Earlier this year, a devastating cancer diagnosis changed everything for my family. This chapter does not try to make a hero out of my brother, who would hate the label. Instead, it looks at what wholeness can do when the world starts coming apart: a demonstration that darkness does not get the final word.

The modern business world loves a tidy story of triumph. Hustle culture tells us to outwork the storm, and the guru economy promises seven figures if we grind hard enough. But the frictions we try to edit out, the isolation, the failure, the budget constraints, are not proof that we have failed. They are the soil from which genuine service grows. This episode rejects false hope and cheap optimism in favour of something sturdier: an iron hope that sees the rain coming and steps into the storm anyway.

This is an invitation to choose how you stand in the wind. You cannot control the weather, but you can decide your pace, guard your boundaries, and hold space for the simple things that matter. Wholeness is not a feeling you wait for. It is a stance you hold, a muscle you build, and a direction you travel. Stand on the solid stone of your intrinsic worth, and let it inform every decision you make.

00:22 - The Diagnosis That Should Not Be
01:09 - Refusing the Saint Pedestal
02:08 - The Hot Wheels Delivery and the Safe Harbour
03:03 - The Friction Has Not Buried the Man
04:16 - He Can’t Control the Weather
05:21 - The Coalface Burns All the Same
06:50 - The Wound Is the Way

What we cover in this episode:

• Wholeness Beyond Circumstance: How your worth exists beyond the reach of any diagnosis, crisis, or business setback.

• Choosing How to Lean Into the Wind: Pacing yourself, guarding your energy, and deciding which calls to take and which to ignore.

• Iron Hope vs. False Hope: Why genuine hope looks straight into the pitch rather than bravado, hustle, or empty promises.

• The Wound as Coordinates: How the scars we carry qualify us to serve others who are bleeding from the same cuts.

Notable Quotes:

• “The friction hasn’t buried the man. It has exposed who he has been all along.”

• “He can’t control the weather, and he can choose how he leans into the wind.”

• “The blood it draws and the scars it leaves are not evidence against you.”

Questions for the Campfire:

1. Where in your life are you trying to control a storm you did not choose, and what would change if you focused only on how you stand in it?

2. Which part of your identity has remained intact through your hardest season, and how can you let it inform your next decision?

3. What wound have you been hiding from, and who might need the invitation only your scars can extend?

Join the conversation:

Read the full written version and gather around the campfire on Substack: https://www.unremarkable.co

Watch Chapter 1 of the series here:

#Wholeness #IronHope #ServiceOverSuccess #ResilienceInTheStorm #TheUnremarkableEntrepreneur

Where We Are:

This is Week 29 of a year-long practice.

Movement 3: Action - eight weeks exploring the architecture of conscious action, how to stand in the weather, and the courage to make contact.

1. Super / Natural

2. Rip a Hole in the Night ← You are here

3. The Distorted Creator

4. Touch the Leper

5. Present Like an Artist

6. You Can’t Steer a Ship That Isn’t Moving

7. Why You’ll Fail

8. Icon / Action Taker

He didn’t choose it.

He cannot control it.

And he is most certainly not living life on his own terms as he is ferried from appointment to appointment, scan to scan, and as chemotherapy floods his system.

This is the same man who offered me a seat one Christmas. Migrant workers cut off from their families. Me, adrift and alone. All of us gathered around a banquet to break the isolation. At least for a moment.

That he should now be enveloped by this level of darkness is something I can’t square.

But here we are.

Now, it would be all too easy to cast my brother in some kind of divine light. To thoughtlessly put him on a pedestal in an attempt to honour his resilience.

But he would hate that. Because he’s not a saint.

He’s a human, demonstrating that who he is exists beyond, and is untouched by, the diagnosis. And as a result, the darkness of the moment and the constraints of his treatment don’t get the final word on how he shows up for himself and the people who love him, or the decisions he makes each day.

If it were me, I’m not sure I could contain my rage against the injustice of it all. And I have no doubt that my brother and his family spend a good deal of time navigating that tension.

But when we speak, it’s not what I get to experience.

He asks about my son, my wife and my business. I hear him waiting at the door with his young son, excitedly anticipating the Evri delivery driver arriving with a secondhand Hotwheels playset. I hear about his drive to London to collect his daughter after her first semester at university. And I hear about his wife, the safe harbour and update holder, who bears the unimaginable weight of processing her own grief whilst stewarding an endless stream of well-meaning well-wishers.

Indeed, everything I write about my brother’s courage is really their courage. And I cannot honour him without honouring her too. She is astonishing.

As a father, my brother is not defined by the cost, but enthralled by what he has. A steady presence and an example to all of us who are watching.

The friction hasn’t buried the man. It has exposed who he has been all along.

Mundane miracles

Many are praying for a miracle. But in looking up there, it would be easy to miss the one that’s happening right here: who he is burns brighter than it ever has because of what he’s facing.

He can accept what is true without pretending, treat others with care, and act decisively precisely because of where he plants his feet: on the solid stone of his immovable, unchangeable, intrinsic worth.

The part of him that no diagnosis can diminish.

As a Church of England priest, my brother holds this truth with deep conviction: a God-given foundation that endures when all else is swept aside, a life held in hands far greater than his own.

When I read this chapter to him, he was quick to admit that without that footing, he could easily find himself washed away by the waves. But faith isn’t just something he has. It’s something he’s built a life around. Something he trusts enough to let it inform his decisions.

This is wholeness: not the fruit of raw belief, but faith made flesh. It’s the soul-level muscle memory, forged over the last fifty years, that gives him the strength to rise as a complete being whose reason to face the day is not determined by his circumstance.

Super / natural.

He didn’t choose this AND he has choices.

He can’t control the weather AND he can choose how he leans into the wind.

Pacing himself, showing up for appointments, taking each day as it comes. When the doctors present another round of treatment, another scan, another protocol, he asks: At what pace? Through what means? How do we manage the schedule?

And though the panic of the diagnosis doesn’t get to dictate the rhythm of his days, he does need to fiercely manage the energy to face them. Guarding the boundary around what he can actually carry. Telling the truth even when it’s unbearable. Deciding which calls to take, and which to ignore, on any given day.

And holding space for the simple things, like a Hotwheels delivery, so an eight-year-old knows he matters too.

In his own way, he’s serving the work, not the outcome.

All of it incomplete, imperfect, and exactly what the work requires.

The hope we carry

You might not be facing a life-altering diagnosis, but none of us live life on our own terms, because none of us live in a vacuum.

We are all nose-to-nose with a reality we can’t control. Whether it’s a personal crisis or a business reality, the coalface burns all the same as we’re ferried from decision to decision, feeling the panic rise, wondering how we are supposed to keep the fire burning.

My brother shows us the answer: the storm doesn’t diminish who you are. It reveals it.

Like yours, his worth exists beyond the reach of any diagnosis. To touch that bedrock is to experience wholeness, but it’s all too easily obscured when the storm rolls in. It’s why we all have moments when we feel complete, and why we often don’t.

And it’s why wholeness cannot be confined to something we feel. It must become something we choose. A stance we hold, a muscle we develop, a sanctuary we raise, knowing that the storm will always return.

But even that is not enough, because wholeness needs a direction of travel. We need to allow it to flow through the actions we take and the decisions we make.

My brother didn’t choose his storm, and we didn’t choose ours.

But we all get to choose how we stand in it.

The darkness is real. The injustice burns. The weight is unbearable.

And yet.

Nested within every storm is an invitation to discover who you actually are when the world starts coming apart. To learn what you’re truly made of when you can no longer control the outcome. To find out what it means to remain whole when everything else is stripped away.

This is hope.

Not false hope that suppresses the grief you need to feel, or cheap optimism that promises seven figures if you grind relentlessly, or bravado that buries the reality of another long day, or the hustle that believes it can out-work an empty bank account.

An iron hope looks straight into the pitch, sees the rain is coming, and steps into the storm anyway.

The frictions we’d edit out if we had the choice: the isolation, the failure, the redundancies, the break-ups, the budget constraints, the diagnosis. They are your coordinates. The soil from which genuine service grows.

I will not stand here and pretend that suffering is a gift, or that devastation is some kind of twisted form of divine intervention. But the blood it draws and the scars it leaves are not evidence against you.

They are the raw materials that qualify you to extend an invitation to others who are bleeding from the same cuts.

The wound is the way.

That is what cuts through the darkness.

Where We Are:

This is Week 29 of a year-long practice.

Movement 3: Action - eight weeks exploring the architecture of conscious action, how to stand in the weather, and the courage to make contact.

1. Super / Natural

2. Rip a Hole in the Night ← You are here

3. The Distorted Creator

4. Touch the Leper

5. Present Like an Artist

6. You Can’t Steer a Ship That Isn’t Moving

7. Why You’ll Fail

8. Icon / Action Taker

We were promised “every song ever recorded in my pocket,” and we were told that was freedom. But the endless menu of choice has quietly stripped away the very thing that teaches us who we are. The algorithm curates, we scroll, and the album that took three listens to crack open is gone. The modern market sells limitless access as a slogan, then keeps us chasing it, forever one swipe away from something better.

This episode dismantles the fantasy of living entirely on your own terms. Instead of chasing a frictionless life, we explore why redundancy, heartbreak, and limitation are the very things that shape empathy and purpose. Through a personal story about trading in a CD collection, a reflection on wholeness as a lightning rod, and a closing benediction, we discover why wholeness needs two contact points: fellowship and friction.

If you have ever felt whole but paralysed, or you know who you are but still cannot find the nerve to speak, this chapter is an invitation to plant your feet. Wholeness is the root. Now it’s time to learn how to stand.

01:04 - Trading Memories for Unlimited Music
02:17 - The Algorithm Curates, We Scroll
04:13 - The Optimisation of the Human Experience
05:05 - Friction Is What Reveals You
06:07 - Wholeness Is the Furnace
08:10 - A Direction of Travel
10:21 - Now We Learn to Stand

What we cover in this episode:

• The Frictionless Trap: How limitless access and endless choice can leave us unable to commit, learn, or truly listen.

