Good.

The most expensive habit a man can carry into his fifties is the reflex to complain.

It feels free and I think that’s what makes it dangerous. The project award goes to someone else, the flight gets cancelled, the pilot data comes back ugly — and before you have processed a single fact, you have already spent forty seconds narrating why this is unfair. Multiply that by a career. Nearly thirty years in civil engineering and transport planning has taught me that the complaint is never the problem. The complaint is the price you pay before you start solving the problem.

Jocko Willink has the best fix I have found, and it is one word.

Good.

Something goes wrong, and you say it out loud. I didn’t win the framework contract. Good. Now I find out what the winner priced that I didn’t. Robot vendor pushed the delivery back a quarter. Good. More time to nail down the brownfield site survey for the client’s warehouse before anything lands on a warehouse floor. Client killed the scheme. Good. I was building it on an assumption I never tested.

The trick is that you have to finish the sentence. “Good” on its own is stoicism as a bumper sticker. “Good, because —” is a demand. It forces your brain out of the grievance loop and into search mode, and your brain, being lazy and obedient, will actually go and look for an answer. Sometimes the answer is thin. Take it anyway. A thin answer beats forty seconds of narration.

Refuse to complain first. Complain later if you must, on your own time, with the work already moving.

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The second habit is harder, because it attacks something men our age quietly treasure: competence.

I moved to Riyadh in July 2021. I now run a mobility practice by day and a warehouse robotics venture, NAYRobotics, alongside it. I am learning Najdi Arabic. I am learning Mandarin. I spend a good part of my week being visibly, measurably worse at things than people twenty years my junior.

The first year of that was awful. Not hard — awful. Because at fifty-something you have built an identity out of being the person in the room who knows. Being a beginner again feels like a demotion so you avoid it. You stay in the sectors and comfort zone where you are already the expert, you delegate the unfamiliar, and you tell yourself it is a use-of-time argument. It isn’t. It is ego management dressed up as prioritisation.

Here is the reframe that worked. Frustration when learning something new is not evidence that you are too old. It is the sensation of the thing working. It is lactate building up in muscles that you haven’t been using. You would not stop a hill climb because your legs hurt — the hurt is the point of the hill. Mental effort is identical, and it is the only signal you get that you are actually building something rather than rehearsing what you already own.

So chase it. Look forward to it. Go and find the meeting where you are the least knowledgeable person present and sit in it deliberately.

One caveat, because I dislike self-help delivered as gospel: the academic literature on “growth mindset” is far weaker than the TED-talk version suggests, and large meta-analyses have found the effects small and inconsistently replicated. I am not making a scientific claim. I am making a practical one, and the practical one is unarguable — the man who is willing to be a beginner has more options at sixty than the man who isn’t.

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The third point is the payoff, and it is the one only a middle-aged man gets.

Frustration when learning something new is not evidence that you are too old. It is the sensation of the thing working.

Thirty years of experience is not thirty years of knowing more transport planning. Its real value is the pattern library and joining the dots across other disciplines and sectors.

When I look at brownfield warehouse automation, I am not seeing robotics. I am seeing a network problem I have solved before — flow, conflict points, throughput at the constrained node, the difference between designed capacity and operated capacity. At its essence, a warehouse shuttle system is a metro system with a smaller loading gauge. When I read a robotics-as-a-service contract, I am reading an availability-payment concession with different nouns. Rate benchmarking, technical due diligence, dialect learning — every one of them is pattern-matching under uncertainty.

Young people learn faster. They cannot do this. They haven’t got the second sector to connect it to.

That is the whole argument. The complaint reflex costs you the first minute. The competence reflex costs you the new sector. Kill both, and thirty years of scar tissue stops being a record of what you have done and starts being an instrument for reading things you have never seen before.

Good.