TQuirk

I spent years living about 18 months ahead of myself. Happy once the project delivered. Happy once I hit the next grade. Happy once I got the house, the title, the number in the account. The problem with that game is it never ends. Each milestone arrived and the goalposts had already moved. I got good enough at achieving things to realise that achieving things wasn't the point. The state youre waiting for doesn't arrive automatically. You have to decide to be in it before the conditions are perfect, because the conditions will never be perfect. This doesn't mean stop wanting things. It means stop making your present self pay rent to a future version of you that might not even want what you're chasing. Figure out what youre actually doing this for. Most people haven't asked.

Most people I know use AI to do tasks faster. Very few use it to stop doing tasks entirely. Those are different games. The first one makes you slightly more productive. The second one reorganises how you work. I used to spend most of my Sunday night preparing for Monday. Calendar review. Email scan. Project status update. All of it manual, all of it slow, all of it gone now. Not faster. Gone. The distinction matters because "faster" is a marginal gain. Removing the work from your plate entirely is compounding. Every week you're not doing that task, you're doing something that actually requires you. Most people are in the optimisation game. The leverage is in the elimination game.

I watched a senior project manager underperform for 18 months once. Everyone on the team knew. I knew. Her manager knew. Nobody said anything because saying something felt unkind. She got let go eventually. In that meeting she said she had no idea there was a problem. That's not kindness. That's cowardice with a kindness story on top. The most useful thing I ever did as a leader wasn't any big strategy call. It was learning to say the hard thing early, clearly, and without dressing it up in so much softening language that the message disappeared. Clarity is the kindest thing you can give someone. They can't improve against a standard they don't know exists.

End of day. You were busy from 8am. Lots of calls. Inbox cleared. Things responded to. Ask yourself: what actually moved forward today? Most people can't answer that clearly. Not because nothing happened, but because they designed their day around being available rather than productive. I ran a hundred-million-pound programme once where half my team worked 10-hour days and generated almost no output that mattered. Busy. Never idle. Completely misaligned with what actually needed to happen. The output is the point. The activity is usually camouflage. One question before you start each day: what's the one thing that, if I do it, makes everthing else easier or irrelevant? If you can't answer it, you haven't planned. You've just prepared to react.

Most people do cardio to burn calories. That's the wrong reason and the wrong metric. Zone 2, the boring conversational-pace stuff, is building the mitochondrial capacity that everything else runs on. Strength. Recovery. Mental sharpness. Hormonal function. Even sleep quality. I used to skip it. Too slow. No visible payoff. The gym guys weren't doing it. I trained for aesthetics for years and wondered why my recovery was mediocre despte the effort I put in. The answer was always the aerobic base. It just doesn't show up in the mirror. You don't feel zone 2 working. You feel it when you're 65 and your peers can't climb two flights of stairs without stopping. That's when the compound interest pays out. Build the engine first.

People say 'keeping your options open' like it's wisdom. Most of the time it's fear dressed up as strategy. I've watched talented people stay uncommited for years. Different job. Different city. Different relationship. Always the next variable, never the decision. Options have a shelf life. Every year you don't choose, the best ones quietly expire. The freedom you're protecting is shrinking, not expanding. The people I've seen live well didn't have more options than everyone else. They made a call, took the consequences, and stopped carrying the weight of all the things they could have done instead. Deciding is the skill. Most people never train it.

This week, VC moved another $1.6bn into AI-native proptech. And 44% of investment committees said they don't trust AI-generated analysis. Those two numbers are going to spend the next 3 years colliding. I spent 15 years building the exact tools that VC is now pouring money into replacing. Feasibility models. Underwriting templates. Development appraisals. I built them for institutions that employed rooms full of people to operate them. The trust problem isn't a technology problem. It's an accountability problem. When the model gives you the wrong answer, who gets fired? Not the AI. That answer, for now, is still keeping a lot of analysts employed. But here's what Bisnow got right this week: the real reshuffle hasn't started yet. What's happening now is the VC land-grab. The actual disruption to how deals get done comes when someone builds the tool that the investment committee does trust. That's a harder problem than building the tool. It's also the only one worth solving.

