A Faster Than Normal update

Two years ago, launching Faster Than Normal as a collection of mental models and frameworks felt like building a compass for faster progress. The world has shifted since then. So have I.

What began as a Twitter experiment has grown into a community of 650,000 people and 70,000 FTN subscribers. The trajectory surprised me—not the growth itself, but how it revealed something fundamental about how insights stick. The most powerful frameworks aren't abstract principles floating in isolation. They're embedded in the stories of the people and companies that prove them.

My path through the last two years carved an unexpected arc. Investment banking had trained me to understand businesses from the outside—analyzing balance sheets, modeling cash flows, building presentations about companies I'd never actually operated. Then Zipline offered something different: the chance to see how businesses actually work from the inside.

The transition was brutal. Everything I thought I knew about business operations proved superficial. Banking teaches you to evaluate; it doesn't teach you to execute. The learning curve from Perth to Los Angeles to San Francisco wasn't just geographical. It was conceptual—unlearning the comfortable distance of analysis for the messy reality of making decisions with incomplete information.

September 2023 marked another inflection point. I committed entirely to FTN, relocating to Sydney to focus on content creation. As of this week, I'm doubling down—full-time content creation for at least the next 24 months.

The shift from 24 to 26 may seem trivial, but it's taught me something crucial about how learning actually happens. Abstract frameworks feel intellectually satisfying but rarely change behavior. Stories do. When you understand how David Ogilvy built his agency or how Anna Wintour transformed Vogue, the principles embedded in their approaches become memorable, actionable, applicable.

This insight is reshaping FTN's editorial direction entirely.

Starting in April, FTN will operate on a dual-track publishing schedule designed around narrative depth rather than framework breadth:

Wednesdays focus on prolific individuals—the founders, leaders, and architects who built something significant. Not hagiography, but analytical portraits that reveal the specific decisions and mental models that created outsized outcomes.

Saturdays spotlight enduring companies—organizations that have achieved scale, longevity, or cultural impact worth studying. The goal isn't celebration but dissection: What patterns enabled their success? What can operators extract and apply?

Each profile will weave narrative around actionable insights. The lens remains entrepreneurial, but the lessons extend to anyone building something meaningful—whether a company, a career, or a personal project.

This month's content offered a preview of the new direction. Anna Wintour and David Ogilvy represented the individual focus. Rolex and Starbucks demonstrated the company analysis. The response confirmed what the data already suggested: depth over breadth, story over abstraction.

April marks the full transition. The short-form Wednesday emails that defined FTN's early identity will be retired in favor of the deeper individual profiles. This isn't about producing more content—it's about producing better content. Stories that stick. Insights that compound. Frameworks embedded in the real decisions of real operators who built real things.

The north star remains unchanged: extracting lessons for faster progress. But the method has evolved from presenting frameworks to revealing them through the people and companies that prove their power.