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Saturday, 25 April 2026

Encoded Advantage: Stablecoins and the US Dollar's new layer

Disclaimer: This reflects my own perspective. This is me thinking out loud. It does not represent the views of my employer or any other organisation.

Niall Ferguson, in his sweeping history of money The Ascent of Money, makes an important observation

"The evolution of money has been a process of gradual dematerialisation."

From gold coins to paper notes to digital ledger entries. Each step moved money further from a physical thing toward a shared belief. Nowhere is this more relevant today than in the world of fiat currencies, which are themselves moving steadily toward digital form. And stablecoins, and other digital assets, are at the next dimension in this shift. But like every step before them, they carry the assumptions of the world they were born into. My argument is simple: these digital assets, particularly stablecoins, will NOT flatten the existing hierarchy of currencies. They will first clone it, more or less.

Origins:

Lets focus on stablecoins mainly. It is a digital token that lives on a blockchain, but unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, its value is pegged to something stable. Usually a currency, like the US dollar. Focusing on the most dominant ones tells us everything we need to know about where the market consensus has landed. More than 90% of fiat-backed stablecoins are pegged to the US dollar, with Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC together accounting for 93% of the total stablecoin market. That concentration has only deepened with regulatory support — in July 2025, the US passed the GENIUS Act, establishing the first formal federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, which has effectively reinforced dollar-linked stablecoins as the standard. So one USDC, issued by Circle, or one USDT, issued by Tether, is supposed to always be worth one dollar. The issuer holds reserves — cash, treasury bills etc — to back that promise. And it is worth noting: Circle and Tether are private enterprises, not governments or central banks.

Why stablecoins exist at all

Stepping back a little, why did stablecoins come to exist at all? It was not because someone thought "let's make global payments better." That is something that has now been discovered as a benefit. The reason stablecoins emerged was because of a more immediate reason than that. Crypto markets were trading around the clock, 24 hours, 7 days a week, and whenever people wanted to take profits or reduce risk, they needed somewhere to park it and that was not volatile. But moving money in and out of bank accounts is slow. The banking system runs on business hours. The crypto market doesn't. So people needed a stable asset that could move on a crypto network, any time, without going through a bank. Stablecoins solved that.

Over time however, stablecoins stopped being just a workaround for crypto traders. They became genuinely useful for moving money across borders, faster and more cheaply than traditional bank transfers. Today, a SWIFT transfer between countries can take two to five days and carry fees that make small transfers impractical. A stablecoin transfer takes minutes and costs almost nothing. That is a meaningful improvement and banks, institutions and government are waking up to the potential.

This dynamic has precedent in history.

A financial instrument created to solve one problem and then becoming infrastructure for something much bigger, has of course happened before. In 17th century Amsterdam, merchants trading across long distances faced a version of the same challenge. Economic historian Jan de Vries, writing about the commercial revolution of early modern Europe, describes how merchants needed instruments that could move faster than coins could physically travel. They created bills of exchange: IOUs between trusted parties that circulated as a kind of proxy money. Not officially issued by any state. But accepted widely enough to do the job.

What is similar about the Amsterdam example is how these bills evolved. They started as a simple workaround for slow settlement between trading partners. But over time, as historian Herman Van der Wee noted in his research on Antwerp and Amsterdam's financial markets, the bills of exchange became the circulatory system of European trade, moving value across cities and countries in ways that the underlying coin-based system never could have managed at that speed or scale.

Stablecoins are following a similar arc. Started as workaround, but now taking on other roles.

Why trust always concentrates

The Amsterdam bills of exchange reached for the most trusted thing available when it came to collateral. The bills clustered around the most accepted currencies of their day. But why did trust concentrate the way it did? Tommaso Contarini, Governor of Verona in 1541, observed in his proposal to the Venetian senate that the Antwerp market succeeded precisely because of an abundance of trust and a scarcity of fraud — so much so that it obviated the need for public records altogether. Trust, in other words, was the table stakes, as it is in banking and finances today. Finance afterall is always playing at the intersection of trust and technology.

That trust eventually found its most durable form in Amsterdam. Herman Van der Wee, in The History of European Banking, describes how the private merchant system that preceded the Bank of Amsterdam already understood this:

"...the foundation of the deposit bank in Amsterdam had been preceded by private initiatives of merchants who deposited full-bodied coins... Lenders were protected from repayment in debased coin, for the bankers undertook to pay back the deposits in the same high-quality coins as they had received."

