Thrilled to announce: nobody’s ahead of you!

Everyone on LinkedIn seems to be ahead of you.

Not by a little. By a lot. They’re scaling, pivoting, launching, and leading. Someone just “stepped down to pursue something bigger” (we all know what that means, and we’re all pretending we don’t). Someone ran a marathon and somehow made it about leadership. Someone is “humbled and grateful” to announce something that is, objectively, quite braggy.

You know it’s curated. You know it’s the highlight reel. You know this, and it still works on you anyway, which is perhaps the most annoying thing about it. This is the peculiar anxiety of professional life in 2026: you are, objectively, doing fine. And yet the ambient noise of everyone else’s momentum makes “fine” feel like falling behind.

So, a newsletter. Really?

Yes. We’re aware of the irony.

Here’s the honest version of why this exists: we think there’s a conversation worth having about work that isn’t happening loudly enough. It usually goes two ways:

The relentlessly optimistic Mary Poppins version: everything is an opportunity, every challenge is a growth moment, here are seven things high-performing teams do before 8am. It’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just not the whole picture.

The contrarian version: everything is broken, nobody knows anything, remote work either saved us or destroyed us depending on which newsletter you read last week.

The reality sits somewhere in the middle. It’s messier, more interesting, and almost never gets written about honestly. The version where things are genuinely hard sometimes. Where careers are non-linear. Where being in the middle of something – uncertain, unresolved, still figuring it out – is not a phase you’re trying to exit. That’s the gap this tries to fill.

‘Work in progress’ as a philosophy

Being unfinished is not a failure state. It’s the only state.

Careers aren’t built on a straight line from A to B. They’re built on a series of decisions that made sense at the time, some of which aged well and some of which you try not to think about at 2 a.m. Organisations aren’t machines that run correctly once you find the right settings. They’re living, shifting, occasionally chaotic collections of people trying to do something together, and the moment you think you’ve cracked the formula is usually the moment something changes.

Work in progress isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s just… the description. Of all of it.

And once you stop treating it as a failure, something useful happens. You start paying attention to the process instead of just the outcome. You get better at sitting with uncertainty. You get better at changing your mind. You get better at doing the thing, instead of performing having already done it.

The problem was never that you’re a work in progress. The problem is that the feed has been carefully edited to remove all evidence that everyone else is too. 

If your career feels messy right now, non-linear, slower than you’d like, full of questions you haven’t answered yet – that’s not a sign that you’re behind. That’s just what it looks like from the inside. As for this newsletter, it’s an attempt to write about work the way it actually feels. Whether it works is, fittingly, still a work in progress.