In partnership with
Lovely Humans,
I am back;-) I enjoy writing and curating this newsletter for you so much that I did not want to delegate it to AI.
So thank you for allowing me the creative brain space to get started on my second book. Five chapters in and I am on a roll with my book coach. We should be done with 50k words by October. September 10th week I begin contacting publishers old and new. Share a warm intro with yours if you think useful to explore.
This week I also re-opened Mentor On-boarding… with a group of brilliant lovely humans from around the world. One story is still playing in my head.
A woman shared that after a 15-year career as a successful creative, she was pivoting into the corporate world. She wasn't just changing jobs; she was consciously letting go of an identity that had defined her for over a decade to build a new one from the ground up.
It struck me how often we talk about career pivots in terms of skills and strategy, but we rarely acknowledge the emotional weight of it. It's an act of profound courage to look at a label you've worn with pride, 'artist,' 'engineer,' 'marketer,' and decide it's no longer your current story.
Many of us are attached to an old version of ourselves, an old title. Just look on LinkedIn at how many 'Former CEO of…' you find. The world is changing so fast that our 'domain capital' is constantly in flux. What was valuable yesterday is most likely obsolete tomorrow and does not serve you.
This forces a transition. It's uncomfortable. It can feel like a loss. But in that discomfort is also immense opportunity.
It's a chance to redefine your identity, who you want to become and your success on new terms. It is not about disregarding all your experiences, but about integrating all parts of ourselves as a stepping stone to build a new future that isn't just a continuation of the past.
The journey isn't about erasing what you were. But it is about letting go and detaching to make space for something new.
It made me think: How many of us are holding onto an old professional identity out of comfort or fear?
And what could we become if we had the courage to let it go?
🤖 AI + Frontier Updates
1 - The six frontiers one investor thinks will define the next hundred years.
Laying out where the century actually gets decided. Useful if you are choosing where to point your investments for the next decade.
2 - An operating system for people who do not have one job.
MyPholyo maps where your money and your energy actually go across a portfolio career, then hands you your real hourly rate and the gaps in what you charge. Sits close to what this issue is about: the version of you that no single title covers.
3 - If you are raising money, your data room is a folder. It should be a story.
Pageform turns scattered documents into a guided narrative and then tells you which sections investors actually read, skip and come back to. Excellent for anyone in a raise right now.
4 - AI makes you more original. The catch is what happens when everyone uses it.
Sash from our own community on the study where AI-assisted stories scored 8.1 percent more novel individually. Originality survives only if you refuse the first answer it hands you.
5 - An invisible teleprompter that feeds you objection handlers mid-call.
MagicScreen sits as a Mac overlay your prospect cannot see and coaches you live. Genuinely useful or slightly unnerving, depending on which side of the call you are sitting on. We are testing this tool and others with our customer success and sales teams.
Smart starts here.
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Lovely Humans in our Community
How Can I Stay Ahead
in Learning & Development?
📚
1 - The ADHD doctor on focus, procrastination and feeling in control.
Mel Robbins with a specialist on why your attention keeps collapsing and what actually rebuilds it. Worth the time even if you do not have ADHD.
2 - The Claude Code skill your smartest friends are quietly using.
Greg Isenberg walks through the one that is doing the heavy lifting for people who build. We build on Claude at GLEAC, so this one went straight into our systems.
3 - Disrupt your own inventions, before somebody else does it for you.
Shantha Mohan's argument is the one most builders flinch at: the thing you are proudest of building is the thing you should be working hardest to make obsolete.
4 - The hypergrowth formula that built Lululemon, taken apart.
A rare look at the actual operating system behind a brand everyone copies and nobody catches. Read it for the machine, not the leggings.
5 - You are carrying an ancestor nobody has ever been able to name.
A ghost lineage that split from us 500,000 years ago still shows up in every non-African genome. Read it next to this week's worldview story: you were never only made of people you can name.
Religious Focus this month: Ubuntu
Every month we pick one religion or way of living. It allows us to open our minds and be mindful of how we and others live better, healthier, joyful and meaningful lives.