The merchants were building and operating for convenience, but on the back of a promise — that what you put in is what you get back, undiluted. When the Bank of Amsterdam formalised this, it institutionalised something that trust had already made possible. As Stephen Quinn and William Roberds write in their study of the Bank's rise in the American Economic Review:

"The Bank [of Amsterdam] provided a uniform and secure money (bank money) for the settlement of large-value transactions... By providing a stable unit of account and a secure means of payment, the Bank reduced the transaction costs and risks associated with the use of a variety of circulating coins."

Private merchants built trust informally. But backed by a stable value surrogate. Because it was reliable.

And that brings us back to the dollar — and why 90% of stablecoins are pegged to it

Stablecoins went straight to the dollar for the same reason. Because when we need something everyone will accept, we reach for what already works. The dollar was, and remains, that thing.

Even at the beginning, the dollar wasn't just a convenient choice.

The shift:

Now the digital asset optimists are genuinely excited, and not without reason. Stablecoins are growing exponentially. And so are other digital assets. CBDCs are being piloted across dozens of countries. Banks are beginning to tokenise deposits and other assets. The infrastructure is expanding rapidly, and there is real momentum behind the idea that digital money will eventually work the way the internet works — open, interoperable, borderless.

But it is worth noting that there are many structural issues which can slow things down, especially for local-currency stablecoins. Apart from the fact that crypto settlement is one of the key uses of stablecoins, and for the other cases to truly matter there are a few hurdles.

The interoperability argument

In fact, one of the livelier debates in the stablecoin world right now is about interoperability: whether different stablecoins, different blockchains, and different digital currency systems will eventually be able to talk to each other seamlessly. If that happens, the argument goes, then using a euro stablecoin or a Singapore dollar stablecoin would be just as easy as using a dollar one. The friction is reduced.

That is a reasonable. But I think it misses something important about why people choose one currency over another in the first place. Interoperability solves a plumbing problem, but not the trust problem.

The trust problem

Think about what happens when someone in a country with serious inflation gets access to a digital asset like a stablecoin for the first time. What do they want? They want to get out of their local currency. They want something that holds its value and is accepted widely. A stablecoin in their local currency gives them none of that. It's a digital version of exactly the thing they are trying to get away from. Making a weak currency digital doesn't make it attractive.

There's also a trust problem that goes beyond inflation. To trust a local currency stablecoin, you have to trust the currency itself, the company issuing it, whatever they are holding as reserves, the local regulator, the legal system around it. That's a lot of trust to stack up. A dollar stablecoin only asks you to trust the issuer and the dollar. And the dollar has been earning that trust for a long time.

Dollar stablecoins also already won the early race. The so called first mover advantage is staggering. They have depth with lots of buyers and sellers, lots of places to use them, and institutional adoption. For a non-USD stablecoin to actually scale, it must do more than just exist. It has to be genuinely better for a specific reason in a specific context.

The government problem

Governments make this more complicated too. The optimistic narrative assumes that local stablecoins will grow because regulation enables them. But why would a government that cares about controlling its own currency allow a private stablecoin to compete with it? The more likely outcome is a government-run digital currency as the many CBDC experiments are showing.

The EU is experimenting with a digital euro, but that's a government project. China's digital yuan exists precisely because the government wants control. These are not yet stories about market demand for local currency stablecoins. They are stories about governments trying to hold onto something.

The local currency case — and its limits

Now, there are genuine cases for local currency stablecoins, and private issuers will find value of this. For purely domestic activity, like doingg local payments, paying salaries, paying suppliers in the same market, holding savings in a familiar currency, a local currency stablecoin makes intuitive sense. And there will be businesses and contexts where this is genuinely useful.

But here is the thing. In most markets, local banking infrastructure for domestic transactions already works reasonably well. Moving money within a country, paying staff, settling with local vendors, these are not the broken parts of the system. Even in countries where digital banking systems are not yet there, and could encourage them to leapfrog to a stablecoin based system, the potential has a ceiling. In fact they can leapfrog to the dollar even in those cases.

The parts that are slow, expensive, and genuinely painful are cross-border transactions. That is where stablecoins have made their most compelling case: faster than SWIFT, cheaper than correspondent banking, available at any hour.

And cross-border is exactly where local currency stablecoins run into trouble. The moment it becomes about moving money across borders, it is back to the same questions of trust, reserves and acceptance. Who holds this currency at the other end? How easily can it be converted? A Singapore dollar stablecoin moving from Singapore to a supplier in Brazil reintroduces all the friction that a dollar stablecoin was designed to remove. The very problem stablecoins solve — cross-border speed and simplicity — tends to resolve in favour of the currency that everyone already accepts.

So where does this leave us

Three things that I see:

First, the expansion of digital money infrastructure does not automatically translate into demand for more currencies offered in digital forms, however attractive it is. It translates into faster, cheaper movement of whichever currencies people already trust.

