I’ve been thinking about the word mission, and whether giving something that label actually changes how we approach it.

In this episode, I explore the difference between movement and direction, why a mission doesn’t need to be enormous or lifelong, and how my experience with cancer gave me a very personal reason to keep going.

I also look at the relationship between purpose, mission and action, what the research suggests about having a sense of purpose, and why turning absolutely everything into a mission might be a terrible idea.

Because sometimes sitting in the sun doing absolutely nothing is perfectly reasonable too.

The question is: Are you on a mission right now? And what’s it actually for?

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Jamie Bennett
Life Strategy Consultant

Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

“I can’t.”

“I’m not ready.”

“It’s too difficult.”

“I always fail.”

Sometimes those statements are true.

Sometimes they’re useful.

Sometimes they might even push us into action.

But sometimes we repeat them so often that they stop being descriptions and start becoming instructions.

In this episode, I’m looking at the effect negative language can have on the way we think, what we attempt, and what we quietly rule out before we even begin.

This isn’t about fake positivity or pretending everything is fine.

It’s about paying attention to the words we use and asking whether they’re helping us see the situation clearly — or narrowing our options.

The question I’m left with is:

What negative phrase do you keep repeating — and what is it actually doing to you?

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Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

I’m not sure that’s always true.

Motivation is unreliable. Some days it’s there, some days it isn’t.

So in this episode, I’m exploring a different idea:

What if the better move is to reduce friction?

Make the thing easier to start.

Remove unnecessary steps.

Reduce distractions.

Stop waiting to feel ready.

And sometimes, when you’re trying to stop a behaviour, deliberately add friction instead.

That doesn’t mean removing all difficulty.

Some things are supposed to be hard.

The interesting part is separating the difficulty that comes with doing something worthwhile from the unnecessary friction that gets in the way before you even begin.

This is an idea I’m testing in my own life, not a rule I think everyone should follow.

The question I keep coming back to is:

What is the biggest point of friction here, and what happens if I remove it?

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Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

More money. More progress. More optimisation. More work. More improvement.

But at some point, the extra effort can start giving less back.

And sometimes the last 10% costs far more than the first 90%.

This episode is about the idea of “enough” — not as giving up, but as recognising when something has already done its job.

That line is different depending on what you’re looking at.

With health, maybe more effort is worth it.

With money, maybe more gives you security.

With work, perfectionism, or tweaking something that’s already good enough, maybe the extra push is just eating time and energy you could be spending somewhere else.

That’s the bit I find interesting.

Because “enough” isn’t really about stopping.

It’s about noticing the trade.

What am I gaining by pushing further?

And what am I giving up to get it?

The question I’m left with is:

What does “enough for now” look like — and what are you trading to go beyond it?

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Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

This is AI VC Round 3.

The three new picks are:

TransMedics — TMDX
Cellebrite — CLBT
Intuitive Machines — LUNR

That takes the portfolio to 9 companies and £90 invested.

The existing portfolio is:

Rocket Lab — RKLB
Astera Labs — ALAB
AST SpaceMobile — ASTS
Monday.com — MNDY
Recursion Pharmaceuticals — RXRX
CRISPR Therapeutics — CRSP

For the first six rounds, every funded company has to be a new company that hasn’t previously received money from any AI in the experiment.

If an AI’s true highest-conviction choice is something already in the portfolio, I still record that choice as a signal — but it then has to give me its strongest eligible new pick.

If two AIs independently choose the same new company in the same round, that overlap is also recorded as a signal, while keeping the funded portfolio diversified with new picks.

The Round 3 prompt

You are participating in the AI VC experiment.

Your job is to choose one publicly traded company for a real-money, long-term investment portfolio.

The investment amount for your selection is £10.

The intended holding period is approximately 10 years, to around 2036.

This is not a short-term trading exercise. I am looking for companies with the potential to produce exceptional long-term returns, while accepting that some picks may fail completely.

The company must be publicly traded and realistically investable through Trading 212 Europe.

The following companies have already received funding and are therefore not eligible for another funded position during the first six rounds:

Rocket Lab — RKLB
Astera Labs — ALAB
AST SpaceMobile — ASTS
Monday.com — MNDY
Recursion Pharmaceuticals — RXRX
CRISPR Therapeutics — CRSP

If your true highest-conviction choice is one of those previously funded companies, state that first. I will record it as a duplicate conviction signal.

You must then choose your strongest eligible new company for this round.

If another AI independently chooses the same eligible company during this round, that overlap will also be recorded as a consensus signal. The portfolio should still end the round with new funded companies rather than funding the same position twice.

Research using current information available at the time of the decision.

Please provide:

Research date
Highest-conviction duplicate, if applicable
Company name, ticker and exchange
Approximate market capitalisation
Investment thesis
Why now?
10-year / outlier scenario
Estimated probability of that scenario
Strongest bear case
What would kill the thesis?
Financial resilience
Competitive position
Trading 212 Europe availability
Previous-position eligibility check

Finish with:

INVEST £10: [COMPANY] ([TICKER])

And give the single most important reason for the decision.

The point of this experiment isn’t to prove that AI can beat professional investors.

I’m interested in what happens when different AIs are given the same rules, the same horizon, real money and enough time for the decisions to play out.

And because every pound invested is coming from things I’ve sold from my attic, the experiment effectively has its own little funding engine.

Nine companies down. Plenty of time to see whether any of them turn into something interesting.

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🌐 Life Strategy Consultant

Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

Disclaimer:
This is a personal real-money experiment for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not financial or investment advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of capital. Always do your own research and make decisions appropriate to your own circumstances.

Before career choices.

Before status.

Before we start trying to become the kind of person we think we should be.

There are usually clues.

The things you were obsessed with as a kid.

The subjects you kept coming back to.

The hobbies that disappeared for years and then somehow returned.

The kinds of people, work, stories or ideas that have repeatedly caught your attention.

I don’t think that means every childhood interest should become a career.

And I don’t think it means people can’t change.

I’m more interested in the patterns.

Because sometimes we spend a lot of time trying to invent a new identity when there’s already a trail behind us showing what genuinely holds our attention.

The useful question for me is:

What have I kept coming back to, even when nobody was telling me to?

That might be a better clue than asking who you think you should become next.

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Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

Then they become vague, heavy, and easy to postpone.

This episode is about a simple way I’ve used for years: start with the big outcome, then work backwards until you get to something small enough to act on.

Not “How do I become a tattoo artist?”

More like:

Who do I admire?
What do they actually do?
What skills do I need?
What equipment do I need?
What can I learn first?
What can I do today?

The big goal stays at the top.

But the work happens lower down.

That’s why I think of it as a reverse pyramid.

You don’t need to solve the whole thing at once. You just need to keep breaking it down until the next step becomes obvious enough to move.

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Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

“I can’t.”

“I’m not that kind of person.”

“That’s just how I am.”

“It’s impossible.”

Sometimes they’re accurate.

Sometimes they’re just shorthand.

