How small businesses and subject matter experts build authority, without forcing a marketing medium they hate. I have kept journals for more than twenty years. Nobody asked me to. Nobody paid me. Through university, through every move and career change, I kept writing. So when I finally decided to build something public, I did not agonise over whether to start a podcast or film videos. The answer had been sitting in a box of old notebooks the whole time: my natural mode of cl

It has one segment that needs it and many that don’t. Finding it is the job. I work at an IT consulting company that also sells its own SaaS. One of those products is a point-of-sale (POS) system for SMEs and corporates. For the longest time, our marketing took a blanket approach: ads that spoke to “your business” without naming which business. When we finally narrowed our focus, we chose the spaza market. It felt logical. It was a massive market with thousands of shops and s

Why making work look easy is making us worse at our jobs. AI “slop” has officially taken over the digital landscape. It fills our feeds with low-quality, low-effort text, synthetic images and generic video, mass-produced by generative models. On the surface, this looks like a problem of aesthetics, too much noise, not enough signal. Beneath it sits a quieter, more dangerous crisis: the erosion of critical thinking at work. Cartoon: Tom Fishburne AI itself isn’t the problem. O

Measuring the gap between acceptable and exceptional. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been thinking about a specific yardstick: what does “good work” actually look like in the marketplace? I recently finished a project for a client, and after submitting the final deliverable, I got a brief thank-you email. That was it. Silence. It got me thinking. It’s one thing to finish a project and hand it over, but was it actually good? Was it the absolute best work I could have done, or j

A stronger link doesn't matter if it's not the one that's breaking. Business is, at its core, a physics problem. The physicist Eli Goldratt mapped this out perfectly with his Theory of Constraints. The premise is brilliantly simple: view an organisation not as a collection of separate departments, but as a single, interconnected chain. A chain can only bear as much weight as its weakest link. Therefore, any improvement made away from the actual bottleneck is a total waste of

Stop being a commodity in a crowded market We all have something that feels like play to us but work to others. Yet, instead of leaning into that, we go to school to learn how to be exactly like everyone else. People graduate expecting the market to eagerly hire them for their newfound knowledge, only to face a harsh reality. They enter a talent pool flooded with thousands of others holding the same qualification, and they quickly realise that nobody actually cares about thei

You don’t need to know how to solve every problem. You just need to know who has the solution. When we first start working, we operate like learner drivers. We rely on an instructor in the passenger seat telling us exactly what to do, when to brake, and what hitting the goal looks like. There are generally two ways people try to get ahead from there: they either spend their whole careers trying to follow instructions to the T, or they figure out how to connect with the people

I grew up a deeply curious person. I loved to read, and I have always documented my life in journals and pictures. Initially, I lacked a proper framework, and because of that, I lost most of my writing and pictures from my teenage years all the way through my early twenties. That loss forced a realisation: succeeding at documentation and sustaining it long-term requires purpose, structure, and a clear, reliable system. My academic background is in Anthropology. From there, I