I came across a line from Richie in The Bear recently. He said, quite as-a-matter-of-factly just before attending a wedding to Syd:

Everything in life is just for a while.

We all know it. This idea is not new, of course. Every tradition that has thought seriously about the human condition has arrived at some version of it. The Japanese call the bittersweet awareness of passing things mono no aware (物の哀れ), “the bittersweet beauty of passing time.” The feeling you get when something beautiful is also passing away, like cherry blossoms, the end of autumn, or a beautiful sunset.

I often think of life as standing in a queue. It’s moving almost agonisingly slow at the beginning but unbelievably fast towards the end. Over the years, I’ve watched older relatives leave the queue. Friends. Those people are getting closer and closer to my own age.

It feels strange when you start to notice it. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no panic. No single moment of revelation. It’s just like standing in line and noticing that the crowd ahead of you is thinning. The line keeps moving. The end, wherever that is, edges a little closer every day, every single moment.

I’m moving into my sixties soon. This awareness feels more real with each passing moment.

We start keeping our heads and eyes down at around the time when we’re 20.

We call it staying focused. We keep ourselves busy. Our career demanded it. The family depended on it. Decades of discipline built everything around us and gave us stuff. And these habits have a way of growing into us. Nothing wrong with that.

But underneath the busyness, we begin to forget. We want to stay productive and keep our calendar full. We forget that we are in a queue that is moving and moving relentlessly forward. Our busyness (or strangely “busi-ness”) becomes a quiet defence against the awareness of our time passing.

And busyness isn’t the only distraction. We also distract ourselves by looking back, replaying better times or reliving old mistakes. Clinging. Regretting. If only I had not said those words. If only I had been more patient. Spent more time. Travelled more. Loved more. Forgive more.

Or we look ahead. Dreaming. Setting goals. Worrying. Planning. Strategising. Worrying. Plotting. When I have this, I will be happy. When the kids have grown up, I will relax. When I have made my millions, I will retire. And enjoy.

These have stolen more living than almost anything else I know. Everywhere but here. Any time but now.

Meanwhile, the queue keeps moving.

The Japanese have a concept called ichigo ichie (一期一会), or “one lifetime, one meeting.” The idea that every encounter, every ordinary afternoon, is singular and will not recur in exactly this form. The traditional tea ceremony is built around this awareness. You’re present with the unrepeatable fact of this tea, this light, these people. The ceremony ends. That’s the whole point of it.

In Parts Unknown (Full Episode - S8 E3), when Anthony Bourdain was looking for the best sushi in the world with Chef Masa Takayama, there was a scene where Takayama explained what I thought was ichigo ichie:

Two great chefs experiencing ichigo ichie during an omakase at Tokyo’s acclaimed Sushi Ko.

Most people live their whole lives getting ready, rehearsing for the real thing. They forget that the rehearsal IS the real thing. It is the only thing.

Cherry blossoms. The Japanese love them with an intensity that I find hard to understand. A week of beautiful blooms, then gone. It passes so quickly that it is painful; you cannot hold it. Or grasp the moment in your hand. Even a video cannot capture its essence.

The brevity of its beauty is the beauty. You cannot separate the bloom from the fall. Life with all its imperfections, its losses, its ordinary, unremarkable days, is the same thing. The ending isn’t what ruins it. The ending is what makes it real and beautiful.

Accepting this is not the same as resigning to it.

Resignation implies hopelessness. Pointlessness. Despair. Everything ends, so what’s the point anyway?

But acceptance, the kind that Zen masters teach, says: everything ends, so this moment is precious. Irreplaceable. Smell it. Taste it. Feel. And live it to the fullest.

Participate. That’s the whole point of it.

I’m trying to learn how to look up. Every day. Every now.

This meal in front of me. This conversation with my wife. The drive to Gary with my cousin. An afternoon of yum cha with my sons. This moment will not come again once it is gone.

Everything in life is just for a while.

So look up. Look around. Now.

Share

The killing started on Monday.

If you live in Adelaide, you may have driven past Possum Park this week without realising that 585 trees, some of them older than a century, have been marked for removal.

A $45 million golf course redevelopment needs the space.

The Possum Park Protection Platoon has been fighting this since Premier Malinauskas first floated the idea. They held rallies. They tagged trees on National Tree Day. To date, they have gathered more than 42,000 signatures. On Mother’s Day, around 300 people wrapped yellow ribbon around the trees at Montefiore Hill, standing there with their children and their signs, choosing to spend that Sunday with what they are about to lose.

And still the chainsaws rolled in.

This past week, Adelaide City Council voted unanimously to call for a federal investigation into whether the development breaches national environmental protection laws. The Lord Mayor described this as “the last possible” attempt to halt proceedings. She is writing to the Federal Environment Minister today.

This is our last chance.

So what is actually being built here?

The $45 million redevelopment is designed to prepare the North Adelaide Golf Course for the LIV Golf and Australian Open tournaments scheduled for 2028. The North Adelaide Golf Course Act was introduced to fast-track site upgrades for the event and granted planning and building consent for the project before the plans were publicly released. InDaily

Yes. Consent was granted before anyone could see the plans.

The government’s released diagram identifies a Championship Course, a Short Course, and a Driving Range, but fails to identify which trees are earmarked for removal, or where the car parks, maintenance sheds, the new clubhouse, and storage for major event infrastructure will be placed. When the Adelaide Park Lands Association asked the Premier to release the full list of trees to be removed, the government declined. Adelaide-parklands Golf

International golf course designer Peter Dalkeith Scott, himself a LIV Golf supporter, warned that 60% of the park’s trees would need to be removed to build the kind of championship course the Premier has in mind. The government’s official number is 585, or “6.5%.” Both numbers cannot be true. Adelaide-Parklands Blog

And the replacement offer. The government has committed to planting three new trees or seedlings for every tree removed. Premier Malinauskas has repeated this assurance in almost every public statement on the matter. Premier of South Australia

Consider the “tradeoff”.

A 100-year-old River Red Gum is not a seedling. It’s living history. It holds within its branches, trunk, and roots a century of carbon, rainfall, and habitat. Its roots shape the soil around them, its canopy has lowered ambient temperatures in its vicinity for decades, and it is home to numerous species that cannot simply relocate because a politician wants a bigger golf course. You can plant 3 seedlings for every tree you cut down tomorrow, but you cannot get back what you are destroying.

What does the loss of 585 mature urban trees mean?

Mature trees in urban parks function as heat sinks. They absorb solar radiation and release water vapour through transpiration, reducing temperatures by measurable amounts, sometimes several degrees in close proximity. In a city like Adelaide, which experiences heatwaves above 40 degrees, that thermal buffering has direct consequences for the health and mortality of elderly people, children, and outdoor workers. Remove 585 mature trees from a park adjacent to the River Torrens and the CBD fringe, and you increase the urban heat island effect in one of Adelaide’s most densely used green corridors. Nature.com

Citizen scientists have already recorded 127 species in and around Possum Park. Not just birds passing through. They are species whose habitat, nesting sites, food sources, and movement corridors exist within this specific patch of urban parkland. When a mature tree comes down, the species that depend on that tree’s hollows and canopy do not simply find another tree. In a fragmented urban environment, there is often no other tree. Adelaide-parklands

And then there is the question of what gets built in place of the trees. The redevelopment plans include commercial buildings, meeting rooms, restaurants, function spaces and bars operating seven days per week, alongside permanent fencing that will exclude the public from portions of their own park lands during major events. Sign the petition at Change.org

This is public land. Held in trust for all of Adelaide’s citizens. Not for LIV Golf, or only those who can afford a tournament ticket.

What about the other side of the argument?

The government says this is already a golf course, so nothing is being taken that was not already restricted to golfers. They say the redevelopment will improve amenities, make the course more accessible, encourage younger people to take up the sport, and bring economic activity and international attention to the city. They say 585 trees out of 9,000 is a small price to pay. They say the Park Lands will be better for it.

These are not unfounded. World-class sporting facilities do generate economic activity. Adelaide does benefit from hosting major international events. Investment in public recreation infrastructure is broadly a good thing.

But…none of that changes the core problem.

The Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith puts it plainly: the legislation allows the State Minister to override Adelaide City Council entirely if the council fails to act in the direction of the minister, granting the minister the power to act as if they were the council itself. That means, “If the Council doesn’t do what the Minister wants, the Council loses its say entirely.” She called this “a very troubling precedent for how the third tier of government, the closest to the people, will be treated.” InDaily

The government has overridden the municipality. It has granted itself planning consent before releasing plans. It has refused to identify which trees will be removed. It is sending security and police to manage protesters watching their park being felled. And it is doing all of this to host, primarily, a golf tournament backed by Saudi sovereign wealth.

Here is what you can do today

The Possum Park Protection Platoon is the community group at the heart of this fight. Join them on Facebook or contact them through the Adelaide Park Lands Association at exec@adelaide-parklands.asn.au. The petition has over 42,000 signatures as of this morning. If you have not signed it, sign it.

If you are a South Australian, write to Premier Malinauskas. Ask him to release the full list of trees to be removed. Ask him why planning consent was granted before plans were made public. Ask him what species-level environmental assessment was conducted, and when, and by whom.

And if you are not a South Australian, share this. Because a state government deciding that public green space has more value as commercial infrastructure than as open, living land is not unique to Adelaide. It is happening everywhere throughout Australia.

The killing started on Monday.

Let’s do something about it.

Sign the Petition

If you found this piece useful, consider sharing it. The Possum Park Protection Platoon needs more voices, not just more signatures.

This article was inspired by a spoken-word piece on the Heart Sutra by the Taiwanese channel AI巷仔內 (”AI Alley | Awake Living”). The creator, who also runs a small oden shop in Taipei called 彼岸 (”The Other Shore”), used the metaphor of a child’s lump of clay to make one of Buddhism’s most impenetrable texts feel like something you already knew.

I hope this piece does justice to the beautiful lyrics.

I misunderstood the word “emptiness” for years.

I thought the Buddha wanted us to hollow ourselves out. To strip away all attachments, all feelings, every messy human impulse until we became cold and untouchable, like a stone that the world could no longer hurt because it could no longer feel.

It made enlightenment sound like emotional anaesthesia. If the goal of spiritual practice is to stop caring about anything, then what exactly are we living for?

Then I came across a Taiwanese piece about the Heart Sutra. Set to ambient folk music, the creator reframed the whole concept with a single image that moved me, and has stuck with me since. So simple, yet so completely right.

Emptiness is the “you” that existed before you became who you are now.

A child’s lump of clay

Watch a child play with a lump of clay.

She shapes out a dinosaur, grins at it for half a second, then smashes and starts over again. No regrets. No hesitation. She doesn’t cling to the clay dinosaur because she understands something that adults don’t: the dinosaur was never the goal or the purpose. The playing and creating were.

The block of clay in the box has no fixed shape. In a technical sense, it is “nothing.” But that nothingness isn’t a void. It’s potential. It could become a dog, a castle, a flower, or a lopsided thing that only makes sense to its creator. The absence of a fixed form is exactly what makes every form possible. It is what makes the lump of clay fun.

In Buddhist philosophy, this is what Anatta (or “non-self”) points to. Not this, not that. You are not the dinosaur. You are not even the hands that shaped it.

The shape we mistake for ourselves

The trouble starts when we forget.

As we grow up, life moulds us into different shapes. Useful ones, mostly. We become The Father. The Provider. The Employee. The Boss. The One Who Must Succeed. These shapes serve us. They give us identity, a way to move through the world.

But over time, we begin to confuse the shape with the clay. We start to believe the role is who we are. And once we believe that, and cling to it, everything becomes a threat. Losing your job becomes an existential crisis. A breakup feels like proof that you’re unlovable. The shape must be protected at all costs, because if it breaks, you break.

The creator of that piece told his own version of this. He spent over a decade in advertising, moulded into the shape of a Creative Director. When that title eventually disappeared, he felt shattered until he realised that what broke was only the shape. The clay hadn’t lost a single piece.

He went on to open a small oden shop in Taipei, which he named 彼岸, meaning “The Other Shore.” The name comes directly from the Heart Sutra’s closing mantra. A man who once built his identity around a senior title in advertising, now ladling broth in a six-seat izakaya, and somehow feels more whole than before.

It’s a story about clay remembering what it is.

What was your face before your parents were born?

There is a Zen riddle (koan) I share in many conversations:

It’s designed to stop the thinking mind in its tracks. But it’s also a genuine question. Before anyone named you. Before you were moulded into a son or daughter, a high achiever or a disappointment, a somebody or a nobody. What were you? What is underneath all the faces you’ve put on?

The question, or riddle, is meant to sit with you until the answer surfaces on its own. But the clay metaphor helps me answer it: your original face is the clay before it had a shape.

Not blank. Not empty in the cold, hollow sense. It’s you that existed before the roles began, the unrestricted potential before life started pressing it into different forms. The Heart Sutra calls this śūnyatā, emptiness. Zen calls it your original face. They’re both pointing at the same thing.

And here’s what makes it reassuring rather than frightening: that face hasn’t gone anywhere. It didn’t dissolve when you got your first job or your first heartbreak. It’s still there, underneath every shape you’ve worn since. You’ve just forgotten it’s there.

What the Heart Sutra is saying

The Heart Sutra is one of Buddhism’s most revered texts, and one of its most misunderstood. Many recite it without fully understanding it, tattooing its lines onto their skin. But you use the clay metaphor to explain its most famous passages, they stop being mystical and start to make sense.

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

This doesn’t mean your life is an illusion or that your roles don’t matter. It means your current shape, although real, is not permanent, and it is not the deepest truth of who you are. Underneath every role you play, the soft, adaptable clay remains. Don’t forget that.

“No birth, no death; no stain, no purity; no adding, no taking away.”

Shapes are born, and shapes die. You get hired, you get fired. You fall in love, you fall out of love. But the clay, the essence of who you are beneath, neither begins nor ends. It can’t be stained because it was never contaminated in the first place. Every time a shape breaks, it’s not a loss. It’s a return to the place where you start over again.

“The five aggregates are empty.”

The five aggregates (form, sensation, perception, ideas, and consciousness) are Buddhism’s map of the entire human experience. Saying they are “empty” is not an instruction to stop seeing, feeling, or thinking. It’s a reminder that none of those experiences defines you permanently. They are NOT you. Once you stop clinging to who you think you must be, you become less afraid of being hurt. Not because you’ve stopped feeling, but because you’ve stopped mistaking your feelings for who you truly are.

Emptiness is the lack of fear about losing what cannot be lost.

The softer you are, the harder it is to break.

We spend enormous energy building fortresses around our identities: titles, reputations, carefully managed self-images. And things. We think rigidity equals safety. But rigidity is exactly what makes things brittle. A ceramic vase can be destroyed easily. A lump of clay, however, absorbs the impact when it falls.

The Heart Sutra’s promise is not that you’ll stop suffering. It’s that suffering loses its permanence when you stop treating each shape as your final and permanent form. You can grieve the dinosaur. You can miss the Creative Director you once were. But you don’t have to lie down next to the broken pieces and believe that you, too, are broken.

You are the clay. You were always the clay.

Gate, gate, pāragate, pārasaṃgate, bodhi svāhā

The Heart Sutra ends with a mantra that sounds like a dare. A challenge!

Go, go, go beyond. Go completely beyond. And awaken!

Go out. Love fiercely. Live fully. Get moulded and broken and moulded again. Day after day, life after life. Don’t be afraid to change, because you are not your shapes, past or present. You are what remains when all the shapes fall away.

Emptiness was never about having nothing.

It is about knowing you are free to become anything.

Most professionals treat LinkedIn like a digital business card: polished headlines, a professional headshot, and a persuasive résumé taking centre stage. They check in periodically, sharing a few lines or a photo from the company lunch last Friday.

LinkedIn remains an important platform, but it’s not enough on its own. In a sea of identical profiles and surface-level engagement, you’re mostly invisible to the (future) employers and clients who could transform your career.

You need something more: a platform where you can command attention, demonstrate who you are, and control your professional narrative. You need a space where your ideas can develop beyond soundbites, where you’re not competing with unsolicited noise, and where you are, unquestionably, the main event.

You need to be on Substack.

What is Substack?

Substack sits at the intersection of blog and newsletter. And social media (with Notes). You write a post, publish it, and it appears on a public page while landing in your subscribers’ inboxes. Although the platform began as a haven for independent writers, today you will find senior executives unpacking corporate strategy, HR leaders sharing talent acquisition insights, designers revealing creative workflows, and sales directors breaking down sales tactics.

Each entry becomes a searchable, shareable portfolio of your thoughts, showing your audience that you do more than the bullet points on your résumé. Over time, this paints a persona, showing how you solve problems and win battles, what it is like to work with you. It can also give employers and clients a reason to connect.

And also, Substack is free.

Why Use Substack for Professional Branding

LinkedIn moves too fast. The thoughtful post you spent a few hours crafting can fall off the feed in minutes. Personal sites on Wix or Squarespace can give you control, but they hide in search results unless you pour time and money into SEO.

Substack strikes a better balance. Each article lives on its own clean, searchable page that Google likes. You decide what stays public and what goes to your audience, and every post lands in their inboxes. This mix of permanence, discoverability, and direct delivery turns Substack into a reliable stage for your professional show.

Key features that make Substack interesting

Long-form posts

Go deeper than a 1,300-character LinkedIn update. Break down case studies, share frameworks, or walk through a project from concept to outcome. Show off. Let your readers in on your modus operandi. Each article becomes a searchable proof of your expertise.

Native podcasts

Record an audio version of a post, host an interview, or share quick reflections on industry news. Substack also automatically generates a podcast feed, so your audience can listen to your podcasts without additional setup.

Video support

Drop in demos, whiteboard walk-throughs, or keynote clips. Video adds context that a written summary often misses, giving recruiters and decision-makers a fuller view of how you think and present.

Email plus web archive

Every time you publish, Substack triggers an email to your list while archiving the content on your public page. You own the relationship, and algorithms do not decide who sees your work. You do.

Audience analytics

Track open rates, reads, and, if you like, paid-subscription conversions. Data shows which topics resonate, guiding the next post or podcast episode.

Substack plays well with LinkedIn and Google

Share a snippet of each Substack article on LinkedIn, then link to the full piece. Curious readers click through, subscribe, and become your audience. Add your Substack URL to the Featured section of your profile, and embed a “Subscribe” call-out in LinkedIn banners or posts. Over time, LinkedIn remains your discovery channel, while Substack houses the depth and continuity of your professional brand.

Thought leaders from venture capital to public policy have already moved their most substantive thinking to Substack. As the platform’s reader base expands, your voice stands beside theirs, and a click away from anyone seeking your expertise.

Here’s how you can use Substack to elevate your brand:

Establish Authority and Thought Leadership

Employers and clients want experts. Publishing your thoughts regularly about your industry demonstrates authority and depth. It shows prospective employers that you’re engaged in your field and leading the conversation.

Imagine you’re a finance executive. Instead of just listing your experience on LinkedIn, you write about market trends, economic insights, or investment strategies. Prospective employers or clients reading will see you’re informed, analytical, and proactive, qualities that are hard to convey on a one-page resume alone.

Personalisation and Personality

People hire people, not resumes. Your Substack should reflect who you are professionally and personally. It can include stories about challenges you’ve faced, how you’ve solved problems, or your perspective on industry trends.

This doesn’t mean you have to craft every word yourself. AI tools like ChatGPT can help speed up and streamline the process. Use it to draft or refine content, improve clarity and flow. Do not just generate. Use it to express your ideas and impress your audience.

