Hey Friends,
Before we get into this month’s essay, a quick word about what is changing around here.
Life Unlocked has worn a lot of different coats since I started writing in 2020. Different lengths, different rhythms, different topics depending on whatever I happened to be obsessing over that week. Somewhere along this inconsistent and ever shifting journey, I managed to pick up 3,300+ of you amazing subscribers!
It has been fun, but it has also been a little chaotic, and I want to give you something you can actually rely on.
So from now on, here is the new shape of things.
You will hear from me once a month, on the last Sunday of the month. One email. Inside it you will find one essay that I would love for you to carry into the month ahead, plus a short list of things I am enjoying right now. The idea is simple: read the essay, sit with it, and see how you might apply one small part of it to your own life over the coming weeks.
The essays will mostly live in three areas:
Navigating career and life fit, so that your work serves your life rather than the other way around.
Building a life that is intentionally rich, not just financially, but in time, health, and relationships.
And finally, the inside view of my health-tech career and the honest thinking behind the decisions I have made.
Who is this for? Anyone who wants to build a life that is rich across what I consider the truest form of wealth: financial, physical, time, social, and mental. More on that below. If I had to picture one person, it would be someone in their mid-twenties, a clinician or an ambitious professional of any kind, sitting with a few big question marks about where their life is heading. That was me a few years ago. I do not have all the answers, but I have learned a few things worth passing on, and I would love for you to navigate the next stretch alongside me.
And if that is not quite you, you are still very welcome here. These themes are universal, even if my particular lens happens to be a doctor who left the wards for technology.
Now is a good moment to unsubscribe if you want to, with my blessing. I've moved on from brilliant newsletters myself. Keep your inbox sacred.
Right. On to this month’s essay.
Why The Boring Life Is Extremely Ambitious
When I started writing this back in 2020, I was 22 and had just worked out something nobody really prepares you for: “get good grades, get a good job” is not a plan for a life. It is a plan for the first twenty-something years of one, and then the map simply runs out.
So I went looking. I spent the next few years reading obsessively about entrepreneurship, about productivity, and about that slippery, underrated idea of knowing what is enough. I worked through a small mountain of self-help, kept what was useful, and quietly binned the rest. Much of what I picked up in those years ended up shaping the decisions I am about to describe.
Here is where it led.
At 18, starting medicine at UCL, I assumed I would spend decades as a hospital doctor working brutal weeks, and that this was simply the price of a meaningful career. I do not practise medicine that way now. I combine it with technology instead, working in clinical product inside health-tech. I no longer do the 70-hour weeks I once thought were compulsory, the ones that quietly cost you your friendships, your home life, and most of your free time. The work is still rigorous. It still tips into unsustainable during busy stretches. But on the whole it is more flexible, better paid, and it has given me something I did not expect: room.
That room is the entire point. It is what let me get married and start our life on the front foot. It is what let us buy and slowly build a home we genuinely love. It is how I became a dog dad, and most recently, how we became parents.
To some of my friends, this looks boring. Too neat. Too stepwise. It runs completely against the grain of hustle culture, which insists you should be grinding every waking hour of your twenties so that some hazy future version of you can finally exhale. I did the opposite. At the precise moment most people speed up, I chose to slow down.
I want to make the case for that choice, because I do not think it is boring at all. I think it might be the most ambitious thing I have done.
The trap hiding inside the default plan
The standard script goes something like this. Work hard for forty years. Be sensible. Pay into a pension. Retire at sixty, or later, and only then start living.
In his book Die With Zero, Bill Perkins has a sharp diagnosis for what this does to people: they over-save and under-live, deferring joy until a retirement that finally arrives with their health, energy, and time already running low. His central idea is to optimise for net fulfilment over net worth, and he points out that experiences pay what he calls “memory dividends”. An adventure at thirty pays you back in memories for decades. The same adventure at seventy has far less runway left to compound.
Sit with that for a moment. The traditional plan asks you to be rich in time only for the final quarter of your life, and to trade the other three quarters in order to get there. That feels broken to me. I am not a believer in the forty-year career followed by a pension and a slow sigh of relief. I think there is far more to a life than that, and I have no intention of arranging mine around it.
