South African CA(SA) — KPMG audit — Johannesburg, London, a secondment in New York. I left because a salary wasn't worth that much of my freedom. Then blockchain consulting, then tokenising energy meter data, then running a crypto fund, to automating my entire role with AI. Each step was toward more frontier and further from the ledger. Useful credentials, but the real education was always in the building.

The knowing-doing gap. Awareness without action is just a more sophisticated form of procrastination. I've been writing variations of that sentence in journals for five years. What I'm trying now is the thing that used to terrify me: publishing anyway.

Systems that let one person operate like a team. I've built an elaborate setup of agents and skills to run my life and business. Part tool, part experiment, part pre-emptive defence against my own scope creep. I want to find out how far a single person with good infrastructure can go.

Cycling. The one domain where the receipts are public and the work translates cleanly. Table Mountain in the dark, heart rate climbing, no room for narrative. The bike is also where most of my thinking gets done — I'd rather solve a problem on a climb than at a desk.

What my dad taught me. He died unexpectedly in 2024. I wrote down five lessons from the way he lived — experiences over things, genuine interest in people, no limit on loving those you love, integrity, and the saying he left us with: don't be kak, be lekker. I'm trying to embody them. Some days better than others.

I read and think far outside what my current work requires, on purpose. Philosophy, consciousness, market structure, biology, history, the occasional detour into whatever is pulling at me in a given week. Some of it compounds into something useful later. Most of it doesn't, and that's the point. Learning for its own sake is the only kind of learning I trust not to bend toward a goal it doesn't belong to.

I've also watched this same curiosity become a hiding place. Breadth can feel like openness and function as commitment avoidance — a dozen explorations is not a portfolio, it's a hedge against any single one mattering enough to fail at. The ongoing practice is telling the difference, in real time, between the inquiry that's alive and the one that's just delaying a harder decision.

I keep a running file of mental models I find worth holding onto. It's a few hundred long now, and the list changes faster than I expected it to.

Happiness is a byproduct, not a destination. The more directly I chase it, the further it moves. What works instead is picking the right kind of struggle and accepting it — because the positive is almost always the side effect of handling the negative well.

The more useful question isn't what makes me happy — it's what am I willing to suffer for. Most of what looks like contentment in other people is really alignment: they've picked a struggle that matches who they are, and the peace is what falls out of doing that work well. Progress, not perfection. One per cent better, compounded, over a long enough window.

I don't think life is about arriving anywhere. It's about the becoming — being a little more yourself each year, and accepting that the path will change as many times as your understanding of it does. You could die tomorrow. Better get on with it.