• Wholeness Versus Completeness: Why wholeness, like a piano, needs contact to stay in tune and avoid calcifying into self-indulgent paralysis.

• Fellowship and Friction: The two contact points that give your wholeness context, purpose, and a reason to burn.

• Beliefs as the Wind: How the stories you believe about your world rise to the surface under pressure, shaping how you fight, perform, and speak.

• The Benediction: A spoken call to rise into friction, contact, movement, and the storm, standing shoulder to shoulder with the listener.

Notable Quotes:

• “The isolation economy is spinning its fable that the goal is complete freedom, and it’s not actually designed to help you achieve that dream. It’s designed to keep you in endless pursuit of it.

• ”Living life on your own terms eliminates the very thing that reveals who you are and what you’re here to do: friction.”

• “Wholeness without a direction of travel is just self-indulgence.”

Questions for the Campfire:

1. Where in your life have you chosen comfort and convenience over the friction that might have taught you something?

2. What belief about your world is quietly shaping how you show up when the pressure builds?

3. What is one small step you can take this week that gives your wholeness a direction of travel?

Join the conversation

Read the full written version and gather around the campfire on Substack: https://www.unremarkable.co

Watch Chapter 1 of the series here:

#TheUnremarkableEntrepreneur #Wholeness #FrictionAndFellowship #CreativeLife #SelfDoubt

Where We Are:

This is Week 28 of a year-long practice.

Movement 3: Action - eight weeks exploring the architecture of conscious action, how to stand in the weather, and the courage to make contact.

1. Super / Natural ← You are here

2. Rip a Hole in the Night Sky

3. The Distorted Creator

4. Touch the Leper

5. Present Like an Artist

6. You Can’t Steer a Ship That Isn’t Moving

7. Why You’ll Fail

8. Icon / Action Taker

Inside was £15. An unremarkable sum, but compared to my siblings I was nothing short of an entertainment tycoon!

I saved every penny, and after three months I became the first person in my family to buy a CD player. At 11 years old I felt like a tech pioneer.

16 years later, the promise of music changed, promising every song ever recorded in my pocket. It was 2009 and Spotify had just added the ability to download music to my phone.

So I boxed up hundreds of discs and traded them in at my local CEX. Years of careful curation reduced to a barcode scan and a voucher for 50 pence.

Unlimited music for the monthly cost of a CD felt like a no-brainer.

But I wasn’t trading up, I was trading memories.

Each disc was a waypoint. Love Is All Around wasn’t a CD single, it was a 12 year old joining the conversation. Grace, a reminder of lost love, then a celebration of being rid of it. American Idiot, the memory of crumpled headphones and a festival tent in the rain.

The market told me those plastic discs were obsolete. And I believed it.

Now I have access to seventy million songs and I can’t remember the last time I listened to an album all the way through. The algorithm curates. I scroll. The friction that forced me to sit with an album I wasn’t sure about, the one that took three listens before it cracked open, is gone.

I have endless choice and I can’t choose anything.

And I don’t sit with the ‘wrong’ choices for long enough to learn the lessons they want to teach me.

Freedom needs a little friction

The promise of limitless access sounds great: live life on your own terms.

But that’s nothing more than a slogan wielded by everyone from slick internet gurus to global juggernauts to make you feel like you are not complete without the thing they’re selling.

The putrid fruit of the system is everywhere: the platforms that keep you hidden so you’re forced to buy reach or keep posting, the dating apps that need you to stay lonely to prop up their business model, the streaming services that now show you an ad every time you hit pause.

Here’s the con: whilst the Isolation Economy is spinning its fable that the goal is complete freedom, it’s not actually designed to help you achieve that dream. It is designed to keep you in endless pursuit of it.

And it keeps you consuming by raising your standards to an impossibly high, frictionless level.

The metrics might say your post flopped, so you ignore the single ‘like’ that could transform your business. A date might introduce you to someone nervous, and perfect for you, but you’re one swipe away from a better first impression. The all-you-can-eat streaming buffet means you scroll endlessly, terrified of wasting ninety minutes on the wrong film. And when you do finally hit play, you don’t settle in; you quietly compare and check the reviews for the other options on your phone.

Welcome to the optimisation of the human experience.

What a dreary way to live.

And the personal paradox is brutal. Even if you could successfully engineer your days to be lived entirely on your own terms, why would you want to?

Given the choice, most of us would willingly engineer the redundancies, the heartbreaks, and the budget limitations out of the equation. But it was the redundancy that taught you empathy. It was the break-up that created a space for a new love to fill. It was the limited budget to buy just one album that made you lean in and really listen.

Living life on your own terms eliminates the very thing that reveals who you are and what you are here to do.

Friction.

Preparation is over

Movement 3, the Book of Action, will maintain what the first two Movements established: you are everything you need. There’s nothing to add, no external validation you need, and no flaw that’s deep enough to stop you from taking the next step.

And everything the coming chapters explore begins and ends with what Presence and Empathy have returned you to: wholeness.

But friction is like the wind.

Without these interior foundations to brace you, you will inevitably reach for the alternative when the pressure builds: your survival mechanisms, learned behaviours, and market conditioning.

Not what is true about you, but what you believe about your world will force its way to the surface: if you believe it will be a battle, you’ll fight when you don’t need to; if you believe you have to prove your worth, you’ll perform until you burn out; if you believe you need everyone to like you, your voice will never rise above the noise.

Wholeness.

It’s not just a nice idea. It’s the furnace.

And it’s arguably as close as anyone can get to living life on your own terms. But it has a fatal flaw of its own: it cannot endure without contact.

Consider a piano. It can be complete with every key, string and pedal. But without contact it will slowly drift out of tune. It needs both maintenance and a musician to release its melody.

It’s why our work needs two contact points. Fellowship and friction. We need contact that illuminates who we are and reveals what the work is truly asking of us. Both offer the context that prevents wholeness from calcifying into a form of self-indulgent paralysis and gives the furnace a reason to burn.

When you are truly grounded in your wholeness, you feel devastatingly different.

You become super-natural. Not in an ethereal or abstract sense, but finally connected with your true nature.

Whole and unashamed.

In a landscape so thoroughly deformed by extraction, certainty, and convenience, to be deeply, profoundly human looks like a miracle.

And that’s the rub. The world won’t get you. The system can no longer contain you, and the algorithm can no longer categorise you. Which creates its own kind of isolation.

It’s why fellowship and friction are critical.

It’s why you can’t just wallow in your revelation; your wholeness needs to actually arrive for the people your journey of empathy helped you notice. And it needs the decisiveness that your presence has awakened in you.

Your wholeness needs a direction of travel.

From who to how

And so the question shifts.

We’re no longer exploring who you are, but how you actually stand when the wind picks up. Because just as faith without works is dead, wholeness without a direction of travel is just self-indulgence.

I know many practitioners who hold their wholeness beautifully. They speak truth with quiet authority, grounded in their Majesty, unmoved by the market’s demands. And paralysed by its silence. Not because the truth isn’t real, but because they speak a language it doesn’t understand.

They know who they are, and it’s not enough.

Wholeness is a lightning rod. It attracts the energy, grounds the charge, holds the voltage. But without the craft, the pacing, the deliberate means to channel it, and the decisiveness to actually use it when the moment arrives, it might as well be a piano without a musician.

Nothing more than an ornament in a room.

Wholeness is not the destination. It is the root. The ground beneath your feet and the confidence to rise. But what good is all that confidence if you don’t give yourself the permission and the means to let your lungs rip?

What makes you super-natural isn’t what you feel, it’s who you serve with it.

Your instrument was designed to be played.

To fumble the notes, learn new songs, and struggle through the friction.

None of it was ever supposed to be seamless. The challenges we face are not symbolic of our shortcomings, they are the very things our work needs to thrive.

We need contact with the rain.

The diagnosis will arrive. The algorithm will bury your work. The pipeline will dry up. These things aren’t sent to test you, they are sent to teach you. And when they arrive, wholeness alone won’t help you distribute your weight.

Knowing who you are is the foundation.

Now we learn how to stand.

Rise in the wind

To help steady you for the road ahead, I have prepared a benediction. Please take a moment to plant your feet before you rise.

As you read, imagine we are standing shoulder to shoulder facing the storm together. I know what it’s like to hide in the safety of preparation, to crave a frictionless life, and to lose your nerve when the market goes quiet. And I know we’re ready to make contact.

These aren’t words I’ve written for you, they are words I’ve written for us.

May you choose to rise.

May you choose friction. A life that refuses to be defined by limitless access, frictionless momentum, and the illusion of living entirely on your own terms.

May you choose to rise.

May you choose contact. A life that refuses to treat your wholeness as a priceless instrument, kept perfectly safe but tragically left unplayed.

May you choose to rise.

May you choose movement. A life that refuses to wallow in self-indulgent revelation, paralysed by the market’s silence or the fear of being misunderstood.

May you choose to rise.

May you choose the storm. A life that refuses to view the empty pipeline, the sudden shift, or the arriving diagnosis as a test, but trusts they were sent to teach you.

May you rise where the work gets messy.

Where you fumble the notes but learn the song.

Where you allow the rough edges to shape you into something real.

Where your wholeness is finally given a direction of travel.

Where you realise that accepting who you are is just the beginning.

Where you become super-natural, whole and unashamed.

Where you finally learn how to stand.

And arrive for the people who need you.

Where We Are:

This is Week 28 of a year-long practice.

Movement 3: Action - eight weeks exploring the architecture of conscious action, how to stand in the weather, and the courage to make contact.

1. Super / Natural ← You are here

2. Rip a Hole in the Night Sky

3. The Distorted Creator

4. Touch the Leper

5. Present Like an Artist

6. You Can’t Steer a Ship That Isn’t Moving

7. Why You’ll Fail

8. Icon / Action Taker

In today’s Dispatch:

• There are two kinds of lonely

• You’re one conversation from revelation

• What’s changing with the Order and why you’re actually not invited

There are two kinds of lonely. The first is isolation, the ache we all feel for good company. The second is the loneliness of being counter-cultural.

