Ep 60 The Question of Enough A Conversation with David Horne

Welcome to Remembering the Forgotten, a space where leaders think out loud without polish or performance. No scripts, no performance, just 2 people thinking out loud. These conversations aren't about delivering insight, but what happens when thinking unfolds in real time. Because there are moments Where you can feel that the answer is already there, but you can't quite reach it. And then something shifts, and suddenly it's simple. Not new, just clear. And that's this space. There's a moment in business where growth stops feeling like progress. where more no longer brings clarity, but weight. Today, I'm joined by David Horn. David has spent decades inside that territory, raising capital, leading acquisitions, structuring growth at scale. But this conversation isn't about what he's built. It's about what it takes to hold what's being built. Because at some point, the question changes. It's no longer, how do they grow? But rather, what am I stepping into as this grows through me? And with that, welcome to the show, David. Thank you, Markus. So before we begin, just notice what becomes clear when nothing is in the way. And with that, David, where can you just be yourself, untouched by expectation or performance?

Hmm. Oh, that's a good question. I can just— the place that comes immediately to mind, I grew up in Canada on the West Coast. Mm-hmm. I'm the youngest of 4 and my sister, who's the oldest of 4, she and her husband have a summer house on a lake that's 25 miles from the nearest town. Until recently, there was no internet, no mobile phones. They've now got internet, which is handy, but that's where I go and absolutely turn off the outside world and just be. And their house is on the side of a hill with forest around it, and then you go down a path, maybe 100 meters down a path, and then you walk onto a dock, and the dock goes out maybe 20 meters into the lake. And the sun comes up over the mountains on this side at about 8 o'clock in the morning, and it sets behind the mountains on this side at about 8 o'clock at night. And it gets up to 35 degrees— for your North American listeners, about 100 degrees. So it's hot. And when it gets really hot, You've got 2 choices. Do I jump in the lake to cool down, or do I get a cold beer? Or maybe I'll do both.

That's fascinating. So you can imagine, and you know me quite a bit, why is it that we have to go to almost become a recluse for a certain time? To just be ourselves, untouched by expectation or performance.

Yeah, I mean, I, I don't always manage it, but I do try to meditate every day. And to a degree, that's untouched, but thoughts of the world still enter. And, you know, you, you kind of let them float through you, and sometimes you get lost and you've missed half the meditation. But, you know, that's life. But I think

That's why many people give up, right?

Yeah, I think because you're putting yourself in a different environment and you're not subject to the intrusiveness of the media or of social media, and, you know, your, your phone's not sitting there going ping ping and notifications flashing up and And so really for me, yeah, when I go to my sister's place, we go there for 4 days, we go back every summer and we go there for 4 days and it's just bliss. It's just, you know, even when the weather's not nice and, you know, sometimes we go and it rains and that's life, but we'll still have fun up at the cabin and it's just, it's the ability to turn off the world. for 4 days. And like, I don't care what's going on in the world, I'm just— I'm here in this little slice of paradise for 4 days, and it's the most relaxing, refreshing, wonderful place to be. Um, and you know, we've been going there for years. My wife and I, when we were first dating, I think the first summer we went there was 1981, so we've been going there for 45 years.

That's your oasis, huh?

It is. It is. Yeah. And it's that ability to just turn off the outside world. And all of my clients know that when I'm like, when we're on holiday in Canada, if my clients need me, they can reach me. But they all know that for those 4 days, I am offline. I turn my phone off.

But let's stay here for a moment because I somehow feel that especially our generation, David, that we have developed in a direction which is not so conducive and which is not so healthy.

Mm-hmm.

So let's talk a little bit about what actually happened in your opinion and in your observation That it is so hard to, as you call it, shut out the world for a moment, not be affected or impacted by the world. That's A. And B, why don't we just take it as it is and acknowledge it? As normal. Because you know what's interesting? When people talk about meditation, right? Not in your case, but many people say, I need to travel somewhere for a meditation retreat. Why has meditation become something that's needed in order for us to connect with ourselves and not to be attached to what's going on in the world. Because you can tell this is something that really goes through my mind in the last couple of days. Because yeah, we find ways how to deal with something, but I'm actually getting to the point where I say, no, we should think whether what we don't want to deal with. is actually something that is actually normal. But we try to almost like move it out of the way instead of saying, no, let's actually face what's going on in the world and find ways how to deal with it without constant attachment.

