I Don't Like Making Mistakes. And I'm Not Sorry About It.

Let me say something that apparently nobody in business is supposed to admit anymore.

I don't like making mistakes.

There. I said it. And I'm not going to dress it up as a learning opportunity, a growth moment, or a chance to fail forward. Because that kind of language, as comforting as it sounds, is mostly nonsense and deep down, you probably already know that.

The people telling you this weren't spending their own money

"Move fast and break things." Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook on that motto and plastered it on the walls of every office. It became the battle cry of Silicon Valley and every startup culture that followed. The message was simple: if you're not breaking things, you're not moving fast enough.

Here's the punchline. By 2014, Zuckerberg himself had quietly dropped it. Replaced it with "move fast with stable infrastructure." Even he figured out it didn't work.

But before we get to that, let's talk about who this philosophy was actually designed for. Because it wasn't designed for you.

Venture capital operates on a simple model. Make a hundred bets. Accept that most of them fail. Wait for the one or two that pay off big enough to cover everything else. The losses are built into the spreadsheet. The money at risk isn't the founder's. The person absorbing the downside is an investor sitting in a fund somewhere, who has spread that risk across a portfolio.

That is not your life. That is not my life. We’re not investing in a portfolio.

When it's your money, your time, your name, your years, the calculation is completely different. You've paid the tax. Not just the financial tax, though that's real enough. The tax of effort, of focus, of emotional investment, of the version of yourself you put into building something. Nobody is covering your losses. Nobody is writing that off against a portfolio.

Think about the last time you paid for something significant in cash outright, in one go. Not a tap of a card, not by monthly payments to a finance company that actually owns the thing until the very last payment clears, if it ever does. I'm a petrol head, so cars are the obvious example for me, and I buy houses the same way.

I'm not suggesting everyone should or can, and a sensible mortgage or loan on an appreciating asset is a completely different conversation. But there is a growing culture of people performing entrepreneurial “cosplay”; the car, the house and the whole lifestyle, often in Dubai, that’s almost entirely financed, not owned. It's borrowed confidence as much as borrowed money.

The psychology of genuine ownership is completely different to that. The weight of it is real. And that's what it feels like to run a business with your own money every single day. Every decision carries that weight. Which is exactly why the casual attitude to mistakes that works in a venture-funded world makes no sense in ours.

So when someone tells you to move fast and break things, ask them one simple question: whose things?

"It's all learning." No. Stop.

Yes, mistakes happen. Yes, when they do, you should extract every lesson you can from them. I'm not arguing for paralysis.

What I'm arguing against is using "it's all learning" as cover for laziness. For not thinking hard enough before you commit. For not doing the work, the preparation, the due diligence that the situation deserved. Too many people use that mantra to let themselves off the hook for something much simpler: they just didn't do the job properly.

And here's the part that nobody writes about, because most people writing about mistakes are, at best, writing about their own or a third party’s. They're not writing about what happens when you're on the hook for someone else's.

I spent nearly two years on a major media project. Financially committed. Emotionally invested. Contracts in place. Letters of intent signed. A venture capital organisation based in Luxembourg on the other side of the table. We built everything out. And then, long story short, the money didn't come. The VC walked away.

There is virtually nothing that feels as bad as somebody else spending and wasting your money, and then you having to choose between walking away having taken the full loss, or bailing it out. And bailing it out isn't just financial. It means getting more deeply involved to fix problems you didn't create, spending resources you hadn't planned to spend, on top of everything you've already lost.

That's what "it's just a learning experience" looks like from the inside.

Speed without preparation is just recklessness with optimism

Here's what I want to be clear about, because I can already hear the objection forming. This isn't about being slow. It isn't about being timid. It isn't about sitting on the sidelines while braver people take the risks.

Let me use a hobby of mine as an example. Think about motor racing, as a driver, not just a spectator. The best drivers in the world are not the ones who throw the car at the track from lap one and hope for the best, it’s not a computer game, so if you crash, there are real-world consequences. They build up. They learn the circuit. They test. They develop the confidence and the feel for what the car can do before they start pushing the limits. They earn the right to go faster. And when they do push, they push harder and more effectively than anyone who went in reckless from the start.

That's my philosophy, not just on the race track, but in business, too. I dial up, I don't dial back. I build speed deliberately, with confidence, because I've done the preparation, I look at the data, I work with engineers and driver coaches. I'm not standing at the side of the track watching. I'm on the track.

Here’s another way to think about it. There's an old saying. The attribution is disputed, but the truth isn't, that if you have five minutes to chop down a tree, you should spend three of them sharpening the axe. Preparation isn't the enemy of progress. It's what makes decisive action possible when the moment arrives, because you've done the thinking before the pressure comes rather than during it.

I didn't retreat. I built.

After Luxembourg, I didn't retreat. I built.

I developed eight principles I now apply to every business I look at. The non-negotiables that separate ventures worth committing to from ones that will drain you.

And I built what people around me started calling my "75 Hard for Business." A framework, or as I say, operating system, of personality traits and professional behaviours that I require from anyone I invest in, partner with, or work alongside.

Because here's what experience actually teaches you, if you're paying attention: passion is cheap. Everyone's got passion. What's rare is resilience under pressure. Professionalism when things get difficult. The ability to do what you said you'd do, when you said you'd do it, without someone chasing you.

That operating system was born directly out of avoiding mistakes. Out of looking honestly at what went wrong, what was missing in the people involved, and what I needed to demand, from others and from myself, to make sure it didn't happen again.

I hold myself to it first, as a minimum, before I ask it of anyone else.

What you truly own never keeps you up at night

Has this made me better? Yes. Sharper? Yes. More protected? Absolutely.

Has it cost me something? Also yes. And I'll be straight with you about that too.

Do I hit the ultimate highs? Maybe not. There are projects I've walked away from, people I've kept at arm's length, excitement I've had to consciously override because the preparation told me to. Scar tissue changes how you move, and I won't pretend otherwise.

But here's what I've found on the other side of that discipline.

The things I've worked hardest for, protected most carefully, built with the most intention, they don't stress me out. If anything, they calm me down. They have real meaning. They can't be taken away. They're mine in a way that things acquired carelessly never quite are.

I'll take that over the rollercoaster every single time.

So no, I don't like making mistakes. And I suggest you adopt that mindset, too.

I want you to succeed. I want you to build something real, something that lasts, something that actually means something to you. And I'm telling you this because someone has to. The romanticised version of failure that dominates your social media feed is not your friend. It's comfortable content written by people who weren't spending their own money when things went wrong. If they even spent any money in the first place.

Sharpen the axe first.

Dial up, don't dial back.

And stop letting yourself off the hook because of what you see and hear online.