I love to read and write. Learning to write in peculiar languages that only computers—and a select few humans—understand, has changed how I think and gifted me a successful career.
As that career shifted, my love of writing returned to the fore and I saw the thread of language, running from early life to the present day, asking to be much more of who I am.
It’s 21:41. This is the latest I’ve left my daily post since I started.
Over the last few days, I started raiding my notes for ideas that were mostly-formed, instead of writing something fresh. It only happened once or twice, but it feels icky.
To be fair, this was a difficult week. I was upset and exhausted. Writing from that place is hard.
I’m writing this fresh, and I’ve no idea where it’s going.
A few days ago, I started a story log, as part of learning to tell better stories. Or rather, tell stories better.
Here’s how Matthew Dicks describes it in his book, Storyworthy:
At the end of every day, take a moment and sit down. Reflect upon your day. Find your most storyworthy moment, even if it doesn’t feel very storyworthy. Write it down. Not the whole story, but a few sentences at most.
…
What is my story from today? What is the thing about today that has made it different from any previous day?
As I crammed hot cross buns into my gob and baked a lot of sourdough, I thought a lot about how quickly things have changed for me.
At the end of 2024, I was looking for full-time work in Tech again. It did not go well.
As 2025 rolled around, I doubled down on coaching and consultancy. Today, I have a steady stream of coaching clients arriving and I earn enough to stay afloat.
I’ve always appreciated the spontaneous answers that pop out when people ask me questions. It leads to responses that it’s hard to manufacture on your own.
But it was rare. You’d have to wait for an interview, some client work or a thoughtful friend to show up.
Until now. Open your AI of choice (I used 4o in this example) and share an idea you’re interested in. Tell it to ask you 4 questions.
When you do these every day, strong writing is simply a byproduct.
It resonates with my own experience: when I tend to my physical movement whilst intentionally engaging with ideas and people, the writing flows naturally.
But “blocking the internet” strikes me as a unique point.
When designing a workout programme for someone time-constrained, you focus on compound exercises that work multiple muscle groups at once. These exercises work the full body through a small number of movement patterns.
Publishing each day is a full-body workout for anyone looking to improve their craft and create something new.
Every day I have to:
Write, knowing something has to be online in the next hour
Delete, because there’s not enough time to fart around with every idea
Access the courage needed to continue to share, even when I think I’m a worthless slug
Refine my metaphors so that people “get” my ideas
Refine my structure so there’s some narrative flow
Give the piece a good title, so people are intrigued
Run through my publishing loop, from writing in Obsidian to migrating it into Hugo to viewing it on the Internet
Repurpose the content according to different social networks; emphasising productive takeaways in some places; personal reflections in others
Stay disciplined on social networks, so I can do this all without developing intense misanthropy
Engage with people who are interested in my ideas, understanding what calls to them and what they want more of
Software engineers can quickly become anxious about deploying new changes.
Each successive deployment brings the risk of something blowing up and blame falling on them. Better to hold off for now.
There is an effective and counter-intuitive solution to this: get them to deploy more often.
A rare event that causes high stress becomes a frequent event that becomes more familiar. Avoiding the scary thing only makes it loom larger, whereas leaning into it forces you to confront the issue and make improvements as you go.
A popular approach to running is the 80/20 philosophy, popularised by Matt Fitzgerald. It says that runners improve most effectively when 80% of their running is at low intensity, with the remaining 20% done at higher intensity.
This approach recognises the value of high-volume, “easy” runs and aims to avoid what’s known as the “grey zone” of training. These are runs that are too hard to be easy and too easy to be hard. Research shows that this way of training provides limited aerobic benefit, whilst contributing significantly to fatigue. It’s a poor return on investment.
On Day 1, I said I would be writing about what’s interesting to me.
Maybe this sounds a little trite. If you write online, there is often an expectation to mould your writings into short, punchy essays, layered with hot, contrarian takes.
But following what’s interesting is deeper than this.
To follow what’s interesting is to trust your sense of salience. Salience is an exquisitely complex way of pulling meaning from the world. It’s fast, yet utterly personalised. A lot of it happens beneath your awareness. You don’t know all the inputs and you never will.
I’m going to be publishing something every day in Q2.
I made this decision about 48 hours ago and I’m writing this half-way through Day 1. I don’t know whether I’m including weekends or not. There are lots of unanswered questions.
I’ve been writing a lot more this year, particularly on LinkedIn, and across two newsletters. The momentum has been building.
Several things happened recently:
I read a book on grief and thought on “the parts of myself that have not known acceptance.” This made me realise how many of my interests I still keep quiet about.
I watched a few Tyler Cowen interviews and was moved by his uninhibited geekiness (and his own daily publishing on Marginal Revolution).
I spent too much time on LinkedIn, which is many ways the antithesis of everything I hold dear.
Tyler mentioned in one interview that Substack often becomes too personal and full of emotion. It encourages longer-format, original reflections and discourages people from being editors of other peoples ideas. I bristled at first, but it brought me back to the original model of blogging: writing whatever you want on your own quirky website. I did this for years as a teenager and I loved it. Here I am again.
I needed some time off. As part of an effort to spend less and explore more of what’s around me, I booked a week away near a village called Cwmystwyth in Ceredigion, Wales.
It’s easily drivable from Bristol and I also have friends a little further North, near Machynlleth. I picked it as I wanted to be somewhere remote, near mountains and running water. Check.