Hmm.

And identification. I think that is the issue. Because it doesn't solve the problem if I go to Calcutta or if I go somewhere else to India in an ashram and I return. How long does it usually take? Not long.

Not long. A few days.

Right, exactly. It's crazy.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's the same thing when you go away on a, like, an executive leadership course or some management development course or some new particular, you know, in whatever field you happen to be in. your continuous professional development stuff and you come back and you're buzzing and it's all great. And like 3 days later, it's all forgotten and you've just reverted back to normal. Why do we do that? I think it's a number of factors. I think one of the problems— and my wife and both of our daughters are teachers. I— they don't agree with me 100%, but they know where I'm coming from when I say that in many parts of the world today, the normal education system that the majority of kids go through is designed to turn us into good factory workers. You know, the system was built 150 years ago for the Industrial Revolution, and here we go, and let's become good factory workers. And, you know, we learn how to read, and we learn how to write, we learn our arithmetic, and we learn how to say yes, sir, and no, sir. And, and then we get jobs in factories, and we're there for life. And then we retire, and then we die. And, and I think that does a, a huge disservice to the potential of humanity, because the vast majority of people don't work in factories anymore. And They need a wider skill set. And in particular, you know, things— I don't know how schools are addressing it now with AI, but, you know, learning AI skills. I mean, I saw a job advert recently. I wasn't looking for a job, but it just popped up somewhere. And it was for someone who was a prompt engineer.

Hmm.

You know, 3 years ago, nobody would have known what a prompt engineer is. And it was a very healthy 6-figure salary. I mean, we're talking like probably half a million dollars a year. And that is a skill set that is absolutely coming out of nowhere. And AI has the ability to change so much in our lives. And our good mutual friend, Daniel Priestley, says that AI is kind of like electricity was 100 years ago. You know, it's this incredibly powerful tool and nobody really knows the full extent of what we can get from it. But it is going to revolutionize the world. And some of the other people that I follow, one guy in particular, he talks about 10/80/10. He says, to get the most value, you want your first 10% to be human intelligence. Designing your prompt, designing whatever you're feeding into the AI. And then for 80%, let it do the heavy lifting. And then for the final 10%, you go back in and look at what it's come with and you fine-tune that and you tailor that and you position that. And so, I think, I mean, I'm coming slightly off course, but this is just a conversation between friends, so it's okay.

Exactly.

But, you know, it's a huge tool that has the ability to revolutionize the world that we live in. And I think it's really, really important that our education systems adapt, adapt quickly to be able to address that. I also feel, you know, I'm a finance guy and I feel the lack of financial education in most schooling systems scares me. And, you know, it leads to all sorts of problems where, you know, you get kids and they finish school and they're out shopping with their friends and they're in a store and someone comes up and says, oh well, here, get a store card. You know, you can buy more and pay it off at the end of the month and blah blah. And they don't, and they build up credit card debt and get into all sorts of nightmare scenarios. There's so much stimulus in the world these days, and I think that's why people go places. That's why I go to my sister's house on the lake. There is just so much stuff. I was reading a book recently, and the woman who wrote it said our brains take in something like 10 million pieces of information every second. Wow. Now, a lot of that is information about what's going on in our bodies, and we have no idea, but That's how the brain regulates the body. But, you know, someone just walked by on the pavement outside and the car came around there and there's a plane flying across the sky and there's the bee that's on my window. You know, all these little bits of information are coming in and our brains are trying to figure out, is this relevant information or not? And one of the things that I've studied, developed, learned on my kind of journey is the incredible power of the human brain, but also the radical selectivity because we're taking in all this information, but we only process whatever little bit of it is relevant. And like, there's a part of your brain is called the reticular activating system, and that's what drives your attention. And the story they often talk about is, let's say you've just bought a red car. Well, all of a sudden you notice red cars everywhere. You never looked at red cars before, but now you've got one and you're noticing them everywhere because your reticular activating system is saying, hey, I want to pay attention to red cars. Or when you're walking down the street and, you know, you're down on your phone and looking through stuff and you're walking along and it's a busy road and you're not actually looking up, but your brain senses, hang on, there's a person walking right at me. I've got to look up and walk around them. So, so the, the human brain is this incredible tool, but the world that we live in with media, with social media, with just everything that's going on, is designed to bombard our brains with so much more. And to me, that's why getting away and switching off is a necessary thing. Um, you'd have to be incredibly disciplined, you know, perhaps if you were a yogi or something like that You could, you could do that. But no, I, I think the modern society that we live in, particularly anybody who lives in a city, uh, there's just so much going on, so much stimulus, news feeds, you know, we've got wars going on and we've all this kind of stuff. And the, the media organizations are just bombarding us, you know, with all this stuff, and most of it's bad. So yeah, that's kind of my take on it.

