What a £20 note taught me about seeing clearly
I love currency. Always have.
Since I was a teenager I’ve been drawn to what different cultures choose to put on their money — it’s a quiet, fascinating reflection of what a society values. Over the years I’ve collected notes from all over the world, including some old Russian currency from the turn of the 1900s that I picked up while I was in Estonia.
So when I was preparing for our family trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland — and tucking some British pounds into an envelope for our nanny, just in case — I found myself looking more closely than usual at a £20 note. And there it was: an unexpected gift.
“Light is therefore colour.” — J.M.W. Turner
What a phrase. I had to sit with it.
Turner, whose work graces the note, was deeply shaped by Isaac Newton. And Newton, it turns out, quietly upended how we understand reality itself.
Before Newton, the common assumption was that objects produce colour. (not color as my autocorrect keeps trying to do lol!) A red apple is red because the apple makes red. Simple, intuitive, wrong.
Newton showed us something different: white light already contains every colour. Pass it through a prism and the spectrum emerges — not created, but revealed. The colours were always there. Light was always carrying them.
Which means the prioritization stack is flipped:
We see light first, and then objects through it. Not objects first, and then light.
A subtle shift. A profound one. Reality isn’t revealed by objects — it’s revealed by light.
The Science Bit
Newton explained how light works. Turner explored what light feels like. The science says light contains the colours of the world. The art says light reveals the emotional — or what we might now call the quantum — reality of the world. Both are true. Both are needed.
Of course, once I started following the thread, I kept going.
Why is the sky blue? Because blue has shorter wavelengths than red — so blue light bounces and scatters more through our atmosphere. Red and orange bend the least, which is why sunsets glow. Violet bends the most. The sky is blue because blue light is generous — it spreads itself everywhere above us.
And this one stopped me completely: humans can only see about 0.0033% of the electromagnetic spectrum. Less than one percent of the available light.
Yet inside that tiny slice — sunsets. Rainbows. Faces. Art. The beauty of the world.
Mind-blowing. Profound. Mystery.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1% lately — or even less. I am, at my core, a visionary. Big picture, hear me roar. And yet as I’ve been deep-diving into paradox, I keep arriving at the same discovery: the Olympian level of life is played in the margins.
The shoreline of the ocean is only about 0.2% of the ocean’s surface — yet that’s where so much life, so much interaction, so much beauty happens. Formula One teams invest millions of dollars to shave 0.6 seconds off a pit stop. Less than one second. Millions of resources. Because at the highest levels, the KPIs become nuanced. Mastery lives in the margins.
One More Science Gift
The electromagnetic field of our hearts extends roughly one meter beyond our bodies. The measurable field of the brain reaches only a few inches. We literally connect heart to heart — long before we connect mind to mind. Science keeps confirming what we intuitively know.
My family has their euros and their pounds tucked safely away, anchoring my peace so they can explore and discover and enjoy all the gifts Ireland holds. And I get to enjoy my love of science, and art, and the ongoing adventure of learning how to radiate.
—
Here is what I keep arriving at:
Leadership is learning to carry light.
Not to manufacture colour. Not to force the spectrum into existence. But to carry light — so that what was always there becomes visible.
We may only see a tiny slice of reality. But inside that slice is everything needed to live a radiant life.
Light reveals what was always there.
So here’s the leadership question I’m sitting with — and I’d love to hear yours:
What is the small margin — the 1%, the nuance, the unseen light — that, if you invested in it, would completely change how you lead and live?
#CarpeDiemLeadership · #HeartLeadership · #StewardYourHeart