12 Steps to Success grew from something I discovered in recovery: many of the principles I was learning to apply to one part of my life became unexpectedly useful in almost every other part of it. The books, podcast and wider work explore those ideas beyond recovery - particularly what they might teach us about success, purpose, leadership, identity and our ability to change.
from the 12 Steps to Success Series
Once you’ve cleared away the noise, once you’ve started living with more awareness, what are you going to build? What kind of life do you want to live? And most importantly, what gives your life meaning?
from the 12 Steps to Success Series
COMING SOON: A fully updated and reworked new edition of 12 Steps to Successful Leadership
How to Be the Best Version of Yourself and Inspire Excellence in everyone Around You
A comprehensive guide to personal and professional success, drawing from real-world experience in the music industry and business leadership.
I got sober in 2021 and, like most people entering recovery, I was initially much more interested in solving the immediate problem than developing a new philosophy for how to live my life. The Twelve Steps introduced me to a framework I hadn’t encountered in quite that way before, built around ideas such as acceptance, honesty, accountability, willingness, reflection and making amends. They also forced me to think considerably more about control: what was actually mine to change, what wasn’t, and how much energy I had spent confusing the two.
What surprised me was how quickly those ideas became useful outside recovery. Acceptance mattered when circumstances at work weren’t what I wanted them to be. Accountability changed the way I thought about leadership and difficult relationships. Willingness became relevant whenever I knew something needed to change but was still resisting what that change might require of me. Reflection and awareness made me notice patterns in my behaviour that had nothing to do with alcohol, while making amends raised much broader questions about responsibility and what we owe other people when our actions affect them.
Eventually, I began to wonder why we tend to encounter some of these ideas only after something has gone seriously wrong. That question became 12 Steps to Successful Leadership, my first attempt to take principles I had encountered through recovery and examine what they might mean in the workplace. 12 Steps to Success: Finding Your Purpose broadened the question considerably, looking at how the same underlying ideas might help us think about identity, purpose, success and the way we build our lives.
None of this is an attempt to rewrite recovery as a universal self-help programme, and I don’t think everybody needs to work through the Twelve Steps. I remain ambitious, care enormously about my career and enjoy conventional forms of success, so the argument isn’t that achievement is somehow superficial or that we should want less from our lives. I’m much more interested in understanding what we are asking those things to do for us. Achievement can be enormously satisfying without needing to establish our worth. Ambition can take us somewhere extraordinary without necessarily telling us where we should go next. The framework simply gave me a different way to examine some of those questions.
The traditional Twelve Steps belong to recovery and I have no interest in disguising a rewritten version of them as something else. What has travelled into my own work are the principles I encountered through them: ideas that recur across both books even when they are being applied to very different questions. I think of them less as instructions to follow in sequence and more as different ways of examining where we are, how we are behaving and what might need our attention.
Change becomes considerably harder when we are still arguing with reality. Acceptance, as I understand it, isn’t approval, resignation or deciding that something doesn’t matter. It is being honest about what is actually happening before deciding what, if anything, we want to do about it. That distinction applies just as readily to a difficult working situation or changing ambition as it does to recovery.
Hope creates the possibility that something can be different; commitment asks what we are prepared to do about it. I find the relationship between the two more useful than either on its own. Hope without commitment can remain wishful thinking, while commitment without believing change is possible becomes difficult to sustain. Together they create enough possibility to begin moving.
Knowing what needs to change and being willing to experience what changing it requires are very different things. Courage is sometimes the large decision, but more often it is our willingness to tolerate uncertainty, discomfort or the possibility that other people may not understand what we are doing. Neither requires fear to disappear before we act.
Integrity is partly about whether our actions resemble the values we claim to hold, particularly when doing so is inconvenient. Accountability makes that harder to keep theoretical. It asks us to recognise our part in what happens, including the effect we have on other people, without turning responsibility into endless self-punishment. Sometimes that means changing our behaviour; sometimes it means acknowledging harm and trying to repair it.
Humility is easily confused with thinking less of ourselves, which isn’t especially useful. I am more interested in the ability to recognise that we may be wrong, that we don’t control everything and that other people’s perspectives contain information ours does not. It allows confidence and uncertainty to coexist, which becomes particularly important in leadership, relationships and any situation where being certain feels safer than being curious.
Insight has limited value if nothing changes as a result of it. Diligence is the less glamorous part of change: continuing to do what matters after the initial clarity or enthusiasm has disappeared. Action then gives our intentions somewhere to go. Neither requires dramatic reinvention. Often the important changes are the repeated decisions that gradually make our behaviour look more like what we say matters to us.
Reflection helps us understand what has happened; awareness helps us notice what is happening while we still have some choice about how to respond. Looking backwards can reveal patterns in our behaviour, assumptions and decisions, not so we can endlessly analyse the past, but so we become better at recognising those patterns when they appear again. Neither requires perfect self-awareness. We continue changing, and reflection gives us the opportunity to keep learning from that while awareness gives us a better chance of doing something differently with what we learn.
The books are only one expression of 12 Steps to Success. The same questions continue through conversations with other people and through my own writing, sometimes reaching very different answers depending on where they begin.
12 Steps to Success explores how other people understand success, purpose, identity, leadership, recovery, work and change, including the experiences that shaped them and the things they have changed their minds about.
My essays approach many of the same questions from a more personal direction, drawing on my own experiences of work, leadership, recovery, relationships, identity and the ways our understanding of ourselves changes over time.
Get my latest insights delivered to your inbox