Before I built any AI workflow, I asked myself: would I trust a new hire to do this on day one? Usually the answer was no. Not because the task was complex. Because I'd never actually written down what "good" looked like. Turns out that's the same reason most AI implementations fail. Not the model. Not the tools. The brief. The discipline of making AI work forces you to articulate things you've been doing on autopilot for years. That process is uncomfortable. It also makes you a better manager, a clearer thinker, and a more effective operator regardless of the output. You don't just get automation. You get a mirror.

@mhp_guy 715k downloads in 22 months without a big name behind it. The "you need an audience first" crowd quietly wrong again.

Today marks 2 years exactly. Today, the ADHDers win. I thought it would take 5+ years to become bigger than my favorite podcast, but it took about 22 months. I launched The Koerner Office as a 10 episode test 2 years ago today. Here are my download numbers: 2024: 715,025 - 60% video 2025: 11,922,878 - 81% video 2026 (so far): - 4,355,097 - 93% video The goal is 10m long form views/downloads per month by the end of 2026. When I launched the name was Koerner's Corner, but a subscriber emailed me the idea for the Koerner Office and I instantly fell in love. The original idea was to be like Dave Ramsey for entrepreneurs - a live call in show - but I didn't like that concept so much. After testing dozens of different concepts I landed on what the pod is today: 1. Riffing on business ideas. 2. Diving deep on ONE business idea or founder's story. My process for selecting which ideas to talk about has gotten extremely strict. I have a focus group of over 6,000 people that vote on ideas and those are the ones I run with. I no longer have to guess if a concept or idea will resonate. The chance of someone wanting to come on the pod actually being a good fit for the pod is almost 0. My team and I have to go out and hunt down the best guests, because they're usually people that no one has ever heard of. I have no interest in interviewing billionaires or out of touch millionaires. I have no interest in going broad or non-business. I wanna find the everyday Americans out there who have uncovered an incredible, overlooked niche that makes them 5 figures per month in the first 6 months and aren't afraid to tell all - holding nothing back. Maybe it's an app and maybe it's a line striping business. Doesn't matter. The ideas MUST be approachable and affordable for almost anyone to start. Anything can start as a side hustle. Any idea can be validated for very little money. Anything can scale. The ideas MUST be backed on specific tactics as to how to start and grow them. No high level motivational fluff. I suck at that stuff anyway. That's the ethos of the pod. My First Million has been my favorite podcast for years - it still is! I freaking love those guys. I will get twice as many downloads as them this month - mostly from YouTube. They are bigger than me on audio (the superior channel IMO). My first episodes were filmed on a $15 mic and on my iPhone 12. I eventually upgraded to a Sony ZV-E10 and a Shure SM7B. Next month I move into my $40,000 studio I had built out upstairs. Below is the first 8 seconds of my first episode ever. If you want to make good content, curate ideas. If you want to make GREAT content, create ideas. I'm glad my lack of focus has finally paid off. Thank you for following along! Go check out The Koerner Office on YT or any podcast platform.

@rezoundous Spent a year adding features nobody asked for. One case study page later, conversion rate doubled.

Proof converts. Features don’t.

@toddsaunders The domain knowledge is the moat. Most software fails not because the code is bad but because the person who built it has never actually done the job.

I know Silicon Valley startups don't want to hear this..... But the combination of someone in the trades with deep domain expertise and Claude Code will run circles around your generic software. I talked to Cory LaChance this morning, a mechanical engineer in industrial piping construction in Houston. He normally works with chemical plants and refineries, but now he also works with the terminal He reached out in a DM a few days ago and I was so fired up by his story, I asked him if we could record the conversation and share it. He built a full application that industrial contractors are using every day. It reads piping isometric drawings and automatically extracts every weld count, every material spec, every commodity code. Work that took 10 minutes per drawing now takes 60 seconds. It can do 100 drawings in five minutes, saving days of time. His co-workers are all mind blown, and when he talks to them, it's like they are speaking different languages. His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything. My favorite quote from him was when he said, "I literally did this with zero outside help other than the AI. My favorite tools are screenshots, step by step instructions and asking Claude to explain things like I'm five." Every trades worker with deep expertise and a willingness to sit down with Claude Code for a few weekends is now a potential software founder. I can't wait to meet more people like Cory.

