I’m fully in World Cup mode right now. Apologies in advance if I’m a little harder to reach over the next few weeks — this only comes around every four years.
Italy didn’t qualify this time, which still stings. But I’m just as locked in. I’m all in on Team Canada.
And I’m not a bandwagon fan. My dad, my brother, and I have been following the Canadian men’s national team since the 90s. Which means we’ve sat through some genuinely rough soccer over the years. Years where you watched out of loyalty, not because the team gave you much reason to.
Those days are gone.
This is a different team. Exciting to watch. Legitimate. Capable of holding their own against anybody in the world. If you’re not following along yet, start now — they play their second group stage game tonight.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about two things that seem unrelated but aren’t: how money is being devalued every year, and how fast AI is changing the way businesses operate.
Nobody — and I mean nobody — actually knows exactly how either of these plays out. Anyone who tells you with certainty what the economy looks like in five years because of AI, or exactly how to protect yourself from currency devaluation, is guessing with confidence. Some guesses will be right. Most won’t.
Here’s what I keep coming back to instead.
The businesses and people who come out ahead during periods of major change are rarely the ones who predicted it correctly. They’re the ones who stayed adaptable enough to respond once the picture became clearer.
Canadian soccer didn’t get good by accident, and it didn’t happen overnight either. It took years of decisions nobody was paying attention to at the time — investment in development, coaching, infrastructure — made by people who couldn’t have known exactly how it would play out, but who positioned things to adapt as the program improved.
That’s the part that’s easy to miss when you’re staring at a big trend like AI or currency devaluation. The instinct is to try to predict the outcome and make one big move. Buy the right thing. Pick the right side. Get ahead of it.
But the more reliable path is usually less dramatic.
In practice, that might just mean not locking yourself into something rigid before you actually need to. A business owner who keeps a little more flexibility in their cash position, or who avoids tying up every available dollar in a single illiquid bet, isn’t doing anything exciting. But they’re the ones who can actually move when an opportunity or a risk shows up — instead of finding out too late that all their options are already spoken for.
We don’t know exactly what the next five years look like. Nobody does — no matter how confidently it’s being sold to you.
But the businesses that handle whatever comes next won’t be the ones who guessed right.
They’ll be the ones who stayed ready to respond.
Until next week,
Vince
P.S. Allez les rouges — French for “let’s go reds,” the rallying cry for Team Canada. Tonight’s the night. I’ll be screaming it at my TV either way.