It is the exhaustion of being entrenched in a world that has optimised every last inch of life for profit. Our feeds, overrun by content created by machines, people who have traded their souls for tactics that promise wealth and glory, on platforms that have welcomed velocity, outrage, and certainty into the black and beating heart of their business model.

You are literally a voice in the desert.

And it was Monday’s call with the Order of Unremarkable Creators that opened my eyes.

We had a deep, and for some painful, conversation. Those who gather in that room know who they are: people called to challenge the system. And they experience a heavy sort of shame: holding space for the individual isn’t enough to change the world.

Except that it is.

We have two paths before us. One is paved, maintained, and inviting. It’s the one the system wants us to walk, where we can be categorised, sold to, and kept in service of the machine. There is no question it cannot answer.

The other is a ragged, narrow way. Overgrown and uneven, it makes no promises, and is full of risk. You’d barely know it was there if you didn’t care to look. Few find it, fewer still choose it. Even though there is no truth it cannot find.

Here’s the thing. If we don’t choose the narrow way, who will? Your first step is the only reason someone else can follow.

My narrow path is teaching me something about permission. Over the years, I have anticipated people’s judgement, so I’ve censored myself to make my message more palatable. The faith that once defined me among them. But through the Order, the wild man I’ve silenced is rediscovering his lungs.

On Monday, he had his say: Jesus didn’t need to go to war with the Romans because the alternative that people were witnessing in his ministry was so fucking unreal that it spread like wildfire. He touched the leper.

The leper was someone to fear. To touch the untouchable made you untouchable too, an act of social suicide. I’m not saying Jesus didn’t resist the empire of his time, but he did it by doing the thing no one else had the courage to do.

The burnout that comes from trying to take on something huge and systemic is real. What you’re experiencing is the soul-shredding way the current empire operates. But the thing that will spread like wildfire isn’t a clever argument. It’s the radical alternative.

So what would you do if you let your courage lead?

Now, I’m not suggesting we retreat into the shadows and burn down our social presence. The people already looking for the servant in you need some way to find them. In that sense, there is a creative tax to pay. But give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and be damn sure to show up on your own terms.

Not by measuring your metrics, but by reaching out and touching somebody.

I mean this quite literally. Leave the audience, the 99, and look for the abundance of one. Find them, send them a message, and let them know that you see them. And that they are not alone.

We will never challenge the system if we don’t serve the person. And nothing that we do or say matters if we’re not in real-world contact with the people who need us. Otherwise it’s just an opinion.

God knows we don’t need another one of those.

Monday wasn’t a conversation, it was a revelation. The group found something together that none of us would have reached alone. And that’s why the Order is changing.

I knew I wanted the Order to meet the isolation we feel and ignite the spark we hold, but it’s only the journey I’ve taken with this small group, who’ve become great friends, that’s revealed what that really means.

It’s a fellowship for those with the courage to outserve the empire and the will to discover how, together. It’s not a group chat for people who just need a friend.

And you’re not invited. For now.

I’ve made the decision to operate on an invite-only basis until January 2027, or until we reach 20 members. This is not my community, it’s a fellowship I belong to, and we shape it together. If I reach out to you in the coming weeks and months to join, it’s because I believe you’ll bring a specific challenge we need, and you’ll be willing to help shape the Order so we’re as ready as we can be to welcome the members who need us.

No one will be excluded based on what they do. They will be included based on how they choose to operate. When you join you’ll find yourself in good company: people who make the pressure of the empire irrelevant by embracing the radical alternative they offer.

And if you’re reading this and have an itch that says ‘hey, this is for me right now’, don’t ignore it. Let’s talk about what you’d bring. Email me at dan@unremarkable.co. Just be aware that the timing needs to be right for both of us.

Today, let me leave you with this thought.

I’ve spent too many years playing it safe. Trying to sound smart, playing by the empire’s rules, and ducking the slow but reality-shifting work of one-to-one contact.

I wish I’d realised sooner that no one needed my polish.

They needed the wild man in the desert and footsteps to follow.

Like yours, my imperfection is what makes me worth hearing.

So look to the desert. You’ll find me there, howling at the top of my lungs.

Be well my friends, speak again soon,

Dan

My heartfelt thanks to , , , and . Without your wisdom, friendship, and vulnerability, I couldn’t have found this path. Our best work is found, not chosen, and you are my testimony.

Each of you has started a campfire. I will do what I can to fan the flames.

Get the digital edition

In today’s Dispatch:

• The pre-mortem and why my business is already dead

• The fear you need to face to save yours

• An invitation to action takers

I did something uncomfortable this week.

I handed Gemini The Unremarkable Entrepreneur book manuscript and the landing pages for the Order of Unremarkable Creators and The Unremarkable Studio. The brief was simple: look twelve months into the future and tell me why I failed.

And the results were all too plausible.

Failure #1: Being too self-interested

You spent too much time on being seen and showing the things you created instead of seeing others and noticing what they’d created. You continued to hit publish on repeat without ever choosing the contact and conversations your practice needed to grow.

Failure #2: Weak boundaries

You spent too much time with people who needed a hug instead of people actually looking for the next step. You became the emotional steward for dozens of exhausted solo operators who simply weren’t ready to see things from a new perspective. Feeling something and being ready to do something about it are different things.

Failure #3: The ideological prison

You were so terrified of looking like a traditional marketer that you starved the business. You rejected organic opportunities for growth, sensible delegation, and strategic partnerships out of a puritanical reflex, convincing yourself that any friction-reducing system was a betrayal of the Unremarkable ethos. The work remained pure, but invisible to the people looking for it.

Failure #4: You let the campfire die

You unconsciously began prioritising high-ticket Studio clients over the Order of Unremarkable Creators. The first thing you have a gift for; the other is your calling. The Fellowship members felt your presence shift from a co-learner around the campfire to a distracted founder following the money.

Failure #5: You chose admin

You told yourself you were choosing the abundance of one, but instead you created long manual lists to work through, offering shallow connections that still operated with a volume mindset. No one felt seen, so no one took the seat at the campfire you prepared for them. You served the outcome, and it killed your dream.

Brutal.

Here’s the thing: these failures feel dangerously personal not because they’re aimed at me, but because they could be true for anyone who’s building a practice around their calling and hoping it will serve them creatively, spiritually, and financially.

They could be aimed at you.

And I would put money on the idea that at least one of those hit a little too close to home. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

For me, I’m going to cling to these three things:

• Continue to be a member of the Order, not just its Steward: It’s not something I run; it’s a fellowship I belong to, which means being challenged and changed by the members around me.

• Ring-fence my Studio Partnerships: Currently, I make room in my diary for two Partnerships and four Sessions each month. That isn’t fixed forever, but I’ll always choose to limit the time I spend on this part of my practice, regardless of how good I am at it and the money it makes.

• Make contact my religion: Pursuing the abundance of one, at depth and without a pre-selected outcome, is the only thing that will save my business, and yours. Without it, I’ll never discover what the work actually needs.

I often talk about creating from the rubble, the choice to look back and see the building blocks of today’s calling instead of the ruins of failure. Rubble lies ahead too, but this time we can choose how we navigate instead of stumbling through.

So today, I invite you to be honest with yourself. Ask why you’ll fail. Reflect on which of my failures felt the heaviest to you. Then choose to step away from the edge.

And if you’d be willing to let others bear the weight of what you’re trying to build, let’s start with a conversation to explore what that next step might be. Book a call with me here, but please only do so if you’ve got the courage to do something about the way you feel.

You are the fuel. I am the spark. And you are only a few conversations away from the best idea you ever had.

Be well my friends, speak again soon,

Dan

Book a Call

Get the digital edition

These pauses are important to me because there is a difference between Dan the author, and Dan the friend who actually understands the lonely road of building something that matters. So, for a few weeks, the chapters can wait whilst we reconnect.

In today’s Dispatch:

• An Unremarkable orientation

• The chance to choose your adventure

• And a gift from me to you

Like me, you probably know what it’s like to face the work alone. It’s easy to get lost in the busywork, fixating on what do I do? when we really need to return to who we are.

I decided to start my own business after five redundancies in a decade. I felt like a failure, but I didn’t let myself down. The system did. Though I found ways to replace my income, the frequency was off. I felt lonely.

So I stopped selling and started discovering. I didn’t choose Unremarkable; I found it in the rubble of past callings, practices that ended too soon, and 15 years of notes, articles, and diary entries.

But that’s only part of the story. The rest I discovered through contact with others. In conversations that revealed the questions I’d missed, offered perspectives I’d overlooked, and held me accountable to what the work actually needs.

Contact is what we all need.

Not contact with our computers, phones, or a better system. Contact with people.

My promise to everyone is simple: I will continue to publish every chapter of The Unremarkable Entrepreneur as it’s written. Free for everyone.

No curriculum, no guaranteed answers, no one telling you to work in a way that just doesn’t feel right. This is about finding your own path, and my attempt to walk alongside you, as incomplete and imperfect as that may be.

But right now, I want to speak to those who are already motivated, those who don’t shrink away from the idea of hard work, those who proudly bring a level of intention into their work that is rare.

You don’t have to face the work alone.

And honestly, you’ll never understand what it needs if you do.

Look, getting an email on a regular basis is unlikely to move much for you. So I invite you to make contact with me.

It’s time to choose the next step in your own Unremarkable adventure.

Read the Books

The Unremarkable Entrepreneur exists in five Movements and each can be read in isolation. Because of that, I’m publishing now, for everyone who needs it.

Of course, you can read everything for free, but if you want to engage with intention and enjoy a polished reading experience, you can find the complete digital editions of The Book of Presence and The Book of Empathy here.

If $12 is a stretch right now, let me know. I’d love to give you a copy.

