Back in 2020, somewhere in the strange early weeks of lockdown, I sat down and wrote a blog post about curve balls. I opened it by reminiscing about the Australia 2020 Summit — that moment in 2008 when we all gazed toward the year 2020 as some mystical far-off time when anything was possible. Self-driving cars. Landing on Mars. A cure for every disease (I noted the irony even then). I poked fun at my own track record as a prophet, having once confidently predicted that camera

When you’re eighteen, you’re ten feet tall and bulletproof. The world is wide open. Anything feels possible. You’re convinced that time is infinite and failure is something that happens to other people.

I recently tried a simple exercise. I imagined myself ten years from now, sitting quietly, looking back at the version of me that exists today. Not judging. Just observing. What would that future version thank me for? What would he wish I’d done differently? What would matter — and what would feel strangely irrelevant? It was confronting how little of it had anything to do with achievements.