Hi Reader,

Somewhere this week a teacher writes one word on a report and moves on to the next student: disruptive. It usually comes with the same request as always. Settle down, stay in your seat, stop pulling the room your way.

Plenty of adult rooms are waiting for someone who can change the energy in them. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 found that 1 in 5 Australian employees are engaged at work (Gallup, 2026).

What changing a room is worth

Changing the energy of a room is the whole job of a workshop facilitator. Schools, sports clubs and teams book people to lift a flat session. Picture a 17-year-old who runs a 45-minute confidence session for a Year 7 class, three times a week at $60 a session. That's $180 a week, earned with the exact skill that put the word on the report.

The report tells you how a young person fits a quiet room. An invitation to run a session tells you they can change one.

Try this tonight, it'll take 5 minutes

This week's tool comes from our Brand Mavericks Kit (this kit gives a business a position people remember). We call it the Refusal Map.

• List five specific refusals: clients, products or tactics you'd turn down.
• Read the list back out loud.
• What the list shows is your position.

Do it alongside your young person, or do it for yourself. Someone who disrupts a room is already refusing something. The list puts words to it, and words are what a position is made of.

If this one lands, the rest of the method is in the Kit. Give people a reason to choose you over the cheaper option.​

What we're watching

A 17-year-old in Melbourne, Ben Adler, built a network of local business directories this year. A Perth study that recorded 2,400 AI answers across 20 industries counted his site, Starworks, 199 times, more than any site except Google and Reddit (Startup Daily, 30 September). The traffic figures are his own testing, and the lesson holds either way: he noticed where people were starting to look and built there before the adults did.

A survey of 584 students at four universities and colleges in China's Fujian Province found that those with more contact with real businesses, and better teaching, felt their learning fitted together better. It rests on students' own ratings, and policy support showed no direct effect (Zhang and colleagues, PLOS ONE, September). For anyone backing a young builder, one practical step is to put a real business owner in front of their idea.

Hit reply and tell me: what did you get told off for that you'd now happily get paid for? I read every one, and I'd love to hear yours.

As always, Good things come to those who make.

My best,
Charbel