Join the Fellowship

If you’re an active maker, artist, or solo-operator who doesn’t want to build in isolation, I lead a small fellowship of practice and co-learning. I’d love to receive your application for membership. Take a look here.

Enter the Studio

If you are feeling stuck, struggling for traction, or simply overwhelmed by the options, I offer a limited number of one-to-one Studio sessions and partnerships every month. Join the Studio here.

I know these are active moves for people ready to act. You might not be in the headspace right now.

So let me offer you a gift. Something to ground you. A way to reframe your relationship with yourself and the work.

Way back in the beginning of Movement 1: Presence, I wrote a benediction for the chapter ‘The Weight We Carry’. It was a reminder that you are everything you need. There is nothing to add, no external validation you need, and no flaw deep enough to stop you from taking the next step.

To act as a physical reminder of this, I have had that benediction beautifully typeset. It is a one-page, print-ready file designed to be kept at your workbench and returned to when the noise of everything gets too loud.

It is completely free for everyone. Download your copy here and please be encouraged.

Once you set the heavy things down, you’ll start to notice the good things that want to happen to you, through you, and for you.

I wish I could say ‘You’ve got this’. But alone, we just don’t.

How about we hold it together?

Dan

Get the digital edition

Like me, you probably know what it’s like to face the work alone. It’s easy to get lost in the busywork, fixating on what do I do? when we really need to return to who we are.

I decided to start my own business after five redundancies in a decade. I felt like a failure, but I didn’t let myself down. The system did. Though I found ways to replace my income, the frequency was off. I felt lonely.

So I stopped selling and started discovering. I didn’t choose Unremarkable; I found it in the rubble of past callings, practices that ended too soon, and 15 years of notes, articles, and diary entries.

But that’s only part of the story. The rest I discovered through contact with others. In conversations that revealed the questions I’d missed, offered perspectives I’d overlooked, and held me accountable to what the work actually needs.

This Substack is my practice made public.

Every week, I publish a new chapter of The Unremarkable Entrepreneur. There is no curriculum, no guaranteed answers, and I’m not going to tell you to work in a way that just doesn’t feel right. This is about finding your own path, and my attempt to walk alongside you, as incomplete and imperfect as that may be.

The weekly chapters will always be free.

But if you are already motivated, if hard work doesn’t scare you, and you bring a level of intention into your work that is rare, know this: you don’t have to face the work alone.

• Read the Books: The Unremarkable Entrepreneur exists in five Movements, each can be read on its own. Every Movement is available on Substack, but if you prefer a polished reading experience, the complete digital editions are available here.

• Join the Fellowship: If you’re an active maker, artist, or solo-operator who doesn’t want to face the work alone, I lead a small fellowship of practice and co-learning. I’d love to receive your application for membership. Take a look here.

• Enter the Studio: If you are feeling stuck, struggling for traction, or simply overwhelmed by the options, I offer a limited number of one-to-one Studio partnerships every month. Need a one-time intervention or ready to go deeper? Join the Studio here.

Wherever you choose to start, you are welcome here. And if you’re working on something and simply need a sounding board, my calendar is always open.

For now, let me leave you with this: you are everything you need. There is nothing to add, no external validation you need, and no flaw deep enough to stop you from taking the next step.

Once you do, you’ll start to notice the good things that want to happen to you, through you and for you.

Dan Dowman
Unremarkable Founder

A Parting Gift: The Benediction

A beautifully typeset and print-ready version of this Benediction is available to download here. Free for everyone.

May you draw a line in the dirt.

May you choose to stand on the side that notices your being. A life that refuses to be defined by the quality of your content, social metrics, or the size of your audience.

May you draw a line in the dirt.

May you choose to stand on the side that notices your feelings. A life that refuses to be defined by performance, KPIs, and the expectations of others.

May you draw a line in the dirt.

May you choose to stand on the side that notices your ability. A life that refuses to be defined by achievements, qualifications, and scale.

May you draw a line in the dirt.

May you choose to stand on the side that notices your limitations. A life that refuses to be defined by endless pressure, the need to be everywhere, and the fear of missing out.

May you draw a line in the dirt.

May you choose to stand on the side that notices your opportunities. A life that refuses to be defined by the fear of failure, the shame of years past, and the fear of what comes next.

May you stand where setbacks become invitations.

Where scars declare: I know your pain.

Where practice reveals your next steps.

Where you trade your podium for a workbench.

Where you tend the ground beneath your feet instead of building an empire.

Where you experience sovereignty, find belonging, and come alive with dignity.

Where you allow what wants to happen to you, through you, and for you, to flow.

We often treat our work like a tactical mission that requires a flawless strategy, sitting at our desks and waiting for the right idea to strike. We lobby for our own versions of success, hoping that one of them will finally get us noticed. But when we isolate ourselves behind a screen, we are merely circling a lonely story that no one is waiting to hear.

The truth is that you cannot plan your way into significance. You are often too close to your own life to see the magnitude of what is shifting around you. Just as a tent flooding in France became a foundational piece of family canon rather than a ruined holiday, the friction in your life is the very thing that makes your story worth hearing.

To serve, you must stop trying to project your expertise and start responding to contact with the real world. You are not a solitary author building a legacy in a vacuum. You are a friend with a seat to offer, a midwife ready to receive, and a narrator waiting to be drenched in the messy, imperfect reality of others.

00:00 - The Lessons of a Flooded Tent
01:28 - Why the Entrepreneurial Mind Gets Stuck
02:26 - The Necessity of External Friction
04:07 - Serving Instead of Distracting
08:14 - You Cannot See the View When You Are In the View

What we cover in this episode

• The Illusion of Control: Why your need for a perfect plan is actually a defence mechanism that prevents you from doing meaningful work.

• Contact with the Rain: How unexpected challenges and personal friction serve as the essential catalyst for your creativity.

• The Narrator, The Midwife, and The Friend: Shifting your internal focus from the marketer or entrepreneur to roles that allow you to truly serve others.

• The Wisdom of Perspective: Learning why being too close to your own situation makes you a blind guide in your own life.

Notable Quotes

• “Without someone or something beyond the desk, there is no heading that leads me away from more guesswork.”

• “You can’t see the view when you’re in the view.”

• “The next chapter isn’t written by what you want; it’s written by what you find.

Questions for the Campfire

• What friction in your current work are you trying to smooth over rather than using it as the substance of your story?

• If you stopped trying to pitch or market your expertise for a day, who is the specific person you could listen to instead?

• What is one “washout” moment in your past that you now look back on as a defining, positive part of your history?

Join the conversation: Read the full written version and gather around the campfire on Substack: https://www.unremarkable.co

Watch Chapter 1 of the series here:

#Perspective #Entrepreneurship #Empathy #CreativeProcess #TheUnremarkableEntrepreneur

An invitation

If you’re already in the work, building with intention, and hard work doesn’t scare you - I’d love to have a conversation.

The Order of Unremarkable Creators exists to offer the fellowship, friction, and context many artists, creators, and solo-operators are missing.

It’s not something you can simply join, and membership is currently capped at 20 members (this is not a tactic, it’s about foundations before growth).

If you’re curious to know more, or if this stanza has raised questions for you, please reach out to me on dan@unremarkable.co.

Where We Are:

This is Week 24 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be

4. Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader

5. The Power of AND

6. The Great Leveller

7. Art Like You Mean It

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View ← You are here

Next we explore Movement 3: Action - eight weeks exploring contact and how to bring our practice to life in the world.

Click here to read the Overture and Movement 1.

This was as close as I could get to the movie and I’d have to wait another few years until it aired on the BBC one Christmas.

That holiday was a literal washout, and when our tent flooded my parents needed to figure out what to do with four kids in the middle of France. For them, it was probably a source of tension, hushed arguments, and frustrated looks.

For me, it was a great adventure.

As a family, we’d go camping most years, but this is the story we keep telling each other. The hilarious imperfection of it all has turned a trip no one wanted to remember into family canon that we could never forget.

Nobody chooses the rain. We haven’t chosen it since.

And we wouldn’t change a thing.

Creator in superposition

When I sit down at my desk in the morning, I am not one person. I am a hundred.

The author who wants to write. The entrepreneur who wants to pitch. The marketer with a post to craft. Each holding a different part of the story, convinced that if I notice them, we’ll finally collapse into the direction we need.

Every version of me exists at the same time, occupying the same moment. Every creative path feels equally promising and full of danger, because to choose one is to risk choosing wrong.

With a hundred different places to start, the last thing I need is the right plan. After all, there isn’t one that will survive contact with the work. I need something to reach me first: a problem to solve, a person to serve, a reader waiting for a reply.

Some rain to respond to.

Without that external contact, the different versions of me will continue to lobby for their version of what we need. Without friction, the answer each holds is just as valid as the next. Without someone or something beyond the desk, there is no heading that leads me away from more guesswork.

The different versions of me that sit at this desk need a mission to serve and a reason to fall in line. Otherwise I’ll just continue my voyage as the lonely practitioner, behind a lonely screen, circling the next version of a lonely story that I hope will get me noticed.

And noticed for what? My wisdom? My expertise? Without someone or something to serve, what I have to say might not be worth hearing. I’m certainly not saying anything that hasn’t been said before.

Our work only matters where it meets someone, where another set of eyes help us understand the bigger picture as we recognise each other in our sodden stories.

The meaning you crave is on the other side of the flood.

The only way forward? Is through.

Meet your maker

Imagine me reading that Batman novel minus the Joker. It would have been a very short and boring book.

It’s the friction that made the story worth reading.

And it’s what makes yours worth hearing.

The redundancy you didn’t expect, the break-up that cast you adrift, or the idea born from someone else’s problem instead of your planning session.

When I sit down to work, the Author, the Entrepreneur and the Marketer try to take charge. They are my protectors, and boy, do I love them. Always ready to bury the unpredictable contact my practice actually needs with something confident to say. They offer the security of immediate direction with ways to feel productive for hours and days on end.

But I don’t want to be distracted, I want to serve. And to serve I need to receive.

