This is a story about stoic self-mastery — and how an ancient Roman slave philosopher named Epictetus saved me from the most expensive email I never sent.
Prefer the tighter version? This essay first ran on Medium: I Almost Sent the £11,000 Email. There is also a short film of the idea if you would rather watch.
The six emotional states most likely to distort professional judgement are not random. They appear at the same hinge points, across industries, across roles, across decades.… Read the rest “The 6 Emotional States Most Likely to Distort Your Professional Judgement — And Specific Protocols for Each”
If you’ve arrived here from the Medium article — The Thirty-Minute Conversation That Cost Me Everything I’d Spent a Decade Building — you already have the story. This is the framework.
If you’ve arrived here directly: the short version is that a senior professional made an unilateral decision in a domain they knew extremely well, without seeking authorisation, because they had enough experience that seeking authorisation didn’t feel necessary.… Read the rest “The Three-Layer Career Framework: How Mid-Career Professionals Choose Their Next Move”
There is a category of professional mistake that almost never makes it into management literature, because the people who make it are too competent, too senior, and too credible for anyone to notice the pattern until it’s too late.
It is not the mistake of inexperience. It is not cutting corners, missing context, or acting from ignorance.… Read the rest “Why Your Smartest Employees Make the Riskiest Decisions”
