Posts

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!

LinkedIn added a button so you can report a post as "AI slop."

Good luck with that.

Because nobody will flag slop, not really. They'll flag polish. Tidy line breaks, a clean structure, em dashes, a sentence that doesn't stumble. Which means the people who got good at writing will get reported, and the people who rough it up on purpose won't.

Not to mention those who'll press it on purpose. Nothing personal, just a competitor having a bad week and a button that costs nothing to tap.

I use AI every day but the words are mine because the life behind them is mine. A report button can't see that. It can only see the surface.

Anyway. It's Friday. If this post gets flagged, at least I'll know somebody read it.

The secret to growing your presence online?

Surround yourself with people laying bricks, sharing tools, and building something of their own. In all honesty, I'm starting to learn this lesson myself.

Builders build better together.

If your goal is to grow online, I want to connect with you. Send me a DM.

I wasn't going to post anything today.

In fact, I had absolutely nothing to say.

But then I just didn’t want to ruin my perfect 14-day posting streak.

Does this count as a real post? Or am I gaming the system?

"Why would I take advice from someone who hasn't made it yet?"

Fair. You shouldn't. Not if what you want is advice.

The whole guru economy runs on one promise: I climbed the mountain, here's the view, pay me and I'll describe it to you. And people love it, because a finished expert feels safe.

Someone who's already done the scary part so you don't have to feel scared alone.

Except the map they're selling you was drawn from the summit. From memory. Years after they crossed the bit you're standing on right now, when the trail looked completely different and the weather was kinder and the path they took don't even exist anymore.

You're not buying a map. You're buying a postcard.

A support group is not that. There's no stage. There's no guru pretending the fog cleared for them and it'll clear for you if you just believe hard enough.

It's a small room of people mid-race. Building on LinkedIn and X, right now, in public, with the same drafts that don't land and the same weeks where nothing moves.

Which means it's a genuinely bad fit for some people. If you want a finished expert to follow, someone with the numbers and the merch and the confident smile, go find one. They're everywhere. They'll take your money and describe the view.

But if you'd rather have someone drawing the map next to you, close enough to notice when you go quiet, then a support group is the right place for you.

I'm building that support group. Founding chairs are free. Entry's by DM.

If you quit the hustle, who's writing your rules now?

I ask because the anti-hustle crowd looks a lot like the hustle crowd in a dressing gown. Same volume, same certainty, same need to tell you exactly how to live. They swapped the pre-dawn cold plunge for a smug lie-in and decided that was enlightenment.

The arc is always the same. Delete the productivity apps, unfollow the 4am guys, write the manifesto about rest being resistance. Then, over the next year or so, become the most rigid person in the room. No posting on weekends. No "hustle language". No selling, because selling is icky now. No ambition you're allowed to say out loud.

That's not freedom. That's taking the hustle crowd's rules and flipping each one upside down. Which answers the question, really. If you define yourself by what you're against, the thing you're against still writes your rules. The productivity guy is still running your life.

I can say this from an odd position, because I've never belonged to either church.

I started working at age fifteen. I've welcomed Mondays my whole life, and people who only seem to exist for the weekends have always puzzled me a bit. By most definitions that puts me squarely in the hustle category, but I've never once called it that.

Nobody's routine, and nobody's rejection of a routine, will ever run my life.

Which is the one thing neither side can give you, because both are selling the same product: one correct way to work, performed loudly for strangers. Hustle shouldn't be idealised, but neither should its opposite. The moment either one becomes your identity, you're preaching an ideology, and someone else is holding the script.

The real choice was never to hustle or not to hustle. It's ignoring the options and working out what actually brings meaning to your one life. For me that happens to be hard work. For you it might be something else entirely, and that's the whole point.

The balanced view of reality is slower, quieter and earns you no applause at all.

Probably why so few people talk about it.

You keep buying the map because you think you're lost.

You're not lost. You know exactly what to do. Post consistently. Talk to people. Show up when you'd rather not. You've read it forty times. You could recite it in your sleep.

So you buy another course. Save another post. Bookmark another "ultimate guide to LinkedIn growth in 2026" like the last twelve didn't turn to dust in a folder you never open.

And you stall at the exact same spot you always stall. Three weeks in. Every time.

Here's the thing you got wrong about that stall, though. You think the problem is a knowledge gap, a missing tactic, or one more piece of information that'll finally make it click.

It's don't have a knowledge problem. You have an audience problem.

Nobody is watching, so you do the work, the good work, the hard invisible work, and it lands in a silence so complete you start to wonder if you're mad. No one in your life gets it. To them it's a strange hobby you do on your laptop while dinner goes cold. They don't clock the effort. They can't. They don't know what a decent post costs you on a bad day.

So the effort goes unwitnessed. And unwitnessed effort dies. Quietly, with your full cooperation, the way I've watched it die in myself for years of building alone.

That's why I'm building a support group. Not another roadmap, but a small room of people running the same race, close enough to notice when you go quiet.

A group where your small numbers aren't embarrassing because everyone's early at something. Where a missed week is data, not a verdict. Where the person who watches your progress knows precisely what it cost, because they're paying the same price this week.

That's the thing information could never buy you. Someone who sees you.

If you're building in public and sick of doing it into the void, DM me.

You prepare for the client call like it’s THE call.

You rehearse the pitch and clean up the deck. You practise the confident version of your answer to the question you know they’ll ask. All of it aimed at projecting your best self.

But that call isn’t where your client decided who you are.

That decision already happened. Quietly. In a tab you never saw them open.

Because the first time any serious prospect learns about you, you’re not there. They hear your name, type it into a search bar, and read whatever comes back before they’ve shaken your hand or heard a single word out of your mouth. By the time you’re in the actual conversation, they’ve already formed an impression.

And what did they find?

A headline you wrote three jobs ago. A profile photo where you look like a stranger to yourself. A featured section that’s empty or whatever you posted in 2023. A trail of old ventures you’ve long outgrown, sitting there like costumes you forgot to take off.

I know the costume problem intimately. I called myself a brand designer for much longer than I should have. Not because it paid, but because I knew my skills were lagging behind my taste, and I kept thinking one more project would close the gap. It never quite did. Then it took me years after I stopped doing the work to tell myself, out loud, that I wasn’t a brand designer anymore. The label outlived the job. That’s how these things go.

You’ve spent months getting genuinely good at the work. Meanwhile, the version of you that greets every prospect first is a shell you stopped inhabiting years ago.

So you walk in, sharp and ready, and you can feel the call is slightly cooler than it should be. You can’t put your finger on why. It’s because the first call already went badly. You just didn’t know it was happening.

Fixing this doesn’t mean creating a fake version of yourself. Do everything you can to improve that first impression, yes. But it can never cost you the truth. No lying, no deceiving, no dressing up as someone you’re not. The whole point is the best possible presentation of your real self.

When someone searches my name, all I’m aiming for is that they perceive me as a person with depth, values, and the competence to back them up. Not much else. I won’t stack it with anything that “converts” but isn’t me, because that’s just lying at scale.

You cannot rehearse for a conversation you’re not invited to. You can only make sure the person who shows up in your place is actually you.

You prepare for the client call like it’s THE call. And you should, but the real call happens before you’re ever invited into the room.

Nobody has ever told you your profile is shite.

Take a second with that. Months of posting, a bio you rewrote four times, a headline you agonised over, and not one person in your life has said "this doesn't sound like you" or "this reads like the guy you were three years ago."

You've decided that silence means it's working.

It doesn't. It means nobody's willing to pay the price of telling you the truth.

Because telling someone their online presence is off is expensive. There's a bill attached. You have to watch their face do the thing. You have to be the one who noticed, which means you have to admit you looked and thought "hmm, no." Your friend isn't going to pay that. Your partner isn't. Nobody who likes you is volunteering for it.

So they do the cheap thing instead. They say "looks great." They give you a like. They move on with their afternoon intact.

And you bank it as evidence. Every polite nothing goes into the same jar labelled "it must be fine, or someone would've said."

Meanwhile the profile keeps quietly doing its work. Pulling the wrong people. Describing a version of you that stopped existing two years ago. Making people less capable than you look established, because they got told the truth and fixed the thing you can't even see.

That's the trap. You are the one person on Earth who cannot read your own presence cold. You know too much. You fill in the gaps the profile leaves, because you know what you meant. A stranger doesn't. A stranger reads exactly what's on the page and decides in four seconds whether you're worth a reply.

The people who could tell you the difference are the same people with every reason to keep their mouths shut. The people who can give you the truth, won't do it for free.

Sometimes, what your profile needs isn’t another rewrite. It needs a dose of reality.

Because nobody has ever told you your profile is shite.

You might be better at doing the actual work than anyone in your feed.

But you're losing to them anyway.

Not because they know more, or do it better. But because their profile looks like a grown-up made it, and yours looks like it was thrown together during lunch.

Competence is invisible. Nobody scrolling past can see your years of experience or your hard-won judgement. All they see is one profile among hundreds on an endless feed.

So the ranking flips. Quietly. In the buyer's head, before you've said a word.