Visibility and Discoverability

Google loves content-rich sites, and Substack articles often rank well in searches. Over time, your articles create a lasting online presence that prospective employers find easily when researching your background.

Unlike transient social media posts, your articles remain accessible indefinitely, serving as a repository of your expertise and experience.

Practical Steps to Start Using Substack

Creating your professional Substack isn’t complicated, but doing it strategically requires some planning. Here’s your roadmap to get started:

Step 1: Set Up Your Substack Account Strategically

Choose Your Publication Name Wisely.

Your Substack name should be professional yet memorable.

• Use your name if you’re building personal brand recognition (e.g., “John Smith’s Insights”).

• Create a descriptive name that reflects your expertise (e.g., “The Marketing Edge” or “Forward Finance”).

• Avoid overly clever names that don’t communicate who you are.

Craft a Compelling About Section.

This is your elevator pitch. Include:

• Who you are professionally (title, industry, years of experience)

• What readers can expect from your content

• Your unique perspective or approach

• A professional headshot that matches your LinkedIn profile

Set Up Your Custom URL

Claim your custom Substack URL immediately (yourname.substack.com). This becomes part of your professional brand, so choose something you’ll be comfortable using long-term.

Step 2: Plan Your Content Strategy Like a Pro

Define Your Content Pillars.

Identify 3 to 4 core topics that showcase your expertise. For example, a marketing professional might focus on:

• Digital marketing trends and tactics

• Personal branding strategies

• Industry case studies and analysis

• Career development in marketing

Create a Content Calendar. Consistency beats perfection. Start with a realistic publishing schedule:

• Weekly: Ideal for building momentum and audience engagement

• Bi-weekly: Good balance for busy professionals

• Monthly: Minimum frequency to maintain relevance

Develop Your Content Framework Use proven formats that resonate with professional audiences:

• Problem-Solution Articles: Identify industry challenges and offer practical solutions

• Case Study Breakdowns: Analyse successful projects or campaigns in your field

• Trend Analysis: Share your perspective on industry developments

• Behind-the-Scenes: Offer insights into your professional processes and decision-making

Step 3: Master the Art of AI-Assisted Writing

Use AI as Your Writing Partner, Not Replacement.

AI tools can dramatically improve your efficiency without compromising authenticity:

For Research and Ideation:

• Use ChatGPT to brainstorm article topics based on current industry trends

• Ask AI to help you outline complex topics or identify key points to cover

• Generate multiple headline options and choose the most compelling

For Drafting and Editing:

• Create detailed outlines, then use AI to expand each section

• Input your rough thoughts and ask AI to help structure them coherently

• Use AI to improve clarity, fix grammar, and enhance readability

Maintain Your Authentic Voice:

• Always review and personalise AI-generated content

• Add your personal experiences, opinions, and insights

• Include specific examples from your professional background

• Ensure the tone matches your personality and professional brand

Step 4: Share and Engage Strategically

Cross-Platform Promotion.

Maximise your reach by sharing strategically across platforms:

LinkedIn Strategy:

• Share the first paragraph of your Substack article as a LinkedIn post

• Include a compelling hook and end with “Read the full article here: [link]”

• Post during peak LinkedIn hours (Tuesday-Thursday, 8-10 AM)

• Engage with comments promptly to boost visibility

Email Signature Integration:

• Add your latest Substack article to your email signature

• Include a brief “Latest from my Substack” section in professional emails

Professional Network Outreach:

• Share relevant articles directly with colleagues and associates who might find them valuable

• Mention your Substack during networking conversations and meetings

Build Genuine Community:

• Respond to every comment on your articles

• Ask questions to encourage engagement

• Share and comment on other professionals’ content in your industry

• Consider collaborating with other Substack writers in your field

Step 5: Measure Success and Optimise

Key Metrics to Track:

• Subscriber Growth: Aim for steady, consistent growth rather than viral spikes

• Open Rates: Industry average is 20-25%; aim to exceed this

• Click-Through Rates: Track which topics generate the most engagement

• Website Traffic: Monitor if your Substack drives traffic to your professional website or LinkedIn

Monthly Review Process:

• Analyse top-performing articles to identify successful themes

• Review subscriber feedback and comments for content ideas

• Adjust your content calendar based on what resonates most

• Experiment with different posting times and formats

Advanced Optimisation:

• Survey your subscribers about topics they’d like to see covered

• Guest post on other Substacks to expand your reach

• Consider creating series or multi-part articles on complex topics

Putting These Strategies Into Action

I started a Substack newsletter to go deeper than what’s possible on LinkedIn. It gives me space to share my previous experience and what I’m currently pursuing without the pressure to chase engagement or compete with the algorithm.

It is a quiet extension of my professional profile. I’ve found that it complements LinkedIn well, offering something more lasting than a feed post, and more personable than a résumé in a way that feels natural and sustainable.

In a world where everyone has a LinkedIn profile, a thoughtfully curated Substack page that showcases your expertise, thought leadership, and personality can make you more discoverable and hireable.

Professionals who will thrive in the coming years are those who understand that building a personal brand is essential. They’re the ones who take control of their story and use platforms like Substack to demonstrate their value before they even walk into an interview.

Don’t wait. Start building your presence today. Your future self will thank you for taking action now.

The idea of setting up a side hustle these days has never been more popular. Whether it’s to supplement your income, explore a passion project, or even lay the groundwork for a full-fledged business venture, the desire to earn additional income is almost universal. Yet, the path to launching a profitable side hustle feels fraught with obstacles.

Perhaps you want to start a freelance writing business, launch (and teach) an online course, or offer consulting services. But you are apprehensive: Do I know enough? Do I have the skills and credibility to pull this off? Can I afford to? Where will I find the time to do this? The effort, the complexity of setting up (and running) a venture, can be daunting, often leading aspiring entrepreneurs to give up before they even begin.

But what if you could bypass many of these traditional barriers? What if you could leverage a powerful, accessible tool that effectively democratises entrepreneurship, enabling you (and anyone) to turn existing skills into a source of income without too many costs? That tool is Artificial Intelligence (AI), and it’s poised to revolutionise the side hustle economy.

The Barriers

The traditional path to a successful side hustle often involves overcoming significant hurdles. There’s the initial capital investment for tools, software, or marketing. Then there’s the learning curve for technical skills like building a website, copywriting and graphic design, or complex social media marketing…stuff. Aspiring entrepreneurs also struggle with the time commitment required to manage every aspect of their venture, from content creation to customer outreach.

Adding to this is the myth of the “IT guru.” It’s easy to look at successful online businesses and assume that their founders possess an innate understanding of coding, data science, or advanced digital marketing. This assumption can be paralysing, leading many to believe that unless they can code an app or analyse complex data, their entrepreneurial dreams are simply out of reach. The truth is, you don’t need to be particularly tech-savvy to harness the power of AI for your business.

AI as Your Intern

Imagine having an incredibly efficient, tireless, and highly skilled intern who works 24/7 (mostly for free). That’s basically what AI can do for your business. It’s a powerful, easily accessible tool that serves as your virtual assistant, helping individuals punch far above their weight. AI significantly lowers the barriers to entry that once hindered business owners.

How? By automating and streamlining tasks that previously required specialised skills, significant time, or substantial investment. AI can handle the grunt work, the repetitive tasks, and even some of the creative heavy lifting, freeing you to focus on your core skills, strategic vision, and connecting with your audience and customers. You no longer need to hire expensive consultants for various aspects of your business, nor do you need to spend countless hours learning complex software tools. AI lets you operate like a larger enterprise, even if you’re a solopreneur working from your bedroom after work.

AI for Every Side Hustle

The power of AI is in its versatility. No matter what your skill set or entrepreneurial ambition, there’s a way AI can amplify your efforts so that you can do the work of many quite easily. Here are some practical applications that you may find useful:

Content Creation (for writers, bloggers, coaches, and online educators):

• Brainstorming & Outlining: AI can generate dozens of blog post topics, video scripts, or course outlines based on your niche and target audience. Instantly. It can help you structure complex arguments or narratives, providing foundational scaffolds and outlines that you can then build upon.

• Drafting & Repurposing: Need a first draft of an email newsletter, a social media caption, or even a section of an e-book? AI can generate it, allowing you to focus on refining and adding your unique voice. You can then repurpose a single piece of content across multiple platforms, such as social media, newsletters/blogs, and email marketing, saving a significant amount of time and resources.

• Editing & Refinement: AI can also edit, check for grammar, spelling, clarity, and even suggest improvements to tone and style, ensuring your content is polished and professional.

Marketing & Outreach (for service providers, small businesses, and consultants):

• Copywriting: If you need help writing ad copy for social media or your website, AI can do just that. AI can generate multiple variations, test different angles, and help you craft messages that resonate with your ideal clients, usually in seconds. You just need to know how to “prompt” it.

• Personalised Outreach: Automate the creation of email sequences for lead nurturing or client onboarding. AI can help you tailor messages to individual prospects, making your outreach consistent and targeted.

• Market Research: Quickly analyse market trends, identify competitor strategies, and even pinpoint your target audience’s pain points, allowing you to refine your propositions and marketing efforts.

Research & Analysis (for consultants, researchers, and analysts):

• Information Synthesis: Need to digest lengthy reports, academic papers, or industry analyses? AI can summarise key findings, extract relevant data points, and even identify emerging patterns, saving you hours of reading.

• Competitive Intelligence: Gather and analyse information on competitors, their products, and marketing strategies, providing actionable insights to differentiate your offerings.

Product Development & Innovation (for creators, inventors, and course creators):

• Idea Generation: Brainstorm new product names, features, or even entirely new business models. AI can provide fresh perspectives and creative solutions you might not have considered.

• Drafting Business Plans: Get a head start on your business plan or pitch deck by having AI generate initial drafts of key sections, such as market analysis, executive summaries, or financial projections.

In essence, AI becomes more than a versatile assistant that handles the heavy lifting and repetitive tasks across every facet of your enterprise. It allows you to scale your efforts and focus on the strategic and creative aspects that truly drive value.

What You Need is a Way of Communicating with AI

How do you tell AI what to do?” This brings us to a crucial skill for anyone looking to leverage AI for their side hustle: prompt crafting.

Forget about coding or understanding algorithms. You are not building an AI tool; you just want to communicate with it effectively so that it can do its thing. Prompt crafting is the ability to craft clear, precise, and effective instructions (prompts) that guide AI models to produce the specific results you need. It’s about learning to ask the right questions in the right way.

The beauty of prompt crafting is its accessibility. It doesn’t require a technical background, years of study, or specialised qualifications. It’s a learnable skill that relies on clarity of thought, an understanding of what you want to achieve, and a willingness to experiment. It’s about transforming ideas into directives so that AI can understand and execute. This is the power that democratises AI, putting its immense capabilities into the hands of anyone with an idea.

The Future is Now

For the first time in human history, building a successful business or side hustle is more attainable than ever before. AI has emerged as a powerful ally, enabling entrepreneurship by removing many of the traditional barriers that once hindered business owners. You don’t need more than imagination and curiosity to harness its power.

With AI as your tireless intern, you can automate tasks, streamline workflows, and amplify your creativity across the different facets of your venture. This lets you focus on what you do best, whether it’s writing compelling content, providing expert consulting, or developing innovative products.

If you’re excited by the potential of an AI-powered side hustle but feel unsure where to start, then PromptCraft is your essential guide.

This book teaches you the art and science of PromptCraft, providing practical techniques and examples for effective communication with AI. Learn how to command AI to generate content, write marketing messages, conduct research, and much more, transforming your skills into a sustainable income stream. Visit Gumroad to get your copy of PromptCraft and start building your AI-powered side hustle today.

We all want more time. To have more time to do the things we want to do. It’s a universal desire, a constant pursuit in all our lives. To achieve this, we buy planners, download apps, and read books, all in the hope of reclaiming a few precious hours in our workday. Now, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we’re told that a new age of unprecedented efficiency is upon us. Yet, why do we sometimes feel that this holy grail is out of reach?

You’ve heard the stories: AI writing articles, generating code, creating businesses. You might have even tried it yourself, only to be met with plain, uninspired, or downright unhelpful “stuff”. It might have left you feeling more sceptical than empowered. You see…potential, but you’re struggling with the “how.” It’s like being handed the keys to a jet plane but having no idea how to fly it.

The key to unlocking AI’s vast potential isn’t about being a tech wiz or understanding complex algorithms. It’s learning to speak its language. There’s a method; a way of getting AI to do what you want, and it’s a skill that anyone can learn: It’s called PromptCraft.

The Productivity Puzzle

If you’ve experimented with AI tools like ChatGPT and walked away feeling somewhat underwhelmed, you’re not alone. Many professionals, from seasoned writers to busy executives, have had similar experiences. They enter a query, expecting a brilliant, tailored response, but instead receive something that feels… so-so. Generic. Not exactly what you would expect. Bland “motherhood” statements, stuff that hardly inspires. This often leads to a common misconception: that AI isn’t quite “good enough” for their specific needs.

This disappointment stems from what we might call the “Magic Box” misconception. We tend to view AI as an all-knowing oracle that must instinctively know all our intentions, even when we are vague or incomplete about what we want. We type in a simple prompt, expecting it to read our minds, grasp the subtle context, and deliver poetic prose on the first try, every single time.

The issue isn’t with AI’s inherent capability. They are incredibly powerful, capable of processing vast amounts of information and generating sophisticated responses. The missing ingredient, the piece of the puzzle that often eludes users, is effective prompting. It’s not that AI can’t deliver; it’s that we haven’t learned how to ask it correctly.

Prompt Crafting: Your Superpower

Enter prompt crafting, the art (and science) of writing purposeful instructions for AI models. Think of it as learning a new language. Just as mastering any language allows you to communicate complex ideas and build deeper relationships, mastering prompt crafting enables you to unlock the potential of AI.

Think of AI as a potent, yet literal, assistant. It doesn’t understand nuance, unspoken assumptions, or your unarticulated desires. It understands exactly what you tell it. The better you become at articulating your needs, providing context, and guiding its responses, the more valuable AI becomes. This is about engaging in a thoughtful dialogue (chat), where your input directly shapes the quality of its output.

In essence, AI is a powerful engine, but it needs a specific type of fuel: well-crafted prompts to deliver optimal results. Learning to provide that fuel is your new superpower in the age of AI.

How Prompt Crafting Unlocks Productivity

Once you grasp the principles of prompt crafting, AI transforms from a simple “answer machine” into a sophisticated assistant. It moves beyond search and queries to become a collaborator in your work, offloading repetitive and mundane tasks and freeing you up for higher-value, creative, and strategic undertakings. This is where the true potential of AI lies.

Let’s look at how this new superpower translates into tangible gains for different professionals:

• Imagine needing to write a detailed outline for a new series of articles. Instead of hours of brainstorming, a well-crafted prompt can generate a comprehensive structure, complete with key themes and potential angles, in minutes. Need to refine the tone of a piece to be more engaging or authoritative? AI can do that. Want to summarise a lengthy research paper or create variations of your content for different platforms? Prompt crafting enables you to guide AI to perform these tasks with precision and purpose, allowing you to focus more on your unique insights and compelling storytelling.

• These days, the job search can be a full-time job in itself. With prompt crafting, you can direct AI to tailor your resume to specific job descriptions, ensuring it hits all the right keywords and highlights your most relevant experience. You can draft personalised outreach emails that resonate with hiring managers, or even simulate interview responses to practice your delivery and refine your answers. AI becomes your career coach, helping you navigate the job-seeking landscape with unparalleled efficiency.

• In the demanding world of leadership, time is a precious commodity. Prompt crafting empowers executives to automate report generation, digest vast amounts of market research into concise summaries, and brainstorm strategic initiatives with an AI partner that can instantly provide different perspectives. Need to draft internal communications or prepare for a critical presentation? AI can help. Guided by your prompts, AI can accelerate these processes, allowing you to focus on high-level decision-making and fostering innovation within your organisation, or more time to play golf with your clients.

In each scenario, the goal isn’t to replace human effort, but to augment it. By learning to ‘speak’ to AI effectively, you gain the ability to delegate tasks that once consumed significant time and energy, allowing you to operate at a higher level of productivity and impact.

Key Principles of Effective Prompt Crafting

So, what does it mean to “speak” the language of AI? It’s about understanding a few core principles that will dramatically improve the quality of your AI interactions and, by extension, your productivity. These are guidelines, not rigid rules, to help you craft prompts that yield the results you desire:

1. Be clear and specific: This is the first principle. Vague prompts lead to vague outputs. Be as precise as possible about what you want. Instead of “Write about AI,” try “Write a 500-word article for LinkedIn executives about the strategic importance of AI literacy, focusing on competitive advantage and efficiency gains.” The more detail (context) you provide, the better AI can understand and fulfil your request.

2. Context is King: AI doesn’t have your background knowledge or the nuances of your situation, so provide all necessary context in your prompts. If you’re asking it to summarise a document, explain the purpose of the summary, the target audience, and any key points to emphasise. When drafting an email, specify the recipient, their relationship, and the desired tone.

3. AI likes a Good Chat: Think of your interaction with AI as a conversation, not a one-way command. Your first prompt might not yield the desired result, and that’s OK. Review the output, identify what’s incomplete or incorrect, and then provide follow-up prompts to refine it. “Make it more concise,” “Expand on point number three,” or “Change the tone to be more casual”. Refine as you go.

4. Role-Playing: A popular and powerful technique involves assigning AI with a persona or role. For example, “Act as a seasoned marketing strategist and draft three compelling ad headlines for a new productivity app.” By giving AI a specific role, you guide its perspective and the style of its output, leading to more relevant responses.

5. Output Format: Specify how you would like the answer to be structured. Do you need a bulleted list, a paragraph, a table, or a specific word count? Providing these helps AI deliver information in a format that’s immediately useful to you. For instance, “Provide a list of five benefits of AI literacy, each explained in a single sentence.”

Mastering these principles will transform your AI interactions from a hit-or-miss endeavour into a predictable and powerful tool for productivity.

Conclusion

Drop the “magic box” mindset. AI is powerful, but not in the way we typically understand ‘powerful’. The frustration that many experience with AI stems from a lack of understanding of how to communicate with it effectively. The secret to unlocking its potential and transforming it into your most valuable professional asset lies in mastering the art of crafting effective prompts.

By embracing prompt crafting, you shift from feeling overwhelmed by AI to feeling empowered. You gain the ability to direct this technology, shaping its output to your specifications and leveraging its speed and efficiency to amplify your work, creativity, and thinking. This isn’t about becoming a programmer; it’s about becoming a master communicator in the age of AI.

If you’re ready to move beyond generic AI outputs and truly harness the power of this transformative technology, if you’re eager to boost your productivity and future-proof your career, then it’s time to learn the secret language of AI. PromptCraft: The Art of Making AI Write Like You is your definitive guide.

This book provides the practical techniques, proven frameworks, and real-world examples you need to master prompt engineering. It will teach you how to speak AI’s language fluently, transforming your interactions into precise, productive collaborations. Don’t just use AI; command it. Visit Gumroad today to purchase your copy of PromptCraft and start unlocking your hidden productivity.

In a world drowning in content, making your voice heard is harder than ever. Every industry is filled with “me-too” businesses that offer similar products and services. So, how do you stand out? How do you ensure that your expertise does not go unnoticed?

The answer lies in thought leadership. It is not about self-promotion or aggressively pushing your opinion. It is about positioning yourself as a trusted authority and offering meaningful insights that help others navigate challenges.