Second, the trust and depth that dollar stablecoins have already built creates a gap that is genuinely hard to close — not impossible, but harder than the optimistic narrative suggests.

Third, the strongest case for local currency stablecoins is domestic, but domestic is also where the problem is least acute. The real prize, cross-border transactions. keeps pointing back to the dollar.

The edge:

Every few decades, a new layer of financial infrastructure gets built. And each time, the question that follows is the same: will this new layer change the balance of power, or will it simply make the existing hegemonies faster and more efficient?

Here there are some counter to expected sense trends at play. The internet did not make every language proliferate equally. It amplified those which were already large. English accounts for nearly 64% of all websites, despite being spoken natively by only 16% of the world's population. And now AI is making this more entrenched, not less. The large language models powering the next layer of the internet are trained predominantly on English data — and MIT researchers have found that even when these models process inputs in other languages, their internal representations default to English as a kind of central processing hub. The technology literally thinks in English. Cable television didn't create new cultural centres either. It extended the reach of existing ones — Hollywood didn't shrink as the world got more screens, it grew. There is a pattern here that the stablecoin conversation can learn from. When a new network expands, the things already flowing most powerfully through it tend to flow even more powerfully. Not because the network is designed that way, but because that is what networks do.

Stablecoins are a new network. And the thing flowing most powerfully through them, from the very beginning, has been the dollar.

"Stablecoins are more likely to reproduce the existing hierarchy of currencies than to flatten it."

So here we are — and here is where I think this goes. The following seem likely.

First, dollar stablecoin dominance will deepen, not dilute. The dollar goes more digital, spreads further, embeds deeper. Digital dollarisation, not digital cuurency diversity.

Second, local currency stablecoins will grow selectively and slowly and well be hoisted by regulation and regional necessity rather than genuine user preference. The euro, Singapore dollar, Hong Kong dollar, renminbi will each find their contexts. But there is a difference between existing and mattering at scale, and that difference will take much longer.

"What if stablecoins are actually how dollar dominance gets written into the new layer of global finance, faster and more embedded than before?"

A word of caution:

I am not saying local currency stablecoins won't exist or won't find their footing. They will. But the burden of proof has to reckon with the fundamental human motivations of what provides trust.

And on top of trust, a local currency stablecoin has to solve a problem that the dollar stablecoin doesn't already solve.

As one economist, David Lubin, put it at a Chatham House discussion on dollar dominance

“the dollar is the QWERTY keyboard of the international monetary system.”

A final thought:

And then there is the question nobody is quite asking yet. When things become digital, costs tend toward zero. That's true for music, for communication, for software. Is that true for money too? And if the cost of moving money approaches zero, does that change anything about which money people want? Or does it just make it easier to want what they already wanted?

I don't have a clean answer to that. But I think it matters. Because if moving money becomes essentially free, the question of which money you move becomes the only question left.

Origins & Edges is an essay series written as thinking-in-public. Structured but not settled.

References

Note: All images were imagined and created with help of Claude (for image prompts), ChatGPT and Gemini.

Tuesday, 7 April 2026

Informational Gravity: AI and the B2B buying journey

Disclaimer: This reflects my own perspective. This is me thinking out loud. It does not represent the views of my employer or any other organisation.

In their groundbreaking work The Trusted Advisor, the authors offer what I think is one of the most underrated principles for anyone in marketing and sales.

“The most effective selling technique is to not sell, but to commence the service process.”

Of course this is not a new idea. Chanakya, the great Indian war and governance strategist of lore, famously wrote in Arthashastra that

"The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity to defeat the enemy."

While he was not writing about the modern-day sales funnel, Chanakya’s wisdom offers an interesting parable for modern day and it is this: “By the time you're in the room, the buying decision has already been made.”

Origins: The idea of a trusted advisor helping clients succeed was central to the early days of modern banking. In Rainer Liedtke’s research paper titled “Agents for the Rothschilds: A Nineteenth-Century Information Network” he talks about how “The gathering, transfer and utilisation of information happened through people who were constantly crossing borders, sometimes physically but more often culturally.” In essence, the merchant banks of the 19th century, the Rothschilds, the Barings, and the Morgans were not only the bankers, but they operated more like private councils for their clients. They did not just arrange capital, they were the intelligence network that helped the clients transact, but more importantly offer their clients information and counsel. They had correspondents in every major city. Information often travelled through them. By controlling the asymmetry of information, they kept both the institution and client ahead.