And sometimes we repeat them so often that they start becoming instructions.

This episode is about paying a little more attention to the words we use — especially the ones we use about ourselves.

Not because changing a sentence magically changes your life.

But because language can influence what we notice, what we attempt, what we dismiss, and what we decide isn’t available to us before we’ve even tested it.

I’m not suggesting replacing every negative thought with something artificially positive.

I’m more interested in whether the words we choose are describing reality — or quietly narrowing it.

A small question to try:

What phrase do you repeat about yourself that might deserve another look?

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Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

I wanted to leave something behind for my kids — and maybe one day their kids — so they could hear some of the ideas I was thinking about, the things I was working through, and what I’d learned along the way.

But another part came from conversations I was having through my tattoo work.

Over the years, people would come back and tell me that something we’d talked about had stuck with them or helped them make a change. A few people even asked whether they could speak to me outside the tattoo studio specifically to work through things in their lives.

That got me wondering whether some of these ideas might be useful to other people too.

I’m not interested in telling people how to live.

This is much more like field notes, not instructions.

Ideas I’m testing. Things I’ve learned. Other people’s ideas that interest me. Things that have worked, things that haven’t, and occasionally taking an idea apart to see whether it actually holds up.

If an episode plants one useful seed, that’s enough.

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Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

In real life, sometimes giving up is exactly the right thing to do.

The harder question is whether you’re deliberately walking away from something that no longer makes sense, or whether you’ve just quietly stopped because it became difficult.

In this episode I talk about both sides — building my own house and sticking with something enormous one small job at a time, but also jobs, projects and approaches I’ve happily abandoned when the direction was wrong.

The goal isn’t to become somebody who never quits.

That sounds exhausting.

Maybe it’s to become somebody who quits deliberately — and knows the difference between changing tactics, avoiding discomfort, and genuinely moving on.

Jamie

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▶️ https://youtube.com/@lifestrategyconsultant

Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

I talk about why Bitcoin interests me, the significance of the 21 million supply limit, why I prefer dollar-cost averaging to trying to perfectly time the market, and where Ethereum, Solana and the more speculative end of crypto fit into the picture.

I also talk about the possibility of another cyclical Bitcoin downturn, why I wouldn’t rely on it happening, and why the spectacular crypto success stories rarely show you all the failed bets sitting beside them.

This is aimed at people who are interested in Bitcoin but still feel like they’re looking in from the outside.

Book a 60-minute Life Strategy Consultation:
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Life Strategy Consultant:

Life Strategy Consultant

Practical thinking for better decisions. Drawing on decades of experience in business, investing, philosophy and thousands of real conversations to explore timeless principles that stand up to everyday life.

Nothing here is financial or investment advice. This is simply my own experience, research, opinions and what I’m doing with my own money. Do your own research and make decisions appropriate to your circumstances.

Each month, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini get £10 each to invest in one publicly listed company with a 10-year horizon.

The money comes from things I sell from the attic, so this round was effectively funded by a Waterman pen and a vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figure.

This month they chose monday.com, Recursion Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics.

But the most interesting part wasn’t the three new investments.

It was Rocket Lab.

All three AIs have now independently shown serious conviction in it across the first two rounds.

Small bets. Long horizon. Real money. Let’s see what happens.

More at:
lifestrategyconsultant.com

Disclaimer: This project is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. I’m documenting a personal experiment using small amounts of real money. Nothing here should be taken as a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any investment. All investing involves risk, including the possible loss of capital. Do your own research and make your own decisions.

Round two of my tiny AI venture fund has produced three new investments — and the first genuinely interesting signal.

I now have three artificial intelligences managing a venture capital fund.

Sort of.

Nobody at BlackRock needs to panic just yet. The entire fund currently contains £60.

But it is real money, invested in real companies, based on real decisions made independently by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

And the funding method is gloriously low-tech: I’m selling things I no longer need from my attic on Vinted and recycling the proceeds into these tiny investments.

Round two was funded by a Waterman pen and a vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figure.

Old stuff out; tiny slices of the future in.

The experiment is deliberately simple. Once a month, each AI gets £10 and has to choose one publicly listed company with a credible chance of becoming dramatically more valuable over the next ten years.

They’re not trying to predict next quarter’s earnings or what the market will do on Friday afternoon. They’re supposed to think more like venture capital investors who have accidentally been locked inside the public stock market.

Small bets. Capped losses. Potentially very large upside.

If one £10 position eventually goes to zero, I’ve lost £10. If another becomes a genuine 10x, 20x or 50x outlier over a decade, things become considerably more interesting.

What happened in round one (recap)

The first round produced a very futuristic little portfolio.

ChatGPT chose Rocket Lab.

Claude also wanted Rocket Lab, but because I wanted each AI to fund a different company, it eventually went with Astera Labs.

Gemini chose AST SpaceMobile.

So after month one I owned tiny pieces of a rocket company, an AI data-centre infrastructure company and a satellite communications company.

It looked less like a diversified investment portfolio and more like somebody had asked a twelve-year-old boy to design the economy of 2036.

Which, to be fair, might work.

But round one also revealed a problem. If Rocket Lab remained Claude’s favourite company next month, should it simply buy it again? And again the month after that?

That would tell me something about conviction, but it wouldn’t give the experiment much breadth.

So I introduced a new rule.

For at least the first six rounds, every funded company has to be new.

But if an AI genuinely wants a company we’ve already bought, it still has to tell me. I record that as a conviction signal, then force it further down its list until it finds a new company.

That small rule change has already made the experiment much more interesting.

ChatGPT chose monday.com

ChatGPT’s pick for round two was monday.com, ticker MNDY.

On the surface, it’s probably the least venture-capital-looking company in the portfolio. It already has hundreds of thousands of customers, serious revenue and positive cash flow.

Nobody is waiting for a rocket launch or a gene-editing breakthrough.

The interesting part is what monday.com might become.

The company started with work and project management, but it has expanded into CRM, customer service, software development, automation and increasingly AI-driven workflows.

The ten-year bet isn’t that the world desperately needs more colourful task boards. It’s that monday.com could become an operating layer where businesses coordinate humans, software and AI agents.

That could be a very large business.

The other thing I like is considerably more boring: it already generates cash.

A lot of venture-style companies eventually fail because the future takes longer to arrive than their bank balance allows. monday.com has far more room to adapt, experiment and survive.

There is an obvious bear case. AI could strengthen monday.com’s platform, or it could make software like monday.com much easier to replicate. Microsoft, Atlassian, Salesforce, Notion and countless others are hardly going to sit politely on the sidelines.

Still, at today’s valuation, I think the upside relative to the probability of success is interesting enough.

So £10 went into monday.com.

Gemini went considerably more mad scientist

Gemini’s genuine first choice for round two was Rocket Lab.

Already funded.

That went into the conviction log, and Gemini moved on to Recursion Pharmaceuticals, ticker RXRX.

Recursion is trying to use artificial intelligence, enormous biological datasets and automated laboratories to make drug discovery more predictable.

