Open Part 1: The age of distrust and distraction

Trust Series, Part 1: Building Trust in an Age of Distrust and Distraction: Powering the Business-Trust-Brand Flywheel

Table of Contents

In this essay:

• The trust economy
• What is trust, anyway?
• What Warren Buffett says about trust
• The brand-trust-business flywheel

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1. The Trust Economy

We’ve had the fourth industrial revolution, and the passion economy, and the attention economy.

All of them are genuine.

But there’s something that’s as important as any of those, something that has al

Open Part 2: Our new global village

Trust Series, Part 2: How the Dynamic of Trust Has Changed in Our New Global Village

Table of Contents

In this essay:

• Cold ice-cream on hot days
• The existential origins of trust
• How trade made money a proxy for trust
• Choosing the right terrain in the fight for trust
• How to avoid being slave to modernity’s masters

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In the first part of this series of essays on the concept of trust in business, I tried to peel back some of the layers on what exactly trust is, outlined the ideas of the trust economy, considered how fragile trust can be, and described what I think of as a “flywheel” that can help all businesses build trust, and leverage it, in a way that is aligned to your val

Open Part 3: The trust equation

Trust Series: The trust equation

Two vital things that add up to the one thing essential in every great relationship.

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There’s a phrase commonly heard in branding and marketing fields.

“The confused mind never buys.”

The thinking is that you must strive to be ultra-clear with what your brand stands for, ultra-clear on what your business offers. Because without clarity there is confusion, and the confused mind never buys.

Confusion, of course, can be overcome. It just takes a different message, a better value proposition, and hey presto, confusion disappears and clarity reigns.

What cannot be overcome is distrust.

Warren Buffett, he of all the billions, knows the potency of distrust. He once said:

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

Reputation, here, is what’s built on trust. As well as being built on trust, a good reputation creates trust.

But it doesn’t need a bad reputation to create distrust. All that’s needed is for a reputatio

Open It’s time to build beautiful: An essay on software and the world we live in

It’s time to build beautiful: An essay on software and the world we live in

Table of Contents

In this essay:

• Ideas as fragile mysteries
• Code, Covid and the global realignment
• The road to salvation
• The confused economist
• Beauty and the try-buy gap

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1. Ideas as fragile mysteries

Like most people, Mikhail Bulgakov is complicated (or was — he died more than 80 years ago).

Born in Kiev in Ukraine, Bulgakov spoke and wrote in Russian. His play The Days of the Turbins was a favourite night out for Josef Stalin, who is said to have seen it 15 times in Moscow in the 1920s and ’30s. The play was banned in 1926 but the ban was later lifted after Stalin’s intervention, continuing its theatre run for almost 1000 performances.

For Bulgakov, it was not exactly triumph in his own lifetime — like all 20th century Russian writers and artists who did not tow the pro-Revolution, pro-Soviet

Open The Sopranos, the football coach and the masculinity spectrum

The Sopranos, the football coach and the masculinity spectrum

Or, how men walk the line.

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This essay was first published on Fee Sheet, my occasional publication on psychology and money, or self worth and net worth.

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There’s an episode in the first series of The Sopranos, that sprawling great Dickens novel set in turn-of-the-century New Jersey.

“Boca”, the ninth episode of the show, was first screened in March 1999.

Rewatching it recently for the first time in at least 15 years, and with those 15 years of growing towards a greater level of self-awareness and at least some form of maturity as an adult male, this episode struck me forcefully as a commentary of the broad spectrum of what it is to be male, masculine, a man.

It seemed to ask the question — or, at least, this was a question I asked myself after watching: “Where do you, as a man, see yourself on this spectrum?”

Let me explain.

Coach Don Hauser is the coach of the school soc

Open The point of pain

The point of pain

Pain is the main driving force for action, but often when the pain stops, so does the action. How might we remember pain for greater action? Or is there a better question to ask?

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My wife, amongst other women, often jokes that until I am able to push a large watermelon out of my ass, or some other approximation of childbirth, I cannot truly know what real physical pain is.

She, and they, are right, of course.

I, nor any many, literally cannot imagine the pain of childbirth

It appears, on the outside, to be so ridiculously grievous, in a way so obscene, that you can’t help wondering why on earth any woman would ever choose to do it again.

But some woman do choose to do it again — some women choose to do it again and again — and they do so not just because their precious, miraculous newborn is worth it.

They do so because pain has no memory.

We might remember something of a feeling, even if it’s just a spectral shadow of the real feeling.

Times of gr

Open Shared narratives

Shared narratives

Without a shared narrative of the past, we don’t know how we got here. Without one of the present, we don’t know where here is.

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Without a shared narrative of the past, we don’t know how we got here.

Without a shared narrative in the present, we don’t know where here is.

A shared narrative is everything from a water cooler conversation about last night’s episode of The Sopranos to general agreement about what happened in concentration camps in World War II.

A shared narrative creates a feeling of belonging in time and in place, a sense that the past made sense, the present is ripe for the picking and the future will open out in one of a small handful of possibilities.

A shared narrative meant a sure footing on solid ground, two things we’ve needed since we told stories around fires in caves.

_Image via [AI Hybrid / Deviant Art](https://www.deviantart.com/aihybrid/art/So-

Open The vanishing point

The vanishing point

The digital opportunity is vast, but standing out from a billion-strong crowd requires you to do something essential and painful to leave the past behind.

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To beat the drum again:

A long list of things you can do before getting out of bed — send an email, order an Uber, DM a model on Instagram — would have looked like black magic to your grandparents.