The modern 20th century avatar of the merchant corporate bank brought in these agents and correspondents as full time employees. Or as we call them Relationship Managers today. The Relationship Manager (RM)-led model remains the dominant approach in corporate and investment banking until today, because of the asymmetry of information advantages provided by that model. As investment banking institutionalised through the 20th century, the RM became the designated carrier of institutional knowledge. About markets, about deals, about what competitors were doing. The coverage sales model was literally designed around the assumption that the client needed a human conduit to make sense of complexity – both of market and product.

The shift: The advent of the information age and the internet shifted this slightly. The Cambrian explosion of information democratization that the age of the internet unleashed has already dented that asymmetry. Google’s initial founding principle was perhaps the best way to articulate that dent - “Provide all the world’s information to all the peoples of the world.”

However, age old institutions don’t crumble so soon. Democratisation of information led to the deluge of information. The new advantage was not about the volume of information, but about the curation of it. It became the oligarchy of the curators of information. The financial agents were successfully able to ride the digital revolution to become the smart curators of information to help clients not get drowned in data and find the signal in the noise. Research now became the moat. Sell-side research — the analyst, the morning note, the sector call — was the bank's way of formalising that asymmetry. Clients read the Bank’s research which shaped their worldview. That was the deal. And for decades, it worked, because there was no other way to get that quality of synthesis at that speed.

But the internet did more than democratise information. I like to call what happened next a shift in "informational gravity." Far more important than the volume of information available was what it made possible — independent judgement. Yes, algorithmic curation has introduced its own distortions and filter bubbles. But even accounting for that, the average person today commands more information to form their own view than the most powerful industrialists of a century ago ever could.

The edge: But more recently, the next evolution of the digital explosion is likely to upend this or at least change it in a much more significant way. We are in the early days of the AI revolution, but the changes that it has already brought about portend a significant upheaval. Decision making is changing – from relationship led to informed consensus. The coalface of this new path is showing up in the way AI infused information curation is changing the B2B corporate buying cycle and cracking the centuries-old RM led model in corporate banking.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not a fan of the doomsayers who seem to think every new digital trick heralds the death of the time-tested models. But there is something deeper afoot. The tension is not just that "buyers are more informed." It is that AI has changed what counts as a credible source, and that the traditional marketing and sales models have only partially registered this threat.

Let me rely on some stats to describe this.

Writing in October 2025, McKinsey noted that “About 50% of Google searches already have AI summaries, a figure expected to rise to more than 75% by 2028, according to trend analysis.” More recently in March 2026, WSJ noted that “For two decades, companies have relied on search-engine optimization, or SEO, to battle for customer attention online—tuning keywords and backlinks to climb Google’s rankings. Now, as AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude increasingly answer questions directly, visibility depends less on ranking first and more on being the source those systems trust.”

But that's only half the story. A change in channel — where people source information — is significant. What's more important, and what has gotten less attention, is that AI has changed what counts as a credible source in the first place.

McKinsey’s analysis of Google AI results shows that “In industries such as financial services, more than 65% of sources across AI-powered searches are publishers (magazines and microsites), user-generated content, and affiliate sites.”

Why is this important? Back to the age-old truth. Edelman’s research shows that “Most deals are not won or lost in the boardroom. They are defined by corridor chats, Teams conversations, Slack threads, AI-driven search, word-of-mouth, and quiet vetoes you never saw coming. With much of the B2B buying journey increasingly self-guided, the people you meet in sales conversations or in the pitch room have already decided what they think about your company and its capabilities.” The key insight here is that hidden buyers have more influence than previously expected. The B2B Institute reports that 40% of B2B deals are abandoned because the buying group cannot reach a consensus.

And where are these hidden buyers forming their opinions? Increasingly the answer is AI led curation. Edelman writing in June 2025 continues “The use of Generative AI is growing faster than the adoption of the computer or internet, with Gartner predicting that brands’ organic search traffic will plummet by 50% by 2028 as B2B decision makers switch to Large Language Models (LLMs) to help them evaluate companies and potential service providers.”

So here we are. The century-old model, built on information asymmetry is being challenged by a slow and structural shift in where trust is formed and is eroding from the outside in.

Three things are happening simultaneously which combined makes this moment different from previous disruptions.

First, AI-led curation has delivered the next significant increment in breaking information asymmetry. Clients no longer rely on the RM banker as much to curate complexity. They arrive with a view already formed.

Second, decision making has shifted from relationship-led to consensus-led. The buying group, including hidden influencers the RM has never met are shaping outcomes before the pitch room is ever booked.

Third, and most critically, AI does not summarise the web evenly. It makes editorial decisions about which sources are worth absorbing and which can be safely ignored. And in financial services, the bank is largely not in those sources. As Kantar puts it — AI doesn't index your brand. It interprets it.

