Hassan Khan

Hassan Khan Founder and Director of Consilium&Co - a Leadership Development firm helping people transform themselves and their organisations.

16/09/2026

What to Read Wednesdays?
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This week’s book is The Good Life by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, based on lessons from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed people across their lives for more than 80 years. It asks a wonderfully simple question: what actually makes a good life? Here are three of the big ideas from the book.
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1 — Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. One of the clearest lessons from decades of studying human lives is just how much the quality of our relationships matters, not only to our happiness but to our health as we grow older.
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2 — Relationships require social fitness. Just like physical fitness, our relationships need attention and effort. Friendships drift and people grow apart unless we keep calling, checking in, making plans and showing up.
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3 — The good life is a complicated life. The lives in the study weren’t perfect. They contained loss, mistakes, conflict and disappointment alongside love, joy and meaning. A good life doesn’t mean escaping the difficult parts of being human.
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This is a beautiful book about happiness, relationships and what more than 80 years of studying human lives can teach us about living our own.

Alexander Zverev has just won the US Open and the second grand slam title of his career. Four months ago he was still wa...
14/09/2026

Alexander Zverev has just won the US Open and the second grand slam title of his career. Four months ago he was still waiting for his first. Maybe the most notable thing about his victory is how quickly the second grand slam has followed the first. For years Zverev was one of the best tennis players in the world who had never won one. He won Olympic gold, he reached number two in the world, he won the ATP Finals twice, he beat the greatest players of his generation. But the Grand Slams remained stubbornly out of reach. There were three finals and three defeats. The most painful came in New York in 2020. Zverev led Dominic Thiem by two sets and later served for the championship, but he had to watch the match disappear from his hands. Then came the 2024 French Open final, where he had another lead and another defeat. Then another runner up trophy in 2025.
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By the time he arrived at Roland Garros this year Zverev had won more Grand Slam matches without winning a Grand Slam than anybody in the history of men’s tennis. Then he finally did it. I want to reflect on what has happened since. Zverev hasn’t missed a Grand Slam final. He won Roland Garros, he reached the Wimbledon final and now he has won the US Open.
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There is an old saying about London buses. You wait forever for one and then two arrive at once. Sport has its own version of this. Sometimes an athlete can spend years trying to break through a door only to discover that once it opens, walking through it again becomes considerably easier. And there is some fascinating psychology behind why.
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Click the link in bio to read the full article.

Carlos Alcaraz had just lost one of the great tennis matches. It was 3:33 in the morning in New York and he had been on ...
10/09/2026

Carlos Alcaraz had just lost one of the great tennis matches. It was 3:33 in the morning in New York and he had been on court for four hours and 28 minutes. He had been two sets to one down and managed to drag himself back into the match, won the fourth set 6-1 and pushed the fifth all the way to a deciding tiebreak. At one point before that final set the cameras caught him vomiting into a towel. This was his first tournament in more than four months. A wrist injury had kept him away from the French Open and Wimbledon and there had been real questions before New York about what his body would allow him to do. But here he was defending his US Open title, exhausted and unwell, still chasing down balls in the middle of the night against a brilliant Ben Shelton.
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Eventually Shelton won. 6-7, 6-1, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6. Alcaraz then did something that I found so amazing. He grinned as he walked towards the net and embraced Shelton, then walked off the court and down the players’ tunnel with a huge smile on his face. And it wasn’t the brittle kind of smile athletes sometimes produce because the cameras are watching. It didn’t disappear once he left the court either. A few minutes later, surrounded by reporters after losing the title he had come to New York to defend, he was still smiling. “I leave the court happy,” he said. “I leave the court with a smile. I am proud of myself, how I fought.” There is something so beautiful in that.
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Click the link in bio to read the full article.

03/09/2026

What if two people can experience exactly the same moment but live in completely different realities? One of my favourite ideas from Shawn Achor’s Before Happiness (my What to Read Wednesdays pick this week) is that our brains can’t possibly process everything happening around us, so they select what gets our attention. And that selection matters a lot.

We can notice what’s going wrong or what’s going right, what we’ve lost or what we still have, the obstacles in front of us or the possibilities hiding amongst them. We can live in the same world but notice completely different things. Over time what we repeatedly pay attention shapes what we believe is possible and therefore what we do next. We may not always get to choose what happens around us, but we can get better at choosing what we look for. This is a great book, and one I’m very glad I picked up again this week.

03/09/2026

What to Read Wednesdays?
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This week’s book is Before Happiness by Shawn Achor. A wonderful look at how the way we perceive the world shapes what we notice and feel and ultimately what we believe is possible. Here are three standout ideas from the book.
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1 — There isn’t just one reality. Our brains can’t process everything happening around us so they constantly choose what to pay attention to. Two people can experience the same situation and see completely different possibilities within it. What we notice helps shape the reality we experience.
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2 — Cancel the noise. Not all information deserves our attention. Achor distinguishes between useful signals and the noise that distracts us without helping us learn, decide or act. A lot of the time better thinking requires less information and better attention.
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3 — Make the goal feel closer. Motivation is influenced by how close we believe we are to the finish line. Instead of only looking at how far there is to go, noticing progress and creating smaller milestones can help us keep moving.
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This is a brilliant book about perception, attention and possibility. Changing where we end up can sometimes begin with changing what we see from where we’re standing.

There was a moment late on Sunday night when Novak Djokovic seemed to grow old right in front of us. It is probably unfa...
31/08/2026

There was a moment late on Sunday night when Novak Djokovic seemed to grow old right in front of us. It is probably unfair to describe it that way. He has been struggling with a health problem for some time and this may turn out to have been nothing more than an awful night at an unfortunate moment. But the match was uncomfortable to watch for a number of reasons. It looked like a man coming face to face with the distance between who he still believed himself to be and what his body would now allow him to be.
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He had vomited earlier in the match. His back was hurting and he was cramping. He was limping between points, trying to summon something that for most of his adult life had always been there when he reached for it. He has spent twenty years making the impossible retrieval. This time his body wouldn’t come with him. He lost 7-6, 5-7, 4-6, 6-2, 6-1, ending a run of 77 consecutive first round victories at Grand Slams stretching back to 2006. By the fifth set there were tears in his eyes. When it was over he made a heart with his hands to the crowd and disappeared down the tunnel.
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Maybe this was just illness and bad timing, maybe it was one of those collisions of circumstance that sport sometimes produces and Djokovic will return in Melbourne and make all of this seem embarrassingly premature. I hope he does. But if it isn’t now, one day it will be. For there is always one opponent none of us can outlast, even Novak Djokovic. That opponent is time. And I wonder when it does come whether the hardest part will be losing the tennis or whether it will be losing himself.
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Click the link in bio to read the full substack article.

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