Interesting. So you must have heard about that story. I'm not sure whether the guy was Canadian or American who said, I'm going to invest quite the sum of money into a media company which only produces positive news. And the company went bust.

Exactly. Exactly.

That company went bust.

Yeah, yeah, because people, people are so drawn to, you know, catastrophizing things. And, you know, and, and, and if people are feeling down and depressed, they go on to the news and they think, oh well, you know, those people have it worse, so maybe I'll feel a little better.

Crazy, isn't it?

It is. It's, it's nuts.

It's really crazy. Because, you know, if you think about when we're born, I think one thing actually changes when we grow up. We develop identity. Mm-hmm. And separation takes place. And I believe you know where I'm going, where I say, The more successful you become, and it's interesting enough with the most successful people I experienced that, the less what's happening is enough. And that's an interesting thing.

The less what's happening is enough. Can you elaborate on that?

So I'll give you 2 examples. One of them is you have the glass ceiling and you just can't break through it. You know, there must be more, right? And it kind of says in you, this can't be it. And then you have the other one who just sold his company. And, you know, you know those people well from your profession.

Mm-hmm.

And with his own shares sits now on half a billion, with a B, half a billion US dollars on his bank account and is calling my friend who is his advisor subbing because there's no purpose anymore.

Yes.

Right?

Yes.

So now think about that. A human being must get to a certain point in life where there is almost a gap occurring, where the actual humanness pushes slightly through and says, this can't be it. There must be more to life.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, what immediately jumped into my mind there was a quote from a religious text. And I'm not a religious person at all. I'm very spiritual, but I'm not religious. And I don't know if it's from the Bible or the Quran or what. But the text is, without vision, the people perish. And I've seen many entrepreneurs who have made a lot of money from selling their companies and they, you know, they buy yachts and they buy Ferraris and they sit on the beach and 6 months later, they are bored to tears.

Yeah.

