I spend my life moving between very different worlds - the strategy room, the boxing ring, family life, my own ambition. Each one keeps challenging what I thought I knew about strength, confidence, success and how I want to live. This is where I write about the questions I'm still trying to work out.
Hi, I'm Ashley.
I've spent more than a decade working in strategy at Disney, learning a lot about people, business and how ideas make their way into the world. But my curiosity has never stayed neatly inside my job.
It has taken me into competitive boxing, psychology, AI, building websites and plenty of other rabbit holes along the way. The more worlds I enter, the more complicated my ideas about who we're supposed to be have become.
Now, in my mid-30s, I'm somewhere in the middle of figuring out what I want the next chapter of my life to look like. If the last decade is anything to go by, I doubt I'll arrive there in a straight line.
Written while I'm still figuring it out.
For years, I thought everyone else had been given the instructions for how to be normal, and I had somehow missed them. On belonging, learning what to change about ourselves - and what to protect.
Read the essay →Friends told me how calm I looked walking to the ring. What they couldn't see was the conversation happening underneath it. On what courage actually feels like - and why it rarely arrives looking the way we expect.
Read the essay →A torpedo ray, a monkey I once watched for an hour, and the slow, quiet way curiosity gets traded for usefulness. On noticing things again - and why I really started building this website.
Read the essay →For a long time in my career, I believed competence had to be proved one answer at a time. On uncertainty, judgement - and what I slowly realised people had been measuring all along.
Read the essay →Building this website without knowing how to build website - you're looking at the experiment.
Deep in annual planning season at work, trying to look at a business I've known for more than ten years with fresh eyes. Familiarity is useful. It can also quietly stop you seeing new possibilities.
Back in boxing camp, with my next fight on the horizon. Less interested in becoming tougher than becoming calmer. I'm looking to see the best version of me yet.
Not every question gets answered. Some are outgrown. Some turn out to have been built on the wrong premise. Sometimes a better question simply takes their place.
I used to imagine there would be an age where I felt certain: about who I was, what I wanted, and where I was going.
Growing older hasn't given me fewer questions. It's helped me recognise which ones are actually worth asking.