Thought leadership is not just a tool or a process. It is a strategy to give you and your business a voice. When infused with your personality and delivered with genuine insight, it becomes a powerful way to engage your audience and build credibility. This article will explore what thought leadership is, why it matters, and how to use it to elevate your game.

What Is Thought Leadership?

Thought leadership goes beyond expertise. It is a positioning strategy that shapes how prospective customers perceive you. How do you want them to think of you? What do you want them to remember when they hear your name? Ideally, they should say, “Hmm… Jack is pretty good. He seems to know quite a bit about setting up a management system for dealerships. Maybe I should connect with him.”

A thought leader influences their industry by addressing key issues, introducing fresh perspectives, and inspiring action. It is not about having groundbreaking ideas. Most industries do not require revolutionary thinking, but they reward those who can articulate their knowledge in a compelling, relatable, and unique way. Your voice, personality, and philosophy shape your thought leadership, making your insights resonate with your audience.

Unlike traditional marketing, thought leadership is not about selling but educating and guiding. By consistently sharing valuable perspectives, you create trust and credibility, ensuring that when your audience needs expertise, they think of you first.

Why Thought Leadership Matters for Your Business

Thought leadership is more than just a buzzword. It is a long-term strategy that builds credibility, trust, and influence in your industry. While it can lead to opportunities such as speaking engagements, collaborations, and increased sales, these are not the primary goals—they are the natural results of establishing yourself as a trusted authority.

When done well, thought leadership:

• Establishes Authority: People trust those who provide insight and guidance.

• Attracts Opportunities: Speaking engagements, partnerships, and media exposure come naturally.

• Generates Leads and Sales: Customers prefer to buy from those they trust.

• Differentiates You from Competitors: Your unique perspective sets you apart.

• Strengthens Customer Loyalty: Clients value businesses that offer knowledge beyond transactions.

Many decision-makers say thought leadership significantly influences purchasing decisions because it fosters trust. People do not engage with thought leaders because they want to be sold. They engage because they find value in the insights they get from the engagement.

That is the key to thought leadership. Do not push an agenda, but genuinely serve your audience. Share your ideas, articulate your philosophy, and establish a reputation for providing value. Over time, the right people will notice, and the business benefits will follow.

Who Benefits from Thought Leadership?

Thought leadership is often associated with knowledge-based professionals—consultants, financial advisors, lawyers, and marketers—because credibility and expertise are central to their work. It helps them establish authority, attract clients, and stand out in competitive industries.

Thought leadership is not limited to these fields. A café owner may not need to write industry white papers, but they can still share insights on creating a great customer experience or fostering a community around their business. An administrative professional may not influence corporate strategy, but they can share productivity hacks, workflow improvements, or lessons from their career.

Thought leadership is ultimately about making your knowledge, personality, and insights visible. It does not have to be directly tied to your profession. You can build thought leadership around your passions, experiences, or unique worldview. Doing so creates a dynamic personal brand that evolves over time, making you more than just a job title.

For example, a writer with marketing and management experience can build thought leadership by publishing articles on LinkedIn and Substack. This work is more than a portfolio; it becomes an evolving resume that demonstrates expertise, attracts opportunities, and opens doors.

If you have ideas worth sharing, you can use thought leadership to position yourself beyond your job description. The keys are consistency, authenticity, and a willingness to engage in meaningful conversations.

How to Build Thought Leadership in Your Industry

So, how do you get started on building thought leadership? Here’s a simple, step-by-step approach:

1. Find Your Niche

What unique perspective can you offer?

Start by thinking about what you truly care about. What topics are you passionate about? What knowledge or experiences do you have that others might benefit from?

Choosing a niche is essential. If you’re not deeply invested in your topic, sustaining the momentum needed to establish yourself as a thought leader will be difficult. Focus on something that aligns with your expertise and passion, and you’ll naturally stand out.

2. Develop Your Voice

Let your personality shine through.

Your voice reflects who you are. It is the combination of your knowledge, experience, and personality. Speak in a way that feels authentic and true to you. Don’t overthink it; just say it like you would to a friend. Whether formal or casual, academic or conversational, let your perspective and personality come through in every post or article.

3. Create High-Value Content

Thought leadership thrives on content.

Start creating. This could be anything from writing articles to recording videos, launching a podcast, or hosting webinars. The keys are consistency and value. Offer insights that help solve problems, challenge conventional thinking, or share your experiences in a way that teaches something new. Focus on providing value—content that educates, entertains, or challenges your audience.

4. Engage With Your Audience

Thought leadership is a conversation, not a monologue.

Don’t just publish content and walk away. Engage with your audience. Respond to comments on your posts, participate in industry discussions, and ask thought-provoking questions. Joining relevant conversations or sharing insights in forums helps deepen your connections and show that you are approachable, not just a voice from afar.

5. Leverage Multiple Platforms

Expand your reach—but stay focused.

While LinkedIn is an excellent starting point for thought leadership, exploring other platforms, such as blogs, guest articles, podcasts, or speaking engagements, is important. Each platform offers a different way to engage and can help you reach new audiences.

However, be careful not to get too distracted by managing too many platforms. It’s better to focus on a few where your audience is most active and where your message can resonate the most. For example, I publish on Substack and share my articles on LinkedIn, as these platforms align well with my writing and thought leadership goals. I’ve found that Facebook and Instagram work well when running a restaurant but not when I am writing.

By honing in on a few key platforms, you can streamline your efforts and avoid spreading yourself too thin. Focus on where you can tell your story most effectively and consistently.

Thought Leadership as a Long-Term Strategy

Becoming a thought leader is not a quick fix—it’s a long-term strategy that requires consistency, patience, and a genuine commitment to providing value.

There are a few common misconceptions that may hold people back:

• “I’m not an expert yet.” You don’t need to be the best in your field. You need unique insights and a fresh perspective that others can learn from.

• “I don’t have time.” You don’t have to start big. Even just one post a week can start building momentum over time.

The key is persistence. With sustained effort, you’ll gradually position yourself as a trusted authority in your industry.

Remember, thought leadership is about building personal brand equity. Over time, it will open doors, whether landing a better job, attracting new clients, or even meeting someone who shares your values and vision. It’s about positioning yourself as a brand so that when people think of your area of expertise, they think of you.

Need Help Building Your Thought Leadership?

Thought leadership can transform your business by elevating your reputation and attracting high-value clients. If you are unsure where to start, I can help. As a writer with marketing expertise, I help clients craft compelling content that establishes credibility and drives engagement.

I’ve seen businesses treat email marketing like a digital megaphone, blasting out promotional pieces and unsolicited sales brochures, hoping that someone would respond. Occasionally, some do. But more often, it annoys potential customers, leading to low engagement, rising unsubscribe rates, and even complaints.

The problem lies in how businesses view email marketing: as an extension of traditional direct mail, a one-way broadcast rather than a two-way conversation. Customers don’t want to be flooded with impersonal, irrelevant offers. They want information that is useful, relevant, and worth their time.

At its core, an email is a letter, a personal message from one person to another. Unlike social media posts or ads, emails arrive in inboxes. That is sacred and should be respected. When done correctly, emails build trust and nurture relationships.

Yet, too many businesses strip email of what makes it powerful. They see “audience” instead of individuals. They chase reach, click-through rates, and Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) instead of engagement. They forget that effective email marketing isn’t about shouting louder but speaking directly to the right people in a way that matters to them.

3 Reasons Email Marketing Fails

“Spray and Pray”

You can tell by the way a client describes their marketing philosophy. Words like “blasting”, “data-based approach”, and “eDMs” permeate the conversation. Clients who still believe in mass emailing the same generic message to everyone. It has minimal segmentation and no personalisation (except the first name in the subject line). Just volume. “It’s a numbers game.” This mindset often stems from the belief that technology enables numbers to compensate for a lack of strategy, a legacy mindset from giving out flyers and cold calling.

These same companies scrape websites for email addresses, acquire “premium” lists, and flood inboxes with generic hard-sells. Inboxes today are overcrowded, and the technology that enabled this abuse has become adept at filtering out unwanted solicitation. They call it “spam” because it is fake.

Focusing on Selling, Not Serving

Many businesses approach email marketing with a singular focus: How do we increase sales? How do we drive conversions? How do we break through? But the question should be: What do my customers want? Or need? How do I become someone they want to do business with?

When businesses are obsessed only with themselves, their offers, and their motive to sell, it shows. Their messages become single-sided pitches filled with features, benefits, and reasons why they are great. The underlying psychology is rooted in an outdated, transactional view of business: overcoming objections, closing the deal, and managing customers’ remorse. It’s an outbound, aggressive approach disguised as communication.

Customers don’t want to be convinced. They want to be understood. The best email strategies shift the focus from selling to serving, persuasion to connection. They solve problems, provide insights, and build trust long before asking for a sale.

Using Technology the Wrong Way

Email marketing should be a tool for understanding and connecting with customers, but businesses often misuse technology. Instead of leveraging data and automation to create more meaningful interactions, they use it to scale bad practices, turning what was once an impersonal sales pitch into a relentless, endless, automated flood of emails.

Before, a company might cold-call a handful of prospects, hoping to make a sale. Now, with a few clicks, they can send out thousands, sometimes millions, of generic messages, gambling that a small percentage will convert. Perhaps some will, but at what cost? Instead of building trust, this strategy alienates far more people than it engages.

With AI, you can now take this disaster further. Businesses can now automate entire sequences: optimising send times, personalising subject lines, and crafting automated responses at scale. But if the core approach is still transactional and impersonal, AI makes it cheaper to annoy more people faster.

What Good Email Marketing Should Look Like

Businesses that use email marketing correctly treat it as a relationship-building tool, not just a sales channel. They understand that every email is an opportunity to connect, engage, and provide value.

Make It Personal, Make It Engaging

Making an email personal isn’t just about inserting a first name into the subject line. It requires a fundamental shift in mindset: from us to them. Instead of asking how we sell more, we should ask why a customer would want to hear from us first. What role do we play in their lives? What makes us worth their time?

To build a relationship, we must be more than just another brand in their inbox; we must be interesting. But more importantly, we have to be interested. The best marketers understand that engaging a customer isn’t so different from starting a romantic courtship. A good impression matters. A compelling story draws people in. And most of all, genuine curiosity about the other person fosters connection.

This means crafting emails that don’t just talk at the customer but invite them into the conversation. It means thinking beyond promotions and asking: What can we offer that is useful, insightful, or entertaining? AI and automation can help scale these interactions, but technology should enhance human connection, not replace it.

Give Before Ask

Offering value isn’t about what we think is important but what matters to the customer. When we shift our mindset from us to them, we stop treating emails (and other communications) as a one-way broadcast and instead treat them as an opportunity to engage. Engagement doesn’t happen just because we send an email. It happens when the recipient finds something helpful, insightful, or delightful worth their attention.

To offer value, we have to listen. What does the customer care about? What challenges do they face? What would make their lives easier, more interesting, or more enjoyable? When we address these things instead of just talking about how great we are, we become relevant. We become a resource, a problem-solver, or even an inspiration.

Good emails don’t just sell; they serve. They anticipate questions, solve problems, and even entertain. They provide value, like knowledge, a different perspective, or even a good laugh. When this happens, engagement follows naturally.

Be Interesting

Being interesting isn’t about flashy subject lines or gimmicks. Authenticity is what keeps people reading. It turns a casual subscriber into someone who looks forward to hearing from you. When we communicate honestly, with a clear voice, and with something worth saying, we create trust that gimmicks can’t buy.

Here is where good writing can make a difference. Words convey information and create an experience. They set the tone, evoke emotion, and determine whether someone feels drawn in or tuned out. A well-crafted letter is like a conversation. It should feel like a person wrote it for a person. From me, to you.

Email Marketing isn’t dead.

If you want email marketing to work, shift your mindset. Stop asking what you can get from it and start thinking about what you can give.

Success isn’t about clickbait subject lines or relentless sales pitches. It’s about trust. It’s about knowing your audience, listening to their needs, and offering something valuable without expecting an immediate return. The brands that succeed aren’t the ones shouting the loudest; they’re the ones that show up consistently, not just to sell but to educate, engage, and help.

Ultimately, marketing is about understanding your customers, delivering meaningful value, and nurturing long-term relationships. Technology should support this approach, not amplify customers’ pain with outdated practices.

In 2018, I wanted to do something completely different. I started a Singaporean restaurant in the Eco Village where we lived. It was a family experiment. My wife and I wanted to set up a business where our two teenage boys could participate. We had no investors, marketing team, or budget, just an idea and a story.

The only other business was Lou’s Shack, an antique shop specialising in vinyl records; we had no signage, advertising, or PR. Customers had to discover us. We became the small family foodie spot purely through word of mouth. How? By making storytelling the heart of our brand.

A good story is positioning. The goal is to get into the heads (and hearts) of your customers. It turns a bowl of laksa into a cultural experience, a takeaway into a personal connection. This article is about how we crafted our Lot 8 story.

How to Build a Brand with No Budget

No Signage? No Problem.

“Lot 8” was part of the story. Not The Singapore Kitchen or Tan’s Recipes. “What is Lot 8?” A Singapore restaurant? Best Authentic Laksa in Australia? They only open 3 nights a week? “Where is it?”

It sounded like a place only insiders knew about.

Customers who discovered us felt part of a secret club and loved sharing it with their friends. “At last! I found you! I didn’t know about you and have lived here for 15 years!”

“Well, now you know!”

This idea came from a story of a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, that inspired me. The chef and owner loved cooking and eating but disliked “people.” So, he set up a restaurant in a deliberately hard-to-find place without signage or advertisements. Only those who knew would come to his restaurant. The more he tried to hide it, the more people found him.

Without a signboard, people had to stumble upon us, hear about us from friends or strangers, or follow their curiosity. And once they found us, they wanted to bring others. That’s word-of-mouth at its best.

Telling Our Story Over the Counter

We had an izakaya-style set-up. When customers dined at the front counter, we chatted. We shared our story, how we got started, our philosophy (free-range and local ingredients), and how we made some of our popular dishes. I shared cooking tips, recipes, and personal anecdotes of when we were living in Singapore. These deepened the connection between us and our customers. We mostly became friends.

This sharing also gave them a story to tell their friends, like how I used a little-known ingredient (dried flounder) to give the wonton soup that unique smoky seafood flavour, how I spent 6 hours a day each week just stewing the laksa paste, and how we manually punched holes into slices of potatoes to make lotus roots (jokingly).

These are more than just USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) or features and benefits. They are the stories of our lives that customers experience firsthand when they come in for a bowl of wonton noodles. They build relationships and create bonds.

How to tell a good (marketing) story

Authenticity: People Connect with People, Not Brands

Lot 8 wasn’t just a restaurant; it was a family-home-restaurant. My wife, our two teenage boys (14 and 11), and I ran the place together. They knew us by name. With our setup, customers saw us working the kitchen, taking orders, and serving food. The kitchen was our stage, genuine and completely unpretentious.

Our little place isn’t fancy. There is minimal decor and no apparent effort to plate each dish. The portions are generous because that is how I like it. Sometimes, we give macaroons to children while they are waiting and go out of our way to accommodate unusual requests. We almost, always, never say “no.”

Customers say, “It feels like I’m eating in your home.” That’s the best compliment a small restaurant can receive.

Emotional Connection: The Power of Nostalgia and Experience

Food is often tied to memory. Many customers told us, “This reminds me of...” That emotional connection turned them from one-time visitors into regular fans. Storytelling is not just us telling our story. Customers often tell the most beautiful stories about how we have brought back memories for them and helped them relive their past.

We had one customer who told us that 30 years ago, she had the most fabulous laksa ever on her honeymoon in Singapore. The taste memory lingered for decades. After trying ours, she said it brought her back to that moment. It was incredibly moving. Customers like these became regulars. More importantly, they become advocates and friends.

Word-of-Mouth is the Best Marketing

One evening, a group of holiday makers told us they had overheard people at a beach 47 kilometers away raving about Lot 8. Intrigued, they drove over just to see what the fuss was about. To them, it felt like uncovering a little hidden treasure.

We heard stories like this all the time. That sense of discovery wasn’t an accident; it was part of our marketing strategy. People love stumbling upon something special, something not everyone knows of. It makes them feel like insiders, part of a secret worth sharing. And when they did share, it wasn’t just about the laksa or chicken rice; it was about the story, the experience, the feeling of finding something unique. That’s the essence of word-of-mouth marketing.

How to Apply This to Your Business

What’s Your Story?

Every business, every enterprise, has a story. Our job is to uncover and tell it in the most interesting and engaging way ever. Ask yourself:

Why does your business exist? Beyond making money, what is your mission? Your goal? For us, it was to experiment: We wanted to set up a family business that involved our teenage sons. We wanted them to learn about work and earn their allowance, including customer service, food preparation, cooking, cleaning, etc. We also wanted to share our heritage food and migration story with our customers.

What makes your story special? Instead of talking endlessly about the features and benefits or how good your products are, ask yourself: What inspired your journey? Maybe you’re preserving a century-old shop passed down from your great-grandfather, carrying forward a legacy of craftsmanship. Maybe you’re driven by a bold vision to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and reshape the future. Or maybe your business is a tribute to your mother, sharing her cherished recipes with the world.

A powerful story isn’t just what you do. It is also why you do it. That’s what makes people connect, remember, and share.

What do customers say about you that stands out? Your customers also tell the story of your business. Pay attention to what they rave about, what surprises them, and what keeps them returning. Their words reveal your brand’s essence, often better than any marketing strategy. Your customers’ words are a goldmine. They highlight the emotional connection they have with your business. What do your customers say that makes them light up? That’s your brand story waiting to be told.

For us8, our story was about a small family kitchen serving authentic Singaporean food, mostly hidden away but cherished by those who found it.

Make Your Customers Part of the Story

The best brands make customers feel like insiders. Engage them, share knowledge, and build relationships. People don’t just buy products; they buy experiences.

Encourage customers to share their own experiences with your brand. Whether through social media, word of mouth, or personal recommendations, their voices amplify your story in a way that no advertisement ever could.

Deliver an Experience, Not Just a Product

It’s called the Customer Journey. How do you craft each step of the customer experience to create a loyal advocate for your business? Lot 8 wasn’t just about the laksa and noodles. It was about family warmth, personal connection, and discovery. It was about creating an experience that goes beyond the product itself. That’s why people kept coming back.

We recently went to see a lawyer to get our affairs sorted. The practice was small, with only two people and a dog. After the consultation, I left a positive review because the experience was surprisingly pleasant. A few days later, the law firm sent us a box of premium chocolates to thank us for our feedback. It completely wowed us.

It could be through personalisation, exceptional customer service, or adding small, memorable touches that make interactions with your business unique. If a small law firm can do that, every business can.

Build a Sense of Discovery and Exclusivity

People love finding something unique and sharing it with others. Whether it’s a hidden gem of a restaurant, a boutique with a unique collection, or an online service with an unexpected personal touch, make your business feel like a discovery.

A good story creates a connection, builds trust, and makes people talk about you. Give your customers a good story to share, and they’ll do the most amazing marketing for you.

In 2010, I stumbled upon a management system that changed how I saw leadership and business growth. It was a eureka moment, one of those rare instances where an idea clicked so profoundly. The concept was simple, yet its implications were immense. It was called OKRs, Objectives and Key Results.

The more I read about OKRs, the more I saw their potential to drive clarity, alignment, and accountability across most organisations. I tried introducing it to my workplace, believing it could significantly improve our operations. However, change is hard when people are used to working a certain way.

