Hello, Lovely Human,
Your answer to this question is critical to your becoming.
I ask and answer this around this time every single year, with our Gleac community and myself personally. My actions in response to this question make many people very uncomfortable, and that’s ok.
But because I am deeply aware that I am only as good as my environment, and that is where I spend a lot of my time, here is what I know: those of us who want to go bigger, higher, or whatever your metric or the change you seek, must improve or change our environment to get there. It’s the fastest path.
And absolutely nothing is wrong with those of us who stay the same, loving it and our environment. Life is so much simpler in this frame of mind. I am not there ;-)
And I am not alone in my thinking, which is so reassuring. I recently read a piece by a woman I am brain crushing on lately. Her piece on this is here.
Science shows that in a gym we ride faster or run faster when someone faster is next to us. It’s not to compete (at least for me), but we get that extra inspiration, energy and WOW because we can see it tangibly in front of us.
Right now, I’m pruning our community. I suspect another 100 or so will be exited, with love and gratitude for sharing parts of themselves with us.
Why do I do this? It’s not only about me watching my company. I have always believed in eating my own dog food. And the Gleac community is a product. So if I cannot feel inspired and uplifted eating my own dog food, i.e. all the people, the services and the product itself, how can I expect others to?
And so I prune. I also get narrower and narrower in who it serves and how.
I suspect that Gleac is a community of senior operators moving into portfolio careers, or starting their first business. And it’s made up of two kinds of people: the curious, ready to begin again, and the AI-enablers, ready to teach the community AI skills.
How we do it and what we focus on is simple. In a world where AI makes expert knowledge cheap, trust becomes the currency. So we build with the community five assets that compound: Social Capital (who trusts you), Network Capital (who connects you, and who you connect), Knowledge Capital (what you can share and teach generously, for payment), Purpose Capital (why you do the work), and Community Capital (where you learn, get support and belong).
This is my season of pruning, to ensure that in 2027 both my company and I thrive. What’s yours?
🤖 AI + Frontier Updates
1 - A ballerina built the market where goats hedge their wages.
Luana Lopes Lara trained at the Bolshoi school, danced professionally in Austria, then went to MIT and cofounded Kalshi, now valued at $11 billion, where you can trade on who takes the Senate and where a California goat herder just bought a $500,000 hedge against his own state legislature rewriting his wage rules.
2 - Your friendships are not a workflow.
Marissa Mayer's AI assistant wrote three bullet points describing her own daughter for a school birthday presentation.
3 - Canva pruned 22% of itself this week.
1,271 people, with at least six months' pay and a year of healthcare each.
4 - The code behind most of the web had a very bad week.
Critical security flaws in PHP, the language running a huge share of the internet, sent companies scrambling and took websites offline worldwide, with the UK government telling anyone unpatched to pull the plug.
5 - Edit video without leaving your Claude or ChatGPT chat.
Cardboard's plugin lets you attach your clips, describe the cut you want, and get the finished reel back inside the conversation, then ask for changes the same way.
How Our Community Moves Mountains with Quiet Capital
Why is the GLEAC community like no other? Quiet Capital. It's everything that never shows up on a balance sheet. Who trusts you. What you know. Who picks up when you call. Here's one of many examples of what it looked like inside our community this week.
How Can I Stay Ahead
in Learning & Development?
📚
1 - Pals, allies, companions. Count yours.
Adam Grant on Plain English: it takes roughly 50 hours to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend and more than 200 to make a close one.
2 - Grit was never the whole story.
The woman who taught us grit now says perseverance isn't always enough, and that changing your situation often beats adapting to it.
3 - The hardest version of you to outgrow is the one still getting applause.
Nobody prunes what is still paying. That is the trap in this piece: the identity people reward you for is the one you will defend longest, even after it stops fitting.
4 - You can't jog your way out of loneliness.
Across 277,489 adults aged 40 to 69, being both lonely and isolated cost men about 5.8 years free of mental disorders and women about 3.7. Diet, exercise and sleep softened the damage of isolation, but did nothing measurable for loneliness.
5 - Everyone wants senior talent. Almost nobody has a plan for it.
