I help owners and consultants build leverage with AI, automation, and decision models.

Everything about the move that people ask about — visas, cost of living, internet, healthcare, where to live — turned out to be solvable admin. The thing that actually cost me isn't on that list.

Connection is the leverage I've most under-invested in — and it quietly costs me across every domain. Isolation is an unhedged risk.

That's from my own notes, written recently rather than in hindsight from a safe distance. It has been the major letdown of the Thailand years, and I'm naming it here because it's the highest-return gap I have rather than because it makes for a good story. The failure mode of this life isn't running out of money or getting a visa wrong. It's year two, when the people you met in year one have rotated out and you realise you built a life optimised for optionality and not for depth.

There's a second admission that sits awkwardly next to the first. The calmest, most settled I have felt in the last few years was a stretch where I was employed by someone else while living in Asia. Not building, not carrying the whole thing — employed. I left Australia partly to get away from working for other people, and the honest reckoning is that the specific combination of a steady role and a life somewhere I chose was better than either half alone. Full-time solo entrepreneurship has been too long a sprint.

I've resolved it, mostly: a job is a floor that funds and de-risks the rest, not a retreat from it. But I'd rather leave the tension visible than tidy it into a cleaner narrative, because the tidy version is the one that would be false.

What I actually miss

Family and friends, obviously, and I'll not dress that up into something more interesting than it is.

Beyond that it's the food, and specifically the ingredients rather than the meals. The baseline quality of Australian produce is simply higher. Thailand is cheaper overall, but that gap narrows sharply in the places you'd least expect — dairy costs roughly the same, and meat is arguably dearer. What you're paying less for isn't everything, it's some things. Thai food also has its own health cost that gets glossed over in the nomad-food-paradise version of this story; the cooking oils in particular are not doing anyone any favours.

And I miss Australian junk food, which I'm aware is not a thing worth missing. Worth saying anyway — a list of what you miss that contains only respectable items is a list someone has edited.

Would I do it again

Without hesitation. The lessons have a real cost and I've been honest above about what that cost was, but the person who comes out the other side is not a modified version of the one who stayed in the nine-to-five — they're a different person. Skills, values, defaults, what you think is normal, what you think is possible: living abroad rearranges all of it in a way that reading about it cannot. I'd take that trade every time.

My operating loop is learn, apply, teach. The third step isn't decoration — it's the part that closes the circuit. Something only becomes properly mine at the point I have to explain it to someone who wasn't there, which is why a surprising amount of this site exists for an audience of one.

The mechanical argument is that documentation compounds where activity doesn't. I keep a private vault of a few hundred notes — research, decisions, project post-mortems, diary. On its own that's a filing cabinet. Wired into an AI that can read it, it stops being storage and starts being a position: my tools no longer research a topic from scratch, they reach into what I already concluded and build from there. The vault compounds because the AI is feeding it, not just reading it. Every note written in 2024 is still doing work in 2026, which is not true of almost anything else I did that year.

There's an identity argument underneath the practical one. A lot of us fused our sense of self to our competence without noticing, and competence is exactly what's being repriced right now. A documented track record — what you tried, what you thought, what you were wrong about, in your own voice and with dates on it — is one of the few things that can't be repossessed by the next model release.

And the barrier collapsed. That's the part people haven't updated on.

Publishing used to cost money and gatekeepers; then it cost only time; now it barely costs that. A single operator with the current tools can ship in an afternoon what needed a team and a quarter. Every excuse that used to be structural — I can't write, I can't design, I don't have time to edit, I don't know how to build the site — has quietly become a preference. The constraint isn't knowledge or capability any more. It's initiative, and initiative is a much less comfortable thing to be short of.

I'll add the caveat, because the version of this argument without one is a sales pitch. I have the data on my own content and most of it went nowhere — posts with a few hundred impressions and nobody clicking through. Documenting is not the same as distribution, and compounding only starts once something actually reaches people. What I'm confident about is the asset. What I'm still figuring out, publicly and slowly, is the audience.

Left arm — perspective

An abstract piece built on a single idea: nature is the most reliable thing I know for restoring proportion. Standing in front of something genuinely large — a mountain that generates its own weather, a coastline, a sky doing something enormous and completely indifferent to you — does something no argument can. It doesn't make your problems smaller. It puts them back at their actual size.

That's the whole content of it. Most of what feels urgent is only urgent from inside my own head, at my own scale, on my own timeline. Nature is the correction, and it works without requiring me to believe anything.

Right arm — the circle

A circle drawn with the sweep of a brush — an ensō, from Japanese Zen. It's traditionally painted in a single uninterrupted stroke, in one breath, and the point is that it cannot be corrected afterwards. What lands is whatever you were in that moment. It's usually left slightly open rather than closed, because a perfect circle would miss the argument: the thing is complete precisely because it isn't perfect.

At the centre is a character meaning mindfulness, built from two parts stacked on top of one another — mind above, heart below. Two elements, one word, and the reason I chose it is that it refuses to separate them. Thinking clearly and feeling honestly aren't two different projects.

It came out of reading The Art of Happiness, during a period where mindfulness genuinely reorganised how I was operating. Almost nobody reads it correctly — two people ever, and I have Chinese friends who didn't. Both of them are seriously intelligent, and I mean that literally rather than as a compliment.

The next one

A QR code. I haven't settled on where it points yet, which is the entire problem — there are a lot of assets now and only one of them gets to be permanent. A link tree is the obvious answer and I'm not convinced it's the right one.

A tattoo that resolves to a URL is a strange thing to commit to, given that every URL I've ever owned has eventually moved. That's most of what makes it interesting.