Last weekend, I was at a wedding in Cartagena and was catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in years.

There was lots of excitement in his life - he was a new Dad, and things were going well at work.

He works in finance - a competitive industry - but he was carving out a pretty interesting niche for himself. His team was one of the only ones in London running a specific strategy, and he was one of the few people building expertise around that.

So I asked him: "Would you start your own fund one day?"

It felt like an obvious opportunity to me - he was becoming one of the few experts in London in this area. But instead, he started listing the reasons it wouldn't work.

He’s too young. He doesn’t have the right relationships. Who would give him money anyway?

What struck me wasn’t the reasons. It was how quickly they came. It felt like it was something he dismissed as impossible. He just defaulted to no.

I pointed to a few examples of people who had made it work but eventually I let it go.

I understood his response. We are programmed to be risk averse - for most of human history spotting threats is what kept us alive.

So we get very good at spotting what could go wrong, and not much practice spotting what could go right.

But when I moved from London to San Francisco, that changed for me. I became surrounded by people who did the opposite. They saw an opportunity, and their instinct was to default to yes.

They’d humor the idea that sounded unreasonable. Give it a few minutes before ruling it out, instead of listing the reasons it couldn’t work. Sitting with it and asking “what would have to be true for this to happen?”

That rubs off on you.

And as I think back, if I still worked in finance in London, I probably would have given a similar answer to my friend. A list of all the reasons why I couldn’t start my own thing yet. I didn’t have a co-founder. I couldn’t code. The list goes on.

Being around people who default to yes changed what I believed was possible for me.

You don’t need to move across the world to get that. But you do need to be around people whose first instinct is to figure out how, not why not.

See you next week,

Will

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