Therefore:

So, what does this all mean? I am going to focus on the implications for the role marketing can play as the sales cycle shifts.

B2B marketing must rethink its key channels to adapt to the changing role and step up to being the function that shapes the room before anyone enters it. If the relationship-manager is no longer the primary intelligence layer, marketing must become it. Deliberately and structurally, before the first conversation happens.

Marketing in B2B banking must stop acting like a support function for sales and start acting like the pre-sales intelligence layer. Its role in shaping the client's AI-curated worldview — before they even write the RFP — will become the difference between being considered and being invisible.

Content is no longer collateral. It is the thing that determines whether your brand exists in the client's considered set before the conversation even begins.

But the nature of that content has to change fundamentally. Generic thought-leadership won't make it through the AI filters. Neither will product advertising, or anything that doesn't offer specific insight into specific problems. AI is a demanding curator — it trusts sources that are structurally useful, not ones that are merely present.

That means marketing teams have to start differently. Not with a content calendar. With a diagnosis — of what clients are actually asking, what problems they are trying to solve, and what questions they are putting to AI before they put them to a banker.

Events will need to be more than broadcast moments. They should provide clients an opportunity to network with others, and crucially as validation forums for decisions already in motion. Therefore, the value of events may lie not just in who attends, but in whether they help clients build conviction—through comparison, peer signals, and real-world validation.

A word of caution:

An important question sits underneath all of this that many are asking. Is this just another wave that institutions will absorb and ride out, the way they did with the internet? Perhaps. The history of banking is also a history of adaptation. And there is no shortage of AI-generated noise (or slop) that would give even the most enthusiastic observer pause.

But the direction of travel feels different this time. Not because AI is infallible. It most definitely is not. But because the quality of reasoning it offers is improving faster than any previous technology, and because it is already changing behaviour at the edges where buying decisions begin. The signal is getting stronger, even if the noise hasn't gone away.

Now what:

But the information gravity has indeed shifted. And when gravity shifts, there are two ways to lose your footing. You become too heavy to move with it and get stuck. Or you become so weightless you drift away from it entirely.

Bain research captures the common lament among CMOs and sales head at B2B firms plainly when they quote "Our customers have gotten way ahead of our sales efforts. Too often, we're not even getting invited to the dance." And yet, Gartner's research shows that fully digital, rep-free buying journeys frequently end in purchase regret. Buyers increasingly have AI provided independence, but they still need a moment of human conviction before they commit.

And therein lies the opportunity for the relationship manager’s new role.

The antidote is not more technology. It is the right human, in the right moment. The RM doesn't disappear. In fact, their job description intensifies in one area.

"They're no longer the carrier of insight. They are the closer of a journey that started without them."

Origins & Edges is an essay series written as thinking-in-public. Structured but not settled.

References

• ResearchGate: Nineteenth-century information networks and the Rothschild communication system
• Edelman: The battle for B2B influence and decision shaping
• McKinsey: The rise of AI search as the new front door to the internet
• Kantar: Marketing to machines and the emergence of generative engine optimisation (GEO)
• WSJ: How AI is reshaping search behaviour and SEO strategies
• Forbes: The evolution of B2B buying behaviour and experience design
• Gartner: Understanding the modern B2B buying journey
• Highspot: Sales enablement perspectives on B2B buyer journeys
• The Asian Banker: Banking sector adoption of emerging technologies in Asia
• Accenture: Top trends shaping banking and financial services
• Content Marketing Institute: B2B content marketing trends and research benchmarks

Note: All images were imagined and created with help of Claude (for image prompts), ChatGPT and Gemini.

Sunday, 29 March 2026

A leader is ambitious for you.

Personal ambition is a good thing. It drives effort and, in most cases, precedes achievement. In a hyper-competitive world, it is almost a default setting.

People in leadership roles in today's world tend to have strong personal ambitions. In many cases, those ambitions are what got them there and that shapes what they prioritise, and how far they are willing to push themselves.

But ambition alone does not make a leader. Managers pursue results through people. Leaders on the other hand pursue the expansion of people themselves.

When that distinction is absent, something quietly shifts in the people being led. Most leaders believe they are doing the latter. The people working for them often experience something different. The difference is felt before it is understood.

A sign of this is when people can see the vision clearly, but cannot see themselves in it. They understand what needs to be done, but not how they grow through doing it. Over time, they begin to feel like instruments of someone else's ambition rather than authors of their own growth.

This is where something starts to narrow.

The people they manage feel truncated at the altar of the manager's priorities. Not in obvious, dramatic ways — in small, everyday moments. In what they choose not to say. In risks they decide not to take. In parts of themselves they quietly leave out of the room.