We are measuring the wrong thing
Part of the problem is that we are taught to measure wealth with a single number.
Sahil Bloom’s book The 5 Types of Wealth reframes this in a way I have not been able to unsee. He argues there are actually five: financial wealth, yes, but also time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, and physical wealth. Money matters, but it is one column on the scorecard, not the whole thing. A life that only optimises the bank balance can quietly go bankrupt everywhere else.
Morgan Housel puts it even more bluntly in The Psychology of Money: “Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.” Not the car. Not the title. The ability to decide what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with. Once you start treating money as a tool for buying back your time, rather than as the scoreboard itself, a lot of conventional advice stops making sense.
The method: reverse engineering
So if not the default plan, then what?
The honest answer is that you have to design it yourself, and that begins with a question most of us avoid: what do you actually want your life to look like? Not the job title. The life. Where you live, who is around you, how your ordinary days feel, how much of your time is genuinely your own.
Stephen Covey called this habit “begin with the end in mind”. Picture the destination clearly, then work backwards from it. I think of it as reverse engineering. Once you know roughly where you are headed, you can ask far better questions today, and you can start taking small actions now that compound towards it. That is really all I have done. I looked hard at the life I wanted, noticed that the standard route would not deliver it, and started building a different one, one decision at a time.
This is the part that gets flattened into a slogan but is actually a discipline: work to live, do not live to work. Easy to print on a mug. Much harder to genuinely structure a career around.
Where I am pointing next
For what it is worth, here is the direction I am walking in.
Alongside the day job, I have been building things on the side: this newsletter, a growing Instagram audience, a coaching practice, a couple of other small ventures. The aim is not to escape health-tech. I love the work, and I am not going anywhere soon. But I can already see a chapter, perhaps as I approach forty, where I want a lifestyle business I own end to end. Something that maximises my freedom over my time and my freedom to choose who I spend it with, so that I can actually be present as my kid(s) grows up, and so that we can build a long, rich list of experiences and memories together.
I haven’t quite figured out what my business will be about (maybe a 1-man AI SaaS lol) but knowing I want a lifestyle business, one that generates enough revenue to achieve financial freedom but doesn’t scale infinitely or require significant overheads/employees, is a pretty liberating feeling. Now, I can reverse engineer steps across the decade to follow to achieve that.
A career that earns me five weeks of annual leave a year in my forties is simply not the deal I want for my one life. So the next decade of this newsletter is going to be me reverse engineering all of it, out loud and in real time. The questions I am asking, the bets I am placing, the things that work and the things that quietly do not. I would love for you to come along for that.
One question to take into your month
There is a line from the writer Annie Dillard I keep returning to: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” The days are the whole thing. There is no separate, realer life waiting patiently on the other side of the grind.
So here is the question I want to leave you with this month, the one I would gently encourage you to carry around for the next few weeks:
What do you actually envision for your life? And what is one step you could reverse engineer from that vision and start taking today?
That is it. Sit with it. Reply and tell me what comes up, if you fancy. I read everything.
See you on the last Sunday of next month.
Yath
This month I’m enjoying
A few things worth your time:
Read: The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom. If this essay landed for you, this is the fuller version of the framework, and a genuinely useful read for anyone rethinking how they measure a good life.
Read: Outlive by Peter Attia. The book that reshaped how I think about training and healthspan, not just lifespan. Very much in the spirit of building physical wealth early.
Watch: Intro To Large Language Models by Andrej Karpathy. I strongly believe it’s important to understand how it all works, this video is exactly that.
Consider: Going old school to the Apple EarPods for calls has been the best thing I’ve done. Never dies on me and has an elite microphone.
This month’s plug
A small sponsor zone. Some months a brand I rate will sit here. This month, the sponsor is me.
I left my clinical career after FY2 with barely a tech background, little network, and not much of a clue how any of this industry actually worked.
So I put everything I wish someone had handed me back then into a HealthTech Career Guide. It is 105 pages on how clinicians actually break into health-tech: understanding different roles, translating your clinical experience into language the industry understands, salary data, the interviews, and the first 90 days.
If you are a doctor or clinician eyeing a move, this guide is the blueprint: