Some moments stay.
You cannot say why. They seem too small to matter. A gesture, a look, a Sunday afternoon. You swipe them away. They come back. Maybe in a different dress. And decades later, quietly, they line up and show you a pattern.
Mine was a softball game in the eighties.
We had one ball. Old, soft, half falling apart. Precious anyway, because on a Sunday in the eighties there was no chance to get a replacement. Sometimes it flew over the fence, into the garden of the neighbour who did not like children. Someone had to climb.
One of us always did. The game went on.
Until the day a boy who was losing took the ball and destroyed it. Not the climber. The one who could not bear to lose. In that minute, everybody lost.
That image stayed with me for forty years. Others joined it. They became a question, then a pattern, then a framework, then a book.
Here is my guess. At least once today you looked at someone and wondered, quietly, whether that person is stupid. Someone educated, possibly. Someone you respect. And then the second question arrives: how is that even possible?
Why do people act this way? Can intelligent behaviour be defined? Can it be trained? And what about its opposite, in a world that seems to produce more of it by the day?
I climbed the fence. This is what I found on the other side.
The OECD tested adult literacy and numeracy across 31 countries in 2023, and compared 27 of them against a decade earlier. Literacy improved in two. Denmark and Finland. Everywhere else it held still or fell. The gap widened at both ends: the weakest tenth lost ground while the strongest tenth pulled away. (Source OECD)
When focus goes, connection goes with it.
Researching the recipe of intelligent behaviour – nourished by a compelling essay by the Italian economist Carlo Cipolla – led me to the oldest question of all: what are we here for? I found my answer. Maybe you will find the same. Or a different one. It would be good to discuss it.
The Fence Climber is the book that grows from all of it. Coming 2027.
There is a shelf behind me. Behaviour, intelligence, communication, focus, presence, creativity. Years of reading it, and one question kept coming back: how does any of this reach somebody who will never sit in one of my workshops?
So I built instruments. Small, free, quick, and made for thinking with rather than for scoring yourself. Two are ready.
Blog & Newsletter
I decided to move my blog and newsletter to Substack, a place that offers something most platforms no longer do: room to write for people instead of for an algorithm. The Fence Climber on Substack is where I think out loud – about human intelligence, attention, communication, and what we are slowly giving away without noticing. One article every Sunday.
Subscribe if you feel something is off. If you are tired of the uniformity that increasingly dictates how we are supposed to behave. If you still like to think for yourself. And if you might not want to feel alone.