Because they like the thrill of the chase. They like the opportunity. They like going in and seeing a gap in the market and figuring out how can I solve this and make something truly different that, you know, makes a dent in the universe. And I think, you know, when I look at my own life in the periods where I had down— I was on like a downward route because, you know, we all have our ups and downs in life. And on the periods where I was on a downward route, I was questioning my vision and where I was going and what I was doing. And in the last, probably the last 8 or 9 years since I actually, since I met Dan and did the KPI program, I've become really, really focused on, hey, this is who I am and this is what I do. And I'm just working to make my little corner of the world as good as possible, not just for me but for the people who are in my team, And, you know, we donate, we donate 1% of our revenue to charitable causes every year. And so, you know, giving back and all of that, but it's like, I can't control the bigger world. You know, if Donald Trump wants to go and bomb Iran, well, there's nothing I can do about it. So I don't get fussed about it. I still watch the news from time to time because the news sucks you in. But I don't stress about things like that, and I've learned to just focus on trying to manage the things that are in my sphere of influence and to concentrate on those things. And, you know, if there's problems there, then that's things I got to work out. And if it's going well, that's things that I enjoy. But I can't change the whole world. You know, I'm not going to solve global hunger. So I just do my best to work on my corner and do my little bit that gives back and to look after the people in my team and to look after my clients. And if I can do that and keep on enjoying what I do, then I'm really happy doing that. But it's really interesting because— so both my parents are gone now, but my wife's dad recently took a turn for the worse, and we had to fly out to Canada for an emergency visit, and then he stabilized. But apparently, my wife was just saying to me earlier today, he's looking at going downhill again. And just thinking, you know, it's that natural cycle of life. He's 91 years old. He's had a good life, but his body's kind of know, his mind is still very sharp, but his body is failing him. And he's said himself, you know, sometimes people live too long. And I think, you know, that whole concept of life and death is a huge rabbit hole that we could go down. But yeah, just, you know, the way— Coming back to the theme that we had, My father-in-law's situation has caused me to rethink my ambitions and what do I want to achieve over the rest of my working life and what do I want to achieve with my family. I've got 2 grandkids, they're 1 and a half and 3 and a half, and, you know, hopefully I'll have some more, but they're absolutely magnificent and I know that this time is so pivotal in their lives. And I don't want to spend all my time working. I love what I do. But, you know, one of those oft-quoted expressions is, you know, they interview people who are lying on their deathbeds and nobody said they wished they'd worked harder.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm starting to realize the importance of that. So we're talking just before the Easter weekend, and I'm taking all 4 days off work. Because we've got the whole family here. So

beautiful.

After this call, the laptop gets shut down and, and the Easter weekend and, you know, we'll do an Easter egg hunt with the little ones and eat too much chocolate and all that fun stuff.

That's amazing. So you literally got to that question yourself. Is this as good as it gets or is it

more? The actual question I started asking myself is how much is enough? Because, and it's really interesting, I work with a lot of very interesting and very driven entrepreneurs. And some of them are saying, well, I've got to have $50 million or $100 million or whatever now. And I'm thinking, okay, maybe you do. What are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with it? And oftentimes when I'm working with a client, particularly if we're looking at like selling a company, one of my questions is, what are you going to do when you're done? And if they respond and say, I'm going to go and sit on a beach somewhere, it's like, I don't want to work with them. I'm not interested in that. But if they say, you know, I want to give back, I want to, I want to build schools in Africa, I want to— whatever it is they want to do that's, that's giving back, that's sharing with the world, that's an incredible thing. And You know, one of my, one of my business heroes is Warren Buffett. And he, together with Bill Gates, came up with something about 10 years ago called the Giving Pledge. And they've been encouraging all of the billionaires in the world to give at least half of their wealth into this Giving Pledge that's going to give back to the world. Look at what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done with healthcare. You know, they've nearly wiped out malaria. They've made incredible advances in helping people in the developing world. And there is so much money that's out there that, you know, what are you going to do with $100 billion? You're never going to be able to spend it all. So, you know, do something good with it. And that's been a really, really interesting thing that's developed in me over the last Probably since my dad died. So that was 2012. So over the last 14 years. And, you know, because life is short. And for those of us who were— and let's be honest about it— for those of us who were lucky enough, we were lucky enough to be born into the right families at the right time in the right place, you know, and We've got it so much better than so many other people in the world. Well, what did they do wrong? You know, and and and I just feel it's incumbent upon all of us to obviously look after our families and look after you know those closest to us. But once that's done, you know, what are you going to do with the rest? Sit there and watch it. I was talking to one guy who advises. ultra-high net worth people. And he was saying to me, he had a client who's worth about $600 million. And every day, this guy wakes up worrying about how he— where he could lose his money. Every single day. He's got $600 million. Even if he lost half of it or 90% of it.

Why do you think that is? Because I can tell you, This is a development which absolutely becomes prevalent at the moment. Absolutely becomes prevalent. And let me share with you a story. When I was living back in Switzerland still, I had a dear friend, Richard Davis. He was from the United States, Minnesota, and he was a Protestant pastor in an international church. So that's how I met him. He sat me down one day in his office, David, and he said, Markus, you know, over there is the Gold Coast in Zurich. There is money.