The opportunity is vast. All of us can build lasting relationships, create saleable items and get paid from anywhere in the world, with just an everyday computer and a decent Internet connection.

The size of the opportunity is directly proportionate to the size of the imagination.

Almost 100 years ago, Napoleon Hill wrote:

“Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

Never in the past 100 years has that been more true than it is now.

The vastness of the opportunity is also directly proportionate to the vastness of the competition. Massive upside creates massive downside.

As a pessimi

Open Other people

Other people

Is this the meaning of life?

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Tommy Tiernan (left) and Shay Healy

It’s strange to write this, because maybe half the people reading this are Irish and know exactly who I’m talking about, and half are not and have no idea, but Tommy Tiernan is an Irish comedian and Shay Healy was an Irish broadcaster, songwriter, journalist and entertainer.

Tiernan rubs many people up the wrong way. His shows routinely run right up to the line of controversy or go sprinting past it. In his defence, and in defence of all comedians everywhere, comedy is about much more than making people laugh. Comedy is about making people laugh about things that are vital in our civilization. By laughing — even involuntarily, even as we might be tempted to look around to see if anyone has seen us laugh — we are forcibly considering and reconsidering things essential about the way we live, or things essen

Open Finding your voice

Finding your voice

Three minutes about one of the most urgent responsibilities of your life.

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“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them.” — Henry David Thoreau

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James Earl Jones, maybe the world's most famous voice, has died.

He voiced two of the most iconic parts in movie history — Darth Vader in Star Wars and Mufasa, father of Simba in The Lion King.

It might have been different.

He landed the part in Star Wars in 1977, when he was an actor already approaching 50, with a decent resumé on stage and screen but zero star attraction. Later, he recalled that the movie’s director, George Lucas, could easily have gone in a different direction.

“The rumor is that he thought of Orson Welles. And then probably thought that Orson might be too recognizable.”

James Earl Jones’s voice feels almost eternal now, nearly half a century late

Open The days of our lives

The days of our lives

When we look backwards and think of what we remember, we know that all days in the past were not equal. But is this really true?

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The sun always rises. (Photo by Marc Kleen on Unsplash)

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Memory is endlessly fascinating.

I’ve written before about money memories, and how they form. But never mind the specifics of money for a moment and just consider memory more broadly.

Think of when you were five years old, or 10, or 20. What do you remember?

We don’t remember whole scenes or occasions. We don’t remember complete events. We don’t remember the start to finish of anything, even days that we might think of as vital days that made us who we are right now, today.

Instead we remember slivers of things. Moments. Flashes.

My first memory is of the football World Cup in 1982. All I remember is color. My mind tells me now that it was

Open Money memories (and how they form)

Money memories (and how they form)

A short essay on the way emotions and memories can infuse together to influence behaviors and attitudes for decades.

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“Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you — and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

— A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

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While I was working on one of this week’s episodes for my Poems for the Speed of Life podcast I had a small realization about the way memory works.

The poem was “Weakness” by Alden Nowlan about a moment, presumably when Nowlan was a boy, when he witnessed his father preparing a sick horse to be euthanized.

I won’t expand here on the specifics of the poem itself, or the teaching it might offer (if that’s something you’re interested in, you’re very welcome to check out the podcast ([Spotify](http

Open What the Paris Olympics can teach us about the world

What the Paris Olympics can teach us about the world

For months after the 2024 Olympics, I wasn't able to get it out of my mind. This essay is my attempt to explain why.

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There’s a great TS Eliot poem of the early 20th century, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

The poem’s original title was “Prufrock Among the Women”, which hints at its subject matter — a poem about an ordinary everyday failure of a man and the incessant chatter of his innermost desires unrealized and lingering regrets for all the opportunities missed.

It is an extraordinary poem, not least because TS Eliot was just 21 when he wrote it. (In that way, it’s a bit like Jackson Browne’s song “These Days”, a song which deals with the regrets of life and love — _“These days I seem to think a lot / About the things that I forgot to do for you / And all the times I had the chance to / And I had a lover / But it's so hard to ris

Open The front of the race

The front of the race

What we don't see when we only see the contenders and the winners.

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Some thoughts bubbled to the surface while parked on the couch for a few hours recently —  and while this essay dives into sports, I promise you don’t have to be into sports to get some value out of what follows.

First, let me offer some context: I’ve never seen myself as a sports “fan”. I don’t support or follow a team. I dislike partisanship, or perhaps more accurately, I find that partisanship doesn’t align with my core values. One of my core values is that we are all individuals and, paradoxically, that we are all one. So the idea of an “us vs them” approach to sports never gives me much enthusiasm.

Instead, I pay close attention to top-level sport because of what top-level sport might teach me about living a good life, one that is whole and fulfilling and which strives to reach into the deepest inner parts of ourselves to discover how much we might be capable of. (This way of thinking led me a

Open A short story about a footballer you've probably never heard of

A short story about a footballer you've probably never heard of

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I want to tell you a story about a footballer.

If you're not a football fan, you probably don't know his name.

The footballer's name is John McGinn.

John McGinn is a regular starter in the English Premier League.

In fact, he's captain of his team in the English Premier League, Aston Villa.

And in March 2025 he captained Aston Villa in the last 16 of the Champions League.

Captain of one of the top 16 teams in Europe? He must be a superstar!

But John McGinn would probably be the first to say he's no superstar.

There might be a hundred Premier League footballers with more talent, more flair, more ball skills.

I'm not sure there's one with as much perseverance, or grit, or leadership ability.

When McGinn led his team out against Club Brugge, it was the next big step in a series of big steps on his lifelong journey.

He started