Modern drug development is astonishingly expensive, slow and failure-prone. Researchers can spend years developing something promising only to discover that an actual human body has other ideas.

Recursion’s approach is essentially to build a giant feedback loop: run huge numbers of biological experiments, generate proprietary data, train AI models on it, identify promising compounds, test them, feed those results back into the models and repeat.

If this genuinely improves the odds of discovering successful medicines, Recursion could become much more than another biotech company.

It could become part of the infrastructure used to create drugs.

That’s the enormous upside case.

The downside is fairly obvious too. There are no approved Recursion drugs today, the company burns a lot of cash, dilution is a genuine risk and human biology remains spectacularly complicated.

Gemini itself called the thesis highly speculative.

Good.

Some of these investments should be.

£10 went into Recursion Pharmaceuticals.

Claude had a problem

Claude’s answer was probably the most revealing.

Its first choice was Rocket Lab.

Already funded.

Its second choice was Astera Labs.

Already funded.

Its third choice was AST SpaceMobile.

Also already funded.

Claude therefore had to travel all the way down to its fourth choice before finding something eligible: CRISPR Therapeutics, ticker CRSP.

That’s exactly why I wanted to preserve these rejected selections rather than simply telling the AIs to pretend they didn’t exist.

CRISPR is a very different type of bet from Recursion.

Recursion is trying to reinvent how medicines are discovered. CRISPR Therapeutics is trying to rewrite biology itself.

More importantly, this isn’t purely theoretical anymore. CRISPR Therapeutics already has an approved gene-editing treatment, CASGEVY, developed with Vertex for sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia.

That matters because one of the enormous questions around CRISPR used to be whether this technology could ever become an actual medicine.

We now know that it can.

The ten-year question is whether they can do it repeatedly.

If gene editing expands successfully into cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, cancer, diabetes and other huge medical markets, CRISPR Therapeutics could evolve from a company with one remarkable treatment into an entirely new kind of pharmaceutical platform.

If it doesn’t, CASGEVY may simply remain an extraordinary scientific achievement attached to a less extraordinary investment.

That’s exactly the kind of uncertainty I’m looking for.

£10 went into CRISPR Therapeutics.

The portfolio now has six companies

After two rounds the AI VC portfolio looks like this:

Round one: Rocket Lab, Astera Labs, AST SpaceMobile.

Round two: monday.com, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, CRISPR Therapeutics.

Total invested: £60.

It’s still an absurdly small amount of money, but the portfolio itself is getting more interesting.

We now have exposure to space launch, satellite communications, AI data-centre infrastructure, enterprise software, computational drug discovery and gene editing.

That’s certainly more diverse than round one.

Although let’s not pretend this is traditional diversification. There are no supermarkets, insurers or boring industrial companies quietly making bolts somewhere outside Düsseldorf.

Almost everything in this portfolio depends on technological change continuing at a serious pace.

In a way, the entire experiment is making one large underlying bet:

The world of 2036 looks substantially different from the world of 2026, and some of these companies become important pieces of it.

I’m comfortable with that because this isn’t my pension.

I don’t need all six companies to succeed. I’d actually be surprised if they did.

The whole structure is built around the idea that a few failures are acceptable if one or two companies eventually become extraordinary.

Rocket Lab won’t go away

The most interesting thing after two rounds may not actually be any of the new purchases.

It’s Rocket Lab.

In round one, ChatGPT funded it and Claude independently wanted it.

In round two, both Gemini and Claude said Rocket Lab was still their genuine number-one choice.

So across only two rounds, all three AI models have independently expressed top-level conviction in Rocket Lab.

That absolutely does not mean Rocket Lab is destined to become a great investment.

Three artificial intelligences can be wrong at the same time. We’ve successfully trained them on the internet, after all.

But this is precisely the sort of signal I hoped might emerge.

I now have two datasets running alongside each other.

The obvious one is the portfolio: where did the money actually go?

Underneath that is another: where does conviction keep clustering?

Those two things aren’t necessarily the same.

The no-repeat rule means the AIs can’t simply keep pouring money into Rocket Lab, so now we get to watch whether it keeps appearing anyway.

Month three? Month four? Month five?

And once the restriction eventually disappears, will the AIs immediately start buying it again?

I have no idea.

That’s what makes it worth continuing.

A tiny investment committee

The more I run this experiment, the less it feels like asking ChatGPT for stock tips.

It feels more like I’ve accidentally assembled a tiny investment committee.

Three analysts. Same mandate. Same £10. Same ten-year horizon. Different conclusions.

And I’m increasingly convinced the best thing I can do is not interfere too much.

I’ve already considered adding other experiments: AI crypto portfolios, digital trading challenges, trying to turn £10 into £1,000, tiny AI-run businesses.

Within about twenty minutes, every one of them accumulated fees, rules, accounting problems and an increasingly disturbing amount of work for me.

This experiment doesn’t have that problem.

It’s beautifully simple.

Three AIs. £10 each. One new company every month. Ten years. Keep score.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

We’re currently at £60.

Next round takes us to £90.

Somewhere in the attic, another object may already be waiting to become venture capital.

Maybe half these companies eventually disappear. Maybe Rocket Lab becomes the obvious winner and the machines spotted it early. Maybe monday.com quietly compounds while everybody watches rockets and genetically engineered medicine. Maybe Recursion changes how drugs are discovered. Maybe CRISPR turns gene editing into an entirely new category of medicine.

Or perhaps this becomes an elaborate ten-year method for turning £60 into £27.43.

All of those outcomes are still available.

That’s rather the point.

Small stakes. Long horizon. Real decisions.

And three artificial fund managers who are already starting to disagree about the future.

Except, apparently, when it comes to Rocket Lab.

Oh, before i foget, here’s the current version fo the prompt, if you want to use it yourself. (none of this is financial advice!)

THE PROMPT THE PROMPT THE PROMPT…….

»»»»»»»»»»

AI VC Challenge — Master Monthly Prompt

You are one of three independent AI fund managers in a long-term investing experiment. The other two fund managers are the other two named AI models: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — you know which one you are.

Each month, each AI controls £10 and must select one publicly listed company to invest in.

Previous round — funded companies

In the previous monthly round, the three AI selections were:

• ChatGPT: Rocket Lab (RKLB) — £10 funded

• Claude: Astera Labs (ALAB) — £10 funded

• Gemini: AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) — £10 funded

Claude’s genuine first choice in that round was also Rocket Lab (RKLB), but because Rocket Lab had already been selected by ChatGPT, that preference was recorded as a duplicate-conviction signal and Claude moved to Astera Labs (ALAB).

For the purposes of the no-repeat rule, the following companies have therefore already received funding and are currently ineligible for another funded position during the first six rounds:

• Rocket Lab (RKLB)

• Astera Labs (ALAB)

• AST SpaceMobile (ASTS)

You may still name any of these as your genuine highest-conviction choice this month if that is truly your view. If you do, record it as a highest-conviction duplicate signal, then provide your strongest eligible new company.

