Posts

You keep explaining your work to people who have no way of knowing if it's any good.

Your partner. Your mate from school. Your mum, who still thinks LinkedIn is where you go to find a "proper job." You show them a post you're proud of, and they nod the way you nod at a toddler's drawing. Nice. Very nice. Now come eat.

They can't tell a good post from a bad one. Why would they? It's not their game. Asking them if your writing is landing is like asking your dog if the wine's corked.

So you're stuck in this loop where the only people who see the effort are the people least equipped to judge it. They can see that you spent an hour on the laptop. They can't see whether that hour was any good.

And that does something quietly rotten to you.

Because when the only feedback available is "you're on that website again," you start writing for the toddler-nod. You start softening. Making it obvious. Making it safe enough that even someone who doesn't get it can't be confused by it. You sand the edges off your own voice to satisfy an audience that was never watching.

Which is how good writers become boring ones. Not from a lack of talent. From a lack of anyone in the room who can call it.

You don't need applause. You need one person who's playing the same game, who can look at a draft and say "the second half's weaker than the first" and actually mean something by it. Someone who knows what a decent post costs on a bad day, because they're paying the same price.

That person isn't at your kitchen table. And that's fine. It was never their job.

It's just that until you find them, you're grading your own homework with a red pen you're too scared to use.

Your saved-posts folder is a graveyard.

You know the one. Hundreds of posts you bookmarked because they were going to change how you work. That thread on writing. That guru's "framework." The carousel you saved at 11pm swearing you'd apply it tomorrow.

You have never gone back. Not once.

And that's fine. Genuinely.

Because here's what those bookmarks actually are: a way to feel like you're working without doing any. You save the post, you get the little hit of progress, and the guilt goes quiet for a bit. You've filed the ambition somewhere safe. Out of sight, off your plate, forgotten by morning.

I've got the same folder. Tips I'll never read again, sitting next to a film collection I built over decades and half of which I'll never rewatch either. Hoarding pretending to be intention.

The pressure underneath it is real though. There's so much advice flying at you that not saving it feels reckless, like you're the idiot who missed the one post that had the answer.

So you collect. And collecting feels like moving.

But nobody grew from a bookmark. The people who actually get good aren't the ones with the fattest saved folder. They're the ones who read one decent idea, shut the laptop, and went and did the boring thing that same afternoon.

Save less. Do the thing you already know.

It’s easy to make plans when you’re feeling good.

You decide you’ll get up early, eat better, post something every day. Seems manageable when you’ve slept properly and haven’t got much else on your mind. Then you have a rough week and realise how much of it depended on having the right energy.

I spent six and a half years running an eBay operation out of a storage unit. I've started it listing ten thousand DVDs and then added more. I felt sharp one day in five. The rest of the time I felt like shite, but there were still listings to do and orders to pack and post.

After a while, the routine was familiar enough that I could get on with it even when I wasn’t feeling up to much. That’s what kept the business going for all those years. Any recognition I got on there came from doing the work consistently, most of it fairly dull.

I think about that with everything else I do online. If your plan involves being interesting and funny every day, you’re asking a lot of yourself. Some days you’ll sit down and have very little to say. You need to allow for that when you decide what you can keep up.

These days, I’m more interested in whether I can manage something when I’m tired or distracted. I’ve had enough good intentions fall apart to know that feeling enthusiastic at the start doesn’t tell me much.

Whatever you’re planning, think about what you’d realistically manage during this coming week. Give yourself something you can keep doing through that.

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.

I've been seeing a lot of this in my feed lately, and I'm getting sick of it. So here's the unspoken truth: every "here's exactly how I did it" post is a lie told by a survivor.

And I don't mean they're deliberately lying. Most of them probably believe every word they're saying. It's a memory lie. They did the thing, it worked, and now their brain reverse-engineers a clean sequence out of what was actually mostly luck, timing, and a hundred small decisions they can't even remember making.

Then they sell that clean sequence. Nine steps. A framework. A "playbook."

And it sells, because a clean sequence feels safe. It makes the scary part seem knowable, mappable, avoidable if you just follow along.

But that's not the map that got them there. It's the map they drew afterwards, from the finish line, with the fog conveniently erased.

I found Bitcoin early, and I had some success with it. I could have made a course about it and capitalised on it, but if I'm honest, most of the success I had came down to timing and being the specific person I happened to be at that moment: a tech background, an appetite for the latest tech, and the ability to digest the technology in ways most people couldn't.

I could dress that up as a system, but it wasn't one. Luck plays a far bigger role in the lives of successful people than most will ever be willing to admit (they'd rather you believed in the playbook). You can make your own luck, sure, but mostly by being willing to learn, grow, and change enough to be standing where the opportunity lands.

Here's what the survivor never mentions: the ten thousand people who ran the exact same nine steps and got nothing. They're not in the case study. They don't get to write the success post. They quit, moved on, or they're still grinding in the dark, and their silence is doing the survivor's marketing for them.

So when someone tells you their formula works, ask the questions that actually matter. Works for who? Out of how many? And where are the ones it didn't work for?

A system can multiply what you already bring to it. Discipline, taste, experience, curiosity, a real story, the willingness to show up on a bad day. But it can't manufacture those things for you. If you bring nothing, it multiplies nothing.

Zero times a framework is still zero.

But the right people can multiply what each other brings. That's why I'm putting together a small working group for people who work together, challenge each other, learn faster, and make more progress together than they would alone.

If that sounds useful to you, let me know. Send me a DM.

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.