101 · Jersey Numbers

First: kill the age anxiety. The view you have of age must never be linear — and it isn't. If you're 24, finished your PhD, $300k in debt, working as a premed, you feel old. If you're 32, living with your parents with nothing going on, you feel old. But when you're 39 running a billion-dollar company, you are younger than ever. If you allow the manifestation of feeling old to reach you, that is the real bottleneck. There are people who toil into their forties making incremental progress — and there are people who make a doctor's salary in a day as a fresher at 22. That is RADICALLY young. Unfathomably young.

My number on my jersey is 1, 10, 50 — doesn't matter. Same for age. Think of your age as the number on your back for the game you're playing. You are the one choosing whether it matters or whether it stops you. What will my 10-year-old self and my 100-year-old self think of this decision? Is it worth another year to get into Cambridge? Will the 100-year-old Jamie say, "that was what I wanted, but I gave up because I felt late compared to all the people who are already dead — and now I have regret"?

I don't believe anybody can be classified as old. I feel the oldest I've ever felt right now because I'm 23, flat broke, still not in college, watching teenage multimillionaires push the frontier through YC. But imagine: in four years you're at Cambridge studying maths, two online businesses each printing £500k a month, a YouTube channel with a million subscribers. After the DPhil begins, you take half a year to travel, go through Y Combinator, build a startup, and come back to Oxford nearly a decade later to finish. The sequence is yours to arrange.

You're 21, Jamie. You're young — but once you hit 25, 26, that's a different story. So take the biggest risks you can possibly take now. Go to New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Apply to every researchship you can. Your time at Cambridge is SACRED — something monumental has to be built inside it. You can be a billionaire in the next five years; do not let the world cage you. Really juice it out at 29 — but before that, lock in, save, reinvest, build yourself financially. High school dropouts and community college students are building products and taking over the world. Don't let a university delay what doesn't need delaying.

You have five years, Jamie. Five years to genuinely start the business, manage the portfolio — and the clock is ticking. Those five years will fly, and that's the end of your twenties: no travelling, no stories, no gap years, nothing monumental — unless you execute the Markov Vows every single day with a radical sense of urgency.

Let's create the meaning. Stop succumbing to the lies of "is it worth it." The years you spend fighting for something you truly want are never wasted. The years you spend not fighting — because you're afraid of being too old — those are the ones you'll regret.

And hold the tension honestly: dreams have time limits, and dreams don't. Certain doors close — the competitions have age rules, the analyst programmes have cohorts. And the bigger doors — the fund, the professorship, the book, the beautiful life — never close at all. Know which kind of door you're standing in front of before you panic about the clock.