Despite the initial lack of traction, I never lost faith in OKRs. Today, I want to share why OKRs might be the best-kept secret for running any organisation, whether managing a café, a marketing agency, or a growing SaaS business.

What Are OKRs?

At the core, OKRs are a goal-setting framework designed to bring transparency, focus, and alignment within an organisation. Andy Grove popularised the system at Intel, and John Doerr later introduced it to Google. It works by defining clear objectives (what you want to achieve) and measurable key results (how you’ll measure progress toward that objective).

The beauty of OKRs lies in their simplicity. Every individual, team, and department sets its OKRs related to the company’s overarching goals. The system is transparent, meaning a junior developer or a barista can see the CEO or business owner’s OKRs. Everyone knows how their work aligns and contributes to the bigger picture.

How OKRs Work

Set Ambitious Objectives

Objectives should be inspiring and aspirational. They answer the question: “What do we want to accomplish?” You might be familiar with the idea of BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals). A strong objective should push the limits of what seems possible and determine the direction of the entire organisation for years to come. Consider NASA’s legendary goal: “We will send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.” That’s a BHAG.

If you’re running a SaaS company, your objective shouldn’t be “increase sales.” It should be something like “Become the most trusted AI-powered customer service platform in the world.” A retail business might aim to “redefine sustainable fashion by creating 100% recyclable clothing at scale.” It should be “change the world” ambitious.

Define Measurable Key Results

Key results answer the question: “How will we know we have achieved our objective?” They must be specific, time-bound, and quantifiable. A well-defined key result eliminates ambiguity and makes success measurable.

For our SaaS company to become the most trusted AI-powered customer service platform, key results might look like this:

• Increase customer retention from 60% to 90% by year-end.

• Reduce average support ticket response time from 24 hours to under 2 hours.

• Achieve $10 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of the year.

Cascading Key Results Down the Organisation

Each key result at the company level becomes an objective for a relevant department or individual. It ensures alignment and accountability at every level.

• The Sales Manager owns “Achieve $10M in annual recurring revenue” as her objective. Her key results might include:

  • Expand the sales team by hiring 20 new sales representatives in key target regions.

  • Implement a performance-based incentive program that increases average deal size by 15%.

  • Launch a targeted sales promotion that generates 5,000 new leads and converts 500 into paying customers within three months.

• The Customer Support Manager’s objective is to “Reduce average support ticket response time to under 2 hours”. His key results might be:

  • Automate 80% of support inquiries through AI-powered chatbots by Q3.

  • Implement a tiered escalation system to resolve high-priority issues within 30 minutes.

  • Hire and train 10 additional support agents to handle peak hours efficiently.

This cascading approach ensures that each team and individual knows precisely how their work contributes to the broader company objective. Everyone’s efforts are aligned, measurable, and purpose-driven.

Set Quarterly OKRs and Aim for 70% Achievement.

OKRs are typically set every quarter, allowing teams to adjust, iterate, and refine their approach based on the business environment. It prevents companies from becoming rigid or stuck in outdated goals, ensuring agility in a fast-changing business landscape.

The sweet spot for achievement is around 70%.

If the team consistently achieves 100% of their OKRs, chances are the goals were too conservative, and these individuals or teams deliberately set the bar to ensure success. It’s human instinct to meet expectations and avoid failure. But in doing so, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to grow.

On the other hand, if the team is hitting below 50%, the OKRs might be overly ambitious, leading to frustration, burnout, and discouragement. People need a challenge that stretches their abilities without overwhelming them.

Psychologically, this approach serves two crucial functions:

1. Encouraging Ambition Without Fear of Failure. Employees may take more significant risks when they know that 100% achievement isn’t the goal. They push beyond their comfort zones, knowing that progress, even without perfection, is valued. This fosters a growth mindset, where the focus shifts from merely checking boxes to making meaningful progress.

2. Maintaining Motivation and Avoiding Burnout. If OKRs are too easy, work becomes uninspiring. If they’re too hard, work becomes demoralising. The 70% mark keeps people engaged and challenged but not discouraged. Teams still feel a sense of accomplishment even when they fall short as long as they see significant movement toward the goal.

Top companies encourage teams to embrace ambitious goals with a built-in acceptance that “failure” (falling short of 100%) is expected. Absolute failure is not stretching far enough.

So, if your company sets an OKR to “Expand into three new international markets” and successfully enters two of them, it is OK. The company has still grown significantly. The 70% rule acknowledges that partial progress toward big, audacious goals is far more valuable than achieving easy goals in full.

Ultimately, OKRs’ genius lies in this deliberate imperfection, which ensures that every goal pushes the organisation to improve.

The Power of Every Individual to Say No

One of the most powerful and often overlooked aspects of OKRs is that they provide a binary decision-making framework for every employee. This is a yes/no answer to every request. If a task doesn’t contribute to an OKR, employees have the authority and responsibility to say “No,” even if it is from the boss.

Distraction is a silent killer in every organisation. In a typical business environment, managers and bosses, often with good intentions, frequently introduce ad-hoc pet projects, one-off requests, or new initiatives that can derail focus. These distractions, while well-meaning, take employees’ attention away from what truly matters. When employees are given last-minute tasks that don’t align with their core objectives, productivity and morale inevitably suffer.

A restaurant owner, for example, might want to launch a new seasonal menu. However, if the OKRs were to focus on increasing customer retention and reducing wait times, the new menu might not achieve those critical goals. While the new menu might be an exciting idea, it distracts from the bigger mission of improving operational efficiency. The business avoids drifting off course by institutionalising the “Say No” policy.

This empowerment to say no extends beyond simple permission; it’s a commitment to focus. When employees are clear on their OKRs, they own them. They are personally accountable for achieving those results; every action they take should be a step in that direction. In this culture, any request must be evaluated through the employee’s OKRs. Does this help me achieve my OKRs?

This shift fundamentally changes how organisations operate. It aligns priorities and ensures that all resources, whether time, energy, or talent, are spent on the things that matter most. By implementing the “Say No” policy, management is completely committed to OKRs. If employees see their leaders making decisions based on OKRs and prioritising what matters, they’re far more likely to do the same.

It means no employee gets a free pass, no matter how senior. Focus becomes a cultural norm, and any deviation requires serious justification. This approach stops the organisation from becoming fragmented and scattered, as everyone stays aligned with the core mission.

The “Say No” policy protects the organisation’s integrity and not just individuals from distractions. It helps create a clear focus and gives every employee a shared sense of purpose. Everyone understands where and how their work fits in and that every decision made within the organisation should serve that higher purpose.

Foster a Culture of Transparency and Accountability

OKRs are tools for individual or team success and the bedrock of a transparent and accountable organisational culture. When OKRs are public within an organisation, employees know what their colleagues are working on. This level of visibility ensures that everyone’s efforts are aligned toward the same goals. A junior marketing associate in a SaaS company can see exactly how their work contributes to the company’s broader revenue goals, making their day-to-day tasks feel purposeful and meaningful.

However, the impact of transparency goes far beyond individual motivation. It redefines how work gets done across the organisation. With clear visibility into everyone’s OKRs, there is no ambiguity about priorities. Colleagues are less likely to ask each other to engage in incompatible tasks.

This clarity reduces unnecessary friction. With transparent OKRs, every task and every action taken is purpose-driven, and employees don’t waste time and energy. Managers no longer need to micromanage or overexplain; they know what their teams are working on and can trust that those efforts align with the organisation’s mission.

From a work culture standpoint, OKRs strengthen the sense of accountability at all levels. Employees no longer work for their benefit or isolated departmental goals. They work towards something tangible that everyone can see and understand. Everyone’s success is tied to the organisation’s collective success, and this shared responsibility fosters collaboration rather than competition.

Why OKRs Are Helpful

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

OKRs shift the focus from activity to outcome. They act as a compass, helping organisations prioritise what matters and ensuring everyone is on the same path.

But here’s the real beauty of OKRs: How you get there doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that you get there. If an employee hits their targets, delivers on their projects, and provides measurable value, why should it matter if they work late into the night, take an afternoon off, or spend a couple of hours gardening between tasks?

Companies fail not because their employees aren’t working hard enough but because they never take the time to define success clearly. Without a clear destination and measurable markers along the way, it’s easy to get lost in the chaos of busyness without achieving anything meaningful.

OKRs offer a framework for success to guide everyone towards a shared outcome, ensuring that every effort is aligned with the company’s priorities. When everyone is focused on the same goal, there’s no need to check “if Joe is at his computer when working from home.”

Results speak for themselves, and success is measured, celebrated, and continuously improved.

How to Get Started with OKRs

If you think OKRs are worth exploring, try it out! Pick one key objective for your business and define 2-3 measurable key results. Test it for a quarter, see how it changes focus and accountability, and refine it.

This excellent book on OKRs by John Doerr, Measure What Matters, is truly worth the read. But the best way to learn is to start applying them.

OKRs transformed Google. They could transform your business, too.

When I was working as a young retail assistant in a leading bookstore in Singapore, I stumbled upon a box of dead stock: 30 copies of a old Children’s Encyclopaedia and 20 copies of a LIFE Special Edition from years ago. My manager told me to price them at a dollar each and get rid of it.

Weeks later, not a single copy had sold.

So I tried something different. Similar books were priced at about $29.90 and $19.90, respectively. So I re-priced them, shrink-wrapped them nicely, and displayed them prominently as “collector’s edition”.

Every copy sold out over the weekend. That’s $1,295 in the early 1990s.

That was my first lesson in marketing: Cheap doesn’t always work.

Price is a signal

Many businesses put a lot of effort into product, promotion, and placement, but treat pricing mostly as an afterthought. They want to charge more but fear losing out to the competitor. Most default to cost-plus pricing (“Let’s just add a 20% margin”) or, worse, undercut competitors without considering what their prices actually communicate.

But “Price” is more than the amount you charge—it’s a consensus of value between you and your customer. This means “value” or the value proposition is the key determinant for price.

Consider this. In Singapore:

• $2 for a coffee at the local coffee shop (kopitiam) would be deemed too expensive.

• $7 for a cappuccino in a Starbucks café would be acceptable.

You might argue that Starbucks’ coffee tastes better, but I believe that if you serve the same coffee in a local food court, you could not charge more than $2 for it. Even if the product is identical, it really isn’t. The value proposition is different.

Here’s an interesting article about coffee prices in Singapore. If you are interested.

Price also tells a story

Every price tag tells a story. That $19.99 purse says “disposable” while its $9,500 designer counterpart says “this is something I leave behind for my children.” The numbers are secondary to the subconscious dialogue they trigger about quality, tastes, and self-perception.

Consider Louis Vuitton’s $15,000 handbags. While the craftsmanship is indeed impeccable, you’re not paying for French leather and monogram stitching. You’re purchasing entry into an exclusive narrative, one where museum-worthy artisanship meets engineered scarcity. The price is intentionally set to exclude, creating social proof through inaccessibility. “If you have to ask why it’s expensive, you’re not our intended customer.”

This insight was expressed in one of my favourite ads by legendary copywriter Neil French:

Following a series of print ads for Chivas Regal, this full-page display in the Singapore Straits Times on 26 June, 1987 (P18) became the stuff of marketing legends.

Full page display, no pictures or logo. Just a stick of copy in FULL CAPS and underlined.

Reference: https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/straitstimes19870626-1.2.32.1

Price is seldom about cost recovery. It’s about constructing a value narrative so compelling that customers feel they’re discovering value, not just paying it. When done right, Price becomes the most eloquent salesperson in your sales team.

The Danger of Under-pricing

Under-pricing is essentially a confession of insecurity. Many entrepreneurs, fearing rejection, default to the “safe” route of lowering price to sell more. They do not realise they’re negotiating against their own worth.

We hesitate to charge more because we see our offering through our own eyes: the hours spent, the costs incurred, the hidden imperfections. This lack of confidence sets off a dangerous chain reaction:

The Commoditization Trap

When you compete on price alone, you train customers to treat your products and services as a commodity; interchangeable and disposable. They become mercenaries, not customers, always looking for a better deal.

The Margin Death Spiral

Thin margins mean you have little room to breathe. You get stuck in a race to the bottom, cutting costs on every corner to stay competitive. This reinforces the perception that your offering isn’t worth more than the next person’s. Without a healthy margin, you can’t invest. You can’t give your customers anything more than a bare minimum.

The Brand Equity Erosion

Discounting is also addictive for the customers. A luxury brand that caves to promotions may never regain its premium aura. Once you’ve conditioned the market to expect bargains, raising prices feels like betrayal, even if your value justifies it.

The Solution

Stop asking, “Will they pay this?” and start asking, “What does this price make them think?” A higher price is a signal of authority and confidence, a filter for the right customers, and a foundation for reinvesting in your craft.

Pricing is mostly psychology. Charge like you believe in what you’ve built, because if you don’t, why should your customers? Your price reflects what you (and your customers) truly believe your product or service is worth. If you’re struggling to sell, the issue might not be the price but the value story behind it.

Marketing is often the first to go when budgets tighten, seen as a discretionary expense rather than the growth engine for the business. This misunderstanding persists across industries, where marketing expenditures are viewed as feel-good “trimmings” rather than critical investment for growth.

My experience as Marketing Manager for Subaru Singapore in the early 2000s demonstrated otherwise. We were struggling with sales in an unfavourable market position. Our costs of goods were significantly higher than the major players.

So when the manufacturer increased the cost further, we executed a strategy that tripled our marketing investment while simultaneously increasing prices. This counterintuitive approach yielded a tenfold sales increase within seven years.

This case study serves not only as proof of marketing’s transformative potential when properly leveraged but also the importance of strategic brand positioning.

The Challenge: Competing Against Market Leaders

Subaru’s position in the Singaporean automotive market was precarious when I assumed joined as marketing manager back in 2001. There were 3 critical issues that demanded attention.

First, our vehicles carried a significant price premium over category leaders Toyota and Nissan without commensurate perceived value among consumers. We were just an expensive option.

Second, the brand suffered from an identity crisis. Known primarily for the cute and economical Vivio model rather than the performance engineering that was making Subaru legendary in motor sports.

Third, Fuji Heavy Industries made its signature All-Wheel Drive (AWD) technology standard in all models. This substantially increased costs further, making our cars even less competitive.

The management’s instinct was to breakeven and make money on service. It was survival mode and unsustainable for niche manufacturers competing against mass-market producers. We also expected sales to decline since even at breakeven, we would still be more expensive than many in the same category.

We needed to change and redefine the competitive framework.

Strategic Repositioning: From FWD to AWD

The breakthrough came from recognizing that our challenge wasn’t pricing but positioning. Subaru needed to transcend the value-for-money comparison with mainstream brands. It needed to establish itself as the intelligent choice for driving enthusiasts who prioritized performance and safety. This required reshaping consumer perceptions about what Subaru’s “Intelligent AWD” represented.

Our strategy rested on three pillars:

First, we increased prices. It was uncomfortable and counterintuitive for us, but it was inevitable. But it also created the margin to fund an aggressive marketing campaign while simultaneously signalling premium positioning. Price communicates value, and we needed to align our pricing with the superior engineering we offered.

Second, we needed a different story. We reallocated most of our marketing budget toward demonstrating and promoting Subaru’s AWD technological advantages. Research revealed consumers misunderstood AWD’s benefits, associating it primarily with off-road capability (which is irrelevant in Singapore) rather than everyday safety and performance advantages.

Third, we changed the customer experience. We supplemented traditional dealership test drives with professional driving events where potential buyers, by invitation, could experience the AWD’s cornering stability and traction with a professional race car driver. These initiatives completely changed our customers’ perception of Subaru, especially when they come in for a test-drive after sitting with a race car driver.

Execution: Making the Technical Tangible

The critical insight driving our campaign was recognizing that specs (superior technology) alone don’t compel the purchase. When “350 Nm of torque at 2000 rpm” becomes “Oh my god! I think I peed in my pants…”, you know that your customers have emotionally connected with your brand, and we have delivered a unique experience. This is something competitors cannot outdo with a weekend special.

Our advertising emphasized control, confidence, and the pleasure of cornering without slippage. Our advertising creative showcased real-world scenarios where AWD provided decisive advantages: downpours (which were common in Singapore), emergency manoeuvres (because everyone drives fast and tight to each other), and winding roads (when they drive into some parts of Malaysia). We supplemented traditional media with extensive public relations efforts, securing coverage in automotive and mainstream press (which is easy when you spend on media) that reinforced our positioning as the intelligent choice for discerning drivers.

Perhaps most importantly, we were single-minded in our message. Consistency of positioning across all touchpoints, from advertising to dealership experience, reinforced Subaru’s credentials as a premium product.

Results: Validation of Strategy
The numbers validated our approach. From approximately 400 annual vehicle sales when we started our repositioning strategy in 2001, we reached nearly 4,000 units by 2008. More importantly, we transformed Subaru’s brand equity into a technologically sophisticated preference in the class of BMWs.

Broader Marketing Implications

This case study offers several critical insights for marketing professionals and business leaders:

1. Positioning Precedes Pricing
   Effective pricing strategy flows from clear brand positioning. What is our value proposition? What are we all about? Competing on price without differentiated positioning signals to the customers that we are just like the rest. One of many. And the value we offer is thinner margins.

   “Of course there are cheaper cars. There are also smaller houses and thinner steaks.” Headlines for an ad I read years ago in a magazine.

2. Making Emotional Connections
   When introducing innovative or new technologies, marketing must bridge the gap between technical capability and consumer benefit. Apple’s 1000 songs in your pocket vs Creative Zen’s 40 GB storage is a classic example. Abstract features become valuable only when consumers emotionally connect with their real-world advantages.

3. Consistency Compounds Returns
   Marketing investments yield returns when maintained consistently and relentlessly across business cycles. Marketing demands patience, and strategies need time to yield results. Consistent marketing compounds in impact, building brand recognition, trust, and preference over months, not days. The Subaru campaign took nearly a year to gain meaningful traction.

4. Experience Trumps Specification
   In categories where products have become increasingly comparable on paper, the customer experience becomes the ultimate differentiator. Every business has the ability to deliver a unique and lasting impression, and its marketing must focus on creating memorable brand interactions and experience.

This Subaru case shows marketing’s true role as a value-creating investment rather than a discretionary “feel-good” expense. By increasing both prices and marketing expenditures while maintaining absolute consistency in positioning, we transformed a struggling brand into a premium brand, briefly overtaking BMW in annual sales in 2008. This approach requires discipline, conviction, and resisting short-term pressures to fall back to the old ways of doing things.

Marketing deserves a central role in strategic planning, with budgets allocated as growth investments rather than a percentage of sales expense. When executed with vision and consistency, marketing doesn’t just communicate value; it creates it.

For marketing professionals and business owners, the challenge isn’t budget constraints but in overcoming outdated perceptions of marketing’s strategic importance. The examples we’ve examined demonstrate that marketing, when properly conceived and executed, represents the most powerful investment an your organization can make in its future.

I was scrolling through Instagram the other night when an ad caught my attention. An artisan chilli oil. Slick, catchy, great packaging. And expensive, by chilli oil standard.

The ad copy goes something like this:

Established brand Lao Gan Ma (LGM) vs Small Local Business (Artisan)

The ad says LGM is mass-produced, while Artisan is hand-made by a passionate chef. What does “hand-made” really mean? Did you skip the food processor? It’s still produced, just in smaller batches.

LGM uses pre-fried ingredients that supposedly taste “old.” Does that mean they aren’t fresh? Artisan claims to use “fresh” ingredients, but you actually have to pre-fry fresh ingredients to keep them from spoiling. Besides shallots (and maybe garlic), which are sliced and then pre-fried, chilli flakes and spices are already dry, so are they “old” too? And honestly, it’s hard for small-batch producers to get good-quality dried chilli flakes outside China, which are key to good chilli oil.