Yep.

You'd manage to take the fear away of those people, they would give you the maturity of what they own. Yeah. I said, tell me more. It's interesting. He said, look, the problem is someone can have $1,000. And feel it represents their worth. The same person then goes to $100,000. It represents their worth. They go to a million, they go up to a billion, and it represents their worth.

Yeah.

So take $1 away. What happens? They're worthless. And that's the craziness.

Yeah, it's a measuring stick.

That is crazy.

Yeah.

So I believe it partially has to do with the school system. And at the same time, I believe what happens in society is this individualization process that is so propagated that I believe there is a system behind it somehow that does not want people to really look at where it really matters. Inside.

Hmm.

Inside. Because imagine this guy suddenly has half a billion dollars on his bank account. That's $500 million out of that one sale. Think about that.

Yeah.

And he's sobbing. So giving him a purpose, David, I don't believe is the solution because it's basically a replacement of something that sounds nice. But I believe we humans are looking for something else.

Well, it's interesting you say that because to me, a purpose is actually something that finds you. You don't find it, it finds you. And, you know, I do a lot of work with female founders and supporting them because there's a horrendous misalignment of the level of funding that goes to female founders. And this all came about from a talk that I was giving nearly 7 years ago about fundraising. And a woman came up and asked me why so little funding went to female founders. And I said, I don't know, but I'll go find out. And I was shocked by what I found out. And I've spent a lot of time, I've created a social enterprise, I've written a book about it. I've done a TEDx talk about it. It's an area of my, my being that I feel very passionately drawn to. And it's really interesting because I look at the 2 most influential women in my life, which was my mom and my wife, and I look at what they taught me about the world and life. And obviously with your mom, it's like, well, you're born, you grow up with them and all that. But growing up in the '60s and the '70s, my mom taught me to cook, my mom taught me to iron shirts, my mom taught me all these things that were women's jobs. And she just had none of it. She would hate it if I called her a feminist, She didn't believe in that, but she felt that it was right for little boys to learn the same school skills as little girls. And that was really, really an important element of my life. And then, you know, I met my wife when we were 17, and we've been married— it'll be 43 years this year. We've been together this year 46 years.

So basically high school sweethearts, huh?

Exactly. And, you know, I look at the impact that she's had on my life. I was always a very, you know, driven, thrusting, you know, out there driving, let's go. And my wife is an empath. My wife can walk into a room with 20 people in it, and she'll sense who's feeling pain. It's just, it's I don't get it, but she gets it. And I have learned from her to become— to be and behave in a much more empathetic and humble way than I used to. I'm not like, oh, you know, meek and humble and all that. I'm still very driven, but I've learned to pause that with a degree of empathy and humility that I didn't have before we met. And, you know, that's made me a much nicer human being. And just the impact of those two when I became aware of this issue— and fundraising is one of the things that I do— and then all of a sudden I realized there was this gross injustice in the world. And I just thought, with all of my skills and experiences, And this newfound information, it's like this found me. I didn't go looking for it. It found me. And I think for people who have been fortunate to have that, that's where the purpose really starts to take on meaning. And so, for instance, I said we give 1% of our revenue every year to charitable causes. Well, we always make sure it's charitable causes that are supporting girls or women. You know, through education or, or, or helping them with business. We do microloans for, for, for small businesses. We do loads of educational things. Again, because I'm a finance guy, one of the things we do is, is, is, you know, training women to become bookkeepers and, you know, giving them skills that they can then support themselves and their families. And that's given me just such a Coming back to our first conversation, such a calm, centered, grounded feeling that this is what I'm meant to be doing. And I know I want to spend more time with my family, but I don't want to give that up entirely.

So it's interesting. So basically, your vocation Led to your purpose.

Yes.