To do that, I need to remember who I am. The Narrator, trying to make sense of the story so far. The Midwife ready to receive what wants to happen to me, through me, and for me. The Friend with a table worth sitting at, and a seat to offer.

All of them are cut off without contact.

It’s the people I meet who make the difference. Where a theory becomes a practice. Where an idea finally finds out why it was thought. Where the rubble of your past suddenly has a new reason to exist.

Where you stop perfecting the plan and start dancing in the rain.

The Author, the Entrepreneur, and the Marketer are great partners to me. I cannot serve the work without them. But they cannot meaningfully create without the Narrator, the Midwife, and the Friend. They need the friction that the others carry.

Contact with the work animates them, and drenches the work you serve with meaning. The Friend notices the common ground with someone in pain. The Midwife receives the questions we’re too afraid to ask. The Narrator discovers how the fragments form the mosaic.

The next chapter isn’t written by what you want. It’s written by what you find.

A room full of questions

There’s one person you’ll find at my desk who is instinctively ready to respond: the Dad with Duplo to master.

My son is a painfully wonderful example of what contact can do. When I feel the pressure of a hundred different things, he’s the rain, and I am the response.

Being an uncle to 11 nephews and nieces taught me almost nothing about parenting save for one thing: it’s not going to go to plan.

We did what we could to prepare, but how do you prepare for something you’ve never done before? We read books, we discussed lots of things, we bought all the stuff, but what we really needed was perspective.

So we joined a group of other on-edge parents-to-be, and a doula. A room full of people who held the questions we hadn’t thought of and a guide who’d seen it all. She didn’t give us a guidebook or a template to follow because no solution could withstand what was about to happen to us, through us, and for us. But she could help us step back far enough so we could see the terrain.

There were questions about feeding schedules, how to manage family challenges, medical realities that carried real fear. The doula held every question without flinching, without fixing, and with enough experience to say: plan for what you hope for, and create room for what actually happens.

We didn’t need more information. We needed friends who could hold the awe and terror with us, and the presence of a guide in the uncertainty.

Contact.

It illuminated what we could not see, revealed the questions we had not thought, and broadened the vista of what being a parent might look like.

The story of a young life, with many authors etched into the acknowledgements.

Already in it

A few years ago, my wife and I travelled to the Caribbean island of Martinique. Like camping in France, this trip did not go to plan. Sadly, not enough years have passed yet for it to be funny.

One afternoon we made our way to the coast and I could see a lighthouse up ahead. I was ready to be adventurous. My wife was not.

She said, “You can’t see the view when you’re in the view.”

It’s the laziest and wisest thing she has ever said.

I wanted to climb to the top, to see further, to capture something worthy of the highlights reel. She wanted to stay exactly where we were because we were already standing in something remarkable.

Of course, she was right. The lighthouse wasn’t the view. We were already in it.

And you are too.

Standing on the surface of planet you, too close to feel the magnitude of what is shifting around you.

In isolation, you are a bottleneck for what wants to happen. Confusing the noise of not-yet-visible progress with the silence of nothing happening. Looking at the gap between where you are and where you imagined you would be, reading it as failure.

But you are so much more than the moment you are in.

Right now, your Majesty remains unmoved and the perspective you cannot see does not reduce who you are. The question of who you are here to serve is not redacted by how you feel about yourself.

The question is whether you’ll stay on the shore or wade in. Because only one of those changes you.

From the edge you can say “I understand you” and mean it. But when you wade in, stand where they stand, you discover you can say “I am changed by you” and know it.

The shore is teeming with authors, entrepreneurs, and marketers. Some are barking coaching tips on how to swim, others are throwing floats, the rest are sitting at their laptops creating a brilliant hook for a social post.

But empathy asks: who are you going to respond to? Only then will you put down the plan and sprint into the water like their life depended on it.

It’s what this Movement has been building toward.

You’ve named the isolation you’re carrying and stopped performing your way through it. You’ve forgiven what you couldn’t fix and danced with what remained. You’re holding your mosaic without apology and meeting another person’s complexity without flinching. You’re learning to say “you’re here” instead of “I’m here.”

Not because it’s good for you, even though it is. But because your calling, owned and lived, is good for everyone.

In the future, they probably won’t know your name. But you’ve begun a life’s work of helping others take a step back, look up, and experience the view that was in front of them the whole time.

And like me, huddled over an objectively bad book under stormy French skies, you’ll know that it wasn’t the plan that made the trip worth it.

It was the contact with the rain.

A song to close Movement 2: Empathy

An invitation

If you’re already in the work, building with intention, and hard work doesn’t scare you - I’d love to have a conversation.

The Order of Unremarkable Creators exists to offer the fellowship, friction, and context many artists, creators, and solo-operators are missing.

It’s not something you can simply join, and membership is currently capped at 20 members (this is not a tactic, it’s about foundations before growth).

If you’re curious to know more, or if this stanza has raised questions for you, please reach out to me on dan@unremarkable.co.

Where We Are:

This is Week 24 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be

4. Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader

5. The Power of AND

6. The Great Leveller

7. Art Like You Mean It

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View ← You are here

Next we explore Movement 3: Action - eight weeks on actually serving the work, thrings to try, and learning from friction.

We are constantly sold the lie that business is a problem to be solved with the right template or system. We buy the books, hunt for the shortcuts, and look for the saviour who will finally make our practice work. But when the 3AM exhaustion sets in, those rigid, performative strategies crumble against the reality of our actual lives.

The truth? You do not need more expertise or another playbook. You need to shift your posture from the hungry magnet trying to be seen, to the midwife who simply shows up to receive what is already happening. Expertise often gets in the way of true connection, while the willingness to stand in the flood with someone else turns a transaction into a miracle.

This episode is an invitation to stop articulating your work and start stepping into it. Instead of hunting for customers, you will learn to look for the person in front of you. By letting go of the need for validation and serving what the moment requires, you build a practice that feels like a natural extension of your own life.

00:00 - The Midwife and the Miracle
02:18 - Beyond Performative Presence
04:38 - Why Your Templates Crumble
06:22 - The Shift From Manager to Midwife
09:07 - Serving the Person, Not the Data Point

What we cover in this episode

• The Myth of the Saviour: Why the pursuit of business nirvana through external shortcuts leaves you feeling empty and disconnected.

• The Midwife Posture: How to stop demanding that life follow your plan and instead learn to receive what is actually happening.

• The Problem with Data Points: Why viewing your audience as a conversion statistic prevents you from truly seeing the person in front of you.

• The abundance of one: Moving away from the lonely, performative hustle of social media and towards personal, one-to-one connection.

• The Weekly Practice: A simple, actionable exercise to step into someone else’s room without a hidden agenda.

Notable Quotes

• “I was simply in the moment with him, responding to what was actually happening as best I could. Incomplete, imperfect, and exactly what the moment required.”

• “My business doesn’t need a manager. It needs a midwife.”

• “Artists are everywhere, but they’re not standing at an easel waiting for inspiration. They’re seeing and serving the everyday work at hand.”

Questions for the Campfire

Take a moment today and ask yourself these three things:

• When you look at your business, are you trying to manage a result or are you serving the person standing right in front of you?

• Where in your work are you clinging to a template instead of responding to what is actually happening?

• If you removed your call to action, how would you change the way you reach out to the three people you want to serve this week?

Join the conversation: Read the full written version and gather around the campfire on Substack: https://www.unremarkable.co

Watch Chapter 1 of the series here:

#ArtLikeYouMeanIt #TheMidwifePosture #SmallBusiness #Authenticity #TheUnremarkableEntrepreneur

Practice Note

This week, don’t create anything new. Don’t post, don’t broadcast, don’t announce.

Pick three people. Step into their room. Let them know you see them.

Then do it again next week.

An invitation

If you’re already in the work, building with intention, and hard work doesn’t scare you - I’d love to have a conversation.

The Order of Unremarkable Creators exists to offer the fellowship, friction, and context many artists, creators, and solo-operators are missing.

It’s not something you can simply join, and membership is currently capped at 20 members (this is not a tactic, it’s about foundations before growth).

If you’re curious to know more, or if this stanza has raised questions for you, please reach out to me on dan@unremarkable.co.

Where We Are:

This is Week 23 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be

4. Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader

5. The Power of AND

6. The Great Leveller

7. Art Like You Mean It ← You are here

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View

Click here to read the Overture and Movement 1.

He moves like lightning, no cupboard is safe, and our miniature Dachshund is regularly subject to a brutish sort of kindness. He does not find it adorable.

He’s also a low sleep needs baby and Laura and I have faced many grinding nights.

Yesterday, I tried to settle him during one of those early morning stretches, I could barely see him except for a faint nightlight reading the temperature of the room. He was crying in that in between awake and asleep way, when there’s something bothering him, but what remains a mystery.

At no point did I find myself wondering whether this moment was worth it. I didn’t look for something in return, or demand he respects our routine, or appreciate my effort and the hours I put in. Of course I didn’t. I was simply in the moment with him, responding to what was actually happening as best I could.

Incomplete, imperfect, and exactly what the moment required.

It’s not a discipline I’ve cultivated, it’s the most natural thing I’ve ever done, and it’s a feeling you know implicitly. It might be a child, a friend in crisis, someone who arrived at your table already undone, but there are people in your world, and moments in your life, when “what do I get from this?” simply doesn’t come up. You’re too busy attending to what’s actually happening.

Moments where the artist steps into places expertise can’t reach.

You’ve been doing it your whole life.

The only thing that changes is the permission you give them.

The artist and the delivery

We talk about our midwife often.

She arrived at the sharp end of what turned out to be a pretty uneventful birth, by some people’s standards. But it didn’t go to plan either.

There was nothing performative about her presence. She had time for every question, concern, and scream. There was no imposter syndrome. No effort in deploying her skill. Knowing who she was, where she was, and what she’d experienced meant she could focus entirely on what the moment needed. What my wife and son needed.

She had complete trust in her ability to serve the moment at hand.

And so did we.

