Hi, I'm Ray.
On facing the truth about yourself, deciding what you stand for, and building a life that matters to you, not just one that looks good from the outside.
Essays on clarity, building and doing work on your own terms.
The best moat is not a huge pile of code. It relates nothing to building a complex sales funnel. It has nothing to do with raising venture capital, or a clean content schedule. The greatest moat you can build relies on a stark simple truth. [read more]
You can lock yourself in an identity to feel safe, or you can stay fluid enough to survive what is coming. You cannot do both. [read more]
Let me tell you a story about trying to stand up while you are still falling. When nothing feels steady. When every attempt to stand only leads to another stumble. When you lose everything you built in a lifetime. [read more]
There's more where these came from. Keep reading.
What I’m building, thinking and learning, as it happens.
I'll score your LinkedIn profile for free. It takes about five minutes.
I'm curious how many people actually know how good (or bad) their LinkedIn profile really is. I mean, you can look at your own profile and think it looks pretty decent, but would someone who doesn't know you come away with the same impression?
Even a profile that looks perfectly fine might be missing some fairly important things.
So I built a tool that scores your profile to help you find out. It runs your LinkedIn profile through 44 checks across 10 areas, including your banner, photo, headline, About section, Featured section, and a few others. At the end, you get a score out of 1000.
You might score better than you expected. You might find there's quite a bit that could be improved. Either way, you'll have a much clearer idea of where your profile stands.
And you don't just get a number. You can see all 44 checks, what's working, what needs attention, and the evidence behind each result. It's specific enough that you can go through the feedback and make the changes yourself, rather than having to guess what "improve your headline" is supposed to mean.
I ran my own profile through the exact same checks and made the result public.
To try it, you just need your LinkedIn URL and an email address. The results arrive in your inbox. No password, and nothing gets posted on your behalf.
You can take the feedback, fix whatever you think needs fixing, and never speak to me. That's absolutely fine. If it helps you make your profile better, then it's done its job.
I'll put the link in the comments.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about.
Quitting rarely feels like quitting. Nobody goes: “Yes, I’m quitting today.”
It’s more like: “I’ll skip today. I’m knackered. I’ll get back to it Monday.”
Then Monday becomes next Monday.
You don’t really notice you’ve stopped until enough time has passed that starting again feels awkward. Sometimes all you need is another person noticing you’re not there.
“You’ve gone quiet. Everything alright?” That can be enough.
It’s one of the reasons I’m building a small group of people who want to keep building, keep showing up, and help each other when the momentum starts to slip.
Nothing complicated. Just good people doing the work and supporting each other.
If that sounds like something you’d want to be part of, drop me a message.
Nobody warns you about the silence you have to explain.
You post something you actually meant. You spend an hour on it, cut it down, sit on it, hit publish with your stomach doing that thing. And then: nothing.
Fine. You've read enough to know that's the deal. You signed up for it. Now, just post consistently, ignore the numbers, blah blah.
Except the numbers aren't the problem.
The problem is the person at the kitchen table who asks what you were doing on your laptop for an hour. And you have to look at them and say, "Writing," and watch it land as, "You've been arsing about on LinkedIn again."
That's the silence that actually kills people off. Not the algorithm. The gap between what it costs you to build something from nothing and what anyone in your life can see.
Because they can't see it. Your partner thinks it's a hobby that makes dinner go cold. Your mate calls it a weird phase. Nobody in the room knows what a decent post takes out of you on a bad day, so the effort goes unwitnessed.
And unwitnessed effort dies quietly, with your full cooperation.
I watched it die in myself for years, refreshing a post nobody clapped for.
So people don't quit because it's hard. They quit because it's lonely, and they've got to keep explaining the loneliness to people who love them and still don't get it.
Being seen by one person who's playing the same game changes everything.
If you can't answer, "What were you doing for an hour?" without flinching, that's something you can actually fix.
I'm here to help you with that. Send me a DM. We'll start from there.
PS. I'm back!
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