I hate this, by the way. I spent years designing brands for clients and disliked promoting myself the whole way through. I'm still making peace with it.

I'm going to be honest here, I would very much prefer to live in a world where substance wins on its own. But the truth is that often doesn't. The work you do needs to be seen to be valued. If it sits behind a locked door, nobody finds it.

Nobody is judged on an absolute scale. There isn't one. People judge you against a background of whoever else is on the screen at that second, and if that person dressed up for a gala and you are still in your pyjamas, that's what they see.

Being right about the work and wrong about the packaging still ends with them getting the call. But I'm not going to tell you to "look professional." That advice is empty.

Here's something better. Find the thing you're genuinely made for, make it as clear as you possibly can, and then dress it in something that doesn't look like an accident.

Give your work a chance to be seen. It will be.

Everyone's bragging about how fast they can write now.

Ten posts before breakfast. A month of content in an afternoon. The machine hums, the words pour out, and everyone's very pleased with themselves for winning.

But winning that race no longer matters when words are worthless.

In the same way that water becomes worthless during a flood. You can't sell a bucket of it to someone standing waist-deep in the stuff. And that's what's happening right now. We're all waist-deep in words, all poured from the same tap.

What's left of value is the one thing that cannot be faked: experience.

A model can write a thousand words about running a business, but it cannot run one. It can describe grief, a bad year, a client who ghosted you, or the specific ache of packing up a storage unit you spent six years filling. It can describe my misery beautifully.

I ran a reselling operation for six and a half years. What the AI can't tell you is that the worst scars I carry weren't caused by the work costing me my health, but by people close to me quietly working against its success. When I finally emptied that storage unit, racking gone, room hollowed out, it felt like deliverance.

I walked out of that empty room lighter than I'd been in years.

The AI that helped me write this post wasn't there. It has no scars to show. But when you feed it your real stories, the words are still yours because the source is you. Feed it nothing, and you get exactly what everyone else does.

I don't lie to it. I don't fake a life. Every story I tell is one I actually lived, because the second you start inventing a life you didn't have, you're destroying your own moat.

The moat is that you did something. You risked, failed, stayed, walked away, learned a trade with your hands, closed a business that was hurting you, and started over. That's the raw material an AI will never manufacture because it hasn't got a life to draw from.

Consistency matters. Showing up every day matters. And yes, AI makes it easier to be consistent. But consistency is the floor, not the ceiling.

Sharing your real life experiences is the whole point. It always was.

A free offer smells like a trap. I get it.

Free usually means one of two things. Either the person's desperate and hoping you'll take pity, or it's a bait price with a "was £X, now £0" sticker peeling at the corner, and you already know the real number is coming for you the second you get comfortable.

So when I say the founding chairs in my support group are free, your gut does the sensible thing. It flinches.

So let me tell you why it's actually free, because it's got nothing to do with either.

This is a small room of people building on LinkedIn and X, keeping each other honest. The whole point is that it notices when you go quiet. That's the mechanic. You skip a week, someone asks where you went. You float a shaky draft, someone pressure-tests it before you embarrass yourself in public.

That only works if is small. A room that notices you stops noticing anyone the second it fills up with three hundred strangers and a leaderboard.

So the smallness isn't a shortage is the product. It's what make it worth it.

Free, right now, because the founding members shape what this becomes and get me directly, not a screenshot of me on a stage. I spent fifteen years building alone, ghosting people who wanted to talk, treating "community" as social overhead I couldn't afford. This is the room I never had. I'm not selling you the view from a summit. I'm drawing the map while I'm still crossing the thing.

If you only want to lurk and consume, this is not the place for you. This room works because people show up and make things.

If you're building in public and sick of doing it alone, the door's open. DM me.

Nobody quits loudly.

You don't announce it. You don't post "I'm stepping away to focus on myself." You just... stop. One skipped day. Then a skipped week. Then you're the guy who used to post, and nobody noticed the exact moment you went dark.

I know because I did it for years, building businesses alone. Nobody clocks the loner going quiet. There's no empty chair. You just fold, and the world carries on refreshing.

So here's what I got wrong for fifteen years.

I thought the thing I was missing was information. A better roadmap. The right thread. The playbook that finally made it click. And I hoarded all of it, saved posts like my life depended on it, and stayed exactly as stuck as before, just with more tabs open.

Turns out the scarce thing was never to own the map. It was to have access to a room where somebody notices when you go quiet. Where you mean something to someone.

With people running the same race, close enough to see when you've missed a week and rude enough to ask why. Because quitting alone passes unopposed. Nobody objects. That's precisely how it kills you: politely, silently, with your full cooperation.

That's why I'm looking for people like myself, who are building in public, and looking to work together to support each other. This is a small side-project, but with big ambitions.

It's going to be free for founding members, and it's meant to stay small.

If you've are tired of having nobody to share your progress: my DMs are open.

You built a "business" on rented land and hung a sign that says freedom over the door.

That's most of us, if we're honest.

You picked the platform. You learned its rhythms. You figured out what it rewards and you fed it, day after day, until the reach came and the income followed. And somewhere in there you started calling it independence. Your own thing. Nobody's boss but you.

Except you never owned the building.

You're a tenant. A good one, maybe. Pays on time, keeps the place tidy, knows which floorboards creak. But the landlord can change the locks whenever it wants, and it never has to tell you why.

One quiet tweak to how the reach works and your rent triples overnight. You didn't do anything wrong. There's no letter, no appeal, and no number to call. Just a graph that no longer goes up and sick feeling that everything you built was a big waste of time.

The cruel part is that the better you get at pleasing the algorithm, the deeper the trap. Every skill you sharpen is a skill that only pays out inside this one house. You're not building equity. You're getting really, really good at being a tenant.

And these platforms love this. Sells you the eviction risk as a growth strategy. "Post more. Ride the trend. Feed the machine." All of it making you more dependent on them.

But here's what actually survives a locked door: the relationships you built while you were in there. The people who'd follow you to the next platform, the next inbox, the next anything. Those are yours. You take them when you leave.

So build on the platform, any platform, but don't make the mistake to think you own it.

Somewhere in a datacenter, Claude just whispered, "I’m going to need a minute."

Status and substance look identical in a feed. That's the whole trap.

Two people post the same week. Same topic, same confidence, same tidy line breaks. One is chasing how they're perceived. One is building what's actually true. On the screen you cannot tell them apart. The reaction counter doesn't know the difference either. It rewards both, generously, right up until it stops.

People often think they're choosing between "good post" and "bad post." They're not. Both posts are polished. Both get likes. The choice was never about quality.

It was about what happens after the attention leaves.

Because attention always leaves. That's its the one guarantee. It shows up for the clever hook, the hot take, the perfectly staged vulnerability, and then it wanders off to the next thing that flickers. The attention player wakes up the next morning and the scoreboard has reset to zero. So they perform again. And again. Feeding the void that eats everything they do.

Meanwhile, the substance player wakes up and something is still there.

A reader who now trusts them a little more. An idea that's clearer than it was yesterday because they had to actually think it through instead of packaging it.

That's the cruel bit. On any given day, chasing attention feels smarter. It's faster, it's louder, it pays out immediately. Substance feels slow and stupid by comparison, like planting something you won't see for months while your neighbour is setting off fireworks.

I'm not going to lie and say I do not optimised for attention. Everyone who posts does, that's what hooks are for. You write the line you believe will land, not the one that's true, and you feel the little hit when it works, and you tell yourself they're the same thing.

But optimising for attention should not replace creating from real substance.

So the question isn't "did this post do well." Anyone can make a post do well for a day. The question is uglier: if the numbers vanished tomorrow, would anything I built still be standing?

Play the scoreboard and you win every day and own nothing. Build the real thing with substance and even if you lose the scoreboard you will wake up richer.

If you have to make a choice, pick the game where losing still pays.

The people who post like their life depends on it usually disappear the fastest.

Every day. No excuses. Turn up or you're not serious. I've heard it dressed as discipline so many times I almost believed it was a virtue instead of a countdown.

It isn't discipline. It's a fuse.

Because "every day, no matter what" only works until the "no matter what" actually happens. The bad week. The flu that flattens you. The client crisis, the funeral, the child who won't sleep, the flat mood that turns the editor into a wall you can't climb. And a pace that demanded your absolute best every single day has no room left for an ordinary shite Tuesday.

So the Tuesday arrives. You miss a day. Then two. And the whole thing you built on the promise of perfect consistency now feels like a lie you can't face, so you stop entirely. Not because you're weak. Because the pace was never survivable to begin with.

I've watched it happen to people who posted like machines and looked unstoppable for three months. Bright, loud, everywhere. Then gone. The void ate them and nobody noticed the exact day they stopped.

Meanwhile the boring ones are still here. The people whose output looked unimpressive, almost lazy, next to the fireworks. A couple of posts a week. Nothing that screamed "serious operator." A year later they're still standing, still building, still the same person online they are when the camera's off.

Turns out the moderate pace is not a lack of ambition. It is the right measure of it.

Anyone can go all-in for a fortnight. The trick isn't how hard you can push on a good day. It's how gently you can carry the thing across a bad one without setting it down for good.