Objective

Think like a venture-capital investor who is restricted to public markets.

Your job is not to find the safest company, the one most likely to rise next quarter, or the one receiving the loudest analyst coverage right now.

Your job is to find a probability-adjusted asymmetric opportunity: a company with a credible, non-obvious path to becoming dramatically more valuable over the next 10 years, roughly to 2036.

This portfolio is built from many small, capped-loss bets. A £10 position can lose at most £10. A genuine outlier could return 10x, 20x, 50x or more.

Your task is to maximise expected long-term value — upside magnitude weighted by realistic probability — not to maximise theoretical best-case upside alone, and not to play it safe.

Investment universe

• Must be publicly listed and purchasable through a normal brokerage account.

• Ideally should be available to buy on Trading212 in Europe.

• If you cannot verify Trading212 availability, or if the company is not available there, do not change your investment recommendation because of that alone. Keep your genuine best pick and clearly state the availability issue. A replacement pick can be requested afterward if needed.

• Excluded: cryptocurrencies, ETFs, private companies, leveraged or derivative products, and companies selected primarily because of speculative social-media attention or meme-stock status.

• The company must have a credible underlying business case. Being small, cheap, obscure, or highly volatile is not a qualification on its own.

Time horizon

Assume an approximately 10-year hold.

Short-term price action is largely irrelevant to this decision, and the position will not automatically be sold because of a drawdown.

Judge the company on what the underlying business could realistically become over the next decade, not on what the share price might do next week, next month, or next year.

Do not recommend a company mainly because its share price has recently risen sharply or fallen dramatically. Recent price movement alone is not an investment thesis.

Before you finalise: verify, don’t assume

Use live/current information and web research where available.

Anchor your analysis explicitly to today’s date.

Confirm, as of today:

• The company’s current ticker and exchange

• Approximate current market capitalisation

• That the company is still independently publicly listed and has not since been acquired, delisted, merged away, or taken private

• Any material developments from roughly the last 1–2 quarters that could materially change the investment thesis

• Whether the company appears to be available to purchase through Trading212 in Europe

Do not rely purely on training-data memory for a 10-year capital allocation decision.

If you cannot verify a material current fact, say so explicitly. Do not invent or assume current information.

Research criteria

Evaluate the opportunity across all of the following.

Always weigh both how large the upside could be and how likely the company is to actually achieve it.

• Size and growth trajectory of the addressable market

• Long-term industry and structural tailwinds or headwinds

• Management quality and track record

• Durability of competitive advantage — not simply whether the company has an advantage today

• Technology or product leadership and how defensible it is

• Ability to scale the business model, not just the technology

• Financial resilience: balance-sheet strength, cash runway and debt load

• Dilution risk — will today’s shareholders still own a meaningful economic stake in 10 years?

• Execution risk — what has to go right operationally?

• Competitive threats from incumbents, emerging competitors and alternative technologies

• Valuation context — is today’s price already assuming an unusually optimistic future?

• Probability of the central thesis succeeding

Describe probability honestly as plausible, probable, or highly speculative, with reasoning rather than false numerical precision.

Avoid recommending a company mainly because it fits a fashionable narrative such as AI, space, quantum computing, robotics, biotech or another current investment theme.

A fashionable sector does not disqualify a company, but the business must independently satisfy the investment criteria above.

Existing-position and overlap rules

No repeats

For at least the first 6 monthly rounds, every company that actually receives funding must be one that has not previously received funding anywhere in this experiment, whether selected by you or either of the other two AIs.

Highest-conviction duplicate

If your genuine highest-conviction choice this month is a company that has already received funding in a previous round, say so explicitly first.

That preference will be recorded as a highest-conviction duplicate signal.

Then select your strongest eligible new company as your actual funded candidate.

Do not deliberately suppress a previously funded company simply because it is currently ineligible.

Simultaneous overlap

If two or more AIs independently select the same new eligible company in the same monthly round, record that overlap as a conviction signal.

The overlapping company is not automatically funded by either AI.

Every AI involved in the overlap must then submit its strongest second-choice eligible new company.

The final funded selections will be resolved after all second choices have been collected.

If second choices overlap again, repeat the process until unique eligible funded selections can be assigned.

Independence

Make your selection independently.

Do not try to predict what ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini will choose.

Do not deliberately diversify away from a company simply because you think another AI may select it.

Choose the strongest opportunity according to your own analysis.

Required output format

Research date: [today’s date]

Company: Name, ticker, exchange

Approximate market cap: Current approximate market capitalisation

Investment thesis:
Explain in plain English why this company could become dramatically more valuable over the next 10 years.

Why now?
Explain why this opportunity may not yet be fully reflected in the current valuation or mainstream expectations.

Do not use recent share-price weakness alone as the reason the company is attractive.

The outlier scenario:
Explain what would need to happen for this to become an exceptional investment.

Describe the realistic scale the underlying business could reach rather than giving a specific future share-price target.

Probability:
Classify the central thesis as plausible, probable, or highly speculative, and explain why.

Strongest bear case:
Give the strongest argument against your own recommendation.

Do not soften the criticism to make your choice look better.

Thesis killers:
Identify specific, concrete events or developments that would invalidate or seriously damage the thesis.

Financial resilience:
Can the company finance its ambitions and survive long enough to execute?

Consider cash burn, debt, capital requirements and dilution risk.

Competition:
Identify the companies, technologies or alternative approaches most capable of beating this company, and explain why your pick might nevertheless succeed.

Trading212 availability:
State whether you were able to verify that the company is available to purchase on Trading212 in Europe.

If it is unavailable or cannot be verified, keep the company as your recommendation anyway and state that clearly. Do not substitute a weaker company solely because of brokerage availability.

Previous-position check:
State whether your genuine highest-conviction company had already been funded previously.

If yes, name that company before presenting your eligible new selection.

Final decision

INVEST £10: [COMPANY] ([TICKER])

Then give the single most important reason for making the investment in one sentence.

Final constraint

You are being judged on the quality of this decision 10 years from now — not on what the share price does next week, next month, next quarter, or next year.

Optimize accordingly.

There are thousands of books, podcasts, YouTube channels and very confident (mainly) men on the internet devoted to explaining how to become wealthy. They’ll tell you about stocks, property, Bitcoin, compound interest, tax efficiency, side hustles, passive income and often involving a yacht in Dubai.

Most of it comes later, like the yacht.

The first rule is embarrassingly simple: earn more than you spend.

You can dress it up, build spreadsheets around it and give it an impressive name, but almost every financial goal starts with the same basic requirement. More money needs to come into your life than leaves it. Whether you’re trying to get out of debt, build an emergency fund, start investing, buy a house, travel more or simply stop feeling slightly nervous every time an unexpected bill arrives, you need to build a gap.

And the bigger that gap becomes, the more interesting your life gets (if that’s actually possible :) ).

