Less Comfort, More Architecture

Week of 6 July 2026, Veneto and the Dolomites

There is a move on one of the steep problems at Kryptonite I couldn’t touch six weeks ago. The shoulder simply wouldn’t load it. This week I pulled through it, twice, and though it still protests in a couple of positions, something has changed. I closed the month well on the wall for the second time running. It isn’t much, and not everyone even bothers to log their sessions, but I log mine, because right now it is the clearest signal I have that the recovery is real. Not painless. Real. The pain is still there on some moves, and around it I’m starting to try harder grades again. Keep going.

Five real objectives beat twelve hopeful ones. The redpoint I want is a 2027 line. Q3 is base volume, the low and wide work that comes first. Confidence is built low and wide long before it shows up high on a route, and there is no shortcut through that. You lay the foundation where nobody is watching, and later it carries you when everyone is. This is what I mean, in my own small way, by Growth Through Discomfort. It reads the same whether the wall is rock or a quarter of work.

I haven’t written here since 29 June. Not for lack of material, the opposite. These have been weeks of real traction between the UK and Italy, clients moving from interest to commitment, and the writing kept losing to the doing. Last week the Monday Momentum alone ate more time than it should have, partly because I was finishing a restyle of the site now that it’s drawing more readers and needed a more logical structure, partly because a white paper, a manifesto, and a couple of submissions all wanted closing at once. On top of that: getting a talented new colleague properly started, and restarting physio in earnest so I can hold my level through the meetings ahead. If you read back through the recent notes you’ll find the content is a lot, and scattered, but there is one thread running under all of it. Understand, learn, help, grow, share.

The week itself started on rock. Sunday in Piani dei Resinelli, on the historic Corno del Nibbio, with my friend M. I was too tired and short of sleep to climb anything like properly, but I came away with an objective, which is sometimes the whole point of a day out: a clean 40m pitch made by linking two together. You rarely leave the mountains empty-handed if you’re paying attention.

From there the week turned into a series of rooms. A very early start to reach the Aula Magna at Il Bo in Padua, that extraordinary lecture hall, full of people from across Veneto’s timber value chain who actually want to change something. I was there to contribute and to advise, and more than that to help build value that stays in the local territory and its community rather than leaking out of it. From that room into a gathering of periti industriali, one of the large regional professional associations. Then an entrepreneur from the creative digital art world telling the story of a career built across continents. And finally, across a table from a national park director, trying to seed something genuinely new for one of the pre-seed companies I back, with both money and sweat equity on the line. Alongside all of it, a book club of fifteen people from very different worlds, wrestling with governance, power, and who gets a seat at the table. And underneath, the slower work of helping the crew get the local fab labs running better, so the incubator has somewhere real to take root.

The sweat equity is not incidental. I could advise from the outside and send an invoice. I would rather be inside the thing, carrying some of the risk. That is what Embedding Over Advising has always meant to me, and it is why I keep choosing Partnerships Over Transactions even when the transaction would be the cleaner deal.

Four rooms. Four very different audiences. And what struck me, again, is how differently you have to show up for each.

Students want permission to ask the naive question. Italian academia has its own protocols, its own language and rituals, a long way from the industries I usually work in. Engineers and periti want the rigour and the edge cases before they’ll trust a word you say. A park director, guarding land that will outlast every company I’ll ever touch, wants to know you understand time horizons longer than a funding round. And a room of board-level peers, sharp and generous and occasionally merciless with one another, wants to be challenged, not presented to. The feedback was generous and I’m grateful for the audiences I had. I could have done better. I had too much on my plate, and at least one session ran on very little sleep and worse English than usual.

Same week, same person at the front of the room, and yet the seniority, the demographics, the languages, the class backgrounds, the nationalities all shift from one door to the next. Motivating a twenty-two-year-old engineering student and motivating a director with thirty years of institutional weight behind her are not the same act. What has to stay identical is the honesty. That is the part I care about most, and it is close to what I mean by Presence Over Performance. You can adapt the register endlessly, but the moment the person underneath starts performing, everyone in the room can smell it.

The book club deserves more than a passing mention. Fifteen of us spent an evening inside Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, using the OpenAI board crisis as a live governance case, then pulling it forward into a UK one, the NHS’s Federated Data Platform contract, and a jurisdictional question closer to home. What stayed with me was how often ego turned out to be the real driver. Not in the book, in the room, as people traced the pattern back to things they had lived through themselves. In hindsight we ranged too wide. Governance, capital structure, jurisdiction, AI export controls, each deserved its own evening, and I compressed them into one. The scores came back strong, mostly 9s and 10s, but the single 8 is sitting with me more than the rest. My read is that Empire of AI leans hard into the E and the S of ESG, while I kept this session almost entirely on the G. That was a design choice, not an oversight, but it is a gap worth naming, and reason enough to run a follow-up that goes straight at Environment and Social, maybe paired with Ed Conway’s Material World. Facilitating this one sharpened my own thinking more than I expected, and I want to keep pulling the thread.

The quality of the people in that room was extraordinary, and we agreed on the thing that matters. We need to educate, and to build the holding structures and models that make shared value possible. Less comfort, more architecture.

Outside the rooms, the outdoor life stayed close to home. On the Fab Rides and the runs we kept it local and, if I’m honest, did relatively little, beaten back by the heat more than once. A short break in the mountains to recharge is coming, and I need it.

That is roughly where the Monday intentions came from, the ones I’ve started writing each morning. To lean far less on AI, and to be transparent when I do use it. To keep my own critical judgement in everything. To learn constantly and across everything. To write the intentions down at all. And to stay close to the people I love. By the end of the day the cave should be in better shape than I found it, and I should have spent real time with Elisa and Michela. Presence Over Performance again, only this time at home, where it counts most and is easiest to fake.

We are closing Q2 now, and I owe myself a proper summary of it. But the conclusion I keep landing on does not need a spreadsheet. This variety, this constant translation across worlds, is not a distraction from the work. It is the work. I love it precisely because it refuses to let me get comfortable in a single register, which is the whole point of choosing Adventure Over Comfort in the first place.

More to come.