LGM is fast and cheap. Artisan is slow-cooked and expensive.

LGM is famous because it is “accessible”. Artisan is not because it is “exclusive”.

LGM is at the bottom. Artisan is at the top.

If you’ve only ever had LGM, you can only go up the quality ladder.

The ad truly annoyed me.

I do not think that Artisan’s chilli oil is bad. In fact, I had wanted to try it since following their Instagram page. Having made my own chilli oil when I ran a restaurant, I have no doubt it probably tastes good. What annoyed me was the arrogance and presumption of it all.

It left a bad aftertaste.

So I’d like to share a bit of history about the “Godmother,” the woman behind Lao Gan Ma chilli oil.

The Godmother

Her name is Tao Huabi (陶华碧). Born in 1947, the eighth daughter in a poor family in Meitan County, Guizhou Province, one of the poorest regions in China. Tao never learned to read or write.

During the Great Chinese Famine, when she was just a teenager, she survived by digging up wild vegetables and learning to make flavours from roots and wild herbs. Years of poverty taught her that spice and fermentation could turn simple ingredients into delicious meals, a lesson that later became the foundation of her billion-dollar company.

She married young but soon became a widow, left to care for her two young sons.

She left her factory work in Guangzhou and opened a street stall in her hometown in Guizhou, selling liangfen (凉粉) and cold noodles (冷面). Then, in 1989, she opened a tiny shop in Guiyang called 实惠食堂 (meaning Affordable Canteen). It was a simple, working‑class eatery serving inexpensive home‑style Guizhou dishes and staple carbs (rice, noodles), with her signature chilli oil on the side.

It was the chilli oil that customers loved.

She gave discounts to students who couldn’t afford full meals. She gave extra food to those who looked like they needed more. Soon, they started calling her Lao Gan Ma (老干妈), which means “Godmother.”

Note: In Chinese, Lao (老) doesn’t really mean “old” the way English uses it. It’s a word that carries respect, familiarity, and seniority. Your teacher is Lao Shi (老师). Your boss is Lao Ban (老板). When you call a close friend Lao plus their surname, like Lao Chen (老陈), it’s a term of warmth and familiarity.

And Gan Ma (干妈) already means godmother, someone who looks after you like family, even though she doesn’t have to.

So Lao Gan Ma isn’t “Old Godmother.” It’s closer to something like “the godmother we all know and respect.”

At that point, it wasn’t a brand yet. Lao Gan Ma was an affectionate nickname, earned through her generosity towards students and working-class customers.

Three Million Bottles a Day

By the mid-nineties, truck drivers passing through Guiyang were buying her sauce in bulk.

Long-haul truck drivers in China often cook their own meals while travelling. Usually, it’s just plain boiled noodles, maybe with some pickled vegetables—just enough to fill up. But a spoonful of Tao’s chilli oil could turn those simple roadside meals into something special.

That’s the power of a good condiment.

At her restaurant, customers wouldn’t eat the noodles if the chilli oil ran out.

So Tao stopped selling noodles and focused on selling her chilli oil instead.

In 1996, she rented a village committee house, hired forty workers, and started bottling her chilli oil in small batches.

Today, the company produces three million bottles a day and sells in over 160 countries. Tao never took the company public or borrowed money to expand. She built everything based on her instinct, a focus on quality, and a refusal to compromise on quality.

The Big Mistake

In 2014, Tao stepped back from running the company and let her sons take over. They followed typical business school advice.

They optimised.

They replaced the high-quality Guizhou chilli peppers, which are grown at high altitudes and have a special depth of flavour, with cheaper peppers from Henan province.

While margins improved, the taste changed.

And customers noticed.

Revenue fell from 4.5 billion yuan to 4.3 billion yuan. Online forums were full of complaints that it didn’t taste the same anymore. Tao’s sons treated a heritage product like any other business, thinking they could optimise it without considering its impact.

In 2019, at age seventy-two, Tao returned. She brought back the original Guizhou peppers and ordered 500 tons of chilli oil, worth over a million yuan, to be destroyed because it didn’t meet her standards.

By 2024, revenue had climbed back to 5.39 billion yuan.

Customers came back because the chilli oil was back to its original recipe.

The “Better” Product

Now, let’s return to the Artisan chilli oil.

LGM’s success opened the door for Western brands to enter the market. Brands like Fly By Jing, Momofuku, Bowlcut, and many “passionate chefs” have jumped in with their own “better versions” of LGM. You’ll find these names in the premium aisle of supermarkets, usually with higher prices.

Some of these can be quite good.

But here’s the thing: if you’re proud of what you’ve made, just say so. Tell me about your peppers, your process, your awards, even your grandmother’s secret recipe. That’s great. There’s room for more than one bottle on the table.

You don’t have to prove yours is good by putting down someone else’s.

But that’s how many brands market themselves. Look at the language: “Clean ingredients.” “No MSG.” “Artisan.” “Original.” “We use only fresh, hand-selected peppers.” “We never pre-fry our ingredients.” “Small batch, never mass-produced.” “We focus on quality, not quantity.”

Every single one is a comparison dressed up as a statement. They’re telling you what someone else doesn’t.

The message is clear. LGM, the Chinese-made, mass-produced, five-dollar bottle, isn’t clean, isn’t fresh, isn’t careful. Western markets have a long history of framing Asian food in certain ways. They often suggest that traditional means unrefined, or that low cost means low quality.

Being the Better Product

This isn’t really about who can make the best chilli oil. Anyone can make a better chilli oil. The real question is what we mean by “better.”

You can use fancy ingredients, design a beautiful label, write marketing copy that calls your product the “better” choice, and charge more for it.

None of that is difficult.

What’s truly hard is what Tao Huabi did. She built something so connected to who she was that you couldn’t separate the product from the person. She couldn’t read her own contracts and tasted every batch herself because that was the only way she knew to ensure quality. She earned the name “Godmother” by feeding students who couldn’t pay, year after year.

It’s not hard to make a better product. It’s hard to truly be a better product.

I probably think about this more than I should. I’ve worked in marketing for most of my life, helping people tell better stories about their products. I know how the game works, and I know how easy it is to mix up style with substance—to assume that better packaging means better everything.

But then I am reminded of Tao Huabi, who built a billion-dollar company without being able to read or write. She didn’t have a content strategy or focus on optimisation. She just showed up every day and let her product speak for itself.

That’s something worth knowing and remembering.

Australians lost $31.5 billion on gambling in a single year. That is more than the federal government spent on aged care. It is approaching what we spend on the entire National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). And it works out to roughly $1,527 for every adult in the country, including the four in ten who do not gamble at all.

We are, by a comfortable margin, the heaviest gambling losers per capita on earth. No other country comes close.

But this is not an article about morality. People can spend their money however they want. This is an article about mathematics and probability. Because the math behind gambling tells a story the gambling industry does not want you to know, and it is this: the system is built to take your money. Not just sometimes. Not just by bad luck. It is set up this way on purpose, and it always works this way.

What the “house edge” means

Every casino game has a built-in advantage for the casino called the house edge. It is not a secret. It is simply the percentage of every dollar bet that the casino expects to keep over time.

In European roulette, the house edge is 2.7%. In American roulette, the house edge is 5.26%. In pokies, it ranges from about 5% to 15%, depending on the machine. Even blackjack, the best game for players if you play with perfect strategies, still has a house edge of about 0.5%.

These numbers sound small. They are not.

Here is what a 5% house edge actually means. If a casino’s roulette tables collectively take $1 million in bets on a Friday night, the casino expects to give out about $950,000 as winnings and keep $50,000 as profit. Every single Friday. Without fail. The players as a group will always lose. Individual players may have good nights and/or bad nights, but the house does not need luck. It just needs you to keep playing.

The roulette illusion

Roulette is the clearest example of how the house edge works, because the math is obvious.

A European roulette wheel has 37 pockets: numbers 1 through 36, plus a single green zero. If you bet on red, you cover 18 of those 37 pockets. Your chance of winning is 18 out of 37, which is 48.6%. Not 50% (Red or Black). The green zero is the house’s edge. It looks like a tiny difference. It is not.

If the game were truly fair, a bet on red would have a 50% chance of winning, and the payout would reflect that. But the zero means the casino wins slightly more often than it loses, on every spin, forever. You are not playing an even game. You are playing a rigged game that feels even.

American roulette adds a second (double) zero, pushing the house edge from 2.7% to 5.26%. The payout stays the same. The casino simply takes a bigger slice. Most players cannot tell the difference.

Why do you lose more than you think

Here is the part that most gamblers never grasp. The house edge does not apply to the money you walk in with. It applies to the total amount you wager. And those are very different numbers.

Say you sit down at a roulette table with $200 and bet $10 each spin. At about 30 spins an hour, you are betting $300 every hour, even though you only brought $200. How? Because you keep using your winnings to bet again. You win some, lose some, and keep playing. Over three hours, you might bet $900 in total. With a 5.26% house edge, the casino expects to keep about $47 of that. But you only brought $200. You have lost almost a quarter of your money, not just 5%.

This is how a small house edge turns into a steady way for the casino to take your money. The longer you play, the more you bet. The more you bet, the more the house edge eats away at your money. The casino does not need to win in one big moment. It just needs you to keep playing.

The one game you can beat (and why it doesn’t matter)

Blackjack is the single casino game where a skilled player can genuinely shift the odds in their favour. Card counting, the practice of tracking which cards have been dealt to estimate what remains in the deck, can flip the house edge from -0.5% to roughly +1% for the player. It is not illegal. It is not cheating. It is simply having an exceptional memory and paying close attention.

Teams of card counters, most famously a group of MIT students in the 1990s, refined this into a system and reportedly made millions. Spotters at separate tables would track the count and signal a big player to join only when the odds were favourable. It worked. For a while.

But here is what the blackjack story actually teaches us. Even with a genuine, proven, mathematically real edge, the advantage was so small that it required thousands of hands, perfect discipline, a large pooled bankroll, and a team of people executing flawlessly under pressure just to grind out a modest return. Most of them could have earned more per hour in a regular job.

And the moment the casinos identified the pattern, they changed the rules. More decks. Faster shuffles. Facial recognition. Shared databases between venues. The industry spent millions engineering the edge away, because a beatable game is an existential threat to a business built on the certainty of the house edge.

Now consider someone who says he can count cards at the local casino and does quite well. It might be true. But even professional counters with years of experience cannot distinguish their skill from a lucky streak over a small number of sessions. The edge is so slim that it only becomes visible across thousands of hands. A weekend at the casino is not thousands of hands. It is probably anecdotes for a weekend BBQ.

This is also the deeper trap. Not just in gambling, but in life. We are wired to attribute good outcomes to our own skill and bad outcomes to bad luck. Someone who picked a winning stock is a genius. Another who lost money was unlucky. The poker player on a hot streak is reading the table. The one on a cold streak just got bad hands.

The truth is, over small samples, you cannot tell the difference between skill and luck. And most of the samples we use to judge our own performance are nowhere near large enough to draw any conclusion at all.

The lottery: You have no chance.

If casino games are unfair, lotteries are worse.

In Australia, the odds of winning Division 1 in Saturday Lotto are 1 in 8,145,060. That is a 0.0000123% chance per game. To put it in perspective, if you bought one ticket every week from the day you were born, you would need to live roughly 156,000 years to have a statistical expectation of winning just once.

Buy two tickets? Your odds are now 2 in 8,145,060. You have technically doubled your probability, and it is still essentially zero.

Buy ten tickets every week for fifty years? That is 26,000 tickets across 2,600 weekly draws. Your total chance of winning at least once over those fifty years is about 0.3%. You would have spent over $75,000 for a 99.7% chance of winning nothing. And none of those draws remembers the last one. Each week, your chances start over. Ten tickets gave you ten shots at a 1-in-8-million target, and then the slate is wiped clean. Next week, the same. For 2,600 weeks straight.

If you prefer Powerball, the odds are 1 in 134,490,400. You are more likely to be struck by lightning twice in the same year and survive. What does that mean? It means that if you won Powerball today, the statistics say you would have to start buying your weekly ticket 2.6 million years ago. Every week.

Unlike a casino game where you can at least choose how to play, a lottery offers no decisions, no skill, no strategy, no edge. You have exactly the same chance of winning whether you have been playing for thirty years or thirty seconds. The lottery is the purest expression of a system where your preparation is completely irrelevant to the outcome.

The pokies: Australia’s disaster

They are everywhere.

Australia has less than 0.5% of the world’s population but nearly 20% of its poker machines. Let that sink in for a moment.

Pokies account for more than half of all gambling losses in Australia. In the 2022-23 financial year, Australians fed almost $150 billion into electronic gaming machines (including winnings) and lost $12 billion (in total). These machines are engineered to create a sense of near-misses and small wins that disguise the steady mathematical drain on your balance.

The house edge on pokies typically ranges from 8% to 15%. But the real damage is the speed. A poker machine can run a game every three to four seconds. That is over a thousand games per hour. Even a modest bet per game, multiplied by that frequency, produces enormous total wagering and therefore enormous losses.

This is no longer just bad luck.

The gambler’s fallacy

Perhaps the most dangerous idea in gambling is the belief that past results influence future outcomes. That a roulette wheel that has landed on red six times in a row is somehow due for black soon. That a pokie machine that has not paid out in hours is closer to hitting the jackpot. Soon.

Wrong.

Each spin, each draw, each game is independent. The roulette wheel has no memory. The poker machine does not know what it did five minutes ago. The odds reset to exactly the same unfavourable number every single time.

And here is where the law actually makes things worse.

In Australia, every poker machine is required by law to return a minimum percentage of all money wagered back to players. In South Australia, that figure is 87.5%. In Queensland, it is 85% for pubs and clubs. In Victoria, 87%. These all sound reassuring.

They are not.

Because the return is calculated over the lifetime of the machine, not while you are there on a Tuesday at 8 p.m. The lifetime of a poker machine is millions of spins, sometimes billions. Over that vast stretch, the maths always average out.

You are not playing for the lifetime of the machine. You are playing for a few hours on weekends. And in that time, the machine can take every cent you have without violating its legal obligation. A hundred players in a row can walk away with nothing, so long as one player eventually hits a payout that pulls the long-term average back into line.

This is why the gambler’s fallacy is so persistent and so profitable for the house. People hear “87.5% return”, and they think the machine owes them something. They think that after a long, cold streak, the payout must be coming. It is not. The percentage is honoured only across a timeframe that no individual player will ever experience.

The government did not legislate these percentages to protect you. It legislated them to guarantee the house its cut. The law says the machine must return at least 87.5 cents of every dollar wagered. That means the law has enshrined your loss at a minimum of 12.5 cents on every dollar.

It also means that if you could somehow sit at a single (87.5% Return to Player) machine and play it for its entire lifetime across millions or even billions of spins, you will still lose 12.5% of everything you wagered.

That’s programmed into the machine, and protected by law.

Then why do people still gamble?

Because gambling feels like a possibility. “IF I win this…”

A near-miss on the pokies feels like you almost won, not the fact that you have lost. A winning streak at the roulette table feels like you are on a roll, not the fact that you are just seeing normal ups and downs that will even out eventually. The lottery ticket in your pocket feels like hope of a new life, not the fact that it is a piece of paper with a 99.9999877% chance of being worthless.

The gambling industry understands this. The sounds, the lights, the free drinks (and free food), the loyalty rewards, the near-miss animations on the pokies, all of it is designed to amplify the feeling of “that was so close...” while obscuring the reality of “mathematical probability”.

And gambling advertising in Australia is relentless.

On free-to-air television alone, gambling ads run hundreds of times a day. Online, they are everywhere. The message is always the same: this could be you. What the ad never says is: it almost certainly will not be you because the math, the house edge, guarantees it.

The real cost

The $1,527 lost per Australian adult each year is an average. Among regular gamblers, the real figure is far higher. The Productivity Commission estimated that Australians who frequently gamble lose, on average, $21,000 per year. For context, that is more than most Australians spend annually on electricity, gas, and fuel combined.

But the real cost of gambling is not just about money. Problem gambling is linked to broken relationships, mental health problems, and, in the worst cases, loss of life. These are not just unlucky side effects of a leisure activity. They are the expected results of a system built to take money from people who believe they can win, even though the facts say otherwise.

The uncomfortable truth

The previous article in this series introduced a concept called luck as a strategy. The idea is simple: you cannot control when luck arrives, but you can build the conditions that allow you to recognise it and act on it when it does. You can acquire skills, build health (and wealth), develop relationships, exercise patience, and manage risk. Each of these things genuinely and measurably increases the probability that good things will happen to you.

Gambling is the opposite of luck as a strategy. It is a system where nothing you do, no skill you learn, no self-control you use, no patience you show, changes the outcome in the slightest. The house edge is set. The lottery odds are set. The poker machine’s random number generator is set. And they are all stacked against you.

The house always wins. It is designed that way right from the start.

There’s an older man I know who buys a lottery ticket every single day. I used to see him most mornings when I stopped by the local butcher to pick up ingredients for my takeaway business. Just recently, I spotted him again, waiting outside the same shop where he still buys his ticket.

I’ve never asked him about it, but he once told me that he spends $10 (sometimes $20) a day for years. I imagine he gets a thrill each week when he checks if he’s won the big prize. Maybe he has, but I really doubt it.

I wanted to write about luck because I think it’s a topic worth exploring. After six decades of experiencing both good and bad luck, I think I have some helpful insights to share.

Luck is a position, not an event.

Like my old friend, many people think luck is random. It seems to fall from the sky like rain, soaking whoever happens to be outside at the right or wrong moment. Some believe certain people are just born luckier than others.

This way of thinking can be comforting because it removes personal responsibility. If success is only about (good) luck, then failure is just bad luck, and neither really depends on how we live our lives.

But if you watch how things really happen, like in careers, relationships, wealth, and in the lives of people who always seem lucky, you might see a different story.

Think about people you know who always seem lucky. They find the right opportunities, meet the right people, and are often in the right place at the right time. You might notice they have habits that aren’t just about chance.

They notice what’s going on. They get ready. They put themselves where things are happening. They’re in the right place. Usually at the right time.

They are lucky.

But I suspect luck isn’t all random. There’s a pattern to the lucky, and we can learn how it works.

The anatomy of a lucky break

Think about someone who gets the career opportunity of a lifetime. From the outside, it looks like pure luck. They met the right person at the right time and were available when the job opened up. Everything seemed to fall into place.

But if you look closer, maybe that person spent years building skills that made them right for the job. They join groups where opportunities are and nurture relationships without seeking rewards. When the chance came, they were ready for it.

This pattern shows up everywhere. The person who found the right partner wasn’t just waiting. They did the quiet work of becoming someone “attractive”. Maybe they were healthy, emotionally mature, and financially stable. The meeting might have been a coincidence, but being ready was no accident.

Conditions, not predictions

A common mistake is trying to control where luck will show up. Some people focus on just one outcome, like a certain job or deal, and feel unlucky if it doesn’t happen. Others chase every new opportunity, never sticking with anything long enough to get good at it.

Both approaches lead to the same result. It’s not about lacking talent or effort, but about not putting yourself in the right position for luck. Not being well-placed.

The real strategy is to focus, and not to get stuck on one outcome, like my friend who buys lottery tickets year after year.

Focus means working hard to get ready and staying open to opportunities that might come from unexpected places.