Rob Cross and Karen Dillon write about this in The Microstress Effect. Their argument is that it is rarely the large, visible pressures that wear people down — it is the small, accumulated ones that go unnoticed. One condition they identify is low trust. Not a dramatic breakdown, but the quieter version: expectations are high, communication is uneven, and neither side takes much risk with the other. Self-oriented ambition tends to produce exactly this.

They also identify something they call conflict with personal values. This is not about ethical dilemmas. It is the slow erosion that comes from small, repeated compromises — when the only way to contribute is to serve the leader's ambition, even when it sits at an angle to your own. Work begins to feel extractive. And over time, that does not just affect performance. It affects how a person sees themselves in relation to the work.

In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out to cross Antarctica. His ship, Endurance, became trapped in ice and was eventually crushed, leaving his crew stranded in one of the harshest environments on earth. The expedition failed in its original goal. Yet every single man survived.

What is remembered is not the plan, but how he led when the plan collapsed. Shackleton shifted his ambition. The mission no longer mattered. The people did. He reorganised roles, managed morale, and paid attention to the smallest details of human strain and resilience. Not as a management technique, but because his people had become the point.

Sir Raymond Priestley, who had served on Antarctic expeditions himself, put it plainly:

For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

Shackleton did not become less ambitious. He redirected it — from achieving a goal, to carrying his people through uncertainty.

Shackleton is an extreme case. Most leaders will never face a shipwreck. But the principle his story surfaces is not about crisis management — it is about where ambition is pointed.

Exceptional leaders are not less ambitious. They are ambitious in a direction that includes the people around them. They recognise that people are different, respond to different things, and carry different constraints. Rather than flattening that difference, they build around it.

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, is a more recent example of this. He built an organisation where creative disagreement was not just tolerated but expected — on the belief that great outcomes come from the friction of different perspectives, not from hierarchy smoothing them away. Teams were encouraged to challenge ideas regardless of seniority. The point was not to eliminate risk but to build people who could recover from it.

He put it directly:
If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will fix it.

Build the team. The outcomes follow.

What is worth noting is that in environments like Pixar, what many organisations now struggle to mandate, genuine diversity of thought, people bringing their full selves to work, emerged as a natural consequence of how people were led. It was not enforced. It was enabled by leaders whose ambition had room for other people's growth inside it.

What this means in practice

One. Ambition is not the problem. Ambition pointed only inward is. The difference is subtle enough that many leaders never notice which one they are doing; and their people notice immediately.

Two. People do not need to be told whether they are being developed or deployed. They feel it in the small moments; the risks that were or were not supported, the growth that did or did not show up in the work. Trust is built or lost there, not in annual reviews.

Three. The leaders who build the strongest teams are rarely the ones trying to build strong teams. They are trying to expand people. The teams are a consequence.

Note: All images were imagined and created with help of Claude and ChatGPT.

Friday, 27 February 2026

The opposite of a good thing is probably also a good thing

The opposite of a good thing can also be a good thing. This is for me a simple statement that makes sense. But I think it is deep and not easy to comprehend and apply. The mind looks for good versus evil to clearly bucket things as “for me” or “against me.” But in life we are often choosing between what is good and what is also good. Each one comes with a certain cost. As Emerson put it: the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

To make decisions, the mind wants a certain degree of certainty. To achieve that, it wants to paint what we did not choose or are not able to choose as something inferior, or often something bad. But that is rarely the case. I am not talking about choosing between something good and something clearly broken. I am talking about two things that are equally good but you can only have one – for various reasons.

They famous idiom says - You cannot have the cake and eat it too. But having the cake is a good idea. And eating it is also a good idea. The idiom was never about foolishness it was always about the cost of a good choice.

The parable of the King who learned to thunder

There was once a king who was noble and devoted. He believed that serving his people was his highest duty. So, he spent little on himself and his household. He wore simple clothes, plain ornaments, and had no ostentatious displays of wealth, whether before his own people or the nobles and kings of neighbouring kingdoms.

This was good. It was virtuous. And yet it cost him something he had not anticipated. And he did not even know what it cost him.

Because of his frugality, people did not know his stature. In councils where he should have led, he was overlooked. His kingdom and his people suffered for it.

Then a sage came to him and told him the story of Lord Indra the king of the gods in the Vedic tradition. Indra, said the sage, does not rule through wisdom alone.

You see the Sage was wise. He knew that even the gods lose power when they become complacent. When they grow quiet, they end up dimming their divinity. Indra, the sage observed, wields the Vajra, the thunderbolt. He moves in lightning and spectacle and divine display. It might be called out as vanity. But there was a reason behind this display of vanity. Power that is hidden becomes power that is doubted. When it is visible, people tend to believe in it. When Indra withdraws into shadow, rivals rise. So, he thunders and does not allow order to dissipate away.