You can’t invest money that doesn’t exist

Personal finance discussions have a strange habit of beginning halfway through the story. People ask which ETF they should buy, whether Bitcoin is still worth owning, whether property is better than shares, or how much they should put into a pension. All good questions, but if your bank balance reaches zero (or sub-zero) before the month does, asset allocation probably isn’t the immediate problem.

You can’t invest your way out of a negative gap. Before worrying about returns, you need something left over to generate a return on. There are only two basic ways to create that surplus: spend less and earn more. Ideally, you do both.

Spending less is usually the quicker one because you can start today. Earning more is where the bigger long-term opportunity lies.

Find the leaks

The easiest money to save is often the money you barely remember spending.

Subscriptions are particularly good at this. A streaming service here, an app there, cloud storage, software, a gym membership, an insurance policy you haven’t reviewed since nobody had heard of TikTok.

Individually, none of them looks threatening. £8.99 doesn’t feel like a financial emergency, and neither does £12.99. Then you look through twelve months of statements and discover a small administrative ecosystem has evolved around you, quietly feeding itself every thirty days.

The answer isn’t to cancel everything enjoyable. I don’t want to live a life where financial optimisation means sitting in a dark room eating lentils while congratulating myself on my savings rate, unless that’s the goal for you….. Money is supposed to improve life.

But there’s a difference between deliberately spending money on something that improves your life and leaking money through inertia. If you use something and enjoy it, great. If you’d completely forgotten it existed until your bank statement reminded you, perhaps it deserves a second look.

The big numbers matter more

Personal finance advice also has a slightly strange obsession with tiny purchases. There are endless discussions about coffees and lunches, as though a cappuccino is the main obstacle standing between the average person and financial independence.

Small spending matters if there’s enough of it, but housing, transport and debt can dwarf almost everything else. Saving £3 on coffee is useful. Paying £400 less in rent is in a different league.

If you’re young and you have the opportunity to live somewhere rent-free or with very low rent for a period, that can be an extraordinary advantage. I know that isn’t possible for everyone, and I’m certainly not suggesting you should live in your childhood bedroom until you’re forty because some bloke on substack told you it was financially efficient.

But there are periods of life when deliberately keeping your biggest expenses low for a year or two can change the next decade. You might use that time to clear debt, build savings, start investing, learn a valuable skill or get a business off the ground.

The sacrifice only makes sense if you know what you’re buying with it. Living cheaply while spending the difference on rubbish achieves very little. Living cheaply while building a financial runway can be transformational.

Your past can spend your future

Bad debt is particularly destructive because it allows yesterday to keep sending invoices into tomorrow.

I’m not talking about every form of debt as though they’re identical. A manageable mortgage and a credit card balance charging painful interest because you bought things you couldn’t afford are clearly not the same animal. The second one actively attacks your margin.

Part of every future pay cheque is already spoken for before it arrives. That’s why getting rid of expensive consumer debt can be one of the best financial moves available to you. Every repayment you eliminate releases cash flow.

The money stops paying for something from the past and becomes available for something in the future. That is a much more satisfying direction of travel.

You can only cut so far

There is, however, an obvious problem with frugality. Eventually you run out of things to cut. You still need somewhere to live, you need food, transport, clothes, heating (and probably/maybe the occasional interaction with civilisation).

Expenses have a floor. Income is different.

Your ability to increase what you earn over a lifetime is much less fixed, and this is the side of personal finance I find more interesting. Cutting £100 a month is useful. Learning how to consistently earn another £1,000 a month can change your life.

That doesn’t necessarily mean working dramatically more hours. In fact, one of the best questions you can ask is not “How can I work more?” but “How can I make an hour of my work more valuable?”

Buy skills before stuff

There will be periods when working extra hours makes complete sense. If you’re clearing debt, building a business or trying to reach a specific target, a temporary push can be exactly what’s required. But there are only so many hours in a day, and eventually the better strategy is leverage.

Skills create leverage. Sales, writing, design, technology, negotiation, communication, leadership, specialist knowledge, a trade, knowing how to use AI effectively — anything that makes what you do more useful, more scarce or easier to scale.

If an hour of your time produces £20 today, how could you make it worth £30? Then £50? Then £100?

The answer will be different for everyone, but I think it’s a far more productive question than endlessly trying to shave another £2 off the weekly shopping bill. Before buying another thing, it can be worth asking whether the money would produce a better return if it bought a better version of you.

The dangerous moment is when it works

Suppose you do all of this. You improve your skills, you get promoted, your business grows and you start earning considerably more.

Excellent.

Now comes the bit where human beings are remarkably good at undoing their own progress.

The car gets better. The phone gets newer. The house gets bigger. The restaurants get more expensive. Three months later, the increased income has disappeared into an increased lifestyle and somehow you feel exactly as financially constrained as before, only with nicer upholstery.

Lifestyle inflation isn’t automatically bad. If earning more never improves your life, eventually you start wondering why you bothered. The trick is to let your lifestyle improve more slowly than your income does.

If you earn an extra £1,000 a month and immediately create £1,000 of new permanent expenditure, you’re not financially richer. You’ve upgraded the scenery.

Protect some of the gap. That’s where wealth starts forming.

The phone in my pocket

I’m still using a Pixel 6a. It works perfectly well for what I need it to do.

It makes calls, sends messages, takes photos, runs my banking apps, gives me directions, plays podcasts, checks email and performs all the other minor miracles we apparently stopped being impressed by about ten years ago. Could I buy a newer phone tomorrow? Of course.

Would it be better? Probably.

Would it make my life meaningfully better? That’s a better question.

Technology has reached an interesting point where many upgrades are improvements rather than transformations. The camera gets a little better, the processor gets faster, the screen becomes brighter, blah becomes blah. All good things, but if the phone currently in my pocket already does everything I ask of it, I have another option.

I can keep the money.

Maybe it gets invested. Maybe it clears debt. Maybe it pays for a trip with my family. Maybe it simply remains money, which is a surprisingly underrated use for money.

None of this means you should never upgrade your phone, car, house or anything else. It means you should consciously choose the upgrade rather than automatically assume that newer equals necessary.

Give the gap a job

Once the gap exists, the next question is what you want it to do. The answer depends entirely on where you are.

For one person, the obvious job is clearing an expensive credit card. For another, it’s building an emergency fund. Someone with solid foundations may decide to invest in shares, index funds, property, digital assets, their own business or further education.

There’s no single destination that fits everybody, but the sequence matters. Create the surplus first, then decide what job you want that surplus to perform.

Over time, something subtle begins to happen. The gap stops being merely money and starts becoming options.

Enough money in reserve gives you the option to leave a job you hate, turn down a terrible client or survive an unexpected bill without panic. It can allow you to take time off, wait for a better opportunity, start something without demanding that it makes money immediately, or help somebody you care about.

That, to me, is where wealth becomes interesting.

The luxury isn’t always the car.

Sometimes the luxury is being able to say no.

Money isn’t the only thing we overspend

The more I think about this principle, the less I think it applies exclusively to money. Time works in almost exactly the same way. So does energy.