Not because we had proof, she didn’t present her credentials before crowning. She simply waded into the flood with us, and served what was actually happening.

She didn’t own the birth, she couldn’t dictate how it would play out, she received it. Like me with my son last night, she didn’t need us to be grateful. She didn’t demand that we respect the plan. She didn’t wonder whether it was worth the effort or look to us for validation.

When my son finally arrived, furiously alive, she placed him on my wife’s chest. Then she simply started tidying the space. For us, it was a miracle. For her, it was just another day at the workbench.

I guess in the artist’s studio, it was.

I think about her often. She didn’t walk into that delivery room looking to be seen. She just observed the moment, and served what she saw.

Artists are everywhere, but they’re not standing at an easel waiting for inspiration. They’re seeing and serving the everyday work at hand. On that day, it looked like someone meeting us in the middle of the flood, completely uninterested in playing the saviour. Someone able to attend to what the moment was asking for and serve it faithfully.

Who received what is already trying to happen and gave it room.

Who saw the person, not a data point.

Step into the room

In preparing for the birth, we bought books. Lots of books.

Books that busted parenting myths, books about developmental stages, books about sleeping, feeding, and teaching. For everything our son will ever try, there’s a whole book we could read about how to get it right.

But all that data, all that insight, and every template crumple like waves against my 3AM survival instinct when it’s just me and my crying son.

Honestly, I’m an easy mark for a well-marketed solution. Hit my pain point just right, and I’ll buy your book or jump on a sales call with you.

I cannot tell you how many people since launching my business have tried to sell me a shortcut to business nirvana. Post less, post more, post at these specific times, build an ecosystem, follow this flywheel, steal our exact system.

I have, I confess, been a successful sales target for them more than once.

But without their underlying advantages, their approach was never going to work for me. Their template crumples against my context.

What made me a sales target was how I was framing my practice. It was a problem to solve with a defined outcome to reach.

The natural question that follows: what do I do? What worked for others? What formula can I apply? How do I extract the outcome I want? All of which would have me building someone else’s version of my business.

The question that was needed: what’s actually happening here?

My business doesn’t need a manager, it needs a midwife.

Because art is about where you put it.

You can know more, improve your technique, and repeatedly start over on a fresh canvas and none of it will move your practice one inch. Your work needs context, and context requires contact.

Sit with others around the campfire. Honour the rubble of your experience, trust your own voice, and step into the room. Be ready to receive what’s actually in front of you and let it shape what happens next.

Most practitioners I meet are sat in a lonely room, in front of a lonely screen, writing the next version of the same lonely story hoping that someone somewhere suddenly responds.

I’ve been honest that most people who read my work don’t share it. Fewer still let me know it’s helping. I’m not mad about it. They are the lonely practitioner: trying to birth something, buried under work, notifications, other people’s launches and other people’s certainty.

Asking: what do I do?

I’m not sure I managed to do it yet clearly, but I’ll keep trying to wade into the flood with them to say ‘I see you’. I’ll keep trying to listen to what they have to say, to notice what they’re carrying, and attend to what the moment is asking for so I can serve it faithfully.

My job, and yours too, is to stop trying to articulate the work, and step into it, because you can’t say ‘you’re here’ if you’re still arranging yourself to say ‘I’m here’.

The people we’re reaching for are drowning under the weight of it all.

Their silence isn’t your judgement.

It’s easier than you think

Last month, the Order gathered around a piece of content a member had created. It was a beautifully written piece about burn-out and nervous system regulation. The natural question that every practitioner asks: how do I get people to see this?

The template is simple enough. Post the work, with a CTA at the end, and cross your fingers for some enquiries.

But we know the template doesn’t work; we’ve all lived it. And the platforms won’t spread your message anymore unless you pay for it.

I asked the group: what would it look like to stop trying to be seen and instead become the person doing the seeing?

The conversation shifted from trying to be a magnet to being a midwife.

The group started to imagine ways to share the article with people one-to-one: printed copies sent by mail with a handwritten note, wise snippets shared with a handful of people over WhatsApp, an email version sent one at a time, with personal context.

What matters though isn’t the method, it’s the posture she stepped into, and the meaning it carried.

The CTA was gone. The goal ceased to be sales. Even the recipient changed.

It’s the corporates who’ll pay, but it’s the middle managers who face the strain of a burnt-out boss. And what they’ll receive is honest recognition of their situation without any strings attached or the pressure of another pitch to ignore.

Data won’t be the judge of anything she tries, because a reply rate cannot hold the nuance of busy lives under stress. And there’s every chance the work offers answers to questions they might not be asking yet, even if their body or nervous system is.

Reply or not, the act of stepping into the room became the discipline to model. To show up and say ‘I see you’ without condition or qualifier. To later return, and say ‘I see you’, again.

One day, that person will feel seen. And then anything can happen.

If you build it, they won’t come

I want you to realise something: the people you are trying to reach are not indifferent.

They’re not ignoring your email because your pitch was weak. They’re already overwhelmed. Too many people competing for the same inbox, a calendar that barely breathes, a brain too saturated to make the journey toward you. The potential client who went quiet isn’t uninterested, they just don’t have the capacity to try another new thing.

You have to go to them. To step into the room. To be the midwife ready to receive, not the expert ready to teach or the magnet hungry to convert.

My son is not indifferent to me either, he is simply unable to describe what he is experiencing right now, and no amount of wisdom from my mouth will change that for him.

But one day, my son will look up at me and tell me exactly what he needs. A natural expression of the relationship we’ve formed and the language he’s developed to describe himself.

And on that day, as this one, I’ll be ready to attend to what the moment is asking for and serve it faithfully.

Like your practice, he is an unfolding work of art. There is no finish line to cross, no outcome to achieve, and no condition to be met.

It’s hard. It can feel endless.

And we wouldn’t change a thing.

Practice Note

This week, don’t create anything new. Don’t post, don’t broadcast, don’t announce.

Pick three people. Step into their room. Let them know you see them.

Then do it again next week.

An invitation

If you’re already in the work, building with intention, and hard work doesn’t scare you - I’d love to have a conversation.

The Order of Unremarkable Creators exists to offer the fellowship, friction, and context many artists, creators, and solo-operators are missing.

It’s not something you can simply join, and membership is currently capped at 20 members (this is not a tactic, it’s about foundations before growth).

If you’re curious to know more, or if this stanza has raised questions for you, please reach out to me on dan@unremarkable.co.

Where We Are:

This is Week 23 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be

4. Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader

5. The Power of AND

6. The Great Leveller

7. Art Like You Mean It ← You are here

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View

Next we explore Movement 3: Action - eight weeks on actually serving the work, thrings to try, and learning from friction.

We often treat community as a luxury, a reward we earn only after achieving a certain level of status or success. We build our projects in isolation, convinced that we are meant to be tortured geniuses facing the world alone. But this approach ignores a fundamental truth about sustainable work: you were never meant to carry the weight by yourself.

The success stories we see are rarely the result of pure strategy; they are often the result of pre-existing context, safety nets, and connections that the rest of us lack. When we build in a vacuum, we stop serving the work and start serving our own fears. We trade genuine connection for the safety of playbooks that promise results but offer no real depth.

This episode suggests a different path. It is not about finding a cheerleading squad or a comfort blanket, but about finding a shared table. It is about allowing others to hold the compass with you, providing the friction and the fellowship necessary to see your work clearly.

When you stop building alone, you find the proof that you are not crazy, and you are not alone.

00:00 - The Great Leveller: Finding a Seat
03:00 - Why We Strive in Isolation
04:11 - The Illusion of Strategy
05:21 - The Trap of Echo Chambers
07:10 - The Proof That You Are Not Alone
09:22 - Choosing to Allow Others to Hold the Compass

What we cover in this episode:

• The Myth of the Tortured Genius: Why building in isolation is a structural failure rather than a conscious choice for most creators.

• The Problem with Curated Brands: How many success stories rely on pre-existing advantages and how this renders most advice useless for the average practitioner.

• Fellowship and Friction: Why a genuine community must challenge your direction as much as it provides warmth and support.

• The Danger of Playbooks: How paying for frameworks and answers often treats the symptoms of surface-level stress while ignoring the source of your fear.

• The Power of Witness: How simply being seen and known by peers provides the undeniable evidence required to keep going on a Tuesday morning.

Notable Quotes:

• “It doesn’t instruct from a distance. It wades into the flood with you, creating space in the moment you feel stranded.”

• “Without witness, you stop serving the work and start serving your fear about the work.”

• “The proof community supplies isn’t a guarantee of success. It is the hard, undeniable evidence that you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone.”

Questions for the Campfire:

1. In what areas of your work have you been serving your own fear instead of the actual project?

2. Does your current circle provide both the fellowship of being known and the friction of being challenged, or are you in an echo chamber?

3. What is one piece of ‘evidence’ or proof you have received from a peer that helped you navigate a difficult moment?

Join the conversation: Read the full written version and gather around the campfire on Substack: https://www.unremarkable.co

Watch Chapter 1 of the series here:

#CommunityBuilding #SoloFounder #CreativePractice #TheGreatLeveler #TheUnremarkableEntrepreneur

An invitation

If you’re already in the work, building with intention, and hard work doesn’t scare you - I’d love to have a conversation.

The Order of Unremarkable Creators exists to offer the fellowship, friction, and context many artists, creators, and solo-operators are missing.

It’s not something you can simply join, and membership is currently capped at 20 members (this is not a tactic, it’s about foundations before growth).

If you’re curious to know more, or if this stanza has raised questions for you, please reach out to me on dan@unremarkable.co

Where We Are:

This is Week 22 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be

4. Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader

5. The Power of AND

6. The Great Leveller ← You are here

7. Think Like an Artist

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View

Click here to read the Overture and Movement 1.

For reasons I still don’t understand, my partner’s parents hated me and without warning, on Christmas morning, they refused to let me into their home.

I was crushed (and stranded), so I did what I have done throughout my life: I called my big brother.

