We rarely frame our choices in terms of suffering. Yet behavioural psychology tells us that almost everything meaningful involves some kind of discomfort. Training for a marathon means early mornings, sore muscles and skipped social plans. Building a business means late nights, uncertainty and repeated rejection. Even developing emotional maturity means confronting your own blind spots and triggers. But avoiding those efforts is also a kind of suffering. The body you don’t train begins to ache in other ways. The business you never start becomes a constant “what if.” The unexamined patterns in your relationships harden into resentment and distance. In psychology this is called the “cost of inaction.” Our brains are wired to minimise pain in the short term, even when it compounds into greater pain over time.

A pattern I’ve noticed in successful people: they’re a little delusional about their abilities. They're irrationally optimistic about what they can work out. While everyone else lists reasons why something won’t work, they’re already trying it. Half the time they’re wrong, but the other half changes their life. Sensible, safe choices usually lead to predictable lives.

The tech landscape in 2025 is more complex than most leaders expected. Roles blur. Authority is under pressure. Innovation cycles shrink to weeks instead of months. ThoughtWorks calls this the age of “macro-trends”: old structures losing relevance, decision-making distributed and change outrunning governance. For capable professionals who feel stretched or stuck, the answer is not more tools. It is sharpening how you think and act under pressure. Four anchors help: Amplified leadership: Mid-level leaders are the nervous system of the organisation. Strengthen them and your reach multiplies. Disciplined clarity: In noisy environments, define what you own, what you influence and what you let go. This is the line between impact and exhaustion. Resilient adaptability: Resilience is pivoting and reconfiguring at speed. Systems built for iteration are what endure. Learning as currency: Harvard’s Global Leadership Development Study shows programmes are judged by how well they enable leaders to act in real time, under ambiguity, not by how elegant the theory sounds. Clarity beats completeness. Values anchor velocity. A few decisive moves outweigh a scatter of weak responses.

It is not instinctive to think that the state of our emotional health shapes the way we choose, engage with and sustain a career. Yet work is never only about income, title or progression. It is also an arena in which our self-esteem, identity and unresolved patterns are at play. Increasingly, younger generations in the workforce approach their employers as if they were extended families and their managers as enlightened parents. The company is expected to be not only a place of work, but also a primary source of purpose and affirmation, a container for professional and even emotional needs. While this reflects a welcome recognition that work affects the whole person, it risks placing an impossible burden on organisations and managers. An emotionally healthy person will not seek to repair through their job what belongs elsewhere. They do not look to a role, a team or a company to resolve personal insecurities, heal childhood wounds or validate their worth. These needs, left unmet, make us vulnerable to overwork, poor boundaries and unhelpful compromises.

Don’t distinguish between work and play. Do everything in the spirit of play. - Alan Watts We are trained to place work and play in separate compartments: one noble and gruelling, the other frivolous and fleeting. Instead of marching grimly through tasks in pursuit of a future reward, we could approach life as if it were something to be enjoyed in the moment, not endured until it ends. The spirit of play doesn’t trivialise effort; it brings lightness to difficulty, curiosity to repetition and creativity to constraint. It allows us to engage fully without being crushed by the weight of proving our worth. P.S. The man had his flaws (monogamy and restraint), I know, but philosophical clarity wasn't one of them.