and was borrowing money. The pound crashed by 30%.

In 1956 Britain was unable to defend the Suez without the US help, often stated as a defining moment where the baton was passed to US as the world’s largest economy, most capable, and strongest currency.

With a large population accustomed to being looked after by the state, returning from the war, to defend and meet the need of demand for greater socialism and being looked after - to satisfy what voters wanted, Britain’s state grew. The welfare state, the NHS.

The British disease is the stagnation of the 1970s. Low growth.

What followed was Margaret Thatcher’s reforms to shift away from the state to the private sector.

The state was concerned with debt by the state, and in order to satisfy economic growth and GDP, it followed a housing debt model - people took on the debt as private lending, mortgages funded the economic growth.

Britain came to rely on rising asset values (mostly housing) as a substitute for productive investment, which created a huge incumbent class whose wealth depends on scarcity, which then entrenches the can't-build paralysis.

Britain now has some of the highest amount of value in the economy in housing, but this is effectively dead money. It’s not money that leads to growth, but is money that grows by scarcity.

The state, wary of its own borrowing, engineered growth through private debt instead - mortgages - so household borrowing against ever-rising house prices became the substitute for real productivity.

What happened is that house prices grew from 1950, and much of Britain’s growth was growth on paper - property priced led growth.

For the last 40 years the best investment for a Brit was in their house, and now we have a generation of people for who’s pension is their house, seeking to protect that value.

But the problem is that putting money under your mattress doesn’t do anything valuable, it doesn’t multiply. It restricts.

But housing wealth is worse than a mattress - it isn't only dead money, it's actively extractive - it relies on scarcity so others can’t afford it. It’s a transfer of those who don’t own to those who do own. it grows by restricting supply, transferring wealth from the young and productive to incumbents. It doesn't just fail to multiply; it multiplies by taking.

This looks good on paper, people feel richer, they have access to debt, until it reaches it’s limit - and there’s no new money or buyer able to buy.

We can’t make housing a good investment that grows faster than income, while making housing affordable - those are two conflicting goals and that’s the heart of Britain’s economic stagnation.

That’s where we are now.

So Whats the solution?

• Education - so property owners can understand the economic implications and people can understand each other to solve it rather than it being a tug of war, and young people, and those with rising expenses can associate this artificial scarcity with their pain.

• Alternative places to put money that can grow. e can’t just allow retirees to lose their wealth, we need to do it gradually and enable alternative investments over years. We need more attractive places to put money - by moving money away from property, it will enable lower costs and Britain to be more competitive in the future.

• Limiting the ability to borrow for houses is also a good idea - as housing gradually deflates the prices will be more market based.

• Freeing up planning permission - zoning rather than asking for permission to build houses - scarcity is what makes housing a good investment, planning restriction is what manufactures the scarcity, so freeing planning is what breaks the investment case and makes housing affordable.

• A new model and expectation of a competent state.

These don’t guarantee abundance. But they increase your chances, and your ability to survive and improve.

Over a long enough time, it’s nearly the same thing.

We just don’t realise it yet.

On paper it still looks like growth - 0.2% this year, 3% in some countries.

But our population is shrinking.

Those are two ends of the same candle: an economy can’t honestly call itself growing while there are fewer people every year to grow for.

Here’s the part the GDP figure misses.

Each year a greater share of that “growth” is just the same life getting more expensive - energy and housing eating a larger slice, not because we’re getting more, but because the basics cost more to stand still.

That’s dead money.

If a pound isn’t creating something new, then growth is just measuring the rising cost of what we already had.

And a lot of what we count as new activity is old activity finally getting a price tag.

Dating apps charge for what courtship did for free.

Single-earner households become dual-earner households that hire a nanny to cover the gap. The work was always happening- now it runs through the market, so now it counts.

That’s the economy doing exactly what it’s designed to do: turn every possible exchange into something monetisable, measurable, taxable, investible.

It looks like growth.

But are we actually any better off?

That’s the flaw in the model. It measures transactions, not future growth - and the two have quietly stopped moving together.

But it was never meant to.

What comes next

Systems overcorrect.

They zig too far one way, then zag too far back.

It’s a global competition, and whoever optimises hardest for the wrong thing eventually gets beaten by whoever didn’t.

That’s part of why the global south is catching up.

Optimise purely for economic output and your population shrinks; the country that kept some slack gains ground.

Everything reverts to the mean in the end.

So this probably resolves itself - competition and evolution will force the correction whether we plan it or not.

The shame is the wasted time.

We could start now: better metrics that count wellbeing and not just throughput, more digital governance, and an all-out push for abundant housing and energy so the basics stop swallowing our growth.

Fix the basics, and growth can go back to meaning what we thought it meant.

“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

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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.

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 📈🚀