In Singapore, 61% of employers say professionals over 50 matter to their future workforce, yet only 14% have a strategy with measurable goals, and 53% name adaptability to AI as the biggest barrier to hiring or keeping them. Read that again.
6 - Norway gave every five year old an iPad. Then it took them back.
Ten years on, reading scores slid, books disappeared from classrooms, and the country is now banning phones in schools, pulling screens from the early years and spending millions putting paper textbooks back. A whole nation admitted its environment was wrong and changed it. If Norway can prune, so can you.
Religious Focus: Stoicism
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.
Last week we sat with Seneca's letters on wealth, and Giulia, the Naples baker who sold her shop and found herself rich and needed by no one. This week, the Stoics on outgrowing your circles, kindly.
Every Thursday for thirty one years, Mireille Fabre has played belote at the same café table by the Vieux Port in Marseille, with the same four girls she went to the lycée with. They are not girls anymore. Mireille is fifty four, a hospital pharmacist, twice a grandmother.
Lately she has started to dread Thursdays.
Nothing happened. Nobody was cruel. It is only that every conversation now travels backwards. Who married whom in 1991. Which teacher was unfair. Why Mireille "changed" after ten years working in Lyon and came home with opinions. When she mentioned the literacy class she wants to teach on Thursday evenings, for women who have just arrived in the city, Josiane laughed and said, "Since when are you a saint? You're still our Mimi."
She is. And she isn't.
On the walk home she thought of a Stoic she had read in her twenties, Hierocles, who drew a human life as a set of circles. In the centre, your own mind. Around it, your immediate family. Then wider family, then neighbours, then fellow citizens, and finally the whole human race. The task, he said, was to keep drawing the outer circles inward, to treat strangers a little more like kin.
The Stoics called this oikeiosis, the slow work of making the world your home. What Mireille realised, sitting on her balcony that night with a paper napkin and a pen, was that it cannot only flow one way. If you are pulling new people in, some circles will move outward. Not because you love them less. Because you are no longer the same centre.
Seneca had given his friend Lucilius advice for exactly this moment. Spend your time with those who will make you better, he wrote, and welcome those you can make better. The process is mutual. Seneca did not say abandon your friends. He said choose your company as if it shapes you, because it does.
Epictetus added the part about kindness. You are given roles, he taught: son, sister, friend, citizen. Each role carries its duties, and you can perform them well or badly. Stepping out of a role is allowed. Stepping out of it carelessly is not.
So the next Thursday Mireille did not invent a busy schedule. She stayed for one round, then told them plainly. She loved them. She was going to teach on Thursdays now. She would come to the café on the first Thursday of every month, and she wanted to hear about their grandchildren, not about 1991.
Josiane was hurt for a week. Then she called to ask whether the literacy class needed someone to bring cake.
Guiding question:
Which circle are you still sitting in out of loyalty to a version of you that no longer lives there?
This Week's Practice
Your Belonging Score. Ten minutes. Be honest.
1. List your communities.
Family, work, alumni, professional groups, faith, friends, the WhatsApp groups you never mute.
2. Score each one from 1 to 10 on two questions.
Can I show up here vulnerably, with what is actually going on with me? And does this community belong to the version of me I am now, or to a past one?
3. Decide on the low scores.
Anything sitting at three or below for too long gets one of three choices: stay and change how you show up, have the honest conversation, or exit cleanly. Not everybody is entitled to be on everybody's journey, and that includes you on theirs.
Membership is a transaction. Belonging is a witness.
🍀 What Can I Do to Impact, Live Sustainably and Make the World a Better Place?
1 - Birthday parties as medicine.
In 100 villages around Wardha, Maharashtra, seniors meet weekly to colour, read, exercise and celebrate a different person's birthday each week, and the grandchildren come along.
2 - Phones in the basket. Family at the table.
Fifteen Sardinian restaurants are running a month long trial: families drop their phones in a basket and get board games and conversation starters instead.
3 - A whole island turned off the lights.
Corvo, an Azores island of about 450 people, switched off its lights for almost three weeks so baby Cory's shearwaters could find the sea by starlight. About 75% of the world's breeding population nests in the Azores.