So it's almost like success and financial means weren't enough anymore. Something must have happened somehow that you became receptive for even entertaining What became your purpose.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I remember when I first came across it and I started to talk to some women I knew in business and I looked around at what was going on and I thought, let's just put on an event and see what happens. So we ran an event in November of 2019 at the London Stock Exchange. We had over 100 people show up. And we've since run not every year, but I think we've run five or six. I think we've run five events since that first one, or including that first one. We've got another one coming up in November of this year, and it's just become a bit of a yeah, a movement isn't the right thing because we're not we're you know a movement implies something that's huge, but but it's it's doing my bit in my little corner of the world to make the world a better place. That's what it feels like to me. Interesting. And I'm happy with that. And that's enough. That's one of the things that I'm sure of is enough. And although that activity on its own doesn't make me any money, when I look at my client pool of clients, I think about 80% of my clients 80% of my clients have at least one woman in the founding team.

Speaks the language, huh? Yeah. Interesting. When was success for you not enough anymore? Can you remember the time?

When was success not enough? I mean, I was, I was, I was, I was really I got lucky early in my career. So I trained as a chartered accountant with PwC, and I had studied, I had learned German at school and then at university. And when I qualified, I said to PwC that I wanted to work in a German-speaking office, and they sent me to Zurich.

A

nice office. Oh, beautiful. And a beautiful city, a wonderful place. And we have such happy memories. We lived there for 6 years. And I was 2 years with PwC. And then my largest client was the Swiss subsidiary of a big American tech company. And they gave me the proverbial job offer you can't refuse. And at the age of 27, I was the number 2 finance guy in a company that turned over $500 million. Turned over being the UK expression, had sales of $500 million. in Switzerland,

you

know, employed 2,500 people. And it was like, wow. And that was kind of a huge kind of boost. That was kind of the rocket fuel that started my career. And, you know, I crashed and burned and recovered and all of that, as we all do. But when has success not been You know, what was the question?

Basically, when did success stop being enough?

Well, and again, it comes— funny, it comes back to money because it's such a convenient measuring stick. And I've read a lot of books about money. I'm fascinated by money in terms of what it is and the history of it and all that. And one of the things that I read said that up to a certain point, money is a necessity because you need it to live and feed yourself and house yourself and clothe yourself and all of that. But then you reach a point where it becomes what they call— I think, I think they call it a hygiene factor, or maybe that's when it's a necessity. I can't remember the exact terminology, but it's like there's a point where all of a sudden the extra dollar or $10 or $1,000 or $1 million Doesn't really matter anymore. Okay, I can go out and buy a Ferrari. I can go out and buy a Lamborghini. I can, I can hire a private jet for the next time my wife and I fly back to visit family in Canada. But like, so what? Um, so, so there is— and I don't know what that point is. I don't know what that number is. For everybody, it's different. Um, and But yeah, there is a point where the monetary return alone isn't enough. And that's where you need more. And so, you know, one of the things I say is I love the work I do. I love the clients I work with. Sometimes they're a pain, but most of the time they're great. But hey, we're all human beings, so we're all a pain sometimes. And I just feel like to a large degree work isn't work. Work is, work is what I do and I make money from it and I really enjoy it. And I look at people who are, you know, stuck in big corporate roles and they're making tons of money and they hate their job and they hate their colleagues and they hate their boss, but they're making so much money that they just can't imagine not doing that. And I was that guy for a while, but I haven't been that guy for the last 16 years since I've been running my own company. And, and, you know, I've had some— I've had some pretty bad lows, but I've had some nice highs as well. But what I have is the freedom to choose, and I have the freedom to choose who I work with. I have the freedom to choose who are the members of my team. I don't have a boss, but my clients are my boss because if I don't keep my clients happy, then they're gonna leave. And the vast majority of them don't. I mean, I've got one client. It's a PR agency. I've been working with them since 2013. We sold them into a big group in 2024. They still come to me for advice. They still come to me and say, oh, this is happening, what should we do? Or, you know, how can we manage this? Or how can we do that? And it's those long-term relationships, you know. I mean, I've been the CFO of all of Dan's companies for 9 years now. So there's, you know, that— and that's a really important thing for me is that That long-term relationship. Sometimes you get involved with a client and it doesn't work out, and, you know, that's okay. It's no big deal. It's not like, you know, you or they are bad people. It's just it didn't work. But I've been blessed with a lot of clients where it works, and it works over an extended period of time. That's amazing. And that makes life a lot more stable.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm not constantly on the chase. Like, I know people who, you know, oh, I gotta win new, you know, I've got to win 20 new clients next quarter, you know. And fine, that's not my business and that's not my style, and it sits comfortably with me. You know, I love it when I win a new client, it's great, but I'm not, you know, constantly on the hunt.

