What I've learned at 45

I turned 45 recently. Since around 2010, I have kept a written life plan. Every year, I sit down and rate five areas of my life out of ten: family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time. If I look back at the early spreadsheets from my thirties, when I had just got back from travelling around the world disconnected from everything and was trying to figure out what came next, the numbers are highly volatile. Work would be a nine, health a four. The next year, personal time a ten, finances a two. Getting older, for me at least, has mostly been a process of flattening out those numbers. You stop chasing tens in one column if it means taking a two in another. I spent a few hours last week reviewing my latest update, trying to pin down what has actually changed in how I operate today compared to fifteen years ago. If you had asked me at thirty what mattered in business, I would have given you a complicated answer about market timing, scaling, and margins. Now, my list of operating rules is painfully short. I build, I invest, and I try to spend my days with people I actually like. But every single one of those simple rules comes with a very real cost. I spent years getting this wrong before I finally noticed the pattern.

Energy beats time

Let me explain. For the first half of my career, starting back when I was cold-calling for a Stockholm PR agency on pure commission against the advice of everyone I knew, I thought the ultimate professional skill was time management. If I could pack my calendar tight enough, I would win. When Fredrik Bage and I co-founded Mediapilot, we worked constantly. We ended up building a company that created more than a hundred jobs, and for roughly seven years, I measured my worth by how many hours I could endure being awake and at a desk. I believed that output was strictly a maths equation based on hours input. I finally realised that time is a completely useless metric if you lack the energy to do anything with it.

You can schedule every minute of your week, but if you sit down at your desk feeling like a crushed empty tin, you will produce terrible work.

We moved our family from Sweden to Marbella in 2018. The original plan was to stay for two years. We are still here. Part of the reason we stayed is that the environment forces you to live differently. Now, I actively manage my energy instead of my hours. I play tennis, often and badly. I eat good food, drink decent wine, and actually see my kids. Building Anchor, which deals with something as heavy as alienated fathers and artificial intelligence, requires absolute focus. Substrat requires the exact same thing. I cannot do either of those things if I am running on fumes. The cost of this belief is that you have to let people think you are lazy. You have to ignore emails for a day, sleep when you are supposed to be grinding, and turn down meetings that sound vaguely interesting. When you stop worshipping the calendar, you miss out on things. I accept that cost now.

The room matters more than the roof

The second shift was how I pick what to work on. I used to fall in love with projects. When you look at software or infrastructure, it is easy to get mesmerised by the mechanics of the thing. But software changes. Markets vanish. Intranets evolve, as I saw clearly during my time on the commercial side at Happeo. The only constant is the people you are stuck in a room with when the servers go down or the bank account runs dry. I met Fredrik at that PR agency because he told me I would be good at sales. We built a company together because we trusted each other, and certainly not because we had a flawless blueprint for media.

Choosing people over projects sounds great in theory. In reality, it is expensive. The hard part is that you occasionally have to walk away from a very good idea, or a highly profitable angel investment, simply because the room feels wrong. It means establishing a few baseline rules for who gets your time. They have to be able to laugh at themselves when things break. They have to tell you when you are making a mistake, plainly and without drama. They have to care about the work more than they care about looking smart.

The price of admission

I have to say no to capable individuals who happen to drain my energy. I still struggle with this. I like saying yes. I like building new things. But my life plan scores are steadier now because I have stopped pretending I can outwork a bad partnership or a broken sleep schedule. Managing your own psychology is the only real job an entrepreneur has, and you can only do that if you protect your energy and curate your circle. I haven't got this perfectly figured out, and my backhand on the tennis court is still a disaster, but I am finally learning to pay the cost upfront.