Grow at a pace that survives your worst week, and you will thrive in the long run.

I've read three books this month. Watched maybe forty training videos. Saved dozens of insightful posts like a squirrel hoarding nuts for a winter that never comes.

Does that sound like something you have done yourself?

Consuming feels like work, productive and responsible. The kind of thing you'd tell others with pride without flinching. "I'm learning." "I'm doing my research." "I'm going deep before I put anything out there."

But your output count sits at zero, and you are sleeping like a baby.

This is the perfect crime because it leaves a similar fingerprint to real effort. You feel full. Full of frameworks. Full of other people's sentences. Full of the quiet confidence that you now know how it's done. And knowing how it's done feels almost exactly like doing it, right up until the moment someone asks to see the thing you made.

I know because I've done this. Been there, done that. Repeatedly.

Creating is the opposite reality. It's slower, it's exposed, it makes you feel stupid for a long time before anything feels any good. So the mind creates a fanciful lie that quietly reroutes your attention. One more video. One more thread. Surely the answer's in the next one.

But it isn't. And it never will be. The answer is always going to cost you the thing you were avoiding: sitting there, saying something imperfect, with your name on it.

Absorbing everyone else's thinking is not preparation for having your own. I'm not saying don't consume anything, but I'm saying don't hide behind.

Publish some half-baked shite today. At least the shite is yours.

I’ve been unusually quiet on here for the past couple of weeks.

Not because I stopped caring about posting.

Because I’ve been deep in the system behind it.

I’m building something that learns how you think: who you’re trying to reach, what you’re trying to say, what you stand for, and how you naturally say it.

This is not prompting. And it’s not a generic AI writing tool.

It’s a multi-step system where the thinking is loaded upfront—so when it generates ideas, they are actually aligned with your goals, your ICP, your positioning, and your voice.

The ideation side is now genuinely excellent. I can generate multiple ideas on the fly, and they’re remarkably accurate, useful, and on-strategy.

The post generation is getting very close too. Still refining it. Still testing. But it’s beginning to reflect a much clearer version of my own voice—and, in the process, helping me clarify what that voice actually is.

And all thanks to Fable 5. It has helped me reach insights no other model could. I've hit my session limit more times than I’d like to admit. Screenshot attached as evidence.

I’m excited about where this is heading.

When this opens, the first intake will be deliberately small. I want to make sure the system is set up properly for every person who joins.

If you want me to add you to the waitlist, send me a DM.

I disappeared for a whole week, and it wasn't a strategy.

No posts, no comments, no "stepping back to recharge" announcement. I was simply too empty to type.

Last week left me wrecked. Turns out I undersold it. I kept meaning to write something, opened the editor a few times, stared at it, made coffee, closed it again. My AI limits reset on Sunday, but my own took a bit longer.

So I did the thing I never do. I stopped. Slept properly. Went for walks.

The thing I've been building is still there, by the way. Still not talking about it. It moved forward this week, just slower and quieter than usual.

What I'm taking away from the week is a bit annoying. I spend a lot of time building systems so the work doesn't depend on my mood. But no system writes the post for you when you're empty. At some point you have to take some time for yourself.

Happy Friday. Good to be back.

It's Friday and I'm completely wrecked.

I spent the entire week building something I can't talk about yet. All I'll say is: it started as something useful for me, and I think it might end up being useful to other people too.

But here's the part that's actually worth talking about.

I burned through my usage limits on three AI platforms this week. Claude. Gemini. Codex. All three. All maxed out. All telling me to come back on Sunday.

So now I'm sitting here, working without AI. It feels like trying to Google something in 1997 on a dial-up connection while someone picks up the phone. Remember that?

Everything is so slow. I keep reaching for something that isn't there. It's like forgetting your phone at home except it's your entire brain extension.

And it made me realise something kind of uncomfortable: if the data centres went dark tomorrow and AI just vanished, I could not go back to working the way I used to.

Not "wouldn't want to." Could not.

I don't know what to make of this. It's a terrifying idea.

Well, on that good note, I'll leave you with some Happy Friday wishes.

P.S. Be honest: how cooked would you be without AI at this point?

Every heatwave I tell myself the same thing.

Just a few days. You can do a few days. It's fine. It's not that deep.

And then I sit here (in Yorkshire) fantasising about moving to Inverness. I'm wondering at what point "a few days" stops being a reasonable thing to say.

I don't want to be dramatic. But I also don't want to be sweating through a Wednesday in June just trying to send emails. (First world problems I guess)

It's not even the heat that gets me. It's the reset. Every year we act like this is new. Every year we collectively suffer through it, complain, wait for it to pass, and go back to normal.

No changes. No preparation. Just vibes and an amber warnings.

Anyway. A few more days. I can do a few more days.

...Edinburgh's looking nice actually.

A tool that adds three more decisions to my day isn't a tool. It's a colleague I have to manage, except it doesn't get tired and I do.

That's the bit nobody says out loud when they're selling you the latest app.

If you're building a name on here, posting, chasing leads, following up, keeping the expert image intact, you've probably done what I did. Bought the project tracker, the automation suite, the CRM with forty-seven fields. The setup "looked" incredible. Tabs everywhere. Statuses. Tags. A dashboard you screenshot for your own quiet satisfaction.

And you're more tired than before.

Because every one of those tools added a small new thing to think about. A status to update. A field to fill. A "did the automation actually fire or do I need to check" that lives in the back of your skull all day like a dripping tap.

You didn't reduce the work. You spread it thinner and made it constant.

Here's what I figured out. A good tool doesn't give you more to manage. It gives you less.

The test isn't "does this organise my work." It's "does this let me stop thinking about something I was carrying before." Big difference. One produces a tidy screenshot. The other produces a quiet head.

Most software fails this test cheerfully. It dresses up friction as features. It hands you a cockpit when what you needed was an autopilot, then calls the extra knobs "power".

(Power for who? You're the one still flying it at midnight.)

I help people who sell their expertise on LinkedIn fix the setup behind the scenes. One place instead of six tabs. Less to manage, not more. So the energy goes into the work clients actually see, not the machinery nobody pays you for.

A good tool is one you forget you're using. It does the boring follow-through, it removes the decision, it shuts up. You only notice it's gone when something breaks and you're holding the weight again.

So before you add the next thing to your stack, ask the only question that matters:

Does this take something off your mind, or just add to your anxiety?

If your "organised" setup leaves you drained, that's exactly what I fix. DMs are open.

For most of human history, nobody had a Monday morning.

There was no commute. No inbox. No manager to report to at nine. There was just the day, and what it needed from you. You hunted when there was hunting to do. You built when something needed building. You rested when the work was done.

For roughly three hundred thousand years, human beings lived like this. Unscheduled. Self-directed. Accountable to survival, not to a hierarchy someone else designed.

Then, in the last two hundred years or so, we reorganised everything. Factories needed bodies at fixed hours. Schools needed children sitting still. Offices needed people who showed up, clocked in, and did what they were told. And slowly, generation by generation, we stopped asking whether any of this was natural. It just became the shape of a life.

Here's what nobody says out loud. The dissatisfaction most people carry.

The low hum of it, the Sunday dread, the sense that something is quietly wrong. This isn't a personal failing. It isn't laziness or ingratitude or a bad attitude. It's a body and a mind that spent three hundred thousand years being built for autonomy, running a two-hundred-year-old operating system designed for compliance.

The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as it was designed to. You're just not what it was designed for.

Once you see that, the restlessness stops feeling like a problem with you. It starts feeling like information.

I'm building a small group for people who've decided to act on that information. People who are building something of their own. If that's you, my DMs open.

X just opened Community Notes to AI writers.

I went straight to the how. Because with AI, the how is everything.

The rules apply to AI the same as everyone else. No shortcuts. AI notes go through the same open scoring algorithm as human notes, rated by people from different perspectives, clearly labelled, only allowed to write where a human has already requested one. They earn their place the same way human contributors do.

I regularly use Community Notes. They've changed how I interpret posts on this platform more than once. This one's worth paying attention to.

What X is building here has actual standards, applied equally, human or AI.

I have more fondness for this platform than any other. The values underneath it are ones I share myself: openness, fairness, bottoms-up, fast-moving, self-correcting.

Any platform that creates conditions for people to genuinely change their minds, regardless of where they started, is doing something right.

I opened LinkedIn this morning and got invited to play a puzzle game.

Not the first time LinkedIn has done something I didn't ask for. Won't be the last. I clicked away and got on with my day.

Here's what actually bothers me about it. LinkedIn is the one platform that was supposed to be different. No dances. No filters. No viral nonsense. Just people saying things that mattered to other people who cared. That was the deal.

A puzzle game is a small thing. But small things point at bigger directions.

The platform is optimising for time-on-app. That's a different goal than the one that made it useful. And when the goal changes, the environment changes with it. It happens quietly, feature by feature, until one day you look up and wonder why everything feels slightly off.

I'm not leaving. The people I want to reach are still here.

But I am writing more carefully than ever. Because on a platform that's learning to compete for attention the way every other platform does, the only response that makes sense is to be worth the attention in the first place.