He’s a Church of England priest and was leading a small church in the next town, and he invited me to stay with him and his family.

Later that day we sat down for Christmas lunch, but it wasn’t what I expected. We were sat in someone else’s home at a huge shared table. My brother’s family were running around the kitchen preparing a massive amount of food for a crowd of honoured guests: the coffee shop servers, the shopping centre cleaners, and supermarket shelf stackers. The migrant workers who couldn’t afford to go home to spend Christmas with their family.

Of course, I couldn’t understand the pressure and pain of their reality, but for the first time I knew something of what loneliness feels like at that time of year and the blistering joy of when someone has the courage to meet you in the middle of it.

At that shared table, we feasted, pulled crackers, and told jokes.

And for a few hours, circumstance, loneliness, and isolation, softened its grip.

The extra seat

That Christmas, my brother didn’t give me advice. He didn’t tell me how to fix the situation or send me resources on healing from rejection. He made space for me. He found another chair and offered me a seat.

He showed me I wasn’t alone by making sure I wasn’t alone.

No one earned their place. Status, credentials, or network potential, didn’t matter. We simply arrived, stranded in one way or another.

Although I knew my life was immeasurably more secure than the people around me, for a few hours, we were just friends sharing a meal.

The table levelled us.

This is what genuine community does. It doesn’t instruct from a distance. It wades into the flood with you, creating space in the moment you feel stranded. It pulls up a chair and offers you a seat.

And yet, despite having our own experiences of this, many of us still strive in isolation. It’s not a choice we’ve made consciously. We’re not trying to be tortured geniuses facing the world alone. We just haven’t named community as something structural.

Not optional enrichment we get to enjoy once we’ve earned it, but part of the very architecture a sustainable practice is built on.

Something that requires intentional investment.

Because doing it your way is the only way, and community is how you find it.

What you’re missing

When you build alone, you’re not just missing emotional support. You’re missing the vital context your practice needs.

Think about the success stories for a moment. The ones with the waiting list, the limited spaces, the high-ticket offer, and the testimonials to match.

Strip away the heavily curated personal brand and what you’ll find is context. People who had a pre-existing audience they could activate (or one they purchased), connections that could open doors, or a safety net that allowed for bold risks.

What feels like strategy is often fortune.

They can wrap it in a curriculum, slap a price tag on it, and collect a handful of testimonials. But their approach fails most people because most people don’t have the same underlying advantages that accelerated their success.

So what do you have?

The extra seat. If you’re willing to take it.

Community is the one thing that can reliably level the playing field. Not by handing you a map, but by wading with you, replacing the fear you woke up with this morning with the quiet relief of being known.

And from that shared table, the missing context begins to find its shape.

Revealing the questions you were missing, the introductions you could not force, and the friction required to make hard decisions. The company you keep become the extra set of hands to bear the weight and ensure you don’t face the work alone.

When it clicks, it feels like fortune. Really, it’s the evidence of a different kind of strategy: choosing to allow others to hold the compass with you.

Not every table is created equal

This is not about forming a cheerleading squad.

If a community only ever makes you feel good or confirms what you’ve already decided, you’ve found yourself an echo chamber.

That’s not a community. It’s a comfort blanket with a group chat.

If you’re paying to be part of something that’s dripping with frameworks, tools, and answers that are too good to be true, that’s not a community either. It’s a club (or a cult).

Though you might get involved looking for genuine depth, the curriculum has been designed to respond to how you feel right now. It might feel like progress, but it’s nothing more than a sophisticated way to respond to surface tension. To treat the symptom, not the source.

Genuine community doesn’t have a curriculum for your discomfort. It sits in the question with you, without an agenda, until you can hear the Oboe’s A once again.

It’s where you’ll find fellowship and friction in equal measure. The warmth of being genuinely known, and the discomfort of being genuinely challenged.

You need both.

Anything else will keep you trained on someone else’s version of you.

Without it, you navigate entirely by an internal compass which, as we established in What Presence Requires, is all too easily bent by your biases and blindspots.

Fellowship is not a nice-to-have.

It’s the whole point.

Holding hope, together

There is one final thing that only community can provide.

Proof.

Sustaining belief by yourself is exhausting. You have to wake up each morning and convince yourself, again, that it’s worth it. That in the silence, the slow, unremarkable steps still matter.

It’s not realistic.

Even this morning I woke up in a hall of mirrors, each reflecting back to me someone experiencing what I perceived as a success I long for. This project loses me more subscribers than it gains. Few people share the work. Fewer still reach out to let me know it resonates.

In my isolation, that silence feels like a personal verdict.

And then I sit down with a member of the Order of Unremarkable Creators and something shifts. We hold creative energy for one another. But it’s more than that. It is the profound relief of being seen, heard, and known.

I hear about their quiet inbox. Their moments of panic. Their struggle to keep the faith.

Suddenly, the silence I woke up to is no longer a sign that I’m failing. It is just the reality of the terrain. Community doesn’t guarantee my success, but does provide the hard, undeniable evidence that I’m not crazy.

And I’m not alone.

And that changes everything about how I show up on any given day.

This is what my brother knew at that Christmas table. He didn’t offer those migrant workers a speech about how their circumstances would magically improve. He offered them evidence: you are not the only one who feels alone this Christmas. Everyone here understands. Pull up a chair.

The grip loosens because you are no longer holding it alone.

Can I get a witness?

You already know community matters. You’ve felt the difference it makes. That Christmas scene isn’t surprising to you: it resonates because you have your own version of it.

And yet most practitioners I meet are building alone. It sits on the list of things to get to when they’ve proven something, when there’s more time, when there’s more certainty.

It doesn’t just leave you unsupported. It changes what you’re serving.

Without witness, you stop serving the work and start serving your fear about the work. When I woke up this morning it knew exactly what it wanted, the safety of the established playbook: a new offer, a waiting list, a thousand direct messages. It even knows how to disguise itself as progress.

Without the people around me, fear fills the space and makes the decision for me. With them, I start to see what the work actually needs.

My friend recently reminded me that art is about where you put it.

A shape is just a shape until it repeats enough to become a pattern, is scaled large enough to alter a room, or is placed in a sequence to communicate an idea. Context doesn’t just frame the art. It determines whether the art can be seen at all, whether its meaning translates, and who gets to experience it.

So give yourself and your work a new context.

A space where your Majesty becomes visible: not just to others, but to yourself. Where fellowship witnesses you, friction sharpens you, and hope becomes evidence instead of wishful thinking.

Art is about where you put it.

So find yourself a table.

And pull up a chair.

An invitation

If you’re already in the work, building with intention, and hard work doesn’t scare you - I’d love to have a conversation.

The Order of Unremarkable Creators exists to offer the fellowship, friction, and context many artists, creators, and solo-operators are missing.

It’s not something you can simply join, and membership is currently capped at 20 members (this is not a tactic, it’s about foundations before growth).

If you’re curious to know more, or if this stanza has raised questions for you, please reach out to me on dan@unremarkable.co.

Where We Are:

This is Week 22 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be

4. Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader

5. The Power of AND

6. The Great Leveller ← You are here

7. Think Like an Artist

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View

Next we explore Movement 3: Action - eight weeks on actually serving the work, thrings to try, and learning from friction.

We spend our days trapped in the Isolation Economy, constantly measuring our progress against the curated lives of others. We feel wounded, we feel lost, and we feel inadequate. The business world encourages us to fix these feelings with more performance or hollow affirmations, but that only keeps us tethered to the surface.

The power of “and” is a simple, structural necessity. It is the skeleton key that reminds your of your worth. By holding two opposing truths, like being exhausted and still full of potential, you stop the surface level circumstances from having the final word. You move from a state of reactive stress to a place of grounded, quiet truth.

This chapter is an invitation to stop battling your own complexity. Instead of chasing external validation to fill the gaps, you will learn how to use this simple tool to release your worth. It’s time to stop getting lost in your own horror story and start building a life that holds the tension of who you are and who you are becoming.

00:00 - The Skeleton Key of “And”
03:02 - The “And What?” Deflection
03:46 - Using “And” for Self-Regulation
04:36 - The Necessity of Community
07:24 - The Trap of the Internal Dialogue

What we cover in this episode:

• The Power of “And”: Why acknowledging two conflicting truths allows you to move beyond surface-level struggles and reconnect with your intrinsic worth.

• Surviving the Isolation Economy: How to use the simple question “And what?” to protect your peace when comparison and jealousy start to creep in.

• The Geometry of Empathy: Why iron empathy, which holds complexity without flinching, is a better foundation for work than the soft, cheerleading version we often see.

• Why Community is Architectural: How to build a circle that sees the majesty you cannot reach on your own, especially when you are stuck in your own horror story.

• The Living Tension: How to view your life not as a fixed narrative of failure, but as a mosaic that honours everything you have survived and everything you are reaching for.

Notable Quotes:

• “Your worth is not dictated by your ability to feel it in any given moment; it is always present, in the middle of the struggle, the anger, the jealousy, and the tension you currently face.”

• “Not soft empathy that finds excuses; iron empathy that holds complexity without flinching.”

• “The wake doesn’t decide the direction of the boat.”

Questions for the Campfire:

Take a moment today and ask yourself these three things:

1. When you feel the sting of comparison this week, what is the “and” you need to hold to regain your perspective?

2. Who are the people in your life who have the wisdom to hold your complexity without trying to fix or change you?

3. What is one struggle you are currently facing that you need to stop letting have the “final word” in your personal narrative?

Join the conversation: Read the full written version and gather around the campfire on Substack: https://www.unremarkable.co

Start from the beginning: Watch Chapter 1 of the series here:

#TheUnremarkableEntrepreneur #IntrinsicWorth #CommunityBuilding #Identity #MentalHealth

What did you feel?

If today’s Stanza has helped you name something, resonated in some way, or made you feel like you want to belong, you might be ready to join a fellowship of practice I lead. If you’re curious to know more, drop me a reply and we’ll talk.