Ubuntu is not a religion. It is a moral philosophy carried in the Nguni languages of Southern Africa, isiZulu, isiXhosa, siSwati and Ndebele, with close relatives right across the continent: botho in Sesotho and Setswana, hunhu in Shona. Its entire weight sits in one phrase. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. A person is a person through other people.
That sounds warm until you follow it properly. Ubuntu says your personhood is not something you own privately and carry into a room. It is grown in you by other people, and it can be built up or worn down by how they hold you, and by how you hold them. You are not a self that happens to have relationships. You are the relationships.
Thandeka is forty-four. The architecture practice she gave eleven years to folded in October. She has been out of work since, living with her uncle and aunt.
A stranger came to visit her uncle today and stayed for lunch.
Her uncle stands up to make the introduction.
"This is Thandeka," he says. "She is teaching herself something new."
She feels her whole face go hot.
He did not say she was an architect. He did not say she used to be one. He said the thing she has not told anybody, because she is not sure yet that it is true.
She waits until the plates are being carried in to ask him why he said that.
He takes his time. He is not a man who rushes an answer just because somebody is uncomfortable.
"Because you cannot be a person by yourself," he says. "If you sit up there alone and decide who you are, you will decide it from your worst week. You will get it wrong. That is what we are for."
The phrase he is working from is umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. It comes from the Nguni languages, isiZulu and isiXhosa, and it is usually translated as "a person is a person through other people."
In Ubuntu thought, personhood is not something you are born already holding, complete, in private. It is grown. It is conferred and maintained in relationship, and it can be strengthened or diminished by how others hold you. Which is why isolating yourself is not treated as a personal preference in this tradition. It is treated as a kind of harm, and the community's job is to come and get you.
Nobody at that lunch offered Thandeka a job. But what happened is that for the next several months her family kept introducing her as the new thing. Her cousin sent her a small job. Somebody's neighbour needed drawings. Her aunt told a woman at church that Thandeka was "doing something with sustainable building now," which was not accurate, and then eight months later it was.
The sentence became true because a room kept saying it out loud while she was still too unsure to.
Guiding question:
Who has been introducing you as the person you used to be, and who in your life is brave enough to introduce you as the person you are becoming?
This Week's Practice
Three steps. Thirty days.
1. Write the sentence you cannot say out loud yet.
One line. "I am becoming ______." Not the title you have earned, the one that makes you wince. If it does not feel premature, it is too small.
2. Give it to three people this week.
Not your partner. Not your closest friend. Three people who will be in rooms you are not in. Ask them plainly: when my name comes up, introduce me as this.
3. Put one small piece of it in public inside 30 days.
Before you feel qualified. A post, a talk, a favour, a first small job. This is what gives the people repeating your sentence something to point at.
Thandeka never introduced herself. Her uncle did it, badly and early, to a stranger over lunch. Eight months later it was true.
🍀 What Can I Do to Impact, Live Sustainably and Make the World a Better Place?
1 - A juice company dumped 1,000 truckloads of orange peel on dead pasture. Sixteen years later it was forest.
That plot held 176 percent more biomass than the land right beside it, and nobody did anything else to it. The waste was the whole intervention.
2 - She briefed the White House. Then her identity went public.
A CIA analyst's account of being pushed out after coming out, and of who unexpectedly spoke up for her. Worth reading slowly, whatever you walked in thinking.
3 - Fertiliser just became a sovereignty question.
India imports 85 percent of its ammonia, which quietly puts the food security of 1.4 billion people in someone else's hands. Green ammonia is no longer a climate story, it is a geopolitics one.
4 - Ospreys hatched at an English reserve for the first time since the Victorian era.
Nobody currently alive had seen it happen there. Somebody protected that habitat for decades on nothing but the possibility.
5 - Open somebody else's window, anywhere in the world.
Strangers upload the view from their window, you look out of it, then you upload yours. It calls itself the calmest place on the internet and it earns it.