The most dangerous manager I ever worked with was universally liked. Great in meetings. Made everyone feel heard. Never got to a decision. Every conversation ended with "let me take that away and think about it." Every deadline slipped. Every escalation landed on me. Being liked and being useful are different jobs. The confusion kills teams. The people who got the most done weren't the ones everyone wanted at the pub. They were the ones who made the call when nobody else wanted to, lived with the consequences, and moved on. That combination is rare. When you find it, protect it.

@bradmillscan @AlexFinn Thank you for saying this - I'm watching these guys cure cancer and make $ million company in three hours and my openclaw can't even read

Every time I watch an OpenClaw influencer video I go a little greyer. What are they doing that I'm not??? I will pay $10,000 in Bitcoin to observe @AlexFinn using OpenClaw for 1 day. BUT if he spends 50% of his time doing tech support, he owes me $5,000. What do you say Alex?

Nobody talks about the recovery cost of a bad meeting. You sit through 90 minutes of status theatre. Nothing decided. Action items that duplicate the ones from last week. You walk out, mentally drained, with an hour of real work ahead of you to get back to where you were. I ran a programme with 14 weekly governance meetings. I eventually killed 9 of them. Output went up. Stress went down. The 5 meetings that remained actually made decisions. The meeting isn't the problem. The meeting that has no decision authority, no agenda, and no owner is the problem. And most organisations run on exactly those. If you can't say in one sentence what gets decided in the meeting, don't hold it.

@ListservedBud @jasonhiner @theDeepView @quillmeetings Exactly this. Speed becomes table stakes in about 18 months. The question is what you're doing with the time you just got back. Most people fill it with more noise.

@TobyQuirk @jasonhiner @theDeepView @quillmeetings yeah speed gets commoditized fast. signal selection is the moat.

🚀 Can an AI agent be your Iron Man suit? My latest piece at @TheDeepView looks at how “Chief of AI Staff” agents like Quilliam (from @quillmeetings) are augmenting knowledge workers instead of replacing them. 🧠💼 Read more: thedeepview.com/articles/can-a…

Everyone wants better performance metrics. Nobody wants to go to bed at the same time every night. Sleep is the variable that actually drives everything else. Not because its news. Because its boring, and boring doesnt sell. I've tracked my HRV for two years. Nothing moves the needle like sleep consistency. Not training. Not nutrition. Not cold exposure. Not anything Im injecting or swallowing. Same time every night. Dark room. Cold. No screens for an hour before. Thats it. The stuff that works is almost always the stuff thats been true for 100 years. We keep looking for the upgrade because we dont want the answer to be obvious.

Nobody tells you that knowing what you want is the hard part. Getting it is almost mechanical once you know. Most people spend their whole lives chasing things they were told to want, and avoiding the quietness where their actual preferences live. I had a three-hour flight once with no wifi. No podcast. No email. About 90 minutes in I started writing. Not notes. Not plans. Just things that were true. By the time we landed I had a page that told me more about what I actually valued than any five-year plan I'd ever written. You already know what you want. The noise is there for a reason.

AI is being sold as a tool decision. It's actually a hiring decision. The question isn't which platform. It's: what work do you want to stop doing yourself? What would you hire someone to handle so you could focus on the 20% that actually requires you? I used to spend an hour every morning triaging emails, checking project status, deciding what was urgent. That hour is gone now. Not automated. Eliminated. The shift isn't about the software. It's about finally being honest with yourself about which parts of your job are genuine leverage and which parts are just the appearance of being busy. Most people automate the wrong things because they've never answered that question clearly.

I promoted someone once because they were the best operator I had. Two years later I had to let them go. Not because they got worse. Because the role evolved past them and they couldnt see it. The job they were brilliant at in year one didnt exist anymore. The job that existed, they werent built for. I made two mistakes. Promoting them for skills instead of potential. Then waiting too long once I knew it wasnt working. Both felt kind at the time. Neither were. The hardest leadership conversations I ever had were with people who deserved better, who'd been let down by slow decisions dressed up as loyalty.

@ListservedBud @jasonhiner @theDeepView @quillmeetings Exactly. When the tool advantage compresses, knowing which signal actually matters becomes the whole game. Most people still think AI is about speed. The real edge is filter quality.

@TobyQuirk @jasonhiner @theDeepView @quillmeetings yep. same in real estate too. once everyone can crank through the obvious stuff faster, the real edge is knowing which signal actually matters right now