Why I Gave My Expertise Away

For most of my working life, I believed that experience accumulated value.

Forty years in business had given me a way of thinking about progress, about success, about how people improve. It was practical knowledge, shaped by results and refined over time. I used it myself, and I helped others to use it. In that sense, it had purpose.

When I stepped away from that world, I did something that surprised a few people.

I took what I had learned, the frameworks, the instincts, the lessons earned through experience, and I made it freely available. I built a model that anyone could use. No fee, no gatekeeping. Just there, for whoever might find it useful.

At the time, it felt straightforward. That knowledge had done its work. It no longer needed me in the same way.

What I had not expected was what followed.

Once it was gone, or at least no longer mine to carry, something shifted. Not suddenly, but in the way certain realisations arrive. Quietly, and then all at once.

I found that I no longer wanted to write about success.

For a time, I continued in familiar territory. I wrote about mindset, progress, comparison, purpose. Some of it resonated. Some of it did not. Looking back, much of it feels as though I was adding my voice to a conversation that did not need another one.

There is no shortage of advice in the world. How to succeed, how to optimise, how to become a better version of yourself. Much of it is reasonable. Some of it is useful. But I began to notice a loss of interest, not in writing itself, but in the questions I was trying to answer.

Or perhaps more honestly, in the questions I was no longer asking.

The change was not dramatic. It was a shift in attention.

Instead of asking how we succeed, I found myself asking what we are trying to succeed in. What kind of world we inhabit, how others have understood it, and what may have been lost along the way.

That led me back to history, though not in any formal sense. More as a way of following threads. Reading, thinking, noticing patterns that seemed to repeat across time.

It found its way into my fiction as well. I had already begun to write stories shaped by history, without fully recognising that they were asking the same questions in another form.

Across different centuries, different cultures, and very different lives, I kept encountering familiar concerns.

What is a good life?

What does it mean to understand something?

What can we rely on, and what must we work out for ourselves?

The answers were rarely settled. But the questions endured.

Over time, I began to see a kind of continuity in this. Not a neat progression, and not an agreement, but an ongoing conversation. People trying to make sense of their world with the tools available to them. Sometimes carefully, sometimes clumsily, often in contradiction, but always recognisably human.

Not so different from us.

That recognition changed how I wanted to write.

I became less interested in offering answers and more interested in exploring questions. Not to avoid clarity, but to allow space for complexity, for uncertainty, and for the possibility that understanding something properly might matter more than reducing it to a conclusion.

There is a certain freedom in that.

Writing about success carries an expectation. You are supposed to know. You are supposed to explain.

Writing about understanding is different. You are allowed to think as you go. To follow an idea and see where it leads, without needing to resolve it too quickly.

None of this makes the earlier work wrong. It had its place. It helped people, I hope, and it certainly helped me. But it was only part of a larger process.

These days, I find myself drawn to different kinds of questions.

Why do certain ideas endure while others fade?

Why do some truths feel obvious in one age and invisible in another?

Why do we keep returning to the same insights, as if encountering them for the first time?

I do not have clear answers to these.

But I am no longer sure that I need them.

If there is anything I have come to recognise, it is that writing is not simply a way of explaining things. It is a way of paying attention.

Of slowing down just enough to notice what might otherwise be missed.

I used to think the goal was to explain.

Now I think it may be to understand.

And for now, that feels like enough.