Richard Feynman’s father was a uniform salesman.
Not a scientist. Not particularly educated.
But he understood something about curiosity that most teachers don’t.

He used to take young Richard on walks in the woods and on those walks.
They would just observe nature.
He'd point at a bird and ask what Feynman thought it was doing, but never gave an answer to the question. He made the not-knowing feel interesting, not embarassing.

Young Richard was once asked by a friend to identify a bird.
He couldn’t.
His friend asserted that his father had actually taught him nothing on those walks.
Feynman disagreed.
His father had taught him:

'You can know the name of that bird in every language in the world,
and when you’re done, you’ll know absolutely nothing about the bird.
So let’s look at what it’s doing. That’s what counts.

He won a Nobel Prize in Physics.
Was widely considered one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.
By his own admission - those walks and the curiosity had a big bearing on that.

Oxford and Cambridge interview the same way.
They don’t ask questions you can revise for.
They put a banana on the desk and ask why it’s curved.
They’re not looking for the right answer.
They’re watching what you do with not knowing.
Whether you lean in or shut down.
Whether the gap between the question and the answer feels interesting or threatening.

Most school prepares you for the opposite.
Fastest correct answer wins.
Fine for exams, useless for everything that actually matters in real life.

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Curiosity isn’t a personality trait.

Some people aren’t just born curious and others aren’t.
Researchers have put children in brain scanners and watched what happens when they’re genuinely interested in something versus when they aren’t.
The hippocampus, the part that decides what to store, is significantly more active. Kids in a curious state remember measurably more than kids who aren’t, even when given identical information.
The brain when curious is a different brain. And that state is sensitive to conditions.
If you make not-knowing the answer feel safe, curiosity grows.
Load it with shame, urgency, or embarassment and it dies.

By the time you read this, getting an instant answer to anything will likely feel completely normal.
But the gap where you don’t know the answer really matters.
Close it too fast, too often, and curiosity won’t develop.
You’ll become reliant on the answer, not the process of finding it out.

Used well, the internet / AI can drive curiosity. Pull on one thread and it gives you twenty more to pull at.
Use it to wonder, to be curious.
It’ll help you come to the answers others wouldn’t find from a search bar.
The valuable answers.

You’re already curious.
Your curiosity encouraged you to stuff play dough into an electrical plug…

But don’t lose your curiosity as education and technology disincentivise it:

Ask the second question.
After you find something out, ask what it means.
Ask why. Ask, so what?

Sit with not knowing for a bit first.
Not forever. Just long enough to get curious and work out the next question.

Use the internet / AI to go deeper, not give you it’s answer as quick as possible.

I’ll keep asking you questions I don’t know the answers to either.

Love,
Dad

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People have started to use AI;DR (AI; didn’t read) in response to content that is obviously AI generated slop.

Most identify slop through excessive use of em-dashes (RIP), parallelisms (that’s not X, it’s Y), and emojis 👀.

For me, it’s indicated by a lack of taste.

Taste isn’t ‘I like this’.

The feeling experienced when something is technically fine, but somehow not right.
The ability to feel the delta between almost and actually.

The late, great Dieter Rams pointed at this with his ten principles of good design.
Purposeful. Honest. Long lasting. Unobtrusive.

Not a list of things he liked.

The feeling something gives you that just feels right or wrong.

People without taste ignore that feeling (and send emails or linkedin posts that are clearly and unashamedly AI generated slop).

People with taste sit with the feeling until they better understand it, and can articulate it.

Some businesses have taste.

Apple, obviously.

But taste isn’t exclusive to design led or luxury fashion brands.

Monzo.
Dyson.
Braun. (Dieter, again)

All of them made choices that required people to say ‘no, not yet’, in place of ‘good enough’.

They understand what the absence of taste costs.
Forgetability. Clunkyness. Sameness.
They don’t see taste, or people with taste as a threat.

The barrier to building stuff is lowering.
3D printers massively accelerate physical product development.
Vibe coding gets a founder from idea to funding for next to no investment.
But just because you can build it fast and cheap, doesn’t make it a good idea.