Think of it as probability. You can’t know which opportunity will change your life, but someone with the right skills, good health, strong relationships, financial discipline, and a sharp mind will see more opportunities than others. More importantly, they’re ready to act when those opportunities arrive.

Luck comes to everyone, eventually. But it sticks around for those who are ready to receive it.

The conditions that matter

If luck favours the prepared, the next question is: how do you get prepared? It comes down to a set of habits that, together, make it much more likely for you to get lucky.

Self-control is a starting point. It’s the steady ability to manage your emotions, such as anger, arrogance, laziness, etc. Self-control means staying calm and clear-headed even when emotions are strong, because letting emotions take over often leads to poor choices.

Foresight also sets good positioning apart from mindlessly reacting. It’s the ability to read your surroundings, know what’s rising and what’s fading, and put yourself in the right place. Foresight isn’t predicting; it’s about paying close attention so you can spot where things are heading before others do.

The ability to delay gratification is an important extension of foresight. The degree or skill you work for helps open doors. Early-morning workouts, instead of sleeping in, condition your body and mind. Saving money diligently each month lets you take advantage of opportunities when they come. You delay immediate gratification for bigger, better rewards in the future.

A growth mindset keeps you from being stagnant. The willingness to be bad at something before you are good at it, to treat failure as information or knowledge, and to keep learning through multiple failures. Luck tends to find those who are still moving, still building, still open to what they do not yet know.

Finally, the willingness (and courage) to take risks is the last key. You can be prepared, patient, disciplined, and smart, but if you never take a chance, never “pull the trigger”, then having all the luck in the world won’t matter. Taking risks is the final act that turns preparation into a lucky outcome.

Luck goes both ways

Bad luck is real, too. Illness can come out of nowhere. An economic crash can end a career. A relationship can fail even if you did everything right. No amount of preparation can make you immune to bad luck.

But strategies of being prepared change how bad luck affects you.

Someone with savings handles losing a job better than someone living paycheck to paycheck. People with strong relationships get through tough times differently from those who are “difficult”. Good health helps you recover faster than if you’ve ignored your health for years.

Getting ready for luck isn’t just about catching good breaks. It’s also about surviving the bad times. If you build enough resilience and strength in your life, bad luck won’t knock you out. You’ll still be in the game, and that gives good luck a chance to find you.

The will it takes

None of this is easy.

Getting ready for luck means working even when there’s no immediate reward in sight. It means sticking with your plan when others are taking shortcuts. It means having a plan. It means investing in yourself during the slow times, when nothing seems to work and quitting feels tempting.

It takes determination to keep preparing when there’s no sign it will pay off. You have to keep building skills before anyone asks for them, and stay healthy and focused even when it would be easier to let go and give up.

The final truth about luck

If you think about it, great success almost always involves good luck. The right door opens at the right time. The right person showing up. The right conditions converged in a way no one could have planned it.

Lucky people are prepared. They’ve spent months, years, or even decades building the habits, the conditions, that let them spot the right door, get there in time, and walk through it.

You cannot control when luck arrives. But you can control what it finds when it does.

Recently, I watched The Last Dance, a Hong Kong film set in the world of funeral work, centred on Po Di Yu (破·地獄). The literal translation of Po Di Yu is “Breaking (the gates of) Hell.” I see it as a kind of “jail-break.”

I didn’t quite expect the movie to have such a strong impact on me.

I used to be dismissive of Chinese funeral rituals. I saw them as noisy, superstitious, and unnecessarily dramatic. This prejudice changed as I grew older, and watching this film now, I feel something stirred inside me. There is wisdom embedded in Po Di Yu, not just a commercial performance for the dead. It is a structured way for the living to mourn and deal with the shock of losing a loved one.

The movie follows Dominic, a wedding planner whose life was turned upside down during the pandemic and who ended up taking over a funeral parlour. He clashes with a traditional Daoist priest, Master Man, because Dominic approaches funerals like an event to be managed, while Man treats them as a sacred rite with strict rules. Over time, it becomes less about the business and more about what rituals do for the living: giving grief a form, and families a way to act when they feel helpless.

I’m not writing this as a movie review. I’m writing because it moved me, and poses the question: when someone dies, what can we, the living, do for them?

That’s where Po Di Yu comes in.

If you want to watch it, there’s an official trailer on YouTube. As for where to watch it: in Australia, it’s currently available on SBS On Demand and can also be rented or bought on Apple TV or YouTube.

Death comes to us all.

Death is traumatic as it is disruptive.

In the immediate hours, there is usually a lot that needs to be done. Practical stuff, like calls to make, relatives and friends to inform, arrangements that need to happen while you are still trying to digest what just happened.

The truth doesn’t sink in immediately. They’re gone. Forever. The person you have loved for so long is no longer here.

It feels like something from you has just been ripped out. Violently. Just a sudden…end. Like hitting a brick wall as you turn a corner.

Grief is often described as sadness, but in the first moments, it feels closer to helplessness. You want to do something, but you cannot.

This is where a Cantonese Daoist funeral rite offers something strangely practical: Po Di Yu (破地獄), or “Breaking the Gates of Hell.”

It’s a rite performed for the dead, a spiritual intervention meant to free the departed soul from the underworld, Di Yu (地獄), and help guide them toward reincarnation.

But it also gives the living a sense of agency at a time when they feel most helpless.

What happens when a person dies

In the Chinese worldview, death marks a transition, not an end, unfolding in stages.

Traditional beliefs hold that the spirit has three aspects after death. The earthy (po, 魄) soul remains with the body in the grave. The ethereal (hun, 魂) soul settles in the ancestral tablet for family veneration. A third aspect, sometimes referred to as the spirit (shen, 神), journeys through the Ten Courts of Hell (Di Yu) before reincarnation.

That underworld journey typically unfolds over forty-nine days, marked by weekly milestones.

The seventh day, Tou Qi (头七), carries special weight. The spirit is believed to return home. Families keep the lights on for them. They’re also told to stay in their rooms and not come out to meet the spirit because attachment can make it difficult for the departed to move on.

These beliefs offer a clear sequence to navigate the haze of “after”, transforming death from a sudden void and shock into a predictable process, one that even the living can participate in at every step. This is the classic function of mythology in Joseph Campbell’s traditions.

Di Yu, a bureaucracy of the afterlife

Di Yu isn’t framed as the eternal damnation in the Western sense of Hell.

It’s closer to a bureaucratic purgatory, a system where souls atone for the wrong they’ve done before they are allowed to re-enter the cycle of rebirth.

A common way Di Yu is described is the Ten Courts of Hell, a kind of underworld bureaucracy, each court presided over by a Yama King, a judge who listens, weighs, and decides.

The first court is a kind of pre-trial. A reckoning in which the life lived is exposed. The good and the evil, what was done out of kindness, what was done out of bad intentions, what was left undone. The soul arrives disoriented and vulnerable, and the journey begins with the unveiling of truth.

The middle courts are where consequence takes form. These courts are corrective and punitive, to extract a punishment for the wrongs one has committed while alive. In Buddhist tradition, one will be punished BY one’s sins, not FOR one’s sins, so that ultimately, you are also the judge of the life you live. Everything has to be accounted for, and debt has to be paid. And the spirit moves from chamber to chamber, through judgments and suffering that are meant to cleanse.

The Naihe Bridge marks the threshold, a slender crossing from the known world into the unknown. It captures the image of a loved one departing to a place where we cannot follow. It is the final letting go.

Then comes Meng Po’s soup of forgetfulness. A reset. For rebirth, the soul must release its hold on its past life; no grudges, no yearnings, no bonds can follow into the next life. The soup grants complete severance. A clean slate.

So, death and the journey through the underworld aren’t all horrible.

It’s a process of letting go and moving on. Not to pass away but to pass from one life into the next.

What the Daoist priest is doing in Po Di Yu

Po Di Yu is often treated as the main spiritual rite in a Cantonese Daoist funeral. On the surface, it’s about helping the deceased, guiding the soul out of Di Yu and toward reincarnation. At the same time, it gives the family some structure to hold onto when the shock of death makes everything feel unreal.

It is also a very physical ritual.

The space is set up to represent the underworld. A fire basin is lit at the centre, commonly described as the “Furnace of Hell.” Around it, usually 9 ceramic tiles are arranged, representing the gates of Hell.

When the Nam Mo master (喃呒师傅) enters, he is doing battle. He is there to jailbreak.

He carries a ritual sword and uses it throughout the rite, but the sword is not “his” power in the personal sense. In Daoist ritual logic, he acts under a borrowed authority (from the gods), granted through ordination, lineage transmission, and the celestial bureaucracy he is licensed to invoke.

A properly ordained priest receives registers (lu, 箓) that function like credentials. These registers link him to a named lineage and, in many traditions, list the divine officials, generals, and spirit soldiers he can lawfully petition or command during ritual. Without that ordination framework, the actions are unauthorised.

That is the background for why he “dares” to do what he does in Po Di Yu. When he swings his sword, he is not claiming personal dominance over the underworld. He is issuing orders as an agent of higher powers, backed by the gods and ancestors of his tradition, and by the ritual office he has inherited and maintained through training.

Scholarly descriptions of Daoist ritual practice are explicit about what the sword signifies in this context: it is a key implement used to convene spirits, mobilise divine agents, subdue harmful forces, and, in mortuary settings, to “break open the prisons of hell” and help liberate the dead.

So when the sword cuts the air, it is a visible sign to the family that the priest is acting with divine authority and, within the ritual’s protocol, opening the way for the deceased to move forward.

The first major action is the breaking.

The Nam Mo master moves in a circuit around the fire, chanting and working with his sword. Then he strikes the tiles one by one, breaking them. This is the “破” in Po Di Yu, a physical act that represents smashing through the gates of hell, so the deceased is no longer trapped.

After the tiles are broken, the rite shifts into the “guiding” phase.

The master takes up the deceased’s memorial tablet (荐位 or 牌位), holding it close as he leads the spirit through the threshold. At the pivotal moment, he whispers to the tablet, loud enough for the family to hear, “跟住我” (Follow me!), giving the deceased a clear instruction as he spits alcohol at the flames, then makes a dramatic leap across the flames to the other side.

In the common explanation, that jump is the “crossing over,” the embodied claim that the deceased is being led out of hellfire and away from bondage. The symbolism is clear and psychologically assuring: the passage has been opened, and the dead are being brought through it.

Why does it matter to the living

Po Di Yu assumes that the dead do not always move easily from one state to the next. A soul can get stuck, held back by the weight of karma, fear, confusion, or unfinished business. In that context, passages can be obstructed.

Without intervention, the spirit may remain trapped, unable to cross the Naihe Bridge and reach Meng Po’s soup of forgetfulness, and enter reincarnation. The 49-day underworld journey can last forever.

So the Daoist priest becomes an envoy. He isn’t a grieving family member. He acts as an agent, trained, authorised, and “registered” within the ritualistic system, someone who can enter the underworld to do a mission. He does for the dead what the family cannot do, no matter how much they love the deceased. He “breaks the gates”, clears obstacles, and pushes the journey forward.

But if you look closely, the emotional centre of Po Di Yu is family and loved ones witnessing the rescue.

Death also creates a kind of hell for the living. It takes away agency. It turns you into a helpless witness. You can only watch while someone you love becomes unreachable. There is nothing you can do to change the fact. That helplessness is often what people are really reacting to in the early days of grief. That helplessness is hell on its own.

Breaking the gates of hell also serves to free the living, to help them move on.

It gives structure to the tragedy that affects them. It provides a mythical sequence of actions to guide the psyche out of emotional turmoil. It creates the sense that love can still be expressed as a duty, and that duty can still be carried out even after the person is gone.

The bond that continues after death

A lot of modern advice circles around the idea of “closure,” as if the goal is to shut a door and move on. But many people don’t experience grief that way. A more accurate phrase from grief psychology is “continuing bonds”: the idea that the relationship doesn’t disappear but changes form. You don’t stop loving the dead. You learn how to live with them differently.

Chinese ancestral practices make that idea visible through rituals.

This is why many families maintain a small shrine or altar at home, why there is incense on certain days, food offerings on festivals, visits to the cemetery, and the careful keeping of a tablet. On one level, it’s devotion. On another level, it’s practical. It gives the relationship a place to live after death, so the dead are not sealed away as “the past,” and the living are not forced into “closure”, or pretending the bond has ended.

Po Di Yu fits into this same idea.

The rite frames the deceased not simply as “gone,” but as someone still on a journey that can be supported. That framing does real work. It turns grief from loss into responsibility and care. It gives love somewhere to go, in a form that feels legitimate.

In a Confucian frame, filial piety doesn’t stop at death. If anything, death makes duty more explicit, because you can no longer rely on everyday acts of care. Maintaining the shrine, remembering dates, performing rites, and offering incense are ways of staying accountable to the people who came before you, and by extension, to the standards they represent. You answer them.

This is why small actions matter so much in these settings. Lighting incense is a way of keeping a presence. Offering paper money is to provide, it is the same impulse as packing food for a parent or paying a bill when they no longer can. Standing close enough to witness the Nam Mo master “break the gates” is not passive observation; it’s a kind of participation. It’s saying: I am still here, and I am still doing what I can for you.

For many, when you love someone, your duty to them does not end at death. It continues in the form of these rituals.

Writer’s note

You don’t have to share the metaphysics of Di Yu or reincarnation to understand what this ritual is doing. You only have to recognise the humanity underneath it: when someone dies, love continues. Po Di Yu is one traditional answer to that continuation.

This is a follow-up article.

In my last article, The Fire Horse Returns, I explored why the Bing Wu year is important in Chinese history.

Since publishing that article, just before the end of the Chinese New Year, the US and Israel took military action against Iran during ongoing negotiations. It seemed nearly timed, as if the Fire Horse was waiting for this moment. I nearly said, “I told you so.”

In this article, I want to look at a bigger picture. The Fire Horse and its partner year, the Fire Goat (Ding Wei), matter not only in Chinese history but also in world history. These years show up across societies and continents over the past thousand years. While difficult events can happen at any time, I believe the pattern during these two-year periods warrants attention.

The message here is: be prepared. History teaches us that periods of extreme pressure tend to arrive in clusters, and the people who come through them best are those who saw them coming and took steps early.

The “Red Horse and Red Goat Calamity”

As I explained in The Fire Horse Returns, the “Red Horse and Red Goat Calamity” (赤马红羊之劫) means the two-year period of Bing Wu followed by Ding Wei. Both years are linked to fire energy. Together, they create a time when things get very intense, and weak systems are likely to break.

A Thousand Years of Upheaval

1066–1067: The Norman Rupture

On 14 October 1066, two armies met at Senlac Hill, near Hastings, in what became one of the most consequential battles in Western history.

King Harold II of England had already fought one battle that month. On 25 September, he defeated a Norwegian invasion force under Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire. It was a decisive victory, but it left his army exhausted and depleted. When news arrived that William of Normandy had landed on the southern coast, Harold force-marched his troops over 400 kilometres in roughly two weeks to meet him.

The battle itself lasted most of the day. Harold’s forces held the high ground with a tight shield wall, and for hours, the Norman cavalry couldn’t break through. But late in the afternoon, Harold was killed. The exact manner of his death is still debated by historians, though the famous image of an arrow striking his eye comes from the Bayeux Tapestry, produced years after the event. What is not debated is the result: with Harold dead, the English defence collapsed.

William’s coronation on Christmas Day 1066 was only the beginning. Over the following years, he dismantled the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and replaced it with a Norman ruling class. Land was redistributed. English was pushed out of courts and governance in favour of Norman French. The legal system was restructured. Castles were built across the country as centres of control.

The English language itself was changed, taking in thousands of French words that are still used today. The system of lords and land that William established became the model for England’s governance for hundreds of years.

1066 was a Fire Horse year. And it changed the history of England forever.

1126–1127: The Jingkang Catastrophe

I covered this in The Fire Horse Returns, but it bears a brief mention here for context. The Jurchen-led Jin dynasty breached the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng, captured two emperors, and forced a dynastic fracture that reshaped China’s demographic and economic centre for generations. It remains one of the most traumatic events in Chinese collective memory and is considered the prototype for the “Red Horse/Red Goat” prophecy.

1246–1247: The Mongol Consolidation

By the mid-1240s, the Mongol Empire was the largest land empire the world had ever seen. But it had a succession problem. Ögedei Khan, the son of Genghis, had died in 1241, and for nearly five years the empire drifted under the regency of his widow, Töregene Khatun. She was politically astute, but the lack of a confirmed Great Khan created uncertainty across the empire’s vast territories.

In August 1246, a grand assembly was convened near the Mongol capital of Karakorum. Güyük, Ögedei’s eldest son, was formally elected as the third Great Khan. The event drew envoys from across Eurasia. Among them was Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, a Franciscan friar sent by Pope Innocent IV, who became one of the first Europeans to travel deep into the Mongol heartland and leave a written account of what he saw.

Güyük’s coronation stabilised the succession at a critical moment. Under his brief reign (he died in 1248), the empire reasserted its administrative reach and continued its expansion westward. The Mongol military machine, which had already devastated Eastern Europe in 1241 and 1242, remained the dominant force on the continent.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the old order was cracking. The Babenberg dynasty in Austria, which had ruled for over 250 years, came to an end when Duke Frederick II was killed in battle against the Hungarians in 1246. His death left Austria without an heir and triggered a decades-long struggle over who would control one of Central Europe’s most strategic territories. That vacuum was eventually filled by the Habsburgs, a family whose rise would change European politics for the next 600 years.

1366–1367: The Fall of the Yuan

By the 1360s, the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty, which had ruled China since Kublai Khan’s conquest, was falling apart. Decades of flooding along the Yellow River, repeated outbreaks of plague, ruinous inflation from over-printing paper currency, and widespread famine had pushed the population to breaking point. Rebellions had been erupting across southern China for years.

Zhu Yuanzhang, a former peasant and novice monk who had risen through the ranks of the rebel Red Turban movement, had by this point consolidated control over much of the Yangtze River basin. In 1363, he fought and won the Battle of Lake Poyang against his rival, Chen Youliang, in what is considered one of the largest naval battles in history, with hundreds of thousands of combatants on both sides.

By 1367, Zhu launched his northern campaign against the Yuan capital of Dadu (modern Beijing). His forces swept through the north with remarkable speed. Dadu fell in 1368, and the last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür, fled to the Mongolian steppe. Zhu proclaimed the founding of the Ming Dynasty and took the reign name Hongwu.

Zhu, a man who had been orphaned and destitute and had begged for food at a Buddhist monastery as a teenager, became the founder of one of the greatest Chinese dynasties, lasting nearly 300 years. The Ming Dynasty brought the restoration of Chinese cultural identity after a century of Mongol rule, major infrastructure projects, including the reconstruction of the Grand Canal, and eventually the maritime expeditions of Zheng He.

1426–1427: National Liberation in Southeast Asia

In 1407, the Ming dynasty invaded and occupied Đại Việt (Vietnam), dissolved its government, and absorbed it as a Chinese province. For nearly two decades, the Ming rule imposed Chinese administrative systems, Confucian education, and heavy taxation on the Vietnamese population. Resistance movements were suppressed with force.

In 1418, Lê Lợi, a wealthy landowner from Thanh Hóa province, launched the Lam Sơn uprising against Ming occupation. The early years were brutal. His forces were small, poorly equipped, and repeatedly defeated. Lê Lợi spent years hiding in the mountains, at times reduced to eating wild plants to survive. But he persevered, and his movement gradually attracted broader support.