Airbnb near Cwmystwyth
Cwmystwyth is a small village nestled alongside the river Ystwyth, which flows all the way west to Aberystwyth. Cwmystwyth literally means “valley of the river Ystwyth.” It sits in the middle of the Cambrian mountains. It is the exact centre point of Wales, according to Wikipedia. This is also West Wales, so it’s pretty wet.
It’s been nearly 2 years, but I’m back writing again.
What happened? Well, I cofounded Almanac with some very smart people, and then this year we raised $9m in seed funding. Which was great news, but of course, also the reason I stopped writing.
Things are no less busy now, but I would like to share more thoughts, spurred on by so much of what is happening in the world at the moment: racial violence, global pandemic, political polarisation and an increasing intolerance of open discussion.
My Kindle is one of my favourite gifts from my wife. I resisted the idea of an electronic reader for a long time, but after seeing Gina use hers on holiday and at home, my curiosity grew.
Besides the convenience, a big selling point for me was highlighting—being able to select and save passages from what I was reading. I rarely read without taking notes, so being able to save and review notes digitally was an irresistible proposition.
Too much of our time is lost struggling with painful feelings that we cannot express.
We try to move forward, try to put up a good fight, but there is something malign and pervasive colouring our mood. It drains our energy, saps our motivation, but remains out of sight. It’s uncomfortable, but even more important than that, it’s unclear.
Whether fear, worry, sadness or doubt—it is this lack of clarity that keeps us feeling stuck.
When you start writing its natural to obsess over the quality of what you share. You’ve read good writing—and this is not it. Your words look feeble and forced. Better to postpone your noble endeavour until you are worthy.
Here’s the underlying belief: these words aren’t good enough to publish, yet. I’ll keep going until they are. Procrastination, recalibration.
Here’s the truth:
It’s not about the right words; it’s about using your voice.
It’s time to break the tyranny of note-taking apps and blogging platforms: write your online content in a universal language that encourages flow and keeps you focused on the content.
When you’re writing for the Internet, you want to be able to save and move your writings around as easily as possible. You don’t want each new app loosing bits of your formatting. After you’ve published your words, you don’t want them locked into that one particular presentation forever, right?
2021 update: I no longer use Ghost to power this blog! But I still think it’s an outstanding project and that the company are pioneering many practices that should be more widespread. I still frequently recommend it to others. Alas, the nerd in me got hooked on blogging via writing offline and committing changes through git. This blog is now powered by Hugo.
Up until now, every time I wanted to start writing I’d expend 97% of my energy thinking about how I could build a blog, which features I want, testing fonts, browsing themes and saving colour schemes. The remaining 3% went towards some writing. It’s the curse of being a developer.
It’s been five months since I launched this blog. I’ve written 14 articles, generated a whopping £2.68 in Amazon referral fees, and built a staggering 19-strong subscriber list.
But I wasn’t an overnight success. It’s taken me a long time to get to the point of publishing these posts. For years, I amassed notes and shared nothing. I was held back by a multitude of fears that pin most people down when they consider sharing their creative work.
My writings tend to revolve around a few reocurring themes:
Investing in perennial practises over short-term lifehacks. This means cultivating the slow habits that really make a difference to our minds and bodies. This is achieved through prioritising consistency and cultivating a skepticism towards the immediate solution.
Protecting ourselves against the misdirection of attention from things that appear to provide fulfilment and instead focusing on those timeless sources of fulfilment under our noses. This involves: 1) discovering those practises that are worth investing in and 2) embedding them in our lives via ritual.
Prioritising basic fitness as your primary health insurance and mental health aid. This comes with the happy consequence of looking good naked.
Indulging in regular solitude and finding ways to carve silence into your life. Each of us— especially if we wish to be creative and productive—has to balance consumption with enough reflection to metabolise incoming information into insight.
A reconnection with the body—the ancient emotions, intuitions and cues that are so often left behind. Questioning the tendency to live life exclusively through the medium of thought.
Finding the sacred in the everyday. Discovering not just the practical but the profound. Giving ourselves to the friction of flourishing as a wellspring of meaning and wisdom instead of the one-dimensional struggle to maintain a state of happiness.
Regularly reconnecting with your values and virtues, and building them into your daily life through ritual. To be fulfilled and productive you have to know what you’re shooting for, point yourself in that direction, and find ways of regularly course-correcting. Being the weird you want to see in the world
Practising minimalism as a means of removing the bloat that prevents your values shining through more clearly. Minimalism is a noise reduction system.
Understanding that every path has some pain. Pick the one you know will make you a better person by the end. Be vulernable and honest.
A reckoning with suffering. Suffering is what is often most real to us and orchestrates a large part of our lives, yet we rarely discuss it. A conscious relationship with the simple and all-pervasive nature of suffering can remake our lives in ways we can barely imagine. By default we push suffering away but this distance creates a host of other problems for us and separates us from one of the most important source of wisdom and growth.
We’re surrounded by wildly different surroundings compared to our ancestors of 10,000 years ago, but our internal struggles with fear, craving, jealousy, love, bliss and deceit have remained remarkably constant.
Practising forgiveness—towards others but most importantly for ourselves. Each of us is fallible and liable to err. Avoiding political ideologies that place the blame with certain groups or economic policies.
The joy of reading great books—their ability to help us to correct errors in thinking and open up new vistas and possibilities in us. Reading classics allows us to participate in the great conversation we as a species have been having with ourselves for over 5,000 years.
The therapeutic gift of writing and journalling in making what is cloudy and chaotic within us visible and meaningful.
The prevalence and challenge of anxiety. Why it matters, how it happens to the best of us, and how to standup to it and grow into someone better because of it.
How to use technology with intention and care, instead of following the multi-tasking path of least resistance.