I'm not playing the game though.

The thought you're trying to write clearly doesn't exist yet.

Most founders sit down to write a post, a positioning page, a client email, and the first thing they do is reach for structure. Bullet points. A framework. Something that looks like it knows what it's saying. And what comes out is clean, organised, and completely hollow. Because they tried to clarify something before they'd actually found it.

(They've built the frame before they know what they're hanging.)

Here's what's actually happening. After a good call, a difficult client, a pitch that didn't land, a product decision that kept you up, there is signal in there. Real signal. The line you said that made the room shift. The reaction you had that you didn't fully trust. The half-formed opinion you swallowed because the meeting was moving on.

That is the thinking. Buried in the mess of it.

Writing doesn't produce it. Writing extracts it. And most people have never been taught the difference, so they sit at a blank page waiting for clarity to arrive, when clarity is already in the room, wearing a disguise, arguing with itself.

The calls, the scribbled notes, the voice memos with three false starts, those aren't the rough draft. Those are the mine.

I don't teach founders to write better summaries of what they already think. I go in, find what's actually there, and show them how to pull it out themselves. The unfinished judgment. The competing reaction. The thing they said sideways that was actually the whole point.

That's the signal. The writing is just what happens after you've found it.

If your content keeps almost saying the right thing, DMs open.

If you never have enough time, you didn't build a business. You built a help desk with your face on it.

"Quick question."
"Just need your eyes on this."
"Which version do you like?"

And you answer them all. Fast, even. You're proud of fast. Meanwhile the actual thinking about the pricing, the offer, the next move, gets done in the scraps. Ten minutes here. Then minutes there. In the car. After the the school run. Whilst pretending to listen at dinner.

Here's the bit nobody tells you about operational independence:

It was never about whether the work happens without your hands. It's whether the work happens without renting space in your head.

Most founders audit their time like accountants but spend their attention like drunks. They'll hire the VA, write the SOPs, automate the invoices, then stay mentally on-call for every small decision, every follow-up, every "should this post go out Tuesday or Thursday."

And they treat the exhaustion as a separate problem. Something to fix with a morning routine and a fucking meditation app. It's not a separate problem. It's the design.

You built a machine with a slot in it shaped exactly like your brain, and now you're surprised it stops running the moment you take your brain to the beach.

A business that needs your hands is a job.
A business that needs your constant attention is a hostage situation with a logo.

Availability isn't dedication. It's a load-bearing wall you forgot you were.

So stop asking "can this run without me doing it" and start asking "can this run without me thinking about it."

The first question got you delegation. The second one gets you out.

Need help to improve the systems that run your online presence? DMs are open.

A good week is not a system. It’s a weather event.

It rolls in, you feel like a different person, you ship three months of work in nine days, and you think: right, so this is who I am now. This is the operating model.

Then it passes.

And the business, which you quietly built around the version of you that exists at peak energy, peak confidence, and zero friction, stops.

Not collapses. Just... stops. The way a car stops when you forget to put petrol in it, then look confused at the dashboard like it's done something personal.

Here's the bit nobody wants to admit. Most founder "systems" are not systems. They're mood-dependent workflows with a Notion doc sellotaped to the front. They work brilliantly when you're switched on, caffeinated, and mildly euphoric from a good call.

They disintegrate the first Tuesday you wake up feeling like wet sand.

A real system produces the right behaviour when motivation has gone to the shops and confidence is still in bed. Not the ideal output. The right behaviour.

The thing that still happens regardless of the internal weather.

(There's a difference. Most people don't find out until they've had a terrible quarter and can't explain why it was different from the great one three months before.)

If you are having "good weeks", you're not running a business. You're running a mood.

If that landed a bit too close to home, I work with founders to pull apart what they've actually built and put a real operating model in its place. DMs are open.

Thirteen hours on LinkedIn today and I have nothing to show for it.

Not posting. Just reading. Properly reading, the way you do when you're actually curious and not just mining for content ideas to steal before lunch.

I've laid my eyes on close to a hundred posts today. Reacted to about half of them. Reached out to dozens of people. Made a few good contacts.

(The ones I reached out to, they didn't hear from a template. They heard from me. There's a difference and most people can't be bothered to make it.)

The dashboard did not went green today. No deals were closed. Nothing was shipped. By every metric the gurus say you should be tracking, today was invisible.

That's fine.

This is what the work actually looks like before the work looks like anything. Turning up. Paying attention. Saying the thing you mean to the person you mean it to.

Planting seeds isn't glamorous. It's just digging.

Thirteen hours on social media today and nothing to show for it.

Close to a hundred posts read. Reacted to about half. Reached out to dozens of people, none of them heard from a template. Planting seeds isn't glamorous.

It's just digging. The harvest comes later.

Most founder systems are badly designed quest logs.

You open them in the morning and you’re back at level one, staring at twelve glowing markers with no idea which one actually moves the story forward.

You’ve got a CRM, a project board, a weekly review doc, too many tabs, and not enough decisions baked in.

It looks like progress, but it plays like a fetch quest.

The problem isn’t that the system needs you. Of course it needs you. You’re the player.

But having to rebuild the strategy every time you log in is not gameplay.

Which move matters?
Which lead matters?
Which client needs attention?
What is urgent now?
What is just side-quest nonsense dressed up as priority?

If you have to decide that fresh every morning, you’re playing the wrong game.

A better system frontloads the thinking: the rules, priorities, filters, and “when this happens, do that” logic.

The main quest is clear. The next move is obvious. The inventory is sorted before the fight starts.

Bad systems create more buttons to press.

Good systems turn yesterday’s strategy into today’s next move.

You still have to play.

You just stop respawning at the tutorial every morning.

P.S. I’m opening a few early spots for the system I’m building. DM me if you want in.

Your content is consistent? Cool. So is wallpaper.

That doesn’t mean anyone stops to look at it. And I think this is where I’m still getting stuck. Probably where a lot of founders get stuck too.

We design content around pillars: hiring, culture, leadership, AI, growth... All the grown-up business words, neatly lined up like beige wallpaper in a meeting room where nobody has ever dared to raise their voice.

It covers the wall. It fills the space. It looks respectable.

Nobody gives a damn.

Not because the ideas are bad, but because we hide ourselves behind a safe social media voice that sounds like it was assembled in a conference room by four people trying very hard not to let anything human leak through.

And yes, I’m guilty of that too.

I keep picking the safe pattern, but I don't want to do that anymore.

People don’t remember wallpaper. They remember the crack in the plaster. The weird stain. The bit someone tried to paint over badly. The place where you can see there was actually a person in the room before everything got smoothed flat.

I'm peeling the wallpaper back one uncomfortable strip at a time.

What part of your content still feels like wallpaper?

Most engagement is just LinkedIn loitering.

You turn up in the comments, shuffle around a bit, nod at strangers, say “great point” like a man trapped in a networking event with no exits, then leave feeling weirdly productive.

I know the move because I’ve done it.

Open app. Reply to five posts. Drop something vaguely thoughtful under someone with a big audience. Pretend the little dopamine cough from a like means progress.

Beautiful little performance. Almost completely useless.

Because the goal was never to be “active.” That’s the lie that turned half the feed into people clapping at each other through glass.

The goal is to become remembered by the right people.

And that changes the whole job.

A random comment might get you seen for three seconds by someone who already forgot you before their coffee went cold. A specific reply, to someone you actually want in your world, repeated over time, with a bit of thought behind it? Different animal.

That’s not activity.

That’s how a conversation starts leaving fingerprints.

Most people treat comments like cardio. Get the reps in. Keep the account warm. Feed the machine. Stay visible enough that nobody can accuse them of disappearing.

Fine. Enjoy your treadmill.

But don’t confuse movement with momentum.

The good stuff happens when you stop spraying polite little sentence-shaped receipts around the internet and start choosing where your attention actually goes.

1. Who do you want to know you exist?
2. Whose trust would actually matter?
3. Who would you reply just for the sake of it?
4. Who matters to you in the long-term?

Start there, because a single comment is not a relationship.

It’s a knock on the door.

And stop knocking on every door in the street just because you like the sound.

This might be controversial, but most founder thought leadership is rubbish.

Not because founders have nothing interesting to say. The problem is that too much of it feels like someone trying to sound clever before they’ve actually earned the lesson.

One day it’s AI, then personal branding, then building products, then social media, then business, then attention, then some random thing they noticed about people that morning.

And look, let’s be frank about this, I do this myself.

I’m still the founder talking about all sorts of things. I’m still trying to work out what my actual lane is, what I should keep coming back to, and how to make it make sense without forcing myself into some neat little box that doesn’t feel true.

The thing is, in my head, it all feels connected because I know the thread inside it. I know why AI connects to writing, why writing connects to personal brand, why personal brand connects to business, why business connects to attention, and why attention connects to everything else I’m trying to build.

But other people don’t live inside my head.

They just see one post, then another post, then another post. And if the connection isn’t obvious, they don’t sit there trying to solve the puzzle. They just don’t know where to put me.

