g’day,
there’s was moment in my early 30s that shook me hard:
i hit my output ceiling.
the “do everything myself” model stopped scaling.
those days were painful, man.
for years i thought the answer was to add more skills: coding, writing, designing.
level up xp and become the strongest pokemon.
but there’s a hard truth that eluded me in my 20s:
you don’t scale. people do.
instead of trying to be charizard, i should be trying to become the pokemon trainer.
be responsible for a team.
because that’s the only way you can build much bigger things.
the fantasy is you can stay in your zone, never manage, never deal with messy humans, and still build something massive.
sam altman thinks solo founders will soon build billion dollar companies. ai may make that possible.
but either way, i now believe managing humans well is a non-negotiable life skill.
what i didn’t understand:
in small team environments, i believed it was easy to influence the success of a team by being a useful connector.
or being the best at doing work.
but the most important shift comes from owning reporting lines.
being the responsible person.
in good times and in bad.
the person whose standard becomes the standard.
a painful learning curve.
once i realised this, i was still a long way from being a good manager.
i swung between two bad archetypes:
too soft and too hard.
too hard was reactive, brutal feedback sessions that sometimes led to tears, and unrealistic perfectionism.
then i would get a bad response from my team, and swing back too soft:
avoiding friction. gifting autonomy. letting quality slide because i didn’t want to upset someone.
eventually i realised both extremes had the same root cause:
i hadn’t hired well.
with the wrong people, every decision becomes the same ugly choice:
conflict or mediocrity.
so you must hire your own team.
not on skill. on values and attitude.
you don’t need “diversity of thought” early in a company.
you need shared goals, shared standards, and people ready to learn.
the final unlock.
the capstone for me was emotional regulation.
slowing feedback down. letting things sit. replying to messages calmly instead of reactively.
therapy helped.
having a kid helped even more.
that pain has made my 30s much easier.
so until ai says otherwise, remember:
your ability to manage people determines the size of the things you can build.
charlie
ps – i’m hoping to push even harder on content next year, so i’m curious: what topics do you want to see covered on the newsletter or youtube channel in 2026?
hit reply and let me have it.
