On Finding Your Tenets
I’ve been reading Dan Koe lately. If you haven’t come across him, he writes about building a life around ideas, writing, creating, thinking for a living. One concept of his caught me off guard: the idea that articulate people aren’t pulling insights out of thin air. They have maybe 8-10 “greatest hits” that they’ve refined through repetition, ideas they can connect to almost any topic because they’ve thought through them hundreds of times.
The uncomfortable part? I realised I’d never actually done this excavation on myself.
I’ve been writing this “On…” series for about a year now. Posts about change, imposter syndrome, legacy, long-term thinking. But if you’d asked me last week “what are your core ideas?”, the ones I keep coming back to, the ones that anchor how I see things, I would have fumbled. I’d have gestured vaguely at themes. I wouldn’t have been able to say it cleanly.
Which is a problem, because you can’t deploy your best thinking if you don’t actually know what it is.
The Problem With Not Knowing Your Stories
Dan talks about the podcast problem: you get asked a question and instead of saying the thing you’ve already refined, you try to invent something new on the spot. You want to sound fresh, not repetitive. So you fumble toward something half-formed when you could have said the thing that already works.
I don’t do podcasts (imposter syndrome is a hell of a thing!). My version is conversations. Someone asks about career decisions or navigating uncertainty or building something new, and I know I’ve written about this. I know I have a perspective. But in the moment, I can’t quite articulate it cleanly. I circle around the point instead of landing on it.
The difference between having ideas and being able to deploy them is the difference between a drawer full of tools and actually knowing which one to reach for.
So I did the exercise. I laid out the “On…” posts and looked for patterns.
The Excavation
Here’s what I noticed: the same handful of themes kept surfacing in different costumes.
The AWS mantra—everything changes all the time—and how the real question is which changes to resist, which to ride, and which to initiate yourself. The adjacent possible, positioning yourself to adapt rather than trying to predict what’s coming. Trade-offs aren’t static: what’s right at 30 might be wrong at 40, the answer changes as conditions change.
Different posts. Same underlying point.
Then there’s imposter syndrome. The 2008 stage freeze that cost me years of career progress. But the reframe—that doubt kept me learning while others calcified into certainty—that shows up everywhere. The Dunning-Kruger observation: the person who just learned about AI yesterday is the most confident in the room. The “yes, and…” conclusion, holding multiple perspectives because certainty is usually wrong. And legacy. The colleague I helped see his situation more clearly. The knowledge that might still be passing through an organisation even though my name isn’t attached to it. The shift to work where people will never know my name—and that being the point.
These aren’t separate ideas living in separate posts. They’re the same ideas, refined through repetition, showing up wherever they’re relevant.
What Emerged: Three Tenets
Dan calls these “greatest hits”, the ideas you can connect to any conversation. But that framing feels like content, something you perform. What I was actually looking for was something closer to tenets: the underlying beliefs that shape how you see things, whether you’re writing or not. The stuff that’s true for you even when no one’s listening.
When I stepped back, three things crystallised:
Stay Curious. Doubt isn’t a bug, it’s the signal that keeps you learning. The moment you think you’ve arrived, you’ve started falling behind. The imposter syndrome that felt like weakness? It was the thing keeping me humble while others got stuck in certainty. Curiosity is the antidote to calcification.
Adapt. The world changes faster than you can predict. So stop predicting. The adjacent possible isn’t about seeing the future, it’s about positioning yourself to navigate whatever future arrives. The AWS jump wasn’t foresight; it was recognising that staying-put guaranteed obsolescence. The virtualization mistake was the cost of not adapting. Strong opinions, loosely held, or you get left behind.
Give Forward. Legacy isn’t what you leave behind in systems or artifacts. It’s what you pass through people, knowledge that compounds because someone else carries it forward. The Geneva colleague. The team I helped build that doesn’t need me anymore.
The sequence matters. Curiosity enables adaptation, you see the adjacent possible because you’re still looking. Adaptation generates learning, you accumulate experience by moving through change, not avoiding it. Giving forward is what you do with what you’ve learned, it’s the legacy that compounds.
Stay Curious. Adapt. Give Forward.
The Synthesis
If someone asked me now what I’d want to be known for, I have an answer. Or at least a starting point:
“The goal isn’t to predict the future, it’s to stay curious so you can adapt when it arrives, and help others do the same.”
This isn’t a manifesto. I’m not putting it on a motivational poster (yet 😉). It’s a lens. A way to check whether what I’m writing or saying connects to something I actually believe. A filter for which opportunities to pursue and which to pass on.
And crucially, it’s a starting point for conversations. Dan’s point about the podcast problem applies here: when someone asks about navigating uncertainty or career decisions or building something new, I don’t have to invent something on the spot anymore. I have the anchor. I have the stories. I just have to connect them to whatever we’re actually talking about.
The Meta-Observation
Here’s the thing though: I didn’t invent these tenets through this exercise. I discovered I’d already been writing them.
The blog posts weren’t building toward a framework. The framework was already there, just unnamed. It was living in the patterns between posts, in the stories that kept reappearing, in the conclusions I kept reaching from different starting points.
Dan’s point about repetition, that the most important ideas deserve to be repeated, and how else are you going to refine them?, lands differently now. I’ve been repeating myself for a year. Same themes, different angles. Same stories, different contexts.
That’s not a problem. That’s the work.
The articulate people I’ve admired, the ones who can connect deep ideas to any conversation, they’re not pulling from an infinite well of novel insights. They’re drawing from a refined pool of ideas they’ve thought through so many times that deploying them is instinctive. The repetition is the refinement.
Holding It Loosely
Of course, this will probably change.
The tenets might shift as I learn more, experience more, get things wrong in new ways. The anchor stories might get replaced by better ones. Even the language might evolve. “Stay Curious, Adapt, Give Forward” feels right today. In two years, I might wince at it.
That’s fine. Even the framework for understanding yourself is subject to everything changes all the time.
But having named it, I can use it. I can check new writing against it. I can reach for it in conversations instead of fumbling. I can notice when I’m drifting from it and ask whether that’s growth or distraction.
And I can hold it loosely enough to update it when I’m wrong.
Which, if I’m being consistent, is exactly what staying curious requires.