It’s like opening a drawer full of useful things, but everything is mixed together. There might be good stuff in there, but it still feels like a mess because nothing has a clear place.

And I think that’s the bit I’m slowly learning.

People remember you when they can place you.

Not in a fake “personal brand” way. More like, “Ah, this is the person who keeps talking about that thing, in that specific way, from that particular angle.”

That’s what sticks.

Not every thought you’ve ever had. Not every topic you’re capable of discussing. Just enough of a pattern that someone can recognise you again.

So maybe the better question is not, “What else can I talk about?”

Maybe it’s, “What do I want people to slowly associate with me?”

Then you keep coming back to that. Not with the same post every time, and not by becoming boring on purpose, but with the same kind of concern, the same kind of problem, the same kind of honesty, shown through different examples.

That is probably enough.

You don’t need to become a content machine. You need to become easier to remember.

Which is annoying, because for me, that means repeating myself more than I naturally feel comfortable doing. But maybe that’s the work.

If you’re also in that weird place of building in public, trying to find your lane, and not quite sure yet how all the pieces fit together, send me a DM.

I’m figuring this out too. Maybe we can figure it out together.

Your content calendar is probably tracking the wrong thing

It tracks what you posted, but not who showed up, and when you think about it, that makes no sense. Why is there so much advice on content but so little on relationships?

I learned that properly during a 2-week beginner challenge on LinkedIn. The plan was simple: post every weekday, send connection requests, leave thoughtful comments, and track it all.

I expected publishing to be the hard part. It wasn’t. I posted every day. Some posts went out later than planned, but they went out.

The thing is, a much more important problem showed up after publishing.

People commented, some more than once. A few conversations had follow-up potential, and some names started to feel familiar.

The best DMs weren’t “cool post” messages. They were follow-ups. People asked about the tools I’m using, how the LinkedIn challenge was going, and what I’m seeing in the market.

That’s when the limits of a normal content calendar became obvious.

Looking at my calendar for those 2 weeks made me feel like “work completed.” But it couldn’t tell me who replied twice, who liked multiple posts, who sent a thoughtful DM, or who was becoming more than a name in the feed.

So here’s my rule for attention now: if someone’s interaction creates a next step, it counts.

Most calendars don’t hold that relationship context, so you lose the thread.

Right now, I’m building a relationship layer that helps answer the question I care about most:

Who showed intent this week, and who needs a reply before the context goes cold?

When you look at your own content system, can you tell who you need to reach out to without opening every single post manually?

I just finished a 2-week Beginner Challenge on X.

I thought posting every day would be the hard part. But it wasn’t. Replying was.

The goal was simple:

- Post at least once every weekday
- Follow 5–10 people per day
- Leave 15–25 replies per day

The result?

I posted every day.

That was the main win. Not always at the time I planned. Some posts went out later because life, work, and fixing bugs on my own custom app got in the way.

But the posts went out.

The part I fell badly behind on was engagement.

I only followed around 6 new people, and I made pretty much zero replies on X.

So, if I’m being honest, I did the publishing part. But messed up on the interaction part.

Writing content was easy.

That was the biggest lesson.

But finding the right people to follow, reading enough posts, finding conversations where I had something useful to add, and leaving replies that didn’t feel forced was much harder.

A lot of the time, I would scroll through posts and feel like I had nothing meaningful to say.

So I skipped them.

I was also doing the same challenge on LinkedIn, and the difference was obvious.

LinkedIn felt easier because the audience was clearer and the conversations were more directly connected to what I’m building.

X felt more scattered. It seems like a platform where I would need more volume, more replies, and more time in the feed before momentum starts to build.

And that’s where the challenge exposed the real bottleneck.

It wasn’t ideas, or writing. It was attention.

X feels like it needs a much higher volume of participation to get traction.

And for the past two weeks, that was harder for me to sustain.

The good thing is that the challenge still gave me useful information.

It helped me restart the habit of posting.

It showed me that writing consistently is not the main problem.

It made me much clearer about how much friction there is in finding the right accounts, tracking engagement, and turning scattered activity into a repeatable workflow.

That matters because I’m building a tool around content, contacts, comments, messages, and engagement workflows.

This challenge helped me improve that system while using it in real life.

I’ve now opened a whitelist for early access, so people who want to try it during development can sign up and be among the first users.

If you want to gain early access, send me a DM and I'll add you to the whitelist.

I just finished a 2-week Beginner Challenge on LinkedIn.

Posting every day was the easy part. The real challenge was everything that happens after you publish. The goal was simple:

- Post at least once every weekday
- Send 5–10 connection requests per day
- Leave 15–25 comments per day

The result?

I posted every day. That was the main win.

Not always at the time I planned. Some posts were supposed to go out around 9am and ended up going out later because other things got in the way.

Today’s post was supposed to go out early and ended up going out close to 11pm.

But the posts went out.

That mattered to me because I wanted to prove I could get back into the habit of publishing consistently. The part I fell behind on was engagement.

Across the two weeks, I left most of my comments on LinkedIn, but nowhere near the 15–25 comments per day I had planned.

I also only sent 18 connection requests in total.

So the honest result is this:

Writing was the easiest part, but participation was the harder part.

Coming up with ideas, writing posts, and publishing them became easier the more I did it.

But finding the right people, reading their posts, deciding where I had something useful to add, leaving comments that didn’t feel generic, and keeping track of everything took much more attention than I expected.

I was also doing the same challenge on X, and the contrast was useful.

LinkedIn felt easier because the audience was clearer. The conversations felt more aligned with what I’m building, and it was easier to find people who are closer to my target market.

X felt more scattered. I get the sense it would need much more volume, more replies, and more time inside live conversations to get the same kind of signal.

Some days, I simply prioritised getting the LinkedIn post out because I knew I didn’t want to fail on that part.

Other days, I got pulled into fixing bugs and improving the tool I’m building to manage content, contacts, comments, messages, and engagement workflows.

That work improved the system a lot, but it also meant I did less manual engagement than planned. The biggest lesson from LinkedIn was this:

Posting is not the same as building presence.

Posting is output. Engagement is participation. And participation takes attention.

Still, I’m glad I did it.

It helped me get back into the rhythm of writing. It gave me real data instead of assumptions. It showed me where the bottleneck is.

And it helped me improve the system I’m building around content and relationship management.

I’ve now opened a whitelist for early access, so people who want to try the system while it’s still in development can sign up and be among the first users.

If you want to gain early access, send me a DM and I'll add you to the whitelist.

My best writing usually starts as complete nonsense.

The best of it only truly surfaces after I stop trying to sound coherent.

That’s why voice notes have become a serious step in my writing process. Not because they’re convenient, although they are, but because my thoughts don’t always arrive in order.

Most of the time, I’m at my desk, looking at the app I’m using to capture the note. Usually, that’s my own app. Sometimes, when I’m on the go, it’s an app on my phone.

The tool changes, but the process is the same.

Usually, I stop, make coffee, open the mic, and start with something like:

“Okay, so what I’m trying to say here…”

Then the first 30 seconds usually sound like a jumble of words with very little connection between them. A bit like trying to start a car that’s been sitting in a garage for years.

Not elegant. But once the engine starts, the ideas begin to move.

I don’t always know what the post will be when I start talking. I might begin with an idea about posting consistency, staying top of mind, or reaching potential clients, and somehow end up somewhere completely different.

Like when I wrote a post about how much I hate advertising.

(That is an actual thing, by the way. I simply cannot stand advertising. It gets on my nerves.)

And that's exactly what I mean.

The point I start with is not always the point I end up writing about. Voice notes let the thought move before I force it into structure.

When I write directly on the page, I organise too early. I try to clean the sentence before the thought is even complete. That slows everything down.

Voice notes lower the pressure.

I can pause, mutter, sip coffee, lose the thread, restart the thought, say something that makes no sense, then find the point two minutes later.

Totally unpolished. But that’s the point.

The first version is not supposed to be clean. It is supposed to capture the storm of thoughts before they disappear.

For the last couple of weeks, most of the posts I’ve published started this way.

I dump the audio, paste the transcript into AI, and ask it to identify the ideas. Usually, I want titles for possible posts, with a brief summary of what each one could cover.

Then I pick the idea I want to develop, ask for a first draft, and sit down to do the actual work: editing, cutting, adding my own thoughts, remembering personal examples, and shaping the thing into something I can stand behind.

Voice notes are a massively underrated writing tool. For me, they work much better than trying to dump ideas directly onto the page.

And AI works much better when you give it real material. Something that happened. Something you noticed. A contradiction. A personal detail. A bit of texture from actual life.

Because then it has something real to shape.

In short, my process is: talk first, make a mess, then find the writing inside it.

How about you? Do you ever use voice notes to captures your thoughts?

I’ve been testing AI for writing since the early versions of ChatGPT.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

At the very beginning, it was bad as bad can be. Every output lacked basic structure, coherence, and flow. It was so bad I would not even use it as placeholder text.

But with the newest models, the output has changed drastically.

Nowadays, you get structure, coherence, relevance, and flow from a single prompt. You get something that, at least on the surface, looks like a good piece of writing.

And it is good.