By the mid-1420s, the tide had turned. Lê Lợi’s forces won a string of decisive victories, and in 1426 and 1427, the uprising reached its climax. The Battle of Tốt Động–Chúc Động in 1426 defeated a major Ming relief army, and in late 1427, after the decisive Battle of Chi Lăng–Xương Giang, the remaining Ming garrison surrendered.

What followed was unusual for the era. Lê Lợi chose not to humiliate the defeated Ming forces. Instead, he provided the retreating Chinese army with supplies, horses, and ships for their journey home. It was designed to preserve future diplomatic relations. In 1428, he formally proclaimed the Lê dynasty, restoring Vietnamese independence after 20 years of occupation.

The Lam Sơn uprising is remembered in Vietnam as a founding national story. Lê Lợi remains one of the country’s most revered historical figures, and the legend of the restored sword at Hoàn Kiếm Lake in Hanoi (where he is said to have returned a magical sword to a golden turtle after the victory) is part of Vietnamese cultural identity to this day.

1486–1487: Stability and Discovery

The 1486 Fire Horse year saw Europe emerging from one of its bloodiest periods. In England, the Wars of the Roses, a 30-year dynastic conflict between the Houses of Lancaster and York, had finally been settled by Henry VII’s victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth of York in January 1486 united the two warring houses and established the Tudor dynasty.

This was more than a royal wedding. It was a political settlement that ended a generation of civil war, usurpation, and instability. Henry VII proved to be a shrewd administrator who rebuilt the Crown’s finances, reduced the power of the nobility through legal and financial mechanisms rather than force, and laid the foundations for one of England’s most consequential dynasties. His son, Henry VIII, and granddaughter, Elizabeth I, would change England’s religious, cultural, and geopolitical identity.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, the Portuguese were pushing the boundaries of the known world. In 1487, King João II appointed Bartolomeu Dias to lead an expedition south along the African coast to find a sea route to the Indian Ocean. Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in early 1488, becoming the first European to do so. He didn’t reach India (his crew forced him to turn back), but the route was now proven. A decade later, Vasco da Gama followed Dias’s path and reached Calicut in India, opening the sea trade routes that would transform global commerce and shift the centre of economic power toward maritime European nations.

1546–1547: New Tsars and Dead Kings

On 16 January 1547, Ivan IV was crowned as the first Tsar of Russia in a ceremony at the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow. He was 16 years old. The title “Tsar” (derived from Caesar) was a deliberate claim to imperial legitimacy, positioning Moscow as the successor to both the Byzantine Empire and Rome. Ivan’s early reign was marked by genuine reform: he convened the first Zemsky Sobor (a national assembly), revised the legal code, reorganised the military, and significantly expanded Russia’s territory, including the conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan. His later years earned him the name “Ivan the Terrible” for the oprichnina, a campaign of domestic terror that devastated the Russian boyar class. But the centralised state he built would endure.

In the same year, two of Europe’s most powerful monarchs died within weeks of each other. Henry VIII of England died on 28 January 1547, ending a reign that had cut England from the Catholic Church, dissolved the monasteries, and altered the relationship between the Crown and religion. His legacy was a country in religious turmoil, with a nine-year-old heir (Edward VI) and decades of instability still to come.

Francis I of France died on 31 March 1547, closing a reign defined by Renaissance patronage, the Italian Wars, and a long rivalry with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Francis had invited Leonardo da Vinci to France and built the foundations of the French Renaissance, but he also left behind mounting debts as well as unresolved religious tensions that would erupt into the French Wars of Religion within a generation.

1606–1607: The New World Order

The year 1606 opened with one of the most dramatic trials in English history. On 27 January, Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators were tried for the Gunpowder Plot, the failed attempt to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. The plot, hatched by a group of English Catholics frustrated by continued persecution under James I, aimed to assassinate the King and much of the Protestant establishment in a single explosion.

Fawkes was executed on 31 January 1606. What happened after changed English politics. Laws against Catholics became even stricter, and the event became part of English national identity (the yearly Bonfire Night is still celebrated). More generally, the Gunpowder Plot strengthened Protestant control in England and deepened the religious divisions that would later lead to the English Civil War.

In the same year, the Virginia Company received its royal charter from James I, authorising the establishment of colonies in North America. The first permanent English settlement, Jamestown, was founded in Virginia in May 1607. The colony nearly failed multiple times (the “Starving Time” of 1609-1610 killed the majority of settlers), but it survived and became the template for English colonisation of North America.

Also in 1606, the Dutch ship Duyfken, under the command of Willem Janszoon, made the first known European landing in Australia, landing on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula. It would be another 164 years before James Cook mapped the east coast, but the first European visit to the southern continent had happened.

Three events in two years: the end of a Catholic conspiracy in England, the beginning of English America, and the first European sighting of the Australian continent. Each is a significant event in the fabric of modern history.

1666–1667: The Great Fire and Plague

London in the mid-1660s was under siege from nature itself.

The Great Plague of 1665 killed about 100,000 people in London, around a quarter of the city’s population. Lists of deaths were published every week, showing the extent of the problem. The rich escaped to the countryside. The poor, who could not leave, died in their homes, which were boarded up and marked with red crosses.

Then, on 2 September 1666, a fire started in a bakery on Pudding Lane. Over the next four days, it burned down 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and most of the buildings in the City of London, including the old St Paul’s Cathedral. The fire left about 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 residents without homes.

The destruction, although catastrophic, was also a kind of “cleansing”. The plague, which had been concentrated in the densely packed medieval streets and timber-framed buildings, effectively ended after the fire. The rebuilding effort, overseen by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke among others, replaced the medieval city with wider streets, brick and stone construction, and improved sanitation. Wren’s new St Paul’s Cathedral, completed in 1710, became one of London’s defining landmarks and a symbol of the city’s resilience.

The “Double Catastrophe” of plague and fire was London’s destruction and rebirth compressed into two years. The Fire Horse burned the old city down. What rose from the ashes was the foundation of modern London.

1786–1787: Revolutions and Nature’s Fury

In the newly independent United States, the excitement of defeating Britain was turning into a crisis over how to run the country. The Articles of Confederation, the first attempt at a national government, created a central government so weak it could not collect taxes, control trade, or maintain a regular army.

In 1786, the cracks became visible. In western Massachusetts, Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, led a rebellion of indebted farmers who were losing their properties to aggressive tax collection and debt enforcement. Shays’ Rebellion was relatively small in military terms, but its political impact was enormous. It demonstrated that the new nation’s government was incapable of maintaining order or responding to grievances. George Washington, in retirement at Mount Vernon, wrote in a famous letter to James Madison dated November 5, 1786, that the republic was on the verge of anarchy.

The rebellion catalysed the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, where delegates, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin, drafted the United States Constitution. The document that emerged, with its system of checks and balances and federal authority, replaced the failing Articles and became the foundation of American governance. Without Shays’ Rebellion exposing the weakness of the existing system, the political will for such a radical overhaul may not have existed.

1846–1847: Expansion and Famine

In May 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico after a series of border fights in Texas. The Mexican-American War was, in many ways, a fight to take land. Over the next two years, US forces took Mexico City, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) gave about half of Mexico’s land to the United States, including what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California in January 1848, just nine days before the treaty was signed, sparked the Gold Rush and accelerated changes in the American West.

At the same time, the Great Famine of Ireland, caused by the potato blight that destroyed the staple crop of the Irish poor, killed roughly one million people between 1845 and 1852 and forced another million to emigrate. The British government’s response was inadequate and callous. The famine reshaped Irish society permanently: Ireland’s population, which had been over 8 million before the famine, would not return to that level (and as of today, the Republic of Ireland’s population remains below it). The Irish diaspora created by the famine, particularly in the United States, Canada, and Australia, became one of the most significant migration events of the 19th century.

1906–1907: Redefining Disaster

At 5:12 AM on 18 April 1906, a massive earthquake struck San Francisco. The tremor itself lasted less than a minute, but the fires that followed burned for three days, destroying over 80% of the city. Roughly 3,000 people were killed, and more than half the city’s population of 400,000 was left homeless. The rebuilding of San Francisco became a defining story of American resilience, with the city largely reconstructed within a decade.

The following year, the Panic of 1907, triggered by a failed attempt to corner the copper market, caused a cascading bank run that threatened to collapse the American financial system. J.P. Morgan personally intervened, organising a consortium of bankers to shore up failing institutions. The crisis exposed the fragility of a financial system without a central bank or a lender of last resort. The direct result was the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the institution that still governs American monetary policy today.

1966–1967: Ideology and Middle East Transformation

In Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War got much worse. By the end of 1966, the US had almost 400,000 troops in Vietnam, and the bombing of North Vietnam had grown much stronger. The war was becoming the main political and social issue for a whole generation, leading to protests that would change American politics and culture.

In June 1967, the Six-Day War completely changed the borders of the Middle East. Israel attacked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan first, and in just six days took over the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The land changes from those six days are still at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict almost 60 years later. The war made Israel the strongest military power in the region and set up the political map that shapes the Middle East today.

2026: The Pattern Repeats

Now here we are again. Bing Wu, 2026. And the pattern has already started.

The conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran feels like just the kind of sudden change this cycle has brought before. Iran’s gradual wear-down of its enemies over time aligns with the long-term struggles that often occur in these periods. The risk of the conflict getting bigger, possibly involving Europe, Russia, and China, is real. The similarities to 1967 are worrying.

I want to be clear: I’m not saying Chinese astrology controls world events. What I am saying is that history, over a thousand years and across many cultures, shows a pattern of significant stress, sudden change, and transformation during the two-year periods of the Fire Horse and Fire Goat. Whether the reason is astrology or just cycles, the lesson is the same.

Be prepared.

Navigating the Inferno

So what does “be prepared” actually look like?

Move with intention, not panic.

The Fire Horse moves quickly. Things are happening faster and faster, and it is natural to want to react to everything. Try not to do that. Panic leads to bad choices. The events happening around the world are shaking things up, yes, but they are also signs. Notice what they are telling you about where the world is going, and act based on that.

Let go of what no longer works.

Every single historical example above has one thing in common: the old structure failed, and something new replaced it. The Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. The Northern Song court. The Yuan dynasty. The Articles of Confederation. The medieval city of London.

If something in your life, like your job, your money plan, or your beliefs about how things work, is only continuing because it has always been that way, this is the year it will be challenged. It is better to change by choice than to have change forced on you.

Build what can survive the furnace.

As I wrote in my previous article: 真金不怕红炉火. Real gold does not fear the furnace. Focus on building things that can withstand extreme pressure. Skills that remain valuable regardless of economic conditions. Relationships grounded in trust rather than convenience. Financial positions that can absorb shocks.

This applies to nations as much as it applies to individuals. The civilisations that emerged strongest from these periods were those that had invested in real capacity, competent governance, genuine social cohesion, and systems designed to endure extreme shocks.

Take care of each other.

The Horse archetype is independent by nature, but history has shown that those who survive these periods lean into community. London was rebuilt because its citizens rebuilt together. The American Constitution was written by a group of people who disagreed on almost everything but recognised that the alternative was collapse.

If there’s one takeaway from a thousand years of Fire Horse and Fire Goat history, it’s this: extreme pressure reveals one’s true nature. In governance, in institutions, and in people. The heat will come. What matters is what we do with it.

Fire as Purification and Hope

I’ll end with the same conclusion as my previous article.

Fire doesn’t only destroy. It reveals. It shows what is solid and what is fragile, what is real and what is fake. The Fire Horse year is a stress test for the world and for each of us individually.

History shows that when systems fracture, people rise. From the ashes of London came a modern city. From the failure of the Articles of Confederation came the US Constitution. From the fall of the Yuan came the Ming Dynasty. From the devastation of 1906 came the Federal Reserve and a new San Francisco.

We can’t always control the fire. But we can choose whether to be consumed by it or to build something from what it leaves behind. Stay safe. Remain grounded. And trust that careful, sincere actions will lead toward a more truthful and resilient future.

The cycle turns for a thousand years. But on the other side of every Fire Horse, there has always been renewal.

Subscribe now

I hope you enjoyed this article. While “Heart Matters” is free, I do appreciate your support as a paid subscriber. If you don’t do subscriptions, you can also buy me a coffee. Either way, it means a lot.

Thank you for being here. Please remember to like, restack, and comment.

I was born in 1966, a Bing Wu (丙午) year, the Year of the Fire Horse.

As a Catholic, then, regarding myself as a “Fire Horse” was considered superstitious. It was just something “heathens” believed in. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that this ancient Chinese wisdom points to a deeply profound collective experience that should not be ignored.

This year, 2026, is one of those years. Not just because the world already feels so unstable. For people born in 1966, it’s also a return point in the traditional 60-year cycle. The sign returns, offering a perspective of warning and opportunity.

The 60-year cycle

The Chinese see time as cyclical. The sexagenary cycle (干支) combines ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches into sixty pairs, so that a full cycle is 60 years.

(If you’re wondering why not a 120-Year cycle, there’s an explanation at the end of this article.)

In the traditional system, Bing (丙) is Yang/Fire, often compared to the sun: direct, visible, forceful. Wu (午) is the Horse branch (also fire by nature) tied to noon and midsummer. Together, you get what the Chinese call “double fire,” intensity on intensity.

A Warning for those in power

One of the most cited “volatility” frames is the “Red Horse and Red Goat calamity” aka 赤马红羊之厄. It refers to the two-year span of Bing Wu (丙午) followed by Ding Wei (丁未). In our context, this is 2026 and 2027.

Bing and Ding are both fire stems, linked to “red.” Horse and Goat are adjacent branches. This does not mean that calamity is inevitable, but that when the heat is high, weak governance and fragile social structures get tested to the extreme.

Chinese history is filled with such examples and lessons from the red “Horse and Goat” periods.

1126–1127, Northern Song: Jingkang Incident 靖康之变

The Jingkang Incident was not a single “bad day.” It was a rapid sequence that exposed just how unprepared the Northern Song Dynasty was for a steppe war from the invaders of the North.

The trigger was the rise of the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty, founded in 1115, which turned on the Northern Song after the Song had allied with the Jurchen against the Liao. From 1125, the Jin launched a full-scale war against the Song, and by December 1126, they besieged the Song capital, Kaifeng (then called Bianjing).

Facing an inevitable invasion, Emperor Huizong abdicated, and his son, Emperor Qinzong, inherited a collapsing empire. The city’s defences included early experiments with gunpowder weapons (not decisive in the modern sense, but notable as an early recorded battlefield use), yet no effective relief force arrived. Kaifeng fell in mid-January 1127.

What followed was remembered as humiliation as much as defeat: looting and destruction, mass atrocities, and the seizure of the imperial house. Emperor Qinzong and his father, Huizong, were taken prisoners, along with large numbers of court officials and members of the imperial clan. Qinzong remained captive until his death.

The political consequence was immediate and permanent. With the capital lost and both emperors captured, the Northern Song effectively ended, and Qinzong’s half-brother, Zhao Gou, escaped south and reestablished the dynasty in 1127 as the first emperor of the Southern Song (Gaozong). The dynasty survived, but with vastly reduced territory, while the north remained under Jin control.

The human consequence was just as profound: 靖康 also helped trigger one of China’s great north-to-south population shifts, often compared to the earlier 4th-century flight south after the Yongjia-era upheavals, as officials, elites, and families moved into the Yangtze basin and the southeast, accelerating the long-term drift of China’s demographic and economic centre toward the south.

That is why the Jingkang Incident endures in Chinese memory: it’s not just a military loss. It’s a moment when a state’s strategic misjudgments, fiscal and military weaknesses, and inability to mobilise effective defence were exposed under extreme pressure, and the cost was a dynastic fracture that reshaped China for generations.

1846–1847, late Qing: pre-Taiping unrest

The 1840s were a turning point for the Qing Dynasty. In 1840, the First Opium War broke out, opening a new era of foreign pressure and internal crisis for China. By the mid-1840s, the dynasty was already under tremendous structural stress: rural hardship, local security problems, and a growing gap between central authority and what counties could actually control. Guangxi in particular was a combustible region facing sharp resource pressure and social conflict, where poor farmers, miners, charcoal workers, and migrant communities were vulnerable to banditry and clan violence.

This is the backdrop for why 1846–1847 matters.

The Taiping story begins with Hong Xiuquan, a failed civil service exam candidate who developed a syncretic Christian-inspired doctrine and a mission to purge “evil” from society. His schoolmate Feng Yunshan was the organiser. In 1844, Hong and Feng preached in Guangxi; Hong returned home, but Feng stayed behind to build what became the God Worshippers’ Society (拜上帝会) among impoverished communities in Guangxi.

In 1847, Hong rejoined Feng in Guangxi and was accepted as the society’s leader. This was the moment the movement became organised and formidable, with a shared doctrine and a growing base.

From there, things escalated quickly. When Qing troops attacked the God Worshippers in July 1850, open rebellion broke out. Within months, Hong proclaimed a new dynasty, the Taiping Tianguo (太平天国, Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace), and assumed the title Tianwang (Heavenly King).

The war that followed (1850 to 1864) was one of the deadliest conflicts in human history. Britannica estimates about 20 million deaths, and other modern historians estimate up to 30 million deaths, reflecting uncertainty and the huge proportion of deaths from famine and disease tied to the war.

So 1846–1847 earns its place in history because it captures the moment when the fuse is lit: hardship is rising, local governance is weakening, and a movement with both a spiritual claim and a social program acquires leadership, structure, and a mass base, setting the stage for an explosion a few years later.

1906–1907, late Qing: reform scramble and social shocks (leading to the fall of the Qing)

In these years of the Fire Horse, the turmoil in China was institutional in nature. After the shocks of the late 19th century, the Qing court tried to modernise rapidly enough to survive, but the effort satisfied no one. Conservatives saw reform as surrender. Reformers saw it as too slow. The result was a growing legitimacy crisis, playing out in public view: a dynasty still wearing imperial robes but increasingly forced to speak the language of constitutionalism.

This matters because 1906–1907 also marks the end of the empire’s final break. By 1911, a chain of political and financial missteps, including the railway nationalisation crisis and resulting unrest, helped trigger the tipping point. On 10 October 1911, the Wuchang Uprising broke out, an event widely treated as the formal start of the Xinhai Revolution.

Provinces declared separation from Qing rule, power fractured, and negotiations reshaped the state. On 12 February, 1912, the child emperor Puyi abdicated, ending China’s last imperial dynasty and opening the Republican era.

1966–1967, modern China: the Cultural Revolution as rupture, and the long runway to reform

The Cultural Revolution did not begin as a vague mood shift. It began as a political decision, with a date you can put on the timeline.

Many historians treat 16 May, 1966 as the moment the movement was declared, when a key Party document warned of “bourgeois” infiltrators inside the system. Mao then formally launched the Cultural Revolution at the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in August 1966, and the country moved rapidly into mass mobilisation and institutional breakdown.

Mao pursued his goals through the Red Guards, mobilising urban youth to attack “bourgeois” elements and the “Four Olds.” Schools were shut, public struggle sessions spread, and violence escalated with little oversight. Key leaders were purged early, most notably Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who were removed from power during the initial phase.

By January 1967, the movement shifted from symbolic denunciation toward the overthrow of provincial Party committees and attempts to build replacement power structures. Through 1967, factional conflict worsened, including armed clashes between rival Red Guard groups, and Mao called on the PLA to intervene, which did not stabilise the situation but deepened the chaos.

The Cultural Revolution ran on until 1976 (and was officially declared over later), leaving the economy disrupted and the political system traumatised.

