Hey :) 

Gavin Bell asked me this question recently, and the honest answer is: it depends on when you ask me.

If I answer this question well today, I should have a different answer in a year — because doing your best work isn't a destination you arrive at. It's a direction you keep moving in. The best work you're doing right now should be surpassed by the best work you'll do next year, and the year after that. It's an upward spiral.

That said, here's where I am right now.

This is the umbrella everything else sits under.

I'm in business with three other people, and I think that's the single biggest lever I've pulled in terms of doing my best work. Not because having partners is automatically better — you can absolutely get into business with the wrong people and have it go badly wrong — but because, done well, partnership gives you something that solo entrepreneurship never can.

It gives you permission to go deep.

Richard Koch talks about the "multi-head entrepreneur" — a founding team where everyone brings a distinct strength, a complementary skill set, and a genuine stake in the outcome. The idea is simple: instead of trying to be good at everything, each person gets to focus on the thing they're actually great at.

For me, that means I'm not trying to close deals and deliver client work and build systems and run operations all at the same time. I have people alongside me who are excellent at the things I'm not. And because of that, I get to spend more of my time on the small set of things only I can do.

That's the upside of partnership when it's working well: you get to do more of what you're good at, not less.

One thing worth saying — it's not without its challenges. You need to be a real collaborator. Ideas stop being yours the moment they enter the business. You won't always be in every decision. You have to trust. And you have to be relentlessly honest with yourself about what your actual contribution is, rather than what you'd like it to be.

But the trade-off is worth it. At least for me, it's been worth it.

Partnership only works if you've done the hard thinking about your own role inside it.

One of the exercises that hit me hardest recently was working through what Richard Koch calls your 20% spike — the small number of things you do that are genuinely excellent, genuinely natural to you, and genuinely hard for others to replicate. It's not a to-do list. It's not your job title. It's an honest answer to: where do I create disproportionate value?

When I did this properly, something shifted. I stopped second-guessing whether I should be doing more of what other people were doing. I stopped looking sideways. I got quiet in a way I hadn't expected.

I know what I'm here to do in this business. That clarity is not nothing. It's actually quite a lot.

If you're a knowledge worker or an owner, this is probably the most important question you can sit with: What's the work only I can do? And am I actually doing it?

The word gets used carelessly, so let me be specific about what I mean.

Strategy isn't a list of goals. It's not a mission statement. It's not a vision board or a set of OKRs.

Strategy is a response to a problem.

The move I keep coming back to is this: start with the constraint. What's the biggest thing holding this business back right now? Agree on it. Then make a plan to solve it. That's strategy. Everything else is tactics pretending to be strategy.

What I've noticed is that when I'm clear on the real problem — not the surface-level symptom, but the actual constraint — the work becomes obvious. There's no confusion about what to say yes to. No anxiety about what everyone else is doing. Just clarity about what needs to happen next and why.

That clarity is deeply motivating. It turns out most procrastination isn't laziness — it's ambiguity. When you know what needs to be done and why it matters, the resistance drops.

My head is future-based. That's not a preference — it's closer to a wiring issue.

I'm not particularly motivated by what happened last quarter. I'm barely engaged by what's happening today. What energises me is the business we're building, the value it will have, and the work that needs to happen now to make that version real.

Everything I say yes to, I run through this filter: Does this help build the future of the business, or is it just keeping today running?

I'm not suggesting the day-to-day doesn't matter — it matters enormously, and I have partners who care deeply about it. But for me, the highest-leverage contribution I can make is working on the things that won't pay off this month but will compound into something real over three to five years.

When your work is genuinely anchored to a future state you care about, it stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like momentum.

This one is unglamorous but probably the most important practical skill I've built.

Most people are good at starting. Starting is exciting — there's novelty, possibility, zero commitment. Finishing is different. Finishing is where the novelty runs out and conviction has to take over.

I've pushed back hard on the idea that "I'm just a starter, not a finisher" is a personality type. I don't think that's true. I think finishing is a skill, and like any skill, you can build it.

The thing that most reliably makes you finish is knowing why something matters. When the work is tethered to a real strategy — when you understand what problem it solves and why solving it matters — the stakes feel real. That's what carries you through the last 10%, which is where almost everyone gives up.

There's a line from Elizabeth Gilbert I come back to: you're not allowed to start something new unless you have a history of finishing something.

I've felt the compounding effect of this. When you become the kind of person who ships things, it changes how you see yourself. You start trusting yourself to follow through, which makes it easier to follow through, which builds more trust. It spirals upward. And the business only captures value from finished work — not from the ideas that are 80% done and sitting in a folder.

I've learned — partly from watching myself and partly from watching the people I work with — that the conditions for good work are real and they matter. I know how I do my best thinking. I know I need space in my day — not packed calendars, not artificial urgency, not a stack of half-important things all competing for attention at once.

I've also learned something uncomfortable: when I'm overloaded, micromanaged, or disconnected from the why of what I'm doing, the quality of my work drops. Not gradually — quite sharply. And the inverse is also true: when the conditions are right, I can do in two hours what would take someone else (or a worse version of me) all day.

This has made me much more deliberate about protecting deep work time. It's made me more thoughtful about what I say yes to. And it's made me a better collaborator, because I've had to extend the same patience to other people that I want for myself.

Good work needs room to happen. That's not an excuse. It's just true.

If I had to distil all of this, I'd say it comes down to one thing: clarity.

Clarity about who you're building with. Clarity about what your actual contribution is. Clarity about the real problem you're solving. Clarity about where you're headed and why. Clarity about what's done and what still needs to be finished.

Most of what gets in the way of doing your best work is some form of ambiguity. And most of what unlocks it is the willingness to do the hard thinking that creates clarity — even when it's uncomfortable, even when it slows you down in the short term.

That's where the work is.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.