Taste helps build ideas with differentiation.
Ideas that resonate, stand the test of time and are hard to copy.

The problem with slop is the lack of thought.
And the lack of value the person placed in that thought.

AI removes the friction of thought.
The friction where judgement and taste manifest.

Sitting with a blank page. Editing a bad first draft.
Thinking about what you’re actually trying to say.
About whether it’s actually worth saying.

Without that friction, you end up with content that has no substance.
Technically correct, but superficial.
You’ve read it before, it’s just arranged slightly differently.

It’s not just inefficient. It’s embarrassing. 🙃

The good news though, is that taste is trainable.

The bad news is that it is slow and needs commitment and attention that most can’t be arsed to invest in.

I will point you toward things. Introduce you to the stuff I develop my taste with.
But I can’t develop your taste for you. Nobody can.
It requires you to want it enough to sit with things when the easier option is to move on.

Here’s how I train my taste:

Slow down.
You can’t develop taste at speed.
Find something you like and stick with it long enough to articulate why.
Find something you don’t like and do the same thing.
Linger. Think about it. Be willing to have your mind changed.

Learn to describe it.
‘I don’t like it’ is infuriating.
Language and perception develop together.
Learn to be precise in articulating what you like, don’t like and feel.
Those that can do this are formidable.

Go wide.
Taste is comparative and works across many domains.
Reading only about your industry, direct competitors or single hobby will narrow you and your taste.
The connections that product genuine judgement usually come from unexpected places.
Architecture leads to art, which leads to fashion, which leads to music.

Seek out tasteful people.
Find those whose taste you respect and pay attention to their choices.
Don’t just copy them.
Understand the standard they apply and work out how you can apply it yourself.

Edit more than you create.
Anyone can add. Especially AI!
Taste and judgement help you know how much to take away and cut, to build something in its simplest, most effective form.

None of this will happen quickly.
And that’s entirely the point.

Love,
Dad

A couple of years ago I hired a coach.

I was frustrated.
I had strong opinions.
I couldn’t articulate them very well when it mattered.

My brief was simple.
Walk away from difficult conversations having said what I needed to say.
The way I wanted to say it.
Not three hours later, replaying it in my head on the tube home.

My first question: is this therapy?

I’ve tried therapy.
Never found the right person.
Always felt performative.
Expensive. Regressive.

My coach described her approach as forward-focused.
Using your strengths to clear obstacles.
Not excavating the past to explain why you’re a tw*t. (Not sic.)

That, I could work with.

She asked about my personal values.

I drew a blank.
No idea.

She sent me a deck of cards.
Each one had a value and a short description.
I picked the ones that resonated, then narrowed it down.
Five, then three.

Creativity. Rational thinking. Authenticity.

To me creativity isn’t just arty creativity.
It’s also commercial. Strategic.
Putting things together that haven’t been put together before.
The kind that makes money or solves the thing people aren’t willing to admit is broken.

For me, rational thinking is using logic, facts, evidence to make objective decisions.
Having opinions you can defend.
Being willing to change them when the evidence changes.
Knowing when to stop and recalibrate.

Authenticity is the simplest, but from over a decade in business, clearly one of the hardest…
It is doing what you say.
Owning what you do.
Voicing an unpopular truth without a hidden agenda.

Strong opinions can alienate people.
I’ve got this wrong plenty of times.
Too forceful.
Not enough evidence.
Wrong room.

My coach helped me use my values to frame the frustration instead.
Get the words out without burning the building down.

When I wanted to say, “you’re a f*cking idiot,”
I’d say, “can you help me understand what you’ve just said?”

It plays to their ego.
Signals they know more than you.
Gets them to dig deeper, reframe, explain.
Sometimes they change your mind.
Sometimes they watch their own argument collapse in real time, which is fun.

Felt ridiculous at first.
“One of my values is creativity.”
What a w*nker.

But it became second nature.
I built a bank of questions.
The kind that make people open up or discover, quite publicly, that they haven’t thought it through properly.

I’m still building it.

Clear values also made the big decisions easier.

I could see when a situation, a job, a personality just didn’t align.
And when they didn’t, I could trade off consciously.

