POst about keepong on moving and making small progress, personal story
Momentum Is a Lie You Tell Yourself in Retrospect I was rebuilding in 2021, not the kind of rebuilding that makes for a clean narrative at a conference: I sat in my home office at 7am with cold coffee and genuinely wondered whether the version of myself I was trying to recover was actually worth recovering. The business pivot I had made the previous year had cost me more than I was prepared to admit publicly, or privately, for some time. The financial exposure was real but survivable. What surprised me, and I say this with the full awareness that I should have known better, was what the failure took from me that I had not put a value on: my confidence in my own judgment, time I will not get back, and a kind of professional identity I had worn for so long that I had mistaken it for my actual self. I had spent two decades advising organisations on transformation, risk strategy, and resilience. Apparently, the curriculum did not include a module on what to do when my own plan unravels on schedule. The Rule I Set Because I Had Nothing Else Somewhere in early 2021, I made a decision that felt embarrassingly small at the time. I gave myself one rule: do one visible thing each day, not a strategy review, not a restructuring plan, not the ambitious Q2 roadmap I kept drafting and abandoning. One thing: an email sent, a conversation completed, a document closed and filed, something that existed in the world after I did it, that had not existed before. I want to be honest about how that rule felt in practice. Some days, sending a single email was a genuine achievement. I would look at the rule, one visible thing, and think: this is a standard set for someone recovering from surgery, not someone who has run teams of several hundred people across multiple geographies. The bar was, objectively, on the floor. I kept the rule anyway, partly because I had nothing better, partly because the alternative was producing nothing, and I had enough experience with organisations in freefall to know that zero output days compound in the wrong direction just as fast as progress days compound in the right one. Ninety days in, I reviewed what I had produced, not to feel good about myself, I was not expecting to feel good about myself, but because I needed an honest read on whether the approach was working or whether I was simply managing a slow decline with better optics. What I found genuinely surprised me. The volume of work was not the surprise. What stopped me was that I could not draw a straight line from where I had been to where I was. The distance had appeared gradually enough that I had not registered it. Momentum, it turned out, does not announce itself. Three Things That Pivot Taught Me That No Strategy Course Ever Did Progress made quietly does not feel like progress. This is the trap most capable people fall into when they are behind. They have succeeded visibly before, they know what it feels like when things are working, the energy in the room, the metrics ticking up, the sense of forward motion that others can see. When none of that is present, my instinct is to conclude that nothing is working. That instinct is usually wrong. The compound effect of consistent small action is not a motivational phrase, it is arithmetic. But arithmetic does not feel like anything while it is happening. The ledger is invisible until I run the numbers. Waiting for readiness is a strategy for staying still. There is a version of professional discipline that looks like patience but is actually avoidance in good clothing. I have watched senior leaders wait for the right conditions, the right quarter, the right team configuration, and I have watched them wait themselves into irrelevance. In 2021, I was at risk of doing exactly that. The energy to do something significant does not precede action, it follows it. That sequencing matters. Getting it backwards is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes I have seen in executive careers, including my own. Consistency is a decision, not a character trait. I used to believe, and I hear this belief echoed constantly in leadership conversation, that some people are naturally consistent and some are not. That consistency is something you either have or you develop through habit. I do not think that is right anymore. What I experienced in that ninety-day period was not the emergence of a new habit, it was a daily decision, made again every morning, often against my own inclination. Some mornings the decision took five minutes of sitting at the desk and arguing with myself. Consistency is not a trait I possess, it is a choice I make when nothing feels worth doing. That distinction matters because traits are fixed and choices are not. What This Means If You Are Running Something Right Now If I lead an organisation, a team, or a professional practice that is currently behind where it should be, and most are, in some dimension, at any given time, my instinct is to wait for the moment when I can make a significant move. Restructure properly, relaunch with conviction, come back strong. I understand that instinct, I have acted on it, and I have watched others act on it, and I have seen what it produces. What it produces, mostly, is a longer period of stagnation with a more elaborate justification. The organisations I have seen recover fastest from genuine difficulty were not the ones that waited for the transformational moment. They were the ones that kept producing output, imperfect, incremental, sometimes undistinguished output, on the days when producing nothing would have been entirely forgivable. The compound effect is not selective, it does not care whether I am in a good quarter or a difficult one. It runs in
post about the difference between how regulators react differently in EU and and US
