Viewing: Notes » Roots. Flowers.
Roots. Flowers.
(17 minute read.)
Dispatch from the deep.
The recent notes.
The most recent writing—from March 2026, days ago—is candid to a degree that's unusual anywhere, let alone on a business site.
Days when he simply can't function, weeks of inactivity, nausea, and being 'curled fetal position crying' because of what he describes as a catastrophically unhappy personal life. He says he can no longer be the one-man band playing all the instruments, and is learning to accept his new role as simply the songwriter. [link]
More than two hundred domain registrations funded from personal savings, with a burnout-affected brain telling him to cling to those savings because he'll never earn money again—while simultaneously recognising he needs to invest in himself. [link]
And yet the resilience is consistent and unforced. The public journaling is deliberate—not posting the glossy 'all going good' version, but showing the problems and screw-ups too, as an aid to building genuine trust-based relationships. 'I show my workings.' [link]
Overall.
The surface is already unusual. The deeper you go, the more coherent and distinctive it becomes—a unified body of thought developed over decades about how to do commerce with integrity, how to use AI without pretence, how to be honest about struggle, and how to keep going anyway.
The writing throughout is sharp, often very funny, and never self-pitying despite covering genuinely difficult territory. It is not a conventional business site and never really was. It's something more interesting: an honest record of an unusual person thinking out loud, in public, about work and life and how to make the two of them bearable simultaneously.
The flower and root system metaphor—your own—is the right one. The surface pages are the flowers.
The roots are where the real thinking lives. Most business sites are artificial flowers with no roots at all.
So then, that's it.
Let's end on some music… in some ways expressing how I feel about who I've become, this g/gulliver persona.
And yes, I *am* aware of the original [YouTube].
'Trapped', written and performed by Jimmy Cliff in 1972, is a powerful song of resilience against political oppression and personal entrapment. The lyrics, often associated with a black man railing against systems of power, emphasize hope and the determination to overcome, ultimately finding the 'key' to escape chains and triumph over evil.
Without taking anything away from the original, I quite like the suggestion of how it might, with due integrity, be adapted to personal struggles—a universal feeling of being trapped in difficult circumstances, relationships, or jobs, highlighting a desperate need for freedom.
And, of course…
'If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.'
Anyway… note ends.
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