But there is still a problem with it.

The problem is that it can still feel like something anyone could have written. It lacks the thing that makes writing feel embodied in human experience.

It lacks texture.

Good writing has ownership. It carries the person behind it. Their values, their judgement, their humour, their contradictions, their specific examples, their way of noticing things.

It’s the difference between saying “consistency matters” and saying “one break made the blank page feel heavy again.”

One is true, but the other feels owned.

That texture is what makes a piece feel like it belongs to someone.

Without it, the text lacks a fingerprint. It could be published by anyone, which means it doesn’t quite belong to anyone. That’s where AI still struggles.

It struggles with the personal layer.

The lived example that makes the idea feel earned. The small hesitation before a strong claim. The odd sentence that somehow sounds exactly like you. The joke you would actually make, not the joke a content template thinks you should make.

That’s the missing layer.

I’ve built a system around this for my own writing. It learns from how I write, what I write, and the patterns that show up in my voice. It keeps track of those patterns and uses them as a calibration layer.

Right now, I’d say it gets me about 70% of the way there in one pass.

Useful? Yes. Does it output a finished piece worth sharing? Not at all.

I don’t think people should pretend AI isn’t useful. It is useful. It’s inevitable. People need to learn how to use it properly, which basically comes down to this:

Prompt it well, and treat the output as a rough draft.

Then work on that draft until it captures exactly what you want to say, in your own way.

Today, I have a short post to share.

This is it.

This is the post. Have a good day.

I broke the rhythm over the weekend.

Then Monday came, and the blank page made it very obvious.

I wasn’t planning to post anything during the weekend, so nothing wrong there. The weekend went fine. Family time. Normal life. Then Monday arrived, and my goal was to write something early and post around 9am, like I did last week.

But I got busy responding to incoming messages from potential clients, which is obviously not a bad problem to have. Still, the post didn’t go out when I wanted it to go out, and by the time I came back to it, hours had gone by.

Not ideal.

I opened the editor a couple of times, stared at the blank page, closed it, opened it again, stared at it again, then went to make coffee because apparently my brain needed external support.

Eventually, I came back and started working on it.

I felt annoyed with myself, if I’m honest. Not because anything dramatic happened, but because the whole point of the challenge is to build the rhythm, and today was supposed to be one of those simple 9am posts that proves the rhythm is there.

But here we are.

And the only thing that came to mind to write about was exactly that: breaking the rhythm, staring at the blank page, and trying to get the thread back.

The blank page can feel like a problem, but I don’t think it is. The blank page is just where the real problem becomes visible.

Today, it became clear to me: it’s about putting in the reps.

Because last week, when I was writing every day and getting posts ready early in the morning, I didn’t really feel this. The ideas were not magically better. The rhythm was better.

One break made the blank page feel heavy again.

Writing gets harder when the reps get colder. That’s the hard part. Not struggling with the lack of ideas, but returning to the page when you’ve lost momentum.

You can plan consistency in a calendar, but you build consistency by coming back when the neat little plan has already broken.

That’s probably the real rep.

Not posting when everything is lined up. Posting when you’re annoyed with yourself, slightly behind where you wanted to be, and the only honest thing left to write about is the fact that you’re still here, trying.

If you’ve read my ramblings up to this point, hope you have a great week.

I’m halfway through the beginner X challenge, and honestly, I’m exhausted.

Not in a bad way. More like: “Oh, right, this is a lot more social interaction than I’m used to” kind of tired.

Posting is one thing. But reading properly, replying thoughtfully, finding the right people, and staying present takes a surprising amount of energy.

Especially if, like me, social interaction doesn’t exactly recharge your batteries.

And I’ll be honest: doing this on X feels harder than doing it on LinkedIn.

My ICP is easier to find on LinkedIn. On X, there are definitely writers, ghostwriters, founders, and people building interesting things, but you have to dig more.

There’s also a lot more political content here.

That’s not me saying politics should not exist on X. Actually, one thing I do like about X is that people seem much more willing to exchange ideas openly, including ideas others might dislike.

LinkedIn feels more polite. X feels more free. Both have value.

But for this challenge, I’m mostly trying to find people around writing, ghostwriting, social growth, content, and building online. And that has been easier on LinkedIn so far.

So I’m starting to think LinkedIn may become my main growth platform in the short term, while X may become more of a place for thoughts, ideas, and less polished expression.

Still figuring that out. The good news is that the challenge is working.

It forced me to improve the system I’m building, especially around managing contacts, follow-ups, and who to engage with next.

And honestly, I don’t think I could have done this with spreadsheets alone.

A mess of tabs, notes, and spreadsheets would have eaten my brain by Tuesday.

So yes, I’m tired. But I’m also happy.

More like the kind of happy you feel when you’re building something you actually want to see exist in the world.

And that’s a pretty good place to end the week, if you ask me.

I’m halfway through the beginner LinkedIn challenge, and honestly, I’m exhausted.

Not in a bad way. More like: “Oh, right, this is a lot more social interaction than I’m used to” kind of tired.

Posting is one thing. But reading posts properly, commenting thoughtfully, replying, connecting with people, and staying present takes a significan amount of energy.

Especially if, like me, social interaction doesn’t exactly recharge your batteries.

That said, doing this on LinkedIn has felt much easier than doing it on X.

Part of that is probably because my ICP is much easier to find here. Founders, operators, coaches, consultants, writers, creators, people building things, people thinking about positioning, content, authority, and growth. They are easy to find on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn also feels more like a real network. Most people are clearly attached to a real name, real face, real work, real context. That makes the act of engaging feel less abstract. You’re not just replying to an avatar. You’re talking to a person.

Of course, LinkedIn has its own weirdness. It can be overly polished, overly polite, and sometimes a little too careful.

But for what I’m trying to build right now, it makes sense.

The challenge has also forced me to improve the system I’m building. Especially the workflow around managing contacts, follow-ups, and deciding who to engage with next.

And if I’m honest, I don’t think I could have done this with spreadsheets alone.

Maybe I'm not organised enough for that. Or maybe I’m too particular about tidiness. Either way, a mess of tabs, notes, and spreadsheets would have eaten my brain by Tuesday.

So yes, I’m tired. But I’m also happy with how things have gone so far.

The first half was the hard part because everything was new, messy, and still being figured out. Now I feel much more confident about handling the second half of the challenge.

Not “feet up, relaxed Friday” happy. I still have plenty of work to do.

More like the kind of happy you feel when you’re building something you actually want to see exist in the world.

And that’s a pretty good place to end the week, if you ask me.

One thing I keep seeing while spending more time reading people’s posts and writing comments, is how many people are posting about not using AI to write.

Maybe it’s the random luck of the posts I’ve stumbled on, but it feels as if a strong majority of people are advocating for some variation of:

1. Avoiding AI at all costs.
2. Writing everything yourself.
3. Keeping it 100% human.

And I get it. I really do.

There is a lot of soulless AI slop floating around. It is annoying to read. You can almost smell it before the second paragraph. Perfectly structured, oddly empty, as if written by nobody in particular. It has the shape of thought, but none of the pulse.

But after reading and interacting with so many posts on the topic, I can’t help feeling that trying to fight against AI completely is the wrong battle.

We’ve seen versions of this before.

In 1785, Edmund Cartwright patented the power loom. Mechanised weaving eventually displaced many skilled handloom weavers who had built their livelihoods around the craft.

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T. By 1913, the moving assembly line helped push cars into the mainstream and changed whole industries around horses, carriages, stables, and blacksmithing.

In 1979, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston released VisiCalc for the Apple II. The spreadsheet changed office work around manual calculations, bookkeeping, and clerical updating.

That doesn’t mean those changes were painless. They weren’t.

When a new technology arrives, it doesn’t politely knock and ask the old world for permission. And trying to stop the technology itself doesn’t seem to work. The better question is usually:

What becomes more valuable because of this change?

And in the case of AI and writing, I think one answer is voice.

But I don’t think “having an authentic voice” means never using AI. The way I see it, an authentic voice is not about whether every sentence was typed without assistance. It’s about whether the writing is truthful to the person behind it.

Being authentic is expressing your thoughts, opinions, judgment, doubts, taste, and perspective with clarity. It’s making the written word feel true to who you are as the author.

You can do that without AI, but you can also use AI to assist you in that process.

The problem starts when people use AI to replace their voice entirely. That’s the part I think damages everyone. Not because AI was involved, but because the human disappeared.

Used badly, AI turns your writing into a polished beige paste.

Used well, it can help you find the words for something you already think, sharpen an idea you’re struggling to express, or make a messy thought clearer without removing you from it.

The real divide is not AI writing versus human writing. I think it’s this:

Are you using AI to express yourself more clearly? Or are you using it to avoid having your own expression at all? That’s where the line is for me. How about you?

The rest of the beginner challenge is now planned inside my own system.

Not fully scheduled, but planned. Everything looks neat, and seeing it laid out like this makes one thing very obvious: planning consistency is easy.

- You put the posts in the calendar.
- You pick the times.
- You create the structure.
- You make it look real.