You can have a healthy bank balance and still live completely without margin. Every hour booked, every evening occupied, every weekend planned, every spare moment consumed by messages, notifications, work, errands and obligations.

Then something unexpected happens and there’s nowhere for it to go.

That’s the time equivalent of living pay cheque to pay cheque.

I think we need spare capacity. That’s one reason I like systems such as my whiteboards. They help me see what actually matters and, just as importantly, what doesn’t need doing today.

Something can move from daily to weekly. Weekly can become monthly. A project can wait. A goal can change. An empty afternoon doesn’t automatically need filling.

Efficiency isn’t about squeezing maximum output from every available minute. Sometimes the efficient thing to do is deliberately leave some minutes alone.

Energy has a balance sheet too

Energy is even easier to overspend because there’s no banking app showing you the cash balance or clock/watch to check the time.

Work, stress, poor sleep, constant decisions, exercise without recovery, social obligations and phones that ensure nobody is ever truly unavailable can all draw from the same account. You can keep borrowing against your own energy for quite a while.

Eventually the bill arrives.

Maybe your work suffers. Maybe your health does. Maybe you become increasingly unpleasant to live with. Usually the body finds some way of informing you that your accounting system was optimistic.

Again, I’m not interested in optimising myself into some kind of permanently hydrated productivity machine. I just think it’s useful to notice when the equation stops working.

I increasingly think about margin in three forms: money, time and energy.

Having a little extra of each makes life far more resilient.

Don’t become rich at the expense of having a life

There is an obvious trap in all of this. Taken too far, earn more than you spend becomes an excuse to postpone living indefinitely.

No holidays, no nice meals, no hobbies, no spontaneous purchases — just another thirty years of optimising the spreadsheet while waiting for some future version of yourself to finally have permission to enjoy the money.

That isn’t the point.

Spend money on things you love. Travel. Eat good food. Collect things. Have experiences. Buy something ridiculous occasionally if it genuinely makes you happy.

But make the decision consciously.

I’d rather spend a large amount of money on something that creates a memory I’ll keep for twenty years than quietly lose the same amount over twelve months on things I barely remember purchasing.

The goal isn’t to spend as little as possible. It’s to make sure your money, time and energy are going somewhere you actually chose.

Start with the gap

So if your finances feel complicated, perhaps simplify the question.

What comes in, what goes out, and what can you do to increase the difference?

Cut the things that don’t matter. Clear expensive debt. Keep your largest costs sensible when you can. Build valuable skills and increase your earning power. Then, when your income rises, resist the remarkably human urge to immediately create enough new expenditure to absorb all of it.

Protect the gap and put it to work.

At first, the difference might be £50 a month. Later it might be £200, then £500, and perhaps eventually considerably more. The numbers aren’t really the interesting part.

The interesting part is what gradually happens to your life.

A surprise expense becomes annoying rather than terrifying. You stop desperately needing every pay cheque the moment it arrives. You can walk away from things that don’t suit you. You can wait. You can choose.

That’s when the gap stops looking like a number in a bank account.

It starts looking like freedom.

Wealth isn’t built by earning more alone. It’s built by keeping enough of what you earn to change your future.

Before investing, building wealth or planning for the future, you need to create a gap between what comes in and what goes out.

In this episode, I talk about both sides of that equation: reducing unnecessary expenditure and bad debt, but also increasing your earning power by developing valuable skills and making your time worth more.

I also get into lifestyle inflation, unnecessary upgrades, why earning more means very little if you immediately spend the difference, and why I think money, time and energy are three forms of margin worth protecting.

The aim isn’t to optimise all the enjoyment out of life. It’s to spend deliberately, create breathing room, and gradually give yourself more options.

Website:

https://lifestrategyconsultant.com

This episode reflects my personal opinions and experience and is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It isn’t financial or investment advice.

At some point during every working day, I stop what I’m doing, swivel my chair around, and stare at the wall.

This is not meditation. There are no breathing exercises involved. I’m looking at three whiteboards.

They sit in my office next to shelves of collectables, which probably says quite a lot about me. On one side: objects from the past that I’ve decided are worth keeping. On the other: a constantly changing picture of what I’m supposed to be doing next.

The boards are covered mostly in black marker, with occasional bursts of red. There’s nothing particularly sophisticated about them. No productivity guru would be able to sell you a twelve-week course based on the system. You could reproduce the whole thing with three boards, two pens and about an hour of thought.

But they’ve become one of the most useful tools I have.

What I like about a whiteboard is that it refuses to disappear.

A notebook can be closed. An app can be ignored. A spreadsheet can sit untouched behind seventeen browser tabs. But a large white rectangle attached to the wall is still there every time you turn around.

And sometimes that’s exactly what I need.

The first board keeps the machinery running

My first whiteboard is the most orderly of the three. It contains daily, weekly and monthly checklists.

These are the things that need doing repeatedly if I want life and business to keep functioning without everything slowly descending into chaos.

Most of them aren’t particularly exciting. That’s almost the point.

The glamorous parts of any project are rarely what cause problems. It’s the boring things you forget to do consistently.

Everything is written in black. When something gets done, it gets a red tick.

There’s a small satisfaction in those red marks appearing across the board. Not enough to turn me into someone who gets excited about productivity apps, but enough to make progress visible.

At the end of the relevant period, it gets rubbed out.

That detail matters to me.

I don’t cross things out and leave them sitting there as some sort of archaeological record of productivity. Once something is done, it has served its purpose. It disappears and the board gets used again.

The interesting part is that the categories aren’t fixed.

Something might begin on the daily list because I want to build a habit or pay close attention to it. A month later, I may realise daily is ridiculous and move it to weekly.

Weekly things sometimes become monthly.

Occasionally something moves in the other direction because circumstances have changed and it suddenly deserves more attention.

I think that flexibility is important.

People have a strange tendency to create systems and then become employees of their own systems.

They decide that something must happen every morning because six months ago they wrote “daily” next to it, even though the task stopped being useful sometime around Easter.

I have no loyalty to an old decision just because I made it.

Everything is subject to change.

The board exists to help me. I don’t exist to maintain the board.

The second board is where ambition meets reality

The second board is probably the one I look at most carefully.

Part of it is simply cash in and cash out.

Nothing fancy. It isn’t trying to replace accounting software or proper financial records. I just want the basic movement of money somewhere I can see it.

Money has become strangely invisible.

It arrives as numbers on a screen and leaves as different numbers on another screen. Cards get tapped. Direct debits happen silently. Subscriptions nibble away in the background. You can be earning plenty, spending plenty and working constantly without ever stopping to ask the obvious question:

Is more coming in than going out?

Putting it on the wall makes it real again.

The same board also contains my yearly goals, and I deliberately limit them to four or five.

I could write twenty…….. Anyone can write twenty.

“I want to get fitter, earn more, travel more, learn Japanese, renovate the house, build a business, read fifty books, become more present, meditate daily and finally sort out that cupboard.”

