12th July 2026

 Learning to Let Go

One of the greatest lessons life has taught me is this: you learn far more about a person by watching how they react to things outside their control than by how they deal with the things they can control.

Modern life encourages us to believe that we are masters of our own destiny. We are surrounded by planners, forecasters, data analysts and experts who tell us that if we make the right decisions, manage risk carefully and follow the evidence, life will unfold exactly as expected.

I don’t believe that for a second.

In my experience, most of life is outside our control.

The important question isn’t whether life throws unexpected challenges at you—it will. The question is how do you respond when it does?

Entrepreneurs Live With Uncertainty

Perhaps that’s why I feel so at home being an entrepreneur.

Running a business is one long exercise in adapting to events you never saw coming.

You can write the perfect business plan.

You can forecast every penny.

You can build spreadsheets until midnight.

Then something happens completely out of left field and the whole plan has to change.

Markets change.

Customers change.

Governments change.

Suppliers let you down.

The weather changes.

A global event changes everything overnight.

The businesses that survive aren’t necessarily the cleverest.

They’re the ones that can pivot.

Holding on too tightly to your original plan is often the quickest route to failure.

Growing Up Without Control

Perhaps my attitude comes from the way I grew up.

I was raised in poverty.

I left school without qualifications.

Many of the circumstances that shaped my early life were completely outside my control.

If I had spent my time complaining about what life had dealt me, I would never have moved forward.

Instead, I learnt to adapt.

That lesson has served me better than any qualification ever could.

The Biggest Lesson of All

Nothing, however, prepared me for what happened when I was fifty-three.

Being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia changes everything.

Suddenly your diary becomes irrelevant.

Your ambitions become irrelevant.

Your business becomes irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is whether you’ll still be alive next year.

I was told that my best chance of survival was a stem cell transplant.

Even then, the risks were enormous.

For the first time in my life, I genuinely had no control over what happened next.

My life was in the hands of doctors, scientists, nurses—and perhaps something greater than all of us.

When people receive a diagnosis like that, the first instinct is often to ask:

“What did I do wrong?”

“What could I have done differently?”

“How can I fix this?”

Sometimes the honest answer is:

You can’t.

And that’s incredibly difficult for many people to accept.

The greatest lesson my illness taught me wasn’t about medicine.

It was about letting go.

Accepting that some things simply cannot be controlled.

That doesn’t mean giving up.

It means putting your energy into the things you can influence and finding peace with the things you can’t.

Ten years later, I’m still here.

And that experience changed the way I look at every problem that comes my way.

The Heatwave

That brings me to this week.

Britain has been experiencing one of the hottest spells I can remember.

It’s uncomfortable.

It’s exhausting.

And for businesses like ours, it’s expensive.

Our air-conditioning has been working flat out from morning until night.

Electricity bills are soaring.

Despite that, the shop still isn’t as cool as everyone would like.

Yet what amazes me is how quickly people expect someone else to solve the problem.

Customers complain.

Staff complain.

As though somehow I can control the weather.

Of course I want everyone to be comfortable.

It’s in my interests to look after both my team and my customers.

But there comes a point where there simply isn’t anything more I can do.

That’s one of the frustrations of running a business.

People often assume that because you own the business, you’re responsible for absolutely everything.

You’re expected to solve problems that nobody can solve.

What We Can Control

The older I get, the more convinced I become that happiness comes from understanding the difference between what you can control and what you can’t.

I can’t control wars.

I can’t control inflation.

I can’t control the weather.

I can’t control whether people choose to spend money.

But I can control how I respond.

I can control the atmosphere in my shops.

I can control how I treat my staff.

I can control the quality of our food.

I can control whether I choose hope over despair.

That is enough.

Closing Reflection

Running a business has taught me many things.

Cancer taught me even more.

Both taught me exactly the same lesson.

Life doesn’t ask your permission before throwing challenges your way.

The sooner you stop trying to control everything, the freer you become.

There is enormous peace in accepting that uncertainty isn’t your enemy.

It’s simply part of the deal.

So when the next unexpected challenge arrives—and it always will—I won’t waste my energy asking, “Why me?”

Instead, I’ll ask a much better question:

“Right then… what’s the best thing I can do next?”

Because that, more than anything else, is how you keep moving forward.