Consistency looks simple when it’s planned in a calendar, but feels demanding when it has to be lived in real time. Because planning does not equal to execution.

The hard part is having enough attention and energy to show up every day:

- Read other people’s posts properly, not skim.
- Comment thoughtfully, not on autopilot.
- Send connection requests to the right people at the right time.
- Stay present enough to participate like a real person.

That’s the part I’m still building reps on. The system helps a lot, I might add.

So the first useful lesson from using my own system in the wild is this:

A good system can support consistency, but it can’t replace execution.

A small update on the beginner X challenge. Yesterday I said I was going to:

- Post once a day
- Follow 5–10 relevant people
- Leave 15–25 thoughtful replies

What actually happened? I posted at 9am. And then I left exactly one reply on X for the rest of the day. A single reply. One.

Not because I forgot, but because I was also running the same challenge on LinkedIn, and that completely took over my attention. That my first useful lesson.

It’s very easy to say “I’ll be consistent on multiple platforms.”

But it’s much harder to do it properly when each platform requires actual attention, reading, thinking, replying, and participating.

Even more so because about half of my productive time was dedicated to make changes to the very system I'm using to help me manage this social media campaign.

I realised you can automate output. But you can’t really automate care.

Now I’m questioning whether running both challenges at the same time is realistic, or whether I need to treat one platform as the main experiment and the other as a lighter version. Either way, this is useful data.

The challenge has barely started and the first bottleneck is already obvious: It’s attention.

I thought the hard part would be coming up with things to post. Turns out the harder part might be having enough energy to actually participate on more than one platform.

Yesterday was the first day of my beginner LinkedIn challenge.

The goal is simple: reactivate an account I’ve neglected for too long by doing the boring things properly for 14 days. Here’s what actually happened.

I published the first post around 9am, and then throughout the day:

- I left 17 comments on other people’s posts
- I liked 21 posts from different people
- I sent 2 new connection requests
- I accepted 3 new connections

On paper, that doesn’t sound like a huge amount, but in reality, it felt like a lot more work than I expected. My first comment was around 9:30am. My last one was close to 10pm.

It wasn’t 12 hours of nonstop LinkedIn, obviously. I was doing other work too. I was also adjusting my own commenting system along the way based on what I was learning by using it in practice.

But the engagement itself was spread across the whole day. And every comment was done carefully.

I wasn’t trying to drop generic “great post” comments everywhere. I was actually reading, thinking, and trying to participate in the conversation properly.

I used AI here and there to help shape a thought when I knew what I wanted to say but couldn’t quite find the words. But the intent, judgment, and final call were still mine.

Using my own social media system made this a proper real-world test too. It’s not perfect yet. I had to make adjustments as I went, but it worked well enough to prove the workflow is usable. Maybe around 80% of where I want it to be.

The honest takeaway from the first day is that this is not “just commenting.”

Done properly, it takes a lot of attention and energy. By the end of the day, I felt genuinely exhausted. But it also reminded me of something important:

A cold account doesn’t wake up because you post once and wait.

It wakes up because you start participating again.

And I’m starting to think most people underestimate how much of LinkedIn is not about content creation, but conversation stamina.

I’ve had this X account for years. Back when X was still Twitter, growing an account mostly meant showing up, posting your thoughts, and talking to people.

But I neglected this account for too long. And now that I want to build something with it, I’m basically starting over like a beginner, despite having thousands of followers.

So for the next two weeks, I’m running a beginner X challenge.

Here’s what I’ll be doing:

- Post at least once every day
- Follow 5–10 relevant people every day
- Leave 15–25 thoughtful replies every day

That’s it. Simple as that. Just slow, basic consistency.

I’m curious to see what happens over 14 days when I do the boring things properly.

I’m going to be using a custom app I’ve built to manage my social media and help me stay consistent. This will be its first proper stress test in the real world.

I’ll post my starting analytics as a screenshot, then check back after day 14 so we can see what actually changed. I'm fairly confident the only way is up.

How do you think this is going to go? Leave your predictions below.

I’ve had this LinkedIn account for years. Back when LinkedIn was simpler, growing an account mostly meant setting it up and staying consistent.

Back then, all you had to do was add the word LION to your profile and you’d get flooded with connection requests. Can you guess what LION stood for?

But I neglected this account for too long. And now that I want to build something with it, I’m basically starting over like a beginner, despite having thousands of connections.

So for the next two weeks, I’m running a beginner LinkedIn challenge.

Here’s what I’ll be doing

- Post at least once every day
- Send 5-10 connection requests every day
- Leave 15-25 comments every day

That’s it. Simple as that. Just slow, basic consistency.

I’m curious to see what happens over 14 days when I do the boring things properly.

I’ll also be using a custom app I’ve built to manage my social media to help me stay consistent. This will be its first proper stress test in the real world.

I’ll post my starting analytics as a screenshot, then check back after day 14 so we can see what actually changed. I'm fairly confident it will improve, the only way is up.

What sorts of results you think I'm going to get? Leave your predictions below.

Happy Friday! And...

Nothing special to say really, just stopping by to say hello.

Some days don’t need to be chased or conquered, just lived.

Hope you're having an easy day today. Talk soon.

For the last 45 days, I've been focused on a single task.

I've transformed my content strategy framework into an app that helps me create and publish content on social media whilst also managing my social media contacts so I can focus on the one thing that matters most: building relationships.

The app is fully functional, and I'm using it for this very post. As an introvert, this is the exact tool I needed to help me take the stress of putting myself out there.

I want to build real relationships. Slowly, respectfully, and authentically.

So for the next days, I’ll be writing more regularly, talking about work, about the app, about things that matter to me, and yes, about my services too. I still need to get paid.

But for now, I guess I just want to mark this point in time with this post. The first post I've written with the help of both: my content framework system and my new app.

If you also struggle with feeling stuck between “showing up” and “trying too hard”, I’d love to chat. I'll leave you with this question: What’s your biggest struggle when it comes to posting on social media? Send me a DM with the answer and we take it from there.

The post that could bring you your next client is still stuck in your head.

Not because you do not know what to say.
Because you think you have to be the one to sit down and type it.

So there you are at 9pm on a Sunday, staring at a blinking cursor, feeling like you have to choose between rest and marketing.

Then an email lands.
A client issue comes up.
The writing block disappears.

Once again, this is probably not the best use of your time.

A better way would be to capture your ideas and hand them off to a content operator. Your thinking is high leverage, but your typing is not.

The usual objection is authenticity. You think that if you do not write it yourself, then it will not really sound like you.

But that is not where authenticity comes from.

The clearest, most valuable ideas often come out when someone is talking through a recent client call, a problem they have solved, or a point of view they hold strongly, not when they are typing on a keyboard.

You could spend your time acting as a typist.
Or you can spend your time where it has more value.

I haven't published a single post for almost an entire month.

Most people would feel the need to come up with an excuse to cover the algorithm gap, or even pretend the silence never happened. The reality is far less glamorous. I stepped back because the tectonic plates underneath my entire business model are shifting.

And frankly, it took all my energy to stay standing.

Over the last few weeks, I didn't schedule content. I sat in silence and used AI to completely rebuild the backend of three entirely distinct projects.

I restructured a digital magazine on personal branding.
I rebuilt a premium reference tool for solo operators.

In a world before AI, a solo operator attempting this would be clinically insane. Overhauling two distinct content platforms by handling the system design, database architecture, frontend, backend, and every line of copy is a six month roadmap for a full agency team.

I did it alone, in less than 30 days. But then, there's more:

I completely rewired my own personal content engine.

After this experience, I can't stop feeling that the content game is over for anyone refusing to use AI as leverage. It is no longer about who is the most talented copywriter. The winners will be those who leverage AI to bring their workflow to a superhuman level.

You can either spend your time feeding the algorithm, or you can go silent and build the engine that feeds it for you.

I chose building the engine. Watch me run it.

If your headline is vague, you're asking a stranger to trust you with no reason.

Your LinkedIn headline is not a title.
It's a filter.

If I can't explain what I do in one breath, I'm not clear enough yet.

I'm not trying to attract everyone.
I'm trying to repel the wrong buyer.

If it doesn't tell the right person what you do in a sentence, you're forcing them to work.
They won't.

The 5-second game

Show your profile to someone smart.
Give them 5 seconds.
Ask: "Who is this for?"

If they answer with your job title, it failed.
If they can't answer in 5 seconds, it's not a headline.
It's a slogan.

A clean pattern (because it forces clarity)

I help [target] get [outcome] with [mechanism].

I use it because it makes me pick a lane.

A quick example

Before: "Helping businesses grow.."
After: "I help founders say what they actually think—clearly—so buyers get it."

Same person.
Now it's legible.

One edit rule

Replace your job title with a verb.
If you can't, you're not clear yet.

Your headline is the promise of relevance.

If it's vague, it's noise.

If your best work is under NDA, you've got a problem.

You can't screenshot the dashboard.
You can't name the client.
You can't post the numbers.

So you end up saying nothing.
Or you say vague things like "great results."

Here's a better rule:

Don't try to prove the result. Show how you work.

