In less than a week, I’ll be heading to the Business Book Awards 2026 at The Drum in Wembley, where Sustain: Mastering the High-Performance Paradox is a finalist in the Short Business Book category.
The winners will be announced on 16 September, and I’m incredibly proud to see Sustain recognised alongside such a strong group of authors and books. The Short Business Book category celebrates books that communicate their ideas with brevity and clarity, which feels particularly meaningful given how deliberately Sustain was written.
Short by design. Big on practical impact.
Sustain is a short book by design.
Busy people in high-performing organisations do not necessarily need another great big tome to work through before they can make a change. They need useful ideas that can land quickly, make sense in the context of their lives and be put into practice without creating yet another demand on their time.
That was very much in my mind when I wrote it.
Sustain explores a question that sits at the heart of so much of my work: how do we continue to perform at a high level without sacrificing our energy, motivation and long-term wellbeing to do it?
Too often, we approach wellbeing and performance as though one must come at the expense of the other. We push hard to achieve, then try to repair the damage afterwards.
I wanted to offer a different way of thinking about it.
The book brings together four pillars – Values, Identity, Community and Resources – with practical ideas for protecting the energy, mood and motivation that underpin sustainable performance.
So feedback like this means a great deal:
“Easy to read and equally easy to apply. This is so important when life often feels like there is continually something else to do! This book gave me lots of reminders of things I need to do to be the best version of myself.”
That is exactly what I hoped the book would do.
But behind the frameworks, research and practical tools, there is also a very personal reason this book matters so much to me.
For Rourke and Raven
Sustain is dedicated to my godchildren, Rourke and Raven.
When I was asked to become their godparent in 2017, I enthusiastically said yes. I said all the right things about being there for them and taking the role seriously. And then, if I’m honest, I did very little differently.
About a year later, something clicked. I realised I had been given this wonderful opportunity to have a meaningful role in two young people’s lives, and I wasn’t really doing anything with it. So I started showing up.
I began picking them up from school once a week, every week and, over time, those small, regular moments built into a relationship that has become enormously important to me and so much more than a nice title of ‘godparent’.
It taught me something that eventually became an important idea within Sustain: some of the things that sustain us are already right in front of us.
We can spend a lot of time searching for more. More opportunities. More connections. More things to improve. More ways to optimise ourselves. Sometimes what we need is to pay greater attention to what we already have, or what is right in front of us.
For me, that relationship with Rourke and Raven has become a source of connection, perspective, fun and energy. It has also reminded me that the things that matter most usually require something very simple from us: our time, our attention and our willingness to keep showing up.
That is why dedicating Sustain to them felt so fitting.
What I hope they take from it
There is another reason they were in my mind as I wrote the book.
Like every generation coming into adulthood, Rourke and Raven will enter a world that will ask a lot of them. The pace of work is unlikely to slow down. Technology will continue to accelerate what is possible. There will always be pressure to achieve more, respond faster and keep going.
My hope is that they grow up knowing that success does not have to mean running themselves into the ground.
That they understand the importance of knowing what matters to them. That they protect the relationships that sustain them. That they recognise when their energy is running low. That they see rest and recovery as part of performing well, not something earned only when everything else is finished. And, perhaps most importantly, that they know there is more to a successful life than simply achieving more.
Those are lessons I continue to learn myself.
Less than a week to go
So, as the Business Book Awards 2026 approaches, being a finalist feels particularly special. Of course I would be delighted if Sustain won. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But seeing a deliberately short, practical book about sustainable high performance recognised in this way already means an enormous amount.
It tells me that this conversation matters.
And whether somebody reads Sustain from beginning to end, picks it up when they are running on empty, returns to a particular chapter when they need it, or changes one small thing because of something they have read, that is ultimately what I wrote it for.
To help people perform well, live well and keep enough of themselves in reserve for the people and things that matter beyond work.
And, in my case, two of those people are called Rourke and Raven. Whatever happens on the 16th of September at the Business Book Awards 2026, I’m very proud that their book, because in many ways that is how I think of it, has made it this far.
