Editor’s Letter – M2 Sep/Oct 2025 Issue
I’m conscious that this is meant to be an energetic and positive welcome to this issue. Actually, I’m not sure there’s a rulebook for editor’s letters, but I presume they’re meant to be upbeat. And generally, over the years, I’ve taken an overly optimistic bias to things. Some have even accused me of being optimistic to the point of delusion, which I think is a fair assessment. Lately, though, I feel like I’ve lost a bit of my grasp on that warm, comforting and familiar delusion. It’s getting late into 2025 and I know we just had to survive till ’25, but I’ve been feeling tired.
I’m not sure exactly what it is, but the combination of daily stories about liquidations, recession, geopolitical tensions, macroeconomic uncertainty, job losses, and AI disruption probably isn’t helping. At the same time, alongside all this news noise, you also get the smug VCs and confident founders who have raised a multi-million-dollar runway but have yet to figure out a revenue model, talking about the need for hustle and working long hours – and if you sleep, make sure it’s on a beanbag under your desk. If you’re failing, it’s because you’re not working hard enough. For many, though, business in an environment of soft consumer confidence and ramped-up interest rates is a grind. Sometimes that grind feels like you’re not moving anywhere, no matter how many hours a day you work. Actually, if I think about it a bit more, I suspect the tiredness comes more from the guilt of not hustling enough than from the actual busyness.
As is so often the case in this job, I get to speak to people who help provide perspective on something I’ve been thinking about. I don’t know how much James Laughlin charges for his coaching services, but given that he works with world leaders, elite athletes, and business legends, I presume it comes at a premium. But under the guise of interviewing him for the release of his new book Habits of High Performers for this issue, I also got to spend an hour picking his brain about performance and success. Normally, you’d think that a conversation about performance would be full of breathless high-RPM energy, big gestures, and multiple mentions of the word “hustle.” But I came away from our conversation feeling calm and cathartic. James covered many points in our interview and many more in his book. But for me, one point really gave me pause: “The highest performers,” James says, “aren’t the busiest. They’re the clearest.”
…Phew. For some reason, that really took a load off. It’s actually okay to stop for a moment. To take a step back and understand your goals. It’s also okay to say no to things. This isn’t a cop-out about hard work, by the way, you still have to show up every day, every week, every month. But it shouldn’t be a crazy blur of busyness. Without clarity, you could be busy going in the wrong direction. On that note, I’m going to sit in silence for a moment, think about my goals, and maybe also think of an optimistic word for “survive” that rhymes with “six.”