Where We Are:

This is Week 21 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be

4. Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader

5. The Power of AND ← You are here

6. Community is the Great Leveller

7. Think Like an Artist

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View

Click here to read the Overture and Movement 1.

As we sat gazing across the water, my classmate and I discussed what it must have been like to witness Jesus walk on water when my religious education teacher, Miss Smith (not her real name), decided to stage an intervention.

She leaned over us and presented a string of different theories designed to entirely debunk the event.

We often clashed, and I instinctively snapped back: “and how does that add to our experience of being here?”

The miracle didn’t need my defence, but the moment we were sitting in did. It might not have happened and we can explore what it must have been like, and what it means, all the same.

My question did not argue. It simply refused to let someone else’s cleverness derail the wonder at hand. A question that pointed out that she’d missed the depth of what this moment meant to us.

Later, I performed a heist and stole my internal school report from the head teacher’s office. In it, Miss Smith described me as ‘extremely irritating’. The feeling, I confess, was entirely mutual.

And I look back on our battles with a fond nostalgia.

Irritated and nostalgic.

Wounded and moving forward.

Grieving and dancing.

Lost and looking.

Devastated and full of potential.

Whole and becoming.

If your Majesty is the ground: the truth of your intrinsic and immeasurable worth beneath the performance, your credentials, and your circumstances. Then ‘and’ is nothing short of a skeleton key that can open the door and let it out, every day.

But you have to pull it out of your pocket.

Your worth is not dictated by your ability to feel it in any given moment. It is always present. In the middle of struggle, anger, jealousy, and the tension you currently face.

And returns you to its depth.

Not by denying what’s happening on the surface. But by reminding you that what’s happening on the surface doesn’t get the final word.

It’s the Majesty in motion.

And as protection

On the Sea of Galilee I used it instinctively. The short version: ‘and what!?’

It’s something we should make a habit of saying to survive our everyday exposure to the Isolation Economy. Every time we scroll, feel a pang of jealousy, or face an external judgement we have the power to say ‘and what?’

That person got the job, they’ve got a bigger house, they’ve got more followers, they’ve got testimonials, they’re younger than me… ‘and what?’

That literally has nothing to say about you or your story.

And as self-regulation

That deflection works when it’s just you and the scroll. But there are times when it definitely won’t work. Sometimes we need to create space instead.

Sleep-deprived with a one-year-old, Laura and I were nipping at each other the other night.

Looking back I should have said to myself: I’m angry and I’m really tired. A way of acknowledging how I was feeling, and creating breathing space around that feeling so I didn’t react in the moment.

If I had used ‘and’ as a tool for self-regulation, maybe then I could have avoided a trait that Laura knows all too well: wanting to hash it out on the spot.

Not fun for anyone at 3am.

And as anchor

But sometimes that’s not enough either because you’re too close to the surface tension. In those moments, asking yourself to regulate is like asking the storm to calm itself.

That’s when you need someone else.

Not to be cleverer than you or trade one thing for another (I’m looking at you Miss Smith). But someone with the wisdom to hold two things at the same time.

Back at school, my English teacher knew I was finding things tough.

I remember standing in the corridor outside class one day and she said: yes, you’re struggling and you’re also kind, don’t forget to be kind to yourself. In that moment she held my complexity: struggling AND something more.

While other teachers were looking at how I was performing, she noticed something about my character that completely reframed our relationship. She saw something of my internal worth: the real me beyond the results, waiting to be noticed.

I went on to achieve the highest possible grades in English. The only top grades of my academic career.

My English teacher reached what I couldn’t. And from my vantage point now, I realise ‘and’ is more than a cognitive tool.

It’s a structural necessity.

You are not transparent to yourself

‘And’ is nothing more than a mechanism to remind you that your Majesty has something to say. But it only works when you can reach for it. When the jealousy hits hard, or the comparison spiral tightens, sometimes you’re too stuck to hold what you feel alongside the larger truth of who you are.

In What Presence Requires, I argued that Community isn’t optional, it’s architectural. You need others to reflect back dimensions of your Majesty that introspection alone can’t reach.

I lead a fellowship of practice called the Order of Unremarkable Creators because of this gap. It’s not a celebration society, it doesn’t exist to be anyone’s cheerleader, it exists to reveal what you can’t see on your own.

When you’re building alone, it’s easy to collapse into your own horror story.

But others take that story in a different direction: “I hear you and look what you built last month and you’re still showing up and the people who need this work are already looking for it”.

They create space for the struggle and refuse to let it have the final word.

This is empathy. Not soft empathy that finds excuses. Iron empathy that holds complexity without flinching.

Last week in the Order, a practitioner said “I just don’t execute.”

Every week she writes. She facilitates events. She joins our calls. She allows us to scrutinise her work. She has paid clients and paid bills. She brings pastoral wisdom we’d be poorer without.

The feeling is legitimate. There’s a challenge and a signal worth noticing. And it’s not the final word.

The isolated practitioner is often lost to their own internal dialogue. Alone, “I don’t execute” feels like truth. It’s where you’ll find the hustle, performance, and judgement, waiting to redirect the work we’re actually called to serve.

With others, it’s information. The difference is everything.

The ‘and’ our member needed could only come from the people around them: this feels like failure and look at what’s actually emerging.

‘And’ is more than a tool for internal regulation; it’s a way of helping others see themselves clearly.

When you go from holding your own ‘and’ to holding someone else’s, that’s when your calling becomes a practice. That’s when you start meeting a need.

That’s when you become the English teacher, reframing the relationship, and helping someone else notice who they are becoming.

And who are you becoming?

You’ve already been experimenting with this idea. Our response to the Isolation Economy, forgiveness, dancing despite circumstance, life as a mosaic instead of a fixed narrative, all demonstrate the power of ‘and’ for those who chose to wield it.

When we view our life only looking backward, where you are right now feels like the conclusion. But your Majesty isn’t subject to your circumstances. It’s immovable. Constant. And it has something to say.

Return to Galilee with me and take a seat on the edge of a boat, legs dangling over the water. The wake follows behind, turbulent and dispersing, the vast ocean lies ahead. Your younger self is sitting with you, looking ahead, whilst your older self leans against the railing to your other side looking back.

You ask: who am I?

They respond: and who are you becoming?

Like Dan junior and Dan senior on Parker’s Piece, the company you keep aren’t interested in collapsing your story into the moment you’re in. And it’s true for the people who want to gather around the campfire you’re creating.

People who can honour your complexity; who see what you’ve survived and every shred of potential you hold.

Your calling, and the practice you’ll build around it, is the living tension between everything you carry AND everything you are reaching for.

‘And’ holds the door open.

It invites others into the conversation.

When they arrive, they remind you: the wake doesn’t decide the direction of the boat.

When you know who you’re becoming, you start to see who you’re for.

And the question becomes: what ‘and’ am I holding for someone else?

Where We Are:

This is Week 21 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be

4. Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader

5. The Power of AND ← You are here

6. Community is the Great Leveller

7. Think Like an Artist

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View

Next we explore Movement 3: Action - eight weeks on actually serving the work, thrings to try, and learning from friction.

We are told to define ourselves, project a consistent persona, and dominate a niche. It is the advice of the shortcut sellers, designed to turn human lives into predictable, marketable assets. But when you squeeze your messy reality into a rigid template, you stop being a person and start being an act. You become the loudest voice in your own cage.

Personal branding is often a lottery disguised as a meritocracy. It demands that you discard your quirks and silence your contradictions to satisfy an algorithm. When the formula fails to deliver the promised salvation, the blame is placed solely on your lack of hustle. It is an exhausting way to exist, trading your humanity for the safety of a professional silhouette.

The alternative is to embrace your life as a mosaic. You are not a static brand to be protected or a monument to be carved. You are a collection of fragments. The failures, the false starts, and the weirdness tell a much deeper and more interesting evolving story. It is time to walk out of the temple and give yourself permission to be a moving target.

00:00 - Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader
02:30 - The Insidious Invitation of Personal Brand
06:56 - The Geometry of Your Life on Parker’s Piece
09:30 - Brand as Monument vs. You as Mosaic
12:12 - Three Questions to Illuminate the Mosaic

What we cover in this episode:

• The Cult of the Guru: How trending frameworks and aesthetic templates sacrifice your authentic voice for the sake of empty engagement.

• The Lottery of Meritocracy: Why the promise of visibility and revenue is often a rigged game designed to extract your time and security.

• The Myth of the Silhouetted Creator: The danger of carving yourself down to fit an algorithm and the exhaustion of maintaining a curated avatar.

• Life as a Mosaic: Shifting from a fixed, brittle narrative to an evolving interpretation of your history where every fragment finds its place.

• The Three Questions: Moving away from sanitised business labels toward the heart, the history, and the service that define your actual mythos.

Notable Quotes:

• “When the formula inevitably fails to capture the nuance of your actual life, the cult doesn’t take the blame; it simply tells you that you didn’t grind hard enough.”

• “You are not a brand; you’re a mosaic, still placing the pieces.”

• “The full story? The grief, the resilience, the apparent chaos? It’s not a liability. It is the thing.”

Questions for the Campfire:

1. What parts of your own story have you been hiding or silencing because they do not fit into the professional template you think you need to maintain?

2. If you stood on your own version of Parker’s Piece and spoke to your future self, what would that version of you say about the work you are choosing to do today?

3. How would your practice change if you stopped trying to build a ‘monument’ and started treating your life as a living, moving mosaic?

Join the conversation: Read the full written version and gather around the campfire on Substack: https://www.unremarkable.co

Start from the beginning: Watch Chapter 1 of the series here:

#Authenticity #PersonalBrand #CreativePractice #Humanity #TheUnremarkableEntrepreneur

What did you feel?

If today’s Stanza has helped you name something, resonated in some way, or made you feel like you want to belong, you might be ready to join a fellowship of practice I lead. If you’re curious to know more, drop me a reply and we’ll talk.

Where We Are:

This is Week 20 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be

4. Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader ← You are here

5