After Mao’s death in September 1976 and the fall of the Gang of Four in October 1976, the internal conditions changed. In the years that followed, Deng Xiaoping emerged as the central figure who restored domestic stability and pushed China toward economic growth. Scholars frame Deng’s legacy specifically as restoring stability and growth “after the disastrous excesses of the Cultural Revolution.”

In other words, the Cultural Revolution is not “the beginning of reform,” but it is part of the reason reform became politically and economically necessary. It burned through the old system, and the post 1976 leadership had to rebuild a workable model for the country.

Bing Wu can also mark golden years

Chinese history also remembers the Fire Horse years as periods of extraordinary competence and cultural bloom. A golden age when those in power got their act together.

646, Tang Taizong: Zhenguan Good Governance

This Bing Wu year sits near the mature end of Tang Taizong’s reign, inside the period later praised as the Zhenguan era of good government. What makes it more than a nostalgic label is that we can point to specific state capacities: tax relief for disaster-stricken regions, relief granaries to buffer famine, and a countryside described as enjoying low prices and general prosperity.

But “flourishing” in the late 640s was not only about domestic administration. It was also visible in how the Tang Dynasty projected confidence outward. In 646, Tang forces defeated the Xueyantuo, turning them into Tang vassals, part of a wider expansion of Tang influence across the north and into the Tarim Basin. This mattered because it stabilised corridors that promoted trade, diplomacy, and the sharing of knowledge.

This was expressed in the Capital Chang’an (Perpetual Peace) as a key eastern terminus of the Silk Roads and, under the Tang Dynasty, a major trade hub with a “surprisingly diverse” population, including many from Sogdiana, the Central Asian merchant culture whose networks connected Eurasian routes into China.

UNESCO notes that one of the few surviving Tang structures that reflects these Silk Road exchanges is the Big (Giant) Wild Goose Pagoda, built to house the scriptures brought back by the monk-scholar Xuanzang. The pagoda’s construction, dated to 652, is a sign of the prosperity and stability of the Zhenguan era, which created the stable, wealthy capital where large scholarly projects like Xuanzang’s translation work could be protected and scaled.

1726, Yong Zheng: the reform furnace

This Bing Wu year sits inside Yong Zheng’s reign (1722–1735), which historians consistently describe as a period of hard, technocratic consolidation. Yongzheng is remembered less for glamour than for a governing style that tightened control, attacked corruption, and rebuilt state revenue. He checked corruption, enforced laws, and reorganised finances, thereby increasing state revenue.

Rebuilding fiscal legitimacy by changing how taxes were assessed
One of Yong Zheng’s hallmark reforms was expanding the policy commonly known as tanding rumu (摊丁入亩), folding the head (poll) tax into the land tax. Yongzheng extended and rolled this out nationally beginning in the mid-1720s, shifting taxation away from counting people and toward taxing land, easing burdens on landless peasants while improving state control over revenue and reducing tax evasion.

Reducing “informal extraction” by making local finance more rules-based
Another major Yongzheng era move was to rationalise the messy world of local surcharges and hidden fees that encouraged corruption and instability. A recent quantitative study of Ming-Qing fiscal revenue describes Yong Zheng’s attempt to legitimise extra-legal conversion surcharges (huohao) into official revenue, including the well-known yanglian silver (养廉银), often treated by scholars as a hallmark of rational fiscal reform because it aimed to fund local administration more transparently and reduce the incentive for predatory fee-taking.

Therefore, in 1726, the “fire” horse was not chaotic. It was the concentrated heat that purified governance, pushed reforms that hardened the state: tightening discipline, rationalising fiscal flows, and rebuilding trust in the administration’s ability to function competently.

Bing Wu can become an accelerator that amplifies both weakness as well as strength.

“Great changes unseen in a hundred years”

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s phrase “great changes unseen in a hundred years” (百年未有之大变局) resonates well in the Year of the Fire Horse in 2026 because it captures something that’s almost impossible to miss: the world’s old structure is failing, and everything is shifting. One key reason is that, over the past several decades, China has shown it can plan ahead, marshal resources, and deliver results at scale.

As of 2025, China has about 50,000 kilometres of high-speed rail, the largest such network on Earth. In energy, China’s clean-power capacity recently surpassed its fossil-fuel capacity, and the International Energy Agency now calls China the main global driver of renewables.

On the human side, the World Bank estimates that nearly 800 million people in China were lifted out of extreme poverty in 2020, accounting for the largest share of global poverty reduction. This was no small feat for a country of 1.4 billion people. As of 2021, China is focused on consolidating its gains and preventing a return to poverty.

In technology, China’s space program has hit major milestones, like bringing back the first samples from the far side of the Moon with Chang’e-6 in 2024, a mission that demonstrates serious depth in engineering and project discipline.

None of this means China is perfect or without problems. But it’s clear that when China sets its mind to something, it can make things happen, and fast. That’s part of why this Bing Wu feels like an accelerator: the familiar routes are gone, new ones are opening up. Change is here.

What the Fire Horse means for us

The Fire Horse year is best understood as a stress test.

Fire doesn’t only destroy. It reveals. It shows what is solid and what is fragile, what is real and what is fake. There’s a Chinese saying: 真金不怕红炉火, real gold does not fear the furnace. Extreme heat reveals our true nature.

That’s a useful way to welcome the Year of the Fire Horse. It accelerates. Weak structures will collapse. Empty slogans will fail. But competence will compound. Good systems will earn trust. People with real skill and steady values gain an edge because they will pass the test.

The question isn’t whether the year is “good” or “bad.” It’s whether we will survive the heat. Focus on building what can pass the furnace test: skills that endure, relationships that hold, institutions that are legitimate, and projects that will leave a useful legacy behind.

Bing Wu will turn up the temperature. And when the temperature rises, the strong become recognisable, in the world, and in ourselves.

Note: Why 60 and not 120?

The reason the sexagenary cycle consists of 60 unique combinations instead of 120 is due to the mathematical concept of the Least Common Multiple (LCM) and a structural restriction known as the “parity rule”.

Share Heart Matters

Why only a 60-year cycle?

The ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches are paired sequentially. Because 10 and 12 share a common factor of 2, the two cycles do not produce every possible mathematical permutation. Instead, the sequence restarts as soon as it reaches the Least Common Multiple of the two numbers:

LCM(10, 12) = 60

After 60 pairings, the sequence returns to its starting point (Jia-Zi), leaving half of the theoretical 120 combinations unused.

The Parity Rule (Yin and Yang)

Metaphysically, the cycle is governed by the law that Yang and Yin elements cannot pair with one another. Every stem and branch is categorised as either Yang or Yin based on its position in the sequence:

• Yang (Odd-numbered): Stems 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and Branches 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11.

• Yin (Even-numbered): Stems 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and Branches 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12.

A Yang Stem will only ever pair with a Yang Branch, and a Yin Stem will only ever pair with a Yin Branch. This restricts the total number of valid pairings to:

(5 Yang Stems X 6 Yang Branches) + (5 Yin Stems X 6 Yin Branches) = 60

Consequently, combinations such as a Yang Stem with a Yin Branch (for example, Jia-Chou) never occur in the traditional calendar. This completed 60-year cycle is often referred to as a Jiazi, figuratively meaning a full human lifespan.

Happy New Year!

Time seems to move so quickly.

January often brings a sense of hope and anticipation. We think about new habits, new routines, and higher goals. Our resolutions are full of plans to improve what is already stretched thin. We want to do better, do more, and keep improving.

But underneath that optimism, there is a familiar tiredness. It shows up more often as we get older. It’s not a sharp fatigue, but a steady, dull exhaustion that comes from doing everything right and still feeling worn out.

We tell ourselves we’re tired because life is hard and moves quickly. The world is always changing, and work and life are demanding. All of this is true, but it leaves out something deeper and more uncomfortable.

Most people aren’t tired because they’re failing. They’re tired because they’re too useful.

If you’re reliable, people depend on you. If you’re good at your job, you get more tasks. If you stay calm, others will bring you their problems. Being capable rarely leads to rest. Instead, it just means more keeps piling up.

This is the trap. Being good at what you do doesn’t protect you. It just creates more demand. The better you perform, the more it costs you, and it never seems to stop.

So maybe this year doesn’t need another promise to be more productive. Maybe it needs something older and less common—a kind of survival wisdom. The skill of being a little less useful. Not lazy, just not always perfectly helpful.

The Equation We Rarely Question

From a young age, we are taught a simple formula: worth equals usefulness.

Our parents tell us to be helpful to society. School rewards those who do well. Work promotes people who get results. We’re encouraged to do more than what’s required. Over time, being useful becomes part of who we are. If I’m valuable, it’s because I’m needed.

Being very useful makes you stand out. That brings expectations, and those expectations lead to people asking more from you. What starts as recognition soon becomes an assumption: you’ll handle it, you’ll step up, you always do.

At work, the most capable and cooperative people are often the first to burn out. It’s not because they’re weak, but because systems quietly shift more tasks their way. Responsibilities pile up without discussion. There’s no relief, because nothing seems wrong on the surface.

This is where modern management proves an old idea. The Peter Principle is often seen as a joke about people being promoted until they can’t do the job. But it also shows that being good at your work leads to more demands, not more support. The system keeps asking for more until someone reaches their limit.

When you show how useful you are, the world doesn’t protect you—it just asks for more. The reward is more roles, more responsibilities, and more demands added to what you already do.

The system never asks if you should keep going. It only asks if you can.

The Twisted Tree

Long before performance reviews and email, a Daoist philosopher told a story about a tree.

Zhuangzi described a tree with twisted, uneven branches and wood full of knots. Carpenters walk by without stopping. Nearby, straight trees stand tall and useful. They are cut down young and turned into beams, planks, and tools.

The twisted tree survives.

The twisted tree survives not because it’s impressive, but because it’s seen as useless. No one wants to cut it down or use it, so it stays. It keeps growing, gives shade, and outlives the useful trees.

Zhuangzi wasn’t telling people to be lazy. He was showing the risk of being too useful. When everything is judged by usefulness, those who aren’t as useful are the ones who last.

In this way, being useless acts as a disguise. The world doesn’t destroy what it can’t easily take from. It just ignores it.

According to Arendt, unlike those who participate in a culture focused solely on relentless productivity, the twisted tree is not trying to compete but instead opts out of a system where the most industrious often experience burnout first.

The ‘straight trees’ are always available, always responsive, and always working to improve themselves. They organize their schedules, build their skills, and handle emotional work. They try to make every interaction as smooth as possible.

This makes them highly useful and, as a result, more easily taken for granted. In modern society, human activity is increasingly centred on labour, emphasising usefulness above all else. When usefulness becomes a person’s defining feature, their time and energy may be claimed by others before they even realise it. Your energy is used up without your say. Over time, you stop feeling like a person and start feeling like just a function.

That’s why exhaustion often shows up without a clear reason. Nothing dramatic happened—you just kept saying yes, kept working, and kept taking on more.

Then one day, you might have a heart attack, and everything stops.

“Yes, he was a very productive employee. Too bad he had to go like this.”

The real danger isn’t being useful—it’s becoming nothing but useful.

Hannah Arendt warned that a life reduced to endless labour becomes cyclical and disposable. Valuable only as long as it continues to perform. Once it pauses, it is replaced.

And you are always replaceable.

Being inconvenient

This way of thinking isn’t about being irresponsible. It doesn’t encourage giving up or abandoning your commitments. It’s not about becoming useless.

It’s about understanding the need to take care of yourself.

Instead of always being useful, try being strategically inconvenient. Be a little slower, not always available, and sometimes a bit inefficient or selfish if it helps protect your well-being.

Don’t answer every message right away. Wait. Let someone else take the lead sometimes. Don’t volunteer for every task you could do. Allow small problems to exist instead of fixing everything.

This is how you stop yourself from being used up all the time.

The safest place isn’t at the top of the usefulness list. It’s on the edge, where expectations are lower. You’re respected, but not pushed to your limits. Your value isn’t easy for systems to measure or exploit.

Like the twisted tree, you might not stand out, but you stay whole.

A Resolution for the Twisted

Straight trees don’t last long. The ones seen as useless are the ones that last.

As 2026 starts, maybe the goal isn’t to do more, learn faster, or work harder. Maybe it’s to avoid burning out.

The old philosophers weren’t telling people to be useless. They were teaching them not to let themselves be used up.

Maybe this year, that’s enough.

Ask someone why China became the world’s manufacturing centre, and many still give the same answer: cheap labour. It was partly true in the 1980s, but not anymore. Industrial wages in many Chinese provinces are now far higher than in Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, or Indonesia. If labour costs were the only consideration, global companies would have left China long ago.

Yet they haven’t.

Apple hasn’t. Tesla hasn’t. Dyson hasn’t.

Nearly every major PC, smartphone, EV battery, appliance, solar panel, and white good is still manufactured in China. Even luxury brands quietly rely on Chinese factories for precision components that require extremely tight tolerances.

I often hear people say, “We don’t buy cheap Chinese crap.” It’s a casual remark, but also a racist and ignorant one. The device used to make that comment was likely assembled in Shenzhen. The modem and router at home, the laptop on their desk, and the batteries in their EVs all come from China’s manufacturing ecosystem. China doesn’t just make cheap goods. It makes the world’s most advanced ones.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, summed up the misunderstanding: China’s advantage is not cheap labour, but capability. China can mobilise tens of thousands of skilled technicians, tooling engineers, and component suppliers in a way no other country can. When a production bottleneck appears, someone nearby can solve it within hours.

China’s manufacturing strength is about a system built to be fast, adaptable, and precise.

The Supply Chain Cluster Effect — China’s Unmatched Advantage

China’s most significant manufacturing power is proximity. Entire industries operate as dense clusters, with suppliers, engineers, and specialists working in the same districts. This clustering effect lets manufacturers move at a speed that feels impossible elsewhere.

A famous example is Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei electronics district, often called the world’s most complete hardware ecosystem. The first several floors of many buildings are filled with small stalls selling every electronic component imaginable: sensors, microcontrollers, displays, batteries, connectors, motors, PCBs, casings, etc. Thousands of parts that companies elsewhere must order from multiple vendors across different countries can be sourced in minutes.

Above these retail floors are offices and small labs where engineers prototype products. If they need a new connector or a revised board layout, they walk downstairs, buy the part, and bring it back. Prototypes are created in days, sometimes hours. And the entire process costs a fraction of what companies would have to pay if they were operating in Europe or America.

This environment exists across industries: Dongguan for electronics and plastics, Guangzhou for garments, Suzhou for precision machining, Quanzhou for footwear, and Yiwu for small commodities. Each city concentrates suppliers in one place, eliminating the delays that slow other countries down.

Distance kills speed. China eliminates distance.

A Technically Skilled, Rapidly Adaptive Workforce

Another misconception is that Chinese manufacturing relies on unskilled (therefore cheap) labour. In reality, it depends on a technically trained, deeply experienced workforce capable of solving problems on the factory floor without waiting for managers or external specialists.

Across the industrial belt, vocational schools and technical colleges operate in partnership with factories. Students graduate with practical skills: machining, electronics assembly, mould fabrication, CNC operation, robotics maintenance, and quality testing. Their learning continues inside the factory, where real production cycles force rapid adaptation.

China has tens of thousands of tooling engineers — the people who build moulds, calibrate machines, adjust tolerances, and keep production running. These capabilities take decades to develop and cannot be relocated easily.

A Western factory may pause production for days waiting for an external specialist. A factory in Dongguan might fix the issue the same afternoon.

Infrastructure: The Hard Skeleton of Manufacturing

Manufacturing depends on the systems around it: roads, ports, rail lines, cheap, stable energy, and efficient logistics. China spent decades building these.

High-speed rail allows engineers, specialists, workers and managers to travel between cities in a matter of hours. Deep-water ports like Shanghai, Ningbo, and Shenzhen handle some of the world’s highest cargo volumes with minimal congestion. Roads and highways across industrial provinces are built for logistics, not just commuters. The national power grid is stable, extensive, and reliable.

In countries where electricity is either expensive or inconsistent, or where ports are slow, productivity collapses. In China, the entire manufacturing rhythm depends on consistency and predictability. Samples, components, and finished products move through the system at incredible speed.

It is one of the biggest reasons companies stay.

A Problem-Solving Culture

China’s manufacturing speed is not only structural; it is also cultural. Inside factories, problems are solved collectively and immediately.

Whenever there’s a problem, engineers, technicians, and line workers gather around it the moment it arises. They improvise a fix or adjust the machine. A toolmaker nearby manufactures a replacement part.

This isn’t about working extreme hours. It’s about a deeply ingrained habit of rapid problem-solving and continuous adaptation. Factories compete by saying “yes” to difficult orders and figuring out how to fulfil them. Workers are fast, flexible, and comfortable with last-minute changes.

This mindset is cultural and evolves through years of practical necessity.

Stability and Scale

Manufacturers need predictability. China’s industrial zones provide a stable environment with consistent regulations, coordinated support, and clear industrial planning.

When one supplier struggles, another is often nearby. When demand spikes, factories expand production without rebuilding an entire supply chain.

This stability allows companies to plan long-term. They know the environment will not change abruptly. Expansion is supported, and the ecosystem can handle sudden surges in demand.

Wage increases don’t threaten this system because the real value is the reliability of the environment surrounding it, not just labour costs.

The Competitive Pressure That Shapes Entire Industries

Perhaps China’s most powerful accelerator is competition. Inside industrial clusters, no factory is insulated from competition. A single street in Shenzhen might have a dozen PCB makers. A block in Dongguan might house numerous injection moulding suppliers. In Guangzhou’s garment districts, workshops compete for orders by improving speed, quality, and flexibility.

This competitive intensity is visible at the national scale. When China decided to develop its EV industry, it didn’t protect its domestic companies. Instead, it invited Tesla to build the first wholly foreign-owned EV factory in China. It was an unprecedented move. China brought in the world’s most formidable competitor and forced its own EV makers to compete.

The result? BYD, NIO, Li Auto, XPeng, and dozens of suppliers accelerated dramatically. Instead of being crushed, the industry surged ahead.

China improves by competing with the best, not hiding from them.

Why Companies Stay Even as Wages Rise

Lower wages don’t automatically attract global manufacturing. Companies don’t chase the cheapest worker. They chase the most reliable system.

Relocating production introduces risk:

• component shortages

• slower supplier networks

• weaker infrastructure

• fewer technically trained workers

• longer prototyping cycles

• inconsistent quality

• higher logistics friction

These costs far outweigh the savings from lower hourly wages.

This is why Apple builds its most complex products in China. It’s why Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory is one of the most productive auto plants in the world. It’s why appliance, telecom, robotics, and battery firms stay anchored in China for critical manufacturing.

Moving that system is far more expensive than paying higher wages.

The Myth of Replication

Every few years, a new country is declared “the next China.” Vietnam, India, and Mexico each experience growth, but none can fully recreate the ecosystem.

China has built an industrial civilisation over the last 40 years. Integrated supplier networks, technical expertise, logistics efficiency, and manufacturing culture. These cannot be replicated overnight. Even when companies diversify, they still depend on China for components, engineering, and scale.

Understand the System, Not the Slogans

China’s manufacturing can’t be explained by the simplistic narrative of cheap labour. It comes from an ecosystem where supply chains are woven together, skilled labour is abundant and accessible, infrastructure is reliable, and competition forces constant improvement. Problems get solved quickly. Production scales instantly. Entire industries adapt as a single organism.

Understanding the system is the first step towards leveraging China’s manufacturing capability as a competitive advantage. China’s manufacturing engine won’t disappear anytime soon.

If nations want to compete, they must understand the system, not just consume the slogans.