It's 10:15pm. The girls have been asleep for three hours & the house is quiet in that way only a house with small children asleep in it can be.
I'm scrolling through the news.
Iran. Fuel prices. Someone furious about something on LinkedIn. A founder I vaguely know announcing a round. Markets down… then markets up. A headline about “Attempted murder arrests made”. Another headline about AI taking over 200 jobs off the payroll.
I put the phone down, I pick it up again, I put it down.
Upstairs, two baby girls are sleeping in the same room they've shared since the day we brought them home. They don't know about the war in Iran. They don't know what a mortgage rate is. They don't know that the man who helped to sell their dad's company is probably up at 1am too, scrolling the same feed, feeling the same low hum of something is wrong and I should do something about it.
And here's the thing I keep coming back to: The world isn't going to get calmer. Not in their lifetime. Definitely not in mine. The defining feature of the next few decades is going to be volatility; political, economic, technological, climatic. Pick your flavour. The noise is the baseline now… it's not a phase we're passing through.
Which means the question isn't how do I wait for things to settle down so I can think clearly.
The question is: how do I become someone who thinks clearly when things don't settle down.
For a long time I thought staying calm was a wellness thing. Something you did on a Sunday with a journal and a candle. A counterweight to the real work, which was being switched on, in the fight, reactive, fast.
But over time I’ve realised I had that backwards.
Calm isn't the counterweight to the work. Calm is the work.
The leaders I know who've compounded real wealth over the last decade aren't the ones who reacted fastest to every headline. They're the ones who kept executing through the noise. Think Brexit, Covid, the 2022 ad market collapse, the AI panic of the last 2 years, and whatever this current thing is going to be called in the history books.
They weren't unaffected & I’m definitely not saying to be ignorant. They just weren't activated by every input.
The activated leader opens X, sees something alarming, feels the chemical hit of urgency, and reshuffles their week & opinions around it. The calm leader sees the same thing, notes it, and goes back to the thing they were doing because the thing they were doing was already the right thing to be doing, and a headline doesn't change that.
Panic feels like productivity. It isn't. It's just motion.
The reason this matters more to me now than it did two years ago is upstairs, asleep.
I'm not raising my daughters to be unaffected by the world, I want them to care. I want them to notice when something's wrong. I want them to have opinions, and defend them, and change them when they should.
But I don't want them to live reactively. I don't want them scrolling at 10:15pm in twenty years' time, feeling a low-grade dread, letting it reshape their mood for a Tuesday that could have been a good Tuesday.
The only way they learn that is if they watch someone do it.
Which means the job, the actual job, more important than NOVOS, more important than this newsletter, more important than any of it, is to be the person in the house who doesn't flinch at every input. Who reads the news and puts the phone down. Who says that's bad, and also, here's what we're having for dinner.
That's not avoidance, that's modelling.
The takeaway:
Calm isn't soft. In a world getting louder, it's the rarest commercial asset you can own and the rarest thing you can give the people who are watching you.
The leaders who win the next decade won't be the fastest to react. They'll be the ones who kept executing while everyone else was refreshing the feed.
And the children who grow up steady in a volatile world will be the ones who watched an adult, somewhere, refuse to be moved by noise they couldn't control.
I closed the app & then I went to bed. The news will still be there in the morning & well, so will I.
See you next week.
— Antonio.