All about relationships.

Yeah.

So you mentioned stable, stability. If someone feels overwhelmed right now, David, and it's easy to be and to do, right, to feel overwhelmed. And this is already the last question of our conversation. What would you want them to return to?

Well, as human beings, we're all designed to try and survive in the world that we live in. Our brain's primary function is to keep us alive. And this is another area I'm fascinated about. I've read lots of books around neuroscience and neuropsychology and neuroplasticity. and all of that stuff. And one of the really, really interesting things that I remember was, and this is fairly widely talked about, is that the conscious brain can handle plus or minus about 7 things at the same time. So we can have our conversation and I can be aware of the bee that's on the window and I can be aware of the traffic and the road, but I can't take in all of the 11 million things.

Right.

I can handle 7. And we get incredibly stressed when it goes beyond 7. And there was a study done. It was either from Harvard or MIT or one of those places. And they did a study over an extended period of time about super stressed out executives. And they analyzed all of their activities and what was going on. And for the vast majority of them, It was because they were having to deal with 8 or 9 things. It wasn't like there was 1,000 things. It wasn't even like there were 25 things, just 8 or 9 things. And our brains can handle 7. So, it's not like you've got to make a massive adjustment. You just need to figure out what can you let go of? What doesn't matter? And I come back to the whole media thing. You know, sure, there's a war going on in Iran. There's a war going on in the Ukraine. There's bad stuff happening in the world. Can you do anything about that? Stop watching the news. Stop, you know, stop doom scrolling on your phone. Let that go. That might be the thing that takes you from 8 down to 7, and all of a sudden your brain's able to deal with things. and you're less stressed. So it's all about letting go. And, you know, when I was younger, I was, as I said, I was a very thrusting young man. Let's drive forward. And as I've gotten older, I've realized, you know, that served me well when I was in my 20s and 30s. I'm in my 60s now. That doesn't serve me well anymore. And I've learned to let go. And I've learned to, you know, and sometimes I get caught up in stuff and it's hard to let go. But my advice to anyone who's really feeling overwhelmed is just take a moment, find a quiet place, go for a walk in nature. Going out and walking, you know, go for a walk in the woods, go for a walk by a river or by the sea. You know, being in nature surrounded by trees with water, it is incredibly calming. to the human mind and the human body and the human spirit. Just reconnect with nature. I know a guy who goes out every single morning of every single day in his bare feet and walks around on the lawn in his back garden. He does it for 5 minutes and then he goes back inside and he feels grounded for the rest of the day.

Thank you.

You know, this world that we live in has incredible benefits If we choose to use them. I knew a guy when I was growing up in Canada. He was in his 80s. He used to go for a swim in the ocean every single day, not in a wetsuit. So in the winter, it was bloody cold.

In

the summer, it was still cold, but it was warm when he got out. But every single day— and he would have been in his 80s— every single day, he went out and swam out to this particular point and then back. It was maybe 500 meters each way. Every day, the Earth. So that would be my advice.

And with that, David, thank you so much for this conversation.

My pleasure, Markus. I've really enjoyed it.

This was Remembering the Forgotten. As you move on, notice what may have been quietly remembered. There are moments where you can feel the answer is already there, but you can't quite reach it. And then something shifts, and suddenly it's simple. No force, no second-guessing, no internal negotiation. Just a clear sense of what's next and the capacity to move. If something shifted, let it stay. A few quiet pointers are waiting below.