Keep a simple list of the people who matter in your working life and contact a few each month. Give before you ask. Send an article they will find useful, make an introduction, recommend them. Help with no expectation of return. It comes back, though often not from the person you helped.
So, what will your life be like when you reach “pension age”, when you’re “allowed to retire”, when you can “draw your pension”? Have you assumed the state will take care of you?
We’ve evolved a language of dependency and assumption over the past century that seems to absolve us of responsibility. But it’s not like that. It was never like that and never meant to be like that.
In the beginning, the UK state pension, although non-contributory, was means-tested. It was paid to those over 70 at a time when you could expect to live another nine years or so and was worth about one fifth of the average wage for a male manual worker.
The state pension was always intended to alleviate poverty, not to provide a comfortable living.
Fast-forward to today. The current state pension (for a single person in tax year 2026-27) is £12,548 per year. The amount required for a “minimum standard of living” is £13,900 and, crucially, this doesn’t include any rent or mortgage costs – it assumes you’ve already paid off a mortgage.
Despite our cosy language, we can’t expect the state to provide for our old age. We need to take a sovereign professional approach and do it ourselves.
The Sovereign Individual, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s 1997 classic, is nearly 30 years old. I bought and read it when it was published and, along with a couple of other books, it shaped my thinking about work and employment. It also inspired this blog, The Sovereign Professional. But does it stand up to scrutiny three decades later?
The book is famous (infamous?) as a libertarian call-to-arms and for correctly anticipating the rise of cryptocurrency, remote working and the (often tax-driven) international mobility of capital. As the cover blurb said,
“Economic responsibility will be shifted to individuals who will become completely responsible for their own destinies, arranging for their own welfare through their own pension schemes, medical insurance investments, etc. The individual will become more of an entrepreneur, a private contractor, in complete control of his or her finances with easy access to enormous computing power – in fact the Sovereign Individual.”
What is it about “old school”? It sounds like it should be an insult, but it almost never is. Old School is professional, it’s standards, it’s a lot of things we’ve been told before (as children?) but somehow most of us have forgotten.
Posting for no other reason than that I’m irrationally happy with the result.
The books are in complete chaos – the Library Project has become more urgent, but no nearer resolution – and the walls you can’t see remain a mess, but tangible progress has been made.
Over on LinkedIn, a friend and former Microsoft colleague, Jamie Rawlings, hosted an interesting discussion on the “uncomfortable by design” life stage of middlescence – a time for “grace and space”. Along with fellow, former Softie Charbel Fakhoury he talks about the stage of life when thoughts turn from “What do I do?” to “Who am I, now?” with all the accompanying restlessness and sense of dissatisfaction. It’s a fascinating, 45-minute chat which, hopefully, you can view, here.
Jamie now has the delightful title of The Liminal Coach. You may find him wandering along shorelines, the edges of dark forests, or indeed on the marches of middlescence.
I’ve always loved the concept of liminal space – “between or belonging to two different places, states, etc.” as the Cambridge Dictionary has it – standing on the threshold of a different place. It can be the ocean shoreline or the edge of a dark forest. In literature there’s often a boundary – The Wall in Game of Thrones or in Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. The Hedge in The Fellowship of the Ring (at the beginning of chapter 6) sticks in my mind. Despite the small strangenesses already encountered by the hobbits, it is the hedge, and the old forest beyond, that really marks the transition to a different world beyond the cosy Shire. Maybe Platform 9 3/4, King’s Cross Station is a liminal space. In China Miéville’s strange novel The City & The City, everywhere feels liminal.
Sometimes, liminal is between two states – land and sea, life and death, familiar and strange – and sometimes it’s between points in time.
St Dunstan in the East Church Garden, St Dunstan’s Hill, London
We either wildly overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies (remember when blockchain was going to replace every institution within five years?) or we catastrophically underestimate their long-term consequences. Nobody building the early internet imagined it would reshape elections, create trillion-dollar companies, or leave millions of people psychologically dependent on dopamine hits from their phones.
The goal is to be the first choice for people who couldn’t imagine doing it themselves, simply because their work is too important or your work is too good for them to ignore.
It’s much too easy to blame generative AI. It’s harder to prove why you’re better.
I like to work from paper drafts. As a result, I’ll type up a document on my computer, then print it off for editing. I know this sounds a tad Luddite, but I can spot errors more quickly on the printed page than on a screen. I also like to maintain my error-spotting skills instead of delegating that task to my computer.
The last thing I did, as I tidied my desk yesterday evening, was shred five versions of a speech I was working on for a CEO. I spot errors and see the flow more clearly when I have my head down over paper. And I can scribble ideas that I might abandon by the next page.
I’m not sure why. Is it because I learned to read and write on paper? Is it the haptic aspect of having a tangible piece of paper in my hands? Or the narrower focus of looking down on an inanimate sheet in contrast to a shiny, dynamic screen?
The Times has an interesting article on how literacy levels in Sweden have dropped since schools abandoned books for “screen-based learning”. Literacy levels dropped from among the highest in Europe (in 2000) until, in 2022, one in four pupils were functionally illiterate when they left secondary school. Now, books are back. As one teacher says: “The feeling of holding a volume and reading it makes it much easier for the student to immerse themselves in the world of the book. To see the words, how they are written, to feel the words, to feel the text in a different way.”