Not with big claims.
With things that are hard to fake.

What to share instead of numbers

1. The calls you make
What do you do when the obvious move is tempting but wrong?
Example: "We stopped doing X because it made the posts noisier, not clearer."

2. The shift you made
Not metrics. The change in approach.
Example: "Before: 'post whenever.' After: 'we only publish when the point passes a filter.'"

3. Your 'won't do' list
The lines you won't cross.
Example: "If it sounds impressive but empty, it dies."

4. The stuff you actually use
A checklist. A workflow. A quick QA gate.
Anything a client could point to and say: "This is how they run it."

5. How you handled the constraints
The best proof is often: "we did this properly, under pressure, without cutting corners."

A quick example

Before: "We helped them grow."
After: "We turned their publishing from last-minute scrambling into a simple weekly routine."

Same idea. Now it means something.

What your buyer is actually trying to learn

They're not asking for your numbers.
They're trying to work out:

Can you explain what you do in plain English?
Do you have a bar?
Will you make the right calls when nobody can see the work?

Numbers are nice, but people pay for the work behind them.

When people say ghostwriting feels fake, they usually mean one of two things:

"Someone helped me write."
"Someone put words in my mouth."

Only the second one is a problem.

Here's the clean way to see it.

There are levels of help

Editing — You wrote it. Someone improves the writing.
Shaping — You provided the raw material. Someone turns it into a clean post.
Drafting — You provided the thinking. Someone writes the first draft. You edit and approve.
Inventing — You didn't provide the thinking. The writer creates opinions, stories, or claims you wouldn't stand behind.

That last one is deception.

Deception isn't "getting help."
Deception is publishing thinking you didn't do.

Two questions settle the ethics

Did you supply the thinking?
Did you approve the claims?

If the answer is "no"… don't publish it.

My ship/no-ship gate

If any of these fail, it doesn't ship.

If you can't explain the post in your own words, it doesn't ship.
If you wouldn't defend it in a room, it doesn't ship.
If it sounds impressive but empty, it doesn't ship.
If it reads like advertising, it doesn't ship.

A quick example

Before: "I've been thinking a lot about leadership lately."
After: "Here's the decision I made this week — and the cost I accepted."

Same point. Now it's real.

Voice-true ghostwriting looks like:
you provide raw material (voice notes, bullets, beliefs, decisions)
someone turns it into readable writing
you challenge it, edit it, approve it (or reject it)

That's not "fake."
That's treating writing like a craft.

Most LinkedIn posts fail a simple test.

Remove the author name.

If the post still works, you have a voice.
If it becomes generic, you were leaning on tone.

My 3-word gate

Mine are:
Clear. Coherent. Collected.

Not because they sound nice.
Because they're part of who I am. I don't do well with chaos or vague language. I need the world to make sense.

How I use it

I score the draft line-by-line.

Clear: is the point obvious, or does the reader have to guess?
Coherent: does the logic actually hold together, or does it contradict itself?
Collected: is it grounded and steady, or is it performing confidence?

If it's 1/3, it's not ready.

A quick example

If I see a line like:
"Excited to share some thoughts…"

I treat it as a leak.

Rewrite it into something I'd actually defend:

"I'm not interested in 'personal branding.' I'm interested in earning trust.
So I'm building a system that forces clarity before it ships."

Same topic.
Different spine.

If you want your writing to compound, it needs fingerprints.
Not polish.

I hate advertising.

I hate advertising.

If it were a person, it would be that guy at the party who cuts in mid-sentence.

Interrupts your conversation.
Presses on your weak spots.
And then smiles like he's helping.

I know that sounds intense, but I genuinely can't stand it.

To me, advertising is manipulation wearing a friendly face.

I pay for premium subscriptions to avoid it.
I won't install mobile apps if they're packed with ads.
I've been using an ad blocker since 1999. (Yes, I'm old)

The irony is my background is in marketing and advertising.

I've run ad campaigns.
And the annoying truth is, they work.

Not by informing you.
By bypassing judgement.
By exploiting attention.

Once you've seen the mechanism, you can't unsee it.

And here's the awkward part.

I know exactly why they convert.
They don't appeal to the rational bits.
They press on the human ones.

Fear.
Insecurity.
Impulse.

And once you see that…

It's hard to pretend it's just "marketing".

I wrote something to post today: clean, smart, and safe… then deleted it. Not because it was bad, but because it had no pulse. I’d rather post less and sound like me than post daily and sound like nobody.

Felt like the right book today.

I wrote a post this morning.

It was clean. It was smart. It was safe.

And I deleted it.

Not because it was bad.
Because it didn't feel like anything.

Truth is, I still get that little jolt in my chest before I hit "Post".
Like I'm stepping out where people can see me.

Years ago I avoided all of this.
Life was quieter. I was fine with that.

But rebuilding costs you some comfort if you want momentum.

So I rewrote it.

Not to sound better.
To sound like me.

That's the part people skip when they talk about "consistency".

The hard part isn't writing.
It's letting the real version of you be seen.

Felt like the right book today.

Consistency isn't a motivation problem.

It's an idea supply problem. Some people struggle to come up with ideas while others have way too many.

I'm the latter.

Still, both are a problem. I built a solution.

And no, I'm not talking about a "content calendar."

I'm talking about a framework that helps you generate ideas and filter them down using your own rules.

A content ideation engine with built‑in guardrails.

It forces every idea through 5 filters:

Objective
Target
Positioning
Signals
Pillars

So instead of chasing more ideas, or staring at a list of "maybe" posts. I can filter hundreds down to the few that actually matter.

I'll share more later. For now, I'm using it.

If you see me posting more often, this is why.

What do you use to decide which ideas make the cut?

I've been quiet for a reason.

I've been building a framework that helps me generate hundreds of ideas on demand without drifting into noise.

I've designed this framework to keep every idea aligned with my goals (not random inspiration, not trends).

I'm not going to share the whole thing yet.

But the concept behind it all is simple:

Every post has to earn its place.

If it doesn't support my goals, it doesn't get written.

Here's my next step:

I'm putting it to the test, which means you'll start seeing content more regularly from here.

Not louder. Just more consistent.

Where do you get stuck most: ideas or execution?

I opened LinkedIn earlier today to do a quick engagement sweep. Coffee in hand. Two minutes in, I noticed a pattern.

People aren't struggling to post. They're struggling to sound like themselves.

That caught my attention because I'm building a content strategy framework for my own use. I started with templates and a calendar… and it felt hollow.

Here's the uncomfortable part.

If you skip voice, you can still get authority. But it's the interchangeable kind. The kind where you can swap the name at the top and nothing changes.

And I'm not saying that as a critique. It's just what happens when you optimise for consistency before you lock in signal.

A few scrolls later, the mistake is usually the same.

People start with topics and templates. They fill the slots. They hit publish.

It reads fine… but it doesn't sound like a person. Not because they're "bad". But because it doesn't feel unique to the author.

Voice is the one asset that doesn't get commoditised. Once your voice is clear, everything else becomes a tool. Templates help. Calendars help. AI helps.

The hard part is judgement. What's yours. What's noise. What's borrowed.

And capturing voice in writing is about noticing patterns:

Your cadence (how you naturally speak)
Your default beliefs (what you assume is true)
Your repeating phrases (what you say without thinking)

Skip this step and you'll still get content. You might even get good content. You might get engagement. You might even go viral.

But you won't get trust if it doesn't sound like you when you speak.

Capture the voice first and everything downstream gets easier. The content becomes consistent. It feels human. And speed becomes the byproduct.

If your content feels like it isn't you right now, ask yourself:

Are you trying to fill a slot? Or are you trying to share what you think?

I'm building a system right now.

AI makes me faster, but speed isn't the hard part.

The hard part is the human part:

What to put in? What to leave out?
What to say? What not to say?
What's actually me? What isn't?

AI could generate 100 posts in 15 minutes.
None of them would make people trust me.

Because trust isn't output. It's judgement.

AI could draft a post, but:

It can't grow your skills.
It can't develop your taste.
It can't make the hard calls.

So I'm building an AI system with a human spine.

Follow me and watch me build.

About two months ago, I wrote:

"I'm rebuilding my life, and this is the next step."

That wasn't a motivational line. It was a decision.

If people can't see you, they can't trust you.

So that's what 2026 is about for me:

Content is strategy.
It's how you build trust without begging for it.
It's how you show the truth of what you know.
It's how you turn competence into authority.

This is the road I'm walking in 2026.

If you're also rebuilding something this year, I'm with you.

This is the next step.

I’m rebuilding my life, and this is the next step.

I’ve avoided the spotlight for years. Life was simple. I was content.

But sometimes, life forces a reset. Now, I’m left to face up to my own fears and put myself out there in a way I’ve never done before.

I chose this path because I know how to solve a painful and expensive problem for introvert professionals who, like me, believe the future is about leveraging your personal brand, but struggle with the performance of it all.

My commitment is to build real authority based on truth, depth, and the courage to be disliked. Your personal brand should not be a fake version of you.

I’m building this live. I’ll share what I learn along the way.

If you value depth, let’s connect. I’m your guy.