Introducing The Reinventor’s Mindset™

I spent my teenage years in housing commission in Sydney’s north-west.

That’s not a common opener for an article about leadership and transformation. But it’s where this story starts – and it’s why I’m writing to you now.

Most entrepreneurship books tell you to quit your job. Burn the boats. Leap and the net will appear.

Most leadership books tell you to conform. Play the game. Wait your turn. Climb the ladder someone else built.

I’ve never found myself in either camp.

I’ve spent twenty years driving change inside established systems – financial services, insurance, wealth management. Regulated industries. Slow-moving organisations. Places where “that’s how we’ve always done it” is both a warning and a weapon.

I didn’t quit. I didn’t conform. I transformed from within.

And along the way, I discovered something: the principles that got me across 1.5 kilometres of open ocean are the same principles that got a new product to market in eight months inside a system that hadn’t shipped anything in a decade.

I call this approach The Reinventor’s Mindset^TM. And it moves in three arcs:

Part One: Learning to Float – Transform yourself first.

1. Commit Before You’re Capable – Book it, then become it
2. Become By Doing – Becoming starts ugly
3. Cold Clarifies – Difficulty is the teacher

Part Two: Reading the Current – Then transform systems.

4. Find the Current – Coalition is not consensus
5. Pay the Price – Momentum beats purity
6. Radical Ideas Demand Speed – Velocity protects innovation

Part Three: The Endless Ocean – Sustaining both.

7. 7. Prune the Tree – Growth through subtraction
8. 8. Lessons Live in the Landing – Touch the wall before you turn

The central thesis runs through everything: Transformation is not something new. It’s reclaiming something true.

Why I’m building this

I wanted to be a writer at eighteen. I chose accounting instead – not because I loved numbers, but because I’d grown up in housing commission and made a promise to myself: never put my family in financial insecurity again.

That choice worked. I built a career. Made money. Forgot I’d ever wanted anything else.

Twenty years later, I’m writing a book. Not because I found more time or discovered hidden discipline. Because I finally understood that the writer was never gone – just buried under marble that needed removing.

The Reinventor’s Mindset™ isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about reclaiming someone true.

What’s coming

I’ll share what I’m learning as I build The Reinventor’s Mindset™ in public. Not from the summit. From the middle of the climb.

Subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll get:

• The Reinventor’s Mindset™ framework deep-dives
• Early excerpts and previews of the book Bold Water
• Insights from interviews with leaders who’ve transformed from within
• Lessons from INSEAD, from teaching, from getting it wrong
• The honest version – what’s working, what isn’t, what I’m still figuring out

I’m writing mid-journey because that’s when the lessons are freshest. And because I think there’s something more honest about sharing the map while you’re still in the territory.

Welcome to The Reinventor’s Mindset™.