Why this newsletter exists

By 2021, I had built a life that looked perfect from the outside and felt empty inside.

I was 38. Then-COO of a private bank in Geneva, with three roles in parallel including the operational lead during COVID. Married to Maria, a brilliant gynecologist running her own practice. A first child. A new home. By every metric the world uses to measure success, I had made it.

And inside, I was empty. Worse, I had started to almost resent everything I had been sacrificing myself for. My family. My work. The life we had built. When in fact, the only person who had decided I had to sacrifice myself for them, was me. They never asked.

That realization came at the end of a long series of warnings I had refused to read. Four of them. One per life.

My parents divorced when I was in my early twenties. My mother’s words have stayed with me: their marriage had been swallowed by their roles as parents.

In 2010, after four years at McKinsey, I cramped in both legs on an easy ten-minute run. My body, an athlete’s body for twenty years, was paying for everything I was not giving it.

In 2016, on a bench by Lake Geneva, after an end of year review, I broke into tears. Not for the review or the bonus. For the realization that I had nothing but my work.

A few months after my first child was born, I came home one Friday evening exhausted and asked my wife to do the last bottle. While she fed our child, I understood I had just outsourced one of the rare moments I got with my child during the week. Not a moment of joy. A task to take off my list.

Four warnings. One per pillar. Spaced over twenty years. I refused to fully absorb any of them. 2019 to 2021 forced me to.

The four warnings were not four separate lessons. They were one lesson, repeated four times, that I had needed to hear in stereo before I would actually listen. The four lives are not four problems. They are one system. And if you do not architect them deliberately, the whole thing collapses.

This newsletter shares the system I built since. Not because I have figured it out perfectly. Because I needed one and one did not exist in the form I needed.

What you get

Every Thursday, one essay on one piece of the four-life architecture. A principle, a framework, a protocol, or a system. Tested in real life, refined over years. Written for high-performers in roles that consume them, with young children and partners who deserve better than their leftovers.

No motivational platitudes. No work-life balance advice. No productivity hacks dressed up as wisdom.

Who this is for

If your work consumes you, your body is not what it was, you have young children, and a partner you want to stay close to, you are in the right place.

Senior executives, founders, investment professionals, traders, managers in scale-ups, consultants, doctors, senior tech individual contributors. If you recognize yourself in this pressure, whatever your title, this is for you.

If you came here from the YouTube channel, the newsletter goes deeper on the ideas the videos can’t fully cover.

If you are new, start with the Manifesto, pinned on the publication. Then read the four Foundation essays here, or watch them on YouTube.

Who I am

Philippe Turrian. Senior Executive at a private bank in Geneva. Husband to Maria Turrian Badda, MD, a gynecologist specialized in women’s intimate health. Father of two children.

McKinsey alum (2006-2010). INSEAD alum (2009). Manager since 2015. Parent since 2020. Still in the executive role, twelve-hour days, navigating the same pressure I write about. Every framework you will find here was tested first in my life and my marriage.

Subscribe. And start architecting.