When the Regulator Calls First, You Have Already Lost I launched a fintech product in the US and the UK on the same day in 2017. It felt like a milestone. Two major markets, simultaneous entry, the kind of thing I put in an investor update with some pride. What I did not fully appreciate at the time was that I had not launched one product into two markets. I had launched two entirely different regulatory relationships, and I only understood that after one of them had already gone wrong. The US engagement started with a detailed inquiry. A user complaint had reached the regulator before my proactive risk framework had reached anyone. The product was live, customers were onboarding, and the first substantive conversation I had with a US regulator was reactive. I was explaining myself rather than introducing myself. The tone of that distinction matters more than most founders realise until they are sitting in it. The UK experience was almost the inverse. I had pre-application meetings, scenario testing, and a structured review of my risk framework before a single customer had touched the product. The FCA wanted to understand how I thought before they watched how I behaved. At the time, I found the process slow and occasionally bureaucratic. In hindsight, I would have paid for it. The Moment I Realised I Was Already Behind Here is the part I do not often tell. By the time I understood that my US launch was already out of compliance – not catastrophically, but materially – I had been operating for several weeks. The product had passed my internal review. It had passed legal. I had built a risk framework I was genuinely proud of. What I had not done was map my compliance assumptions against US-specific regulatory philosophy, because I had made the mistake of assuming that a well-built product with strong internal governance would translate cleanly across jurisdictions. It did not. The first user complaint was not about the product. It was about a data handling notice. A feature that no customer had meaningfully used – and that most of my team had forgotten was even in the product – had a data retention disclosure that did not meet state-level requirements in one US market. The regulator’s first question to me was not about my business model, my risk controls, or my financial standing. It was about my data retention policy for a feature my customers had ignored. I had spent months perfecting the user experience. The regulator’s opening question was about a disclosure buried in a settings page. There is a lesson in that irony that I have never fully stopped finding uncomfortable. Three Things I Now Understand That I Did Not Then The rules are not the philosophy. Every jurisdiction has rules. What determines how those rules are applied – the timing of engagement, the tolerance for ambiguity, the willingness to work through uncertainty with me – is the philosophy sitting underneath them. The US regulatory model, particularly in financial services, operates on a philosophy of permissiveness with enforcement backstop. I am broadly allowed to innovate, and the system corrects through action after the fact. The EU and UK model is built on a philosophy of pre-emptive assurance. The regulator wants confidence before I build momentum, not accountability after I have it. Neither philosophy is superior. But confusing one for the other is where serious exposure lives. Proactive engagement is not a soft skill in the EU – it is a market entry strategy. The assumption most founders carry into European regulatory engagement is that more rules mean slower progress. The opposite is often true. Because EU and UK regulators expect pre-engagement, they are structurally set up to give it to me. The FCA’s innovation pathways, the sandbox frameworks, the pre-application guidance – these exist because the philosophy demands proactive dialogue. If I use them properly, I arrive at launch with documented regulatory alignment rather than undisclosed risk. That is not a slower path to market. That is a cleaner one. The regulator does not surprise me. I surprise myself. This is the thing I keep coming back to. In both markets, the regulator behaved exactly as their published guidance, their public speeches, and their prior enforcement actions would have predicted. I was the one who had not read the signals correctly. I had read the rules. I had not read the character of the institution. Those are different things, and the gap between them is where most cross-border regulatory failure actually happens. What This Means If You Are Building Across Jurisdictions Now If I am running a fintech, a GRC platform, or any regulated product across more than one geography, the question is not whether I have legal coverage in each market. The question is whether the person responsible for regulatory strategy in each market has genuine fluency in how that regulator thinks, not just what it requires. Rules can be read by a good lawyer. Philosophy has to be learned through proximity – through pre-meetings, through sandbox engagement, through understanding what a regulator has said in its last five public consultations and why. The organisations I have seen handle multi-jurisdictional launches well share one common trait: they treat regulatory engagement as a relationship to be built before it is needed, not a process to be managed after something goes wrong. That requires time, and it requires the kind of senior attention that often gets deprioritised in favour of product and commercial priorities. I have made that deprioritisation myself. I am not exempt from the lesson. It also requires the kind of honest internal culture where the compliance team feels genuinely empowered to raise a concern before launch, not after. That is a different conversation – one I have written about elsewhere – but it is inseparable from this one. The Closing Thought Two regulators, one product, entirely different outcomes – and the difference had nothing to do with the quality of what