Yesterday a guy I hadn't really crossed paths with since around 2015 wrote me out of nowhere. Old colleague. He asked if he and his team could help me on something, for free. That was kind, and I'll probably take him up on it. That's not the part that stopped me.
The part that stopped me was buried in the same note. He said he'd been reading my writing. Enjoying it.
My first fan. Ever.
I sat with that for a minute. Twenty years of running companies, decades of blog posts, LinkedIn posts, Substack drafts, podcast descriptions, and I don't think anyone ever told me they were reading. Not once. Certainly not unsolicited. The quiet assumption I'd been writing under was that the words went into the void, and the void did not respond.
There's a strange freedom in that. If nobody is reading, you can say anything. You can be wrong, be boring, be too personal, be too business, repeat yourself, contradict yourself. Nobody is keeping score because nobody is at the match.
Immediately one of my favourite sayings comes to mind — dance like nobody's watching, which lately I really have been trying to do myself. The quote gets attributed to Mark Twain, to William Purkey, to a hand-stitched pillow in every aunt's guest bedroom. What it means, when you actually live it, is the performance falls away and the real thing starts.
I hopped on a call with my reader to find out what he liked. He told me something I've been quietly uncomfortable with for most of my career. I'm not great at any one thing. I've been a five out of ten in about fifteen different areas of business for twenty years. The things where I might actually be good are things like; running teams, hiring, managing people (be respectful — not hard), sales (also be respectful — also not hard), marketing (meh, decent), a bit of finance. Basically, I'm good at delegating. I might actually be decent at operations, a bit of product. Never the best in the room at any of it. Always sufficient. That's been a point of quiet insecurity, or close to it, for most of two decades.
Take writing. The thing the lone reader apparently likes. I've grown to enjoy it, and most of that has come from journaling. Five years and counting of starting every morning with Today I am grateful for… followed by three things. No gaps. Not a day missed. I know I'm nowhere near a good writer. If I compare myself to Oscar Wilde, one of my personal favs, well, not even close. But what I do have, because of the five-in-fifteen-areas problem, is range.
The dubious distinctions pile up. Grieving parent. Cancer survivor, for now. Five companies, four exits, some better than others. Hustling since 2006. Rarely in the same place more than four months. Avid surfer. Skier. And in the last six months, someone who decided to shed every rule and asset and try again 100% on my own terms. A 100% reinvention of my professional self and all in public.
Which means at the very least I have something to write about. Summer 2022, surfing in Indonesia with Kirsten, Finn, and Somers — the four of us, whole, in the sun. A clear memory walking through an Indonesian rain forest trail, the zenith of the happiest time of my life. And eighteen months later, October 2023, the darkest stretch of my life, six months after losing Finn. In Sri Lanka, holding my wife in the waves as we both were bawling wondering how the world could be so cruel to two people who were trying their hardest to be good. And why the universe would take such a beautiful soul so young who clearly deserved otherwise.
I've been at both ends of the human range, that I am 100% certain about. That doesn't make me a good writer. It gives me material.
Thirty months after Finn's death, the writing is starting to come out a different way. Not curated. Not polished. More like a diary that accidentally has readers — a reality-TV-in-prose of someone starting a business from scratch with rules he won't bend for, no matter what it costs the monthly revenue line.
Here's the other thing about being a five in a lot of spaces in 2026. A thin harness wrapped around fat skills (Day 18 covered this in full) can ratchet a five to a seven. I'll never be Hemingway, even with Claude in the loop. But I can be real, and I can ship. My charity grant application MVP is the proof. I built a working x402-native nonprofit registry with a self-learning enrichment loop, in two weeks, ahead of the grant application I'm submitting on Saturday, at a code quality a senior developer twelve months ago could not have produced in the same window. In fact, a whole team couldn't have done it in months. Not because I'm a good developer. Because the harness is thin, the skills inside it are fat, and a five-in-fifteen generalist using those tools is dangerous in a way that wasn't possible in 2019.
Back to the reader. He told me something else on the call, almost as an aside. He said the people I'm already quietly writing to exist as a subculture. They have a name. The FIRE movement.
I'd never heard of it.
FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. Spend less than you make. Invest the difference. Hit a number equal to roughly twenty-five times your annual expenses. At that threshold, investment returns cover your life, indefinitely, and you stop needing to work for money. Simple premise. Huge community.
My reader pointed me at four writers, and I read fragments of all four last night.
MrMoneyMustache.com — Pete Adeney. Most popular FIRE blog, more or less started the movement. Retired in his thirties on a software engineer's salary. His 2013 "Getting Rich: From Zero to Hero in One Blog Post" is a model for the origin page my reader has been telling me I owe my own audience.
JLCollinsnh.com — the grandfather of the movement. His stock series is the foolproof, slightly boring, extremely effective investing bible the rest of FIRE rests on.
JordanGrumet.com — hospice doctor. Writes about purpose and meaning in work. The part of FIRE most FIRE writers skip.
JillianJohnsrud.com — meaningful work and mini-retirements as a way to discover what's next without quitting the whole game.
Two things clicked reading them. One, these are not fringe freaks. They're highly qualified people who did the math, hit the number or are close to it, and are now circling the realisation that the number was never the point. Two, the question they're all orbiting — I hit the exit, now what? — is the same question the second half of my journey is trying to answer. I just didn't know there was a reader cluster already asking it.
My angle, which I think is the part I can actually own: you don't have to wait for the number. You can reinvent now. You may not hit full financial independence, but you can rebuild the day. Pick clients. Design a five-hours-of-real-work-a-day that still funds the life. AI in 2026 makes this possible in a way it wasn't in 2019. The FIRE crew is arriving at the "now what" question after a decade of grinding toward the number. I got there without the number, through a door I'd have never chosen — Finn's death, a company that stopped being the thing I cared about, a fresh professional rock bottom. Same question, different route.
So maybe these are my peeps. Maybe not. Either way, thanks to one lone reader, I know the subculture exists, and I'll be pulling on those threads from time to time. Keeping it real, and raw, things I'm now becoming a 8 or 9 at. Do I care if a hater calls me out one day? Sorry mate, I've been through a lot worse things than you hating on something I'm writing about because it may not be perfect.
Here's the deal I'm making with whoever's reading, which for all I still know is nobody. I may ramble. I'll try to land a point most days and sometimes I'll miss. Some posts will be fractional AI ops plumbing — AI ops geekdom, grant submission staring me down on Saturday which I probably won't earn, the pricing decisions, the client rules I won't bend for. Others will be about Finn, grief thirty months deep, what it feels like to be deep in the pain cave at 3,400m at 4am on a Swiss glacier and what it's like to rebuild a life with one chair at the dinner table gone. The Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund is part of that rebuild — sending deserving 18-to-26-year-olds on the epic adventures he would have been the first to take — and that thread will keep running through the BIP too.
Write like nobody's reading. That's the licence. Apparently at least one person is. Oh, locked down another client yesterday, so bumping the monthly revenues up too. That's something to smile about.
Monthly Revenues $11,800 | Clients 2 | Prospects — not too worried about