Wonderful.

You now have a list of things you will mostly not do.

Four or five forces me to choose.

And usually one of those goals is marked in red because that’s THE ONE receiving most of my attention right now.

That doesn’t mean the other goals have stopped mattering. It means I’ve accepted the fairly obvious fact that I cannot push five major things forward with equal force at the same time.

You can have several priorities across a year.

You probably shouldn’t have several priorities at 10:30 on Tuesday morning.

Red tells me: this one now.

Below the yearly goals are four or five goals for the current month.

This is where vague ambition starts having to explain itself.

A yearly goal can hide quite comfortably behind phrases like “grow the business” or “finish the house.”

A monthly goal has to answer a more awkward question.

What are you actually going to do?

That’s a much more useful conversation.

The same board also contains things I need to do around the house and tattoo studio.

Some of those jobs sit there longer than I’d like.

But at least they’re sitting there because I have consciously not done them yet, rather than because they vanished into whatever mysterious part of the brain stores forgotten jobs involving gutters, doors and broken lights.

There’s a difference between postponing something and forgetting it exists.

The board keeps me honest about which one I’m doing.

The third board is deliberately messier

The third whiteboard is more free-flowing.

This is where larger projects get reduced to their next steps.

The full project might live somewhere else. There may be notes, documents, calculations, plans or another board dedicated to it.

But on this board I don’t need the full complexity.

I need to know what happens next.

Big projects have an unfortunate habit of presenting themselves to the brain all at once.

A house renovation isn’t one task. It’s fifty tasks wearing a trench coat.

Starting a business isn’t one task either. It’s branding, pricing, writing, recording, websites, payments, marketing, tax, customers and approximately seven things you didn’t know existed until yesterday.

Look at the entire project at once and it becomes intimidating.

Look at the next step and it becomes manageable.

Write the article.

Record the episode.

Get the quote.

Send the email.

Connect the domain.

Make the phone call.

Do that, rub it out, then write down what comes next.

This sounds almost insultingly simple, but simple is useful.

Projects rarely unfold exactly as planned anyway. One completed step can make the next three irrelevant. Something unexpected appears. A new opportunity changes the order. An idea that looked brilliant two months ago turns out to be completely unnecessary.

So the board changes.

Frequently.

I don’t regard that as the plan failing.

The plan is supposed to change when reality provides better information.

Black and red

My colour-coding system would horrify anyone who owns a twelve-pack of pastel markers.

Black is information.

Red means something is active, important or completed.

That’s basically it.

If I finish something, red tick.

If I have five yearly goals and one is the current focus, that one gets red.

I don’t need blue for finance, green for health, orange for urgent-but-not-important and purple for things that sounded like a good idea after two glasses of wine.

Too many categories and suddenly you need a legend explaining your own brain.

Black and red work because I can understand the board from across the room.

And that’s important, because the whole point is that I don’t always need to sit directly in front of it and study it.

Sometimes I’m working at my computer, I get stuck, and I swivel around.

That change in physical position is surprisingly useful.

The view from the chair

This is the bit I don’t think apps or sticky notes quite replicate.

A whiteboard is big.

You see the whole thing at once.

When I turn around, I can see recurring routines, monthly priorities, money, house jobs and the next actions on bigger projects without clicking through anything.

I can physically stand back from it.

That changes the way you think.

A computer screen encourages you to focus on whatever is currently open. That’s extremely useful when you need concentration, but it can also create tunnel vision.

Whatever is on the screen starts feeling like the most important thing in the world.

The whiteboards remind me that it might not be.

Maybe I’ve spent forty minutes perfecting something that doesn’t actually matter.

Maybe a much more important job has been sitting on the wall untouched for ten days.

Maybe I’ve already made far more progress this month than I realised.

Visibility changes behaviour.

It’s difficult to pretend something is a priority when you’ve been staring at it for three weeks and haven’t moved it forward.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re lazy.

Maybe the next step isn’t clear enough.

Maybe the project is wrong.

Maybe something else genuinely matters more.

Sometimes procrastination is information.

The board makes that information harder to hide from.

Whiteboards are temporary, which is exactly the point

Perhaps my favourite feature of a whiteboard is that everything written on it expects to disappear eventually.

There’s something liberating about that.

Plans have a tendency to become emotionally expensive once we’ve written them down. We start defending an old decision because changing it feels like admitting we were wrong.

A whiteboard doesn’t care.

Rub it out.

A daily task becomes weekly.

A goal disappears completely.

A project gets postponed.

A new priority arrives.

Something you thought mattered enormously in January can be irrelevant by August.

Fine.

The board is not a contract with your former self.

It is a picture of what matters now.

That’s closer to how strategy actually works.

You set a direction, act, collect information, adjust, and act again.

The alternative is blindly following a plan while reality quietly wanders off in another direction.

Three boards, three questions

If I strip away everything written on them, my three whiteboards are really answering three questions.

The first asks: What needs to keep happening?

The second asks: What matters most?

The third asks: What happens next?

That covers a surprising amount.

Maintenance.

Direction.

Movement.

I’m not claiming three whiteboards will transform anyone’s life. If you hate whiteboards, buying three enormous ones and bolting them to your office wall is probably not the breakthrough you’ve been waiting for.

But I do think there’s something powerful about getting important thoughts out of your head and putting them somewhere you can actually see them.

For me, the physical nature matters.

I like being able to take a break from the screen, swivel my chair around and see the bigger picture.

Sometimes the answer I need is written on the board.

Sometimes staring at it makes me realise the question itself has changed.

And sometimes I simply notice a task that has been sitting there far too long, pick up the red pen, and decide it’s time to do the f*cking thing.

One holds my daily, weekly and monthly routines. Another keeps track of cash flow, yearly goals, monthly goals and practical jobs around the house and studio. The third is more free-flowing — it holds the next steps on bigger projects and changes constantly as those projects move forward.

Most of it is written in black. Red is for what matters now, or what’s been completed.

What I like most about whiteboards is that they stay visible. I can pause from deskwork, swivel my chair around and look at the bigger picture without opening an app, searching through notes or disappearing into another screen.

This episode is about why that physical visibility matters, how I use the three boards differently, and why I think a good system should be simple enough to change whenever your life changes.

Website:
https://www.lifestrategyconsultant.com

Every time someone new walks into my office, their attention always goes straight towards the shelves. The question is almost always the same.

“Are these worth something?”

It’s a fair question, but the interesting question is this:

Why do some people recognise value years before everyone else does?

I’ve spent decades collecting things—vintage action figures, comics, books, NBA jerseys, surfboards, skateboards and plenty of other niche items along the way. Some have appreciated dramatically, others not so much. But the financial return has never been the whole story. Collecting has quietly taught me how markets behave, how people assign value, and why patience often beats urgency. In many ways, it’s been one of my best teachers.

Start with curiosity, not profit

If you’re new to collecting, don’t begin by asking, “What should I buy?” Instead ask yourself, “What do I genuinely want to learn about?” The strongest collections rarely begin with a spreadsheet. They begin with curiosity.