Security and salary against dull, uncreative work.
Less money and higher risk for more fulfilling, purposeful work.
I’d made the call. I could live with it.
Make the trade off and owned it.

The one thing you can’t trade is authenticity.
Honesty. Trust.
Don’t let people chip away at those.
And don’t chip away at them yourself.
It never ends well.

Self-reflection, kind self-critique and self-awareness are super valuable and rewarding tools to have in your toolkit.

Using a coach to get there is one fo the best things I’ve done.
Great value…

Understand your values.
Be proud of them.
Use them to solve for and frame the tough stuff.

Love,
Dad

Along with writing more this year, I resolved to read more.
Such a cliche.

I didn’t set a target.
Just more. Which wasn’t hard.

I started leaving my phone plugged in outside our bedroom at night.
Total game changer for sleep and reading capacity.

The YouTube algorithm (handily, for once) showed me a few shorts from Jack Edwards and The Inklings book club. He was interviewing Cillian Murphy and Max Porter about their Netflix drama ‘Steve’, based in the same world as Max’s book ‘Shy’.

It wasn’t your standard press junket.
Three book lovers chatting.
What they read.
How they read.
Why they read.

I wanted to be part of that conversation.
But I felt entirely underqualified.

The longest book I’d read in the last 18 months was to you.
‘The Gruffalo’. Still a banger.

I mentioned the video to my sister in law over Christmas. She loves a good book.
We got talking about another Max Porter, ‘Grief is the thing with feathers’, and its movie adaptation with Benedict Cucumberbumhatch.
She urged me to read it.

I ordered a copy from World of Books.
It arrived.
150 pages.
Is that it?
Does that even count?

I got into bed early that night.
I wanted to give it a go.
Honestly, I was a bit scared.
Didn’t want to feel thick.

I read it cover to cover. One sitting.
I Laughed and cried.
I loved it.
I think it might be my new favourite book?!

I ordered all of Max Porter’s books immediately.
Also a load of other recommendations from Jack Edwards.

‘Grief’ was my first novella. Ever, I think.
Demonstrating my total lack of literary prowess.

I’m one of those readers who constantly closes the book with my finger on the page to see how far through I am.
I get disheartened when it feels like I haven’t made progress.
These thinner books help with that.
And the dopamine rush of finishing a book and putting it back on the shelf comes more frequently. Win.

That dopamine hit of finishing was infectious.
I’ve read 4 books since Christmas.

1143 pages.
28 days.
A new record.

It’s made me feel really good.
I’m probably going to be insufferable about it.
(I mean, I’ve already written a substack about it, so…)

I’ve even written a reading list for the rest of 2026.
20 books so far.
A real mix of non-fiction and fiction.
Longer novels and shorter novellas.
Books about creativity, technology, history.

You love books.
Granted, your Mummy and I are doing all the reading.
And you’re mainly interested in the flaps.
And pointing out people wearing hats.
But I genuinely hope you continue to love books.

I doubt it will come easy to you.
You’re almost certain to be dyslexic. (Sorry about that)
But I really hope you stick it out.
I’ll be sure to keep a list of required reading for you.

Love,
Dad

There’s a lot of noise floating around about AI taking everyone’s jobs.

Ok. Maybe not everyone’s.
And maybe not right away.

But the world of work will look very different when you enter it.

I’m not going to try to predict, or tell you what to study.
But definitely study something you’ll love.
I learnt how to design boats and have no regrets.

But here’s what I think will be hardest to replace.
The stuff that makes you valuable to an employer or your own customers.
The stuff that works alongside machines rather than competing with them.

Be weird

Van Gogh chopped his own ear off.
Einstein refused to wear socks.
Turing collected the serial numbers of street lights.

Whatever was going on there, it wasn’t normal.

AI looks for patterns.
Predicts what’s most likely to come next.
Averages what came before.

Ask it for something genuinely novel and it’ll give you a great remix.
But it would never come up with Bohemian Rhapsody or Shine On You Crazy Diamond.

The really interesting ideas sit right at the extremities.
Miles away from average. Without socks.