The sage looked at the king and said: subtle authority is good. Visible grandeur is also good. These are not opposites they are two truths about the same throne. Kings are obeyed not only because they are wise, but because they appear powerful. You have not erred in being humble, O King. You have erred in thinking that grandeur was beneath you.

The king saw the light. His humility had not been wrong. What had led him astray was the belief that its opposite was wrong. He saw now that grandeur was not a betrayal of his virtue it was the other half of it, waiting to be called upon when the moment required.

Why this matter and what can we do to overcome it?

I have noticed this in my own life when I choose one opportunity and then spend months explaining to myself why what I did not take was never worth it. The mind does not see the world as it is. It sees it as it needs to. Whatever happens to us is not inherently good or bad but the mind, in its need for certainty, will quickly label what we did not get or did not choose as inferior, even wrong. This is the trap. It is not reality. It is just the mind protecting the choice it made.

We can use this to our advantage. If the mind is going to justify whatever we chose anyway, we can consciously direct it toward the good in what we have rather than letting it default to making the unchosen thing the villain.

I suppose this is what cognitive behavioural reframing is trying to teach us. When something happens that you did not want, try this: tell yourself it was a conscious choice you made, for good reasons, and then actively look for the silver linings. The mind will find what you point it toward. Point it toward the good.

Note: All images were imagined and created with Gemini, Google Whisk and ChatGPT.

Friday, 20 February 2026

Explorer's Syndrome

Impostor Syndrome is a well-known and widely discussed idea. It is used to explain the nervousness one feels and as something that can be overcome if consciously acknowledged. It is also used as an excuse when one wants to avoid something. But what if Impostor Syndrome is not the only frame available to us? What if there is another stance altogether, an Explorer Syndrome, which is a different framing that can be learned? To explain what I mean, I need to share what shaped this thought.

Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology, has in recent years popularized the idea of deliberately cultivating awe. His work suggests that awe diminishes cynicism and helps us notice goodness, courage, and beauty in places outside ourselves. This is a modern articulation of an ancient intuition: that there is greatness in the natural world, something almost divine in what is beautiful, and that our curiosity about it changes us. For me, this distinction lies at the very core of the difference between an explorer and an impostor.

As I was hearing about the cultivation of awe on a podcast, what struck me most was that we first have to be open to experiencing things as magical and larger than ourselves in order to feel it. Identifying with impostor syndrome, even if you are openly trying to acknowledge it and overcome it, shuts you off to experiencing awe. Counterintuitively, one would expect someone besotted with impostor syndrome to be always in awe of others. But that is not the case. It is the one who has the openness and curiosity of an explorer that is able to find awe, both within and outside of them.

What I am saying here feels like Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset at first glance, but I feel it is slightly different. When I hear or read about growth mindset, it feels evaluative for me. It is about skill improvement and openness. It rightly says effort matters, failure is informative, and that abilities can be developed. A person with impostor syndrome can have all that and they can still be shut off to the sense of awe and curiosity.

When I think about the Explorer’s Syndrome, I feel that it is a bit more poetic and has an implicit license to chase joy. While growth mindset says “keep improving,” the Explorer’s Syndrome is more about “There is something greater than me that is worth moving towards.” And the other thing about it is that it invites you to break away from autopilot, even for positive habit loops. I will explain why.

As Jonathan Goodman puts it in Unhinged Habits, “Escape from autopilot begins with exploration.” Autopilot happens when someone too easily falls into a routine of things, for both the good habits and the bad. But the autopilot is more insidious. It is the repetition of safe patterns shaped by fear. How many of our habits are shaped by what we want to avoid or what we fear? I suspect many.

Exploration interrupts that loop.

For someone in the grip of an Explorer’s Syndrome, growth is not the goal; curiosity is, along with awe, exploration, and the urge to see what lies beyond the next hill. It is the drive to pursue what is novel, simply because it is new and unexplored. It is also the quiet curiosity to take things apart just to understand how they work—and to put them back together once you do.

There is something deeply productive about believing you can figure something out and not being consumed by what you don’t yet know or might get wrong.

At Davos in 2026, Elon Musk famously said, “I would rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.”

The productivity of optimism lies in this willingness to move. When you assume things might work out, you act; when you obsess over how they might fail, you stall. And stalling, more often than not, proves the pessimism right.

But for most of us, the default setting in modern life seems to tilt in the other direction. The impostor’s attention turns inward, circling perceived gaps—what they lack, what they might mishandle, whether they will measure up.

That inward spiral rarely produces clarity. It narrows attention until action feels risky and visibility feels dangerous. Every new opportunity is weighed less as possibility to explore and more as a test to survive. And because the focus stays fixed on deficiency, the lens through which the world is viewed becomes distorted. It is not that ability is absent—it is that attention is misdirected.

Courage Before Certainty

I have written elsewhere that agonizing over a decision is often worse than the decision itself. Much of that agony comes from trying to pre-decide outcomes in a future none of us can predict. When prediction is impossible, progress comes not from perfect certainty but from movement—act, observe, adjust. Courage, in that sense, beats confidence.

Overthinking keeps us waiting for a perfect answer. This is the posture of the impostor: cautious, self-monitoring, waiting to feel ready. It feels safe, even responsible. But it quietly narrows the world. Exploration moves forward with one that feels interesting and yes, considered, but not obsessed over. Then learns from the experience gained from the exploration.

In fact, the explorer shifts the axis entirely. Attention leaves the self and moves toward the playground —what can be learned, what can be tested, what might unfold. The unknown stops being a threat and becomes a canvas to paint on. Gaps in knowledge are not evidence of being caught as a fraud, but invitations to inquire. Mistakes are not verdicts on worth, but information gathered along the way.

I have written before about how courage is often found in the embrace of the unknown. In reflecting on writers like Sontag, McCarthy, and even the idea of Fernweh—a longing for the unfamiliar—I realized that what looks like “being lost” is often just a refusal to abandon oneself. To live deeply is to step into uncertainty without betraying who you are.

The Performance Trap

That same stance—the willingness to enter unfamiliar terrain without collapsing inward—plays out in far more ordinary settings than travel or mortality. Let’s take a concrete example from the world of work in 2026. Consider something as commonplace—and revealing—as networking.

In a professional setting, networking often becomes a performance. For the impostor, a networking meeting is less a conversation and more a test. They over-prepare to avoid appearing uninformed, choose environments where they feel in control, and leave measuring whether they impressed rather than whether they learned. If the exchange does not yield visible validation, it feels like failure.

The explorer walks into the same meeting, but with a completely different orientation. They are curious first, strategic second. The goal is not to impress, but to discover—what this person knows, how they think, where their world intersects with yours. There is intention without an agenda; presence without performance. Trust, in that context, emerges not from polish, but from reduced self-orientation.

Let’s zoom out. Networking was only one example; this is about something more fundamental.

Unlearning the Reflex

What I am really arguing is that impostor syndrome is not merely insecurity, but a strategy built around securing validation. It is not something that simply happens to us; it is something we participate in. We structure our actions to avoid confronting weaknesses we do not want to admit—even to ourselves.

Explorer Syndrome, then, is the quiet refusal to live by that logic. And because it is a strategy, it can be unlearned.

The first lever is attention. Validation-seeking trains attention inward; exploration trains it outward.

The second lever is repeated contact with situations that do not guarantee approval. Small acts of outreach without over-preparation begin to loosen the grip.

The third lever is learning to release the outcome and doing so completes the shift.

Over time, outward-directed attention makes awe easier to notice. But awe is not sustained by accident; it is cultivated through repetition and openness. Left unattended, repetition becomes routine, and routine slides back into autopilot. Ritual is repetition done with awareness—an intentional return to outward attention. This is why all ancient religious practices emphasize the importance of rituals in cultivating a sense of awe of the divine.

Across both ancient discipline and modern individualist thought, one idea repeats: action is directed toward a chosen aim. When the aim is validation, disapproval strikes at who you think you are. When the aim is exploration and a surrender to something larger than oneself, disapproval becomes noise rather than threat. Placed in that frame, criticism changes texture. It may still register, but it no longer dictates movement. In practice, this shift is quieter than it sounds.

An Ongoing Apprenticeship

On a personal note, I am beginning to notice how this impacts me in the small things. I used to find myself choosing books, projects, even leisure partly for how they will appear—to myself as much as to anyone else. Reading something “serious,” avoiding something indulgent, rehearsing questions before asking them. Lately, I have been interrupting that reflex. I slow down. I breathe. I deliberately unclench from the need to look curated and intelligent. I ask the obvious question in rooms. I volunteer for work that might be judged as beneath me. Nothing dramatic changes in the moment. But when validation does not arrive, or even when criticism does—either directly said to me or felt indirectly— the impact feels different. It stops meaning so much.

In fact, each instance of the lack of validation stops registering altogether and, if anything, feels like a small exposure—leading to the strengthening of the muscle. If antifragility to judgment means growing steadier each time approval is absent, then this is how I am beginning to train it.

A quiet apprenticeship into Explorer Syndrome.

Note: All images were imagined and created with Gemini.

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