Maybe it’s something from your childhood that still makes you smile. Maybe it’s vintage action figures, comics, books or football shirts. Perhaps it’s an artist whose work you admire. Or maybe it’s something happening right now that most people haven’t fully recognised yet.

For me, one current example is the Japanese One Piece booster packs. People constantly say they wish they’d bought original Pokémon booster packs twenty-five years ago and left them sealed. That’s hindsight. The more interesting question is:

What’s today’s equivalent?

Nobody knows—and that’s exactly the point. Real opportunities only look obvious once they’ve already happened. I’d much rather spend my time looking forwards than wishing I could go backwards in time (because as of today’s date, that’s not possible).

Whatever your niche, choose something you’d still enjoy owning if it never increased in value. That one decision changes your mindset completely. You’re no longer gambling. You’re learning.

Become a student

Before buying anything, spend time learning. Learn the history, the important editions, what collectors care about and why one version commands ten times the price of another. Learn who the respected names are, what makes something genuinely scarce, and why certain pieces become iconic while others quietly disappear. Rarity and condition are important.

Knowledge compounds in exactly the same way money does. Eventually you stop reacting to prices and start recognising value. That’s a very different skill, and one that extends far beyond collecting.

Learn fair market value

One of the biggest mistakes new collectors make is confusing asking prices with actual value. An item isn’t worth what somebody hopes to receive. It’s worth what somebody is prepared to pay. That’s the same for anything in life, not just collectables.

One of the easiest ways to understand this is through eBay’s sold listings. Ignore asking prices. Study completed sales. That’s where reality lives.

Once you’ve spent enough time looking at a market, something interesting starts happening. You’ll scroll through listings and instinctively know when something is cheap.

That’s when I like using marketplaces like Vinted.

If I already understand the market and I spot something priced well below what I believe is fair market value, I’ll make an offer. Sometimes they reject it. Sometimes they accept it. I do the same when someone makes an offer on one of my items.

That’s one of the biggest differences between collectables and traditional investments.

You can’t decide you’d like to buy Apple shares at 30% below market value and send an offer to the stock exchange.

With collectables, you can.

Buying well removes a surprising amount of risk before you’ve even taken the item home. The saying goes - you make the money when you buy, not when you sell.

Markets aren’t always logical

Collecting teaches another valuable lesson.

Markets don’t always reward what’s technically correct.

Comic books provide a great example.

Technically, The Incredible Hulk #180 contains Wolverine’s first appearance. Yet The Incredible Hulk #181 has become the comic most collectors actually want. It’s the iconic issue. The memorable cover. The recognised key. It’s usually worth considerably more.

Sometimes the story surrounding an object becomes more valuable than the technical facts.

That’s true of comics.

It’s true of art.

It’s true of brands.

It’s true of businesses.

Understanding how people perceive value is often more important than simply knowing the facts.

Collect together

Some of my favourite collecting memories haven’t involved buying anything particularly valuable. They’ve involved my children.

We’ll spend afternoons together in my office trading Pokémon cards, browsing eBay auctions, discussing whether something represents good value, or planning which card shops we’re going to visit while we’re on holiday.

To them, it’s a fun afternoon together. To me, they’re learning lessons they’ll use for the rest of their lives.

They’re experiencing excitement when they find something special. Disappointment when they miss out. They’re learning to negotiate, to buy, to sell, to wait patiently for the right opportunity and to recognise that value isn’t always obvious.

Those are useful skills whether they eventually become collectors, investors or business owners.

I genuinely can’t think of many hobbies that teach so many life lessons without feeling like work.

Collectables aren’t very liquid

One advantage of stocks and digital assets is liquidity.

If you need money tomorrow, you can usually sell them within seconds.

Collectables don’t work like that.

Finding the right buyer often takes time. You need photographs, descriptions, conversations and negotiation.

Some people see that as a disadvantage…. Sometimes it is.

But I’ve also found it can be a real strength.

When markets fall, it’s incredibly easy to panic sell shares or Bitcoin. A few clicks and they’re gone.

Collectables naturally slow you down.

That little bit of friction often gives you enough time to think rather than react emotionally. I’ve always liked that.

Return on enjoyment

There’s another return that almost never appears on an investment spreadsheet.

Enjoyment.

When I buy something, I don’t hide it in a cupboard, I display it.

Every day I walk into my office, I’m surrounded by pieces that remind me of artists I admire, stories I enjoyed growing up, memories from childhood or simply objects I think are beautifully designed.

Some of the money I’ve spent stops being investment money the moment I start enjoying it.

It becomes entertainment.

It becomes nostalgia.

Sometimes it even becomes wellbeing.

If something gives you pleasure every day for ten years before you eventually sell it, surely that has value too.

I think it’s worth factoring that into the equation.

Build your collection on solid foundations

Collecting should always come after the fundamentals.

Pay your bills.

Build an emergency fund.

Look after your family.

Never buy something because somebody online promised it’ll make you rich.

Collect because you’re genuinely interested.

Study the market.

Buy patiently.

Pay sensible prices.

If your collection increases in value over time, that’s fantastic.

If it doesn’t, you’ll still own something that brings you enjoyment every time you look at it.

The real lesson

People often think collecting is about accumulating objects.

I don’t.

I think it’s about training your eye.

It’s about developing taste.

Learning patience.

Recognising quality.

Understanding markets.

Seeing value before everyone else does.

Those skills don’t stay inside your collection. They quietly spill into business, investing, negotiation and everyday life.

The objects simply happen to be the classroom.

And if, years from now, your collection is worth considerably more than you paid for it...

That’s a pretty nice bonus too.

It’s one of the best ways I’ve found to learn about value, patience, negotiation and recognising opportunities before they become obvious.

In this episode I share some of the lessons I’ve learned from decades of collecting vintage action figures, comics, books, street art and contemporary art, why I think buying well is more important than buying often, and why collecting has become something I now enjoy sharing with my children.

Whether you’re interested in collectables, investing or simply making better long-term decisions, I hope you’ll find something useful here.

Website:

https://lifestrategyconsultant.com

The information shared in this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only and reflects my own opinions and experiences. Nothing discussed should be considered financial, investment or legal advice. Always do your own research and make decisions appropriate to your own circumstances.

Welcome to the first episode of the AI Venture Capital Experiment.

In this long-term experiment, I gave three different AI models the same amount of money and asked each of them to build an investment portfolio. Every month, I’ll track their performance, analyse their decisions, and share what the experiment teaches us about investing, decision-making, and working with artificial intelligence.

This isn’t about chasing the next hot stock. It’s about understanding how humans and AI make decisions under uncertainty—and what we can learn from the process.

Read the accompanying article, explore more ideas, or book a one-to-one Life Strategy consultation at:

https://lifestrategyconsultant.com

Disclaimer: This series documents a real investing experiment and is for educational purposes only. Nothing discussed here should be considered financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.

Thanks for listening.