Weird, creative people are great at solving problems.
They’re great at deciphering what the real problem is before they start trying to solve it. They ask questions. Really good questions.
They’re glass half full and half empty simultaneously.
They know when to stop, and when to change direction.

So be creative.
Question everything.
Get good at solving tough problems.
Be weird.

Develop taste

You can create images, videos, music, apps, books with AI now.
But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Most of the content created is absolute trash.

Knowing the difference between good enough and actually good is rarer than you might think.
It’s what makes people seem stylish, cultured, worth listening to.

Taste comes from range.
Listening to blues and then thrash metal.
Reading Jilly Cooper then Charles Dickens.
Watching Emily in Paris then The Brutalist.
Listening to Farage’s take, then Corbyn’s.

Work out what you like, and why you like it.
Work out what influenced the stuff you like. You’ll probably like that too.

Work out what you don’t like.
Be able to articulate why you don’t like it.
Try it again in a year and see if you’ve changed your mind.

With taste you’ll be able to create things that stand out. Not slop.

Get good at making decisions
(especially when things are unclear)

Sam Altman (OpenAI Chief Vampire) is worried that people growing up with ChatGPT won’t be able to decide anything for themselves.
Everyone asks the machine.
The machine decides.
Agency is entirely lost.

Useless in uncertainty.
With ambiguity.
When you don’t have all of the data for the machine to make the right decision.

Being able to take a step forward when the data isn’t complete, or best practice doesn’t exist is extremely powerful.

You take a step.
You expect something to happen.
You know what to do whether it does or doesn’t.
Either way is progress.

Decision making is a muscle you need to keep flexing.
You train it by making decisions and learning from them, good and bad.

Your gut matters when the facts aren’t clear, but you need to move.

AI is great at giving you summaries of all the information available.
It can run models for you to consider.
But never let it decide for you.

Make the call. Stand by it.
Own up and learn from it if it goes wrong.

You’d be amazed how many people wait for someone else to tell them what to do.
Don’t be one of them.

Be someone that people call

Trust.
The one thing machines will always lack.
Mainly thanks to Terminator.

Humans will always want to do business with humans that they trust.
Yes, a lot of transactional stuff will happen agent to agent.
But the big stuff will start and finish with a handshake. Or a fist bump. Or possible an embarrassing TikTok dance.

Be the person people want to work with.
Honest. Direct. Does right by them. Loyal.

Be the friend someone calls when things fall apart.
The one who’ll laugh about it first, but can switch on the serious when a solution needs finding.

Be the friend someone calls in their darkest hour.

Trust is near impossible to replicate.
Earn it.
Respect it.
Be careful who you give it to.

You won’t get all of this right.
I didn’t. That’s fine.

Keep deciding.
Keep noticing what’s good.
Be decent to people.

Be human and and be kind and you’ll be bloody hard to replace with a machine.

Love,
Dad

At the start of 2026 I set myself a task to read more books and write more stuff.

How cliche.

I’m dyslexic.
So it takes me a while to read stuff.
I get letters and numbers jumbled up when I write them.

But I love stories. I love storytelling.

I tell stories every day at work - I’m told it’s one of my best skills.

Helping to articulate the pain.
The journey we’ll go on to solve it.
And the happy ending we’ll end up at.

While I’m quite good at this corporate storytelling, it’s pretty much the only storytelling I do.
So this resolution is my way of scratching a creative itch that I haven’t really allowed / pushed myself to scratch since getting a ‘B’ in English Literature at GCSE.

I’m fulfilling the writing part of my resolution here.
On substack.
In the form of letters to you.
Father to son.

The mistakes I’ve made. The stuff I wish I’d known about sooner.
Observations of what’s going on around us.
The stuff you’re going to grow up with - AI, social media, the creator economy. Trump, Elon, Vlad (I’ll probably steer clear of politics)

Maybe it ends up as a book, printed for your 18th. (Feel like a kn*b for writing that!)

I’ll probably shamelessly use it as a way of feeding my LinkedIn algorithm.
Showing how I work through things. What I’ve learned. What I’m still figuring out.

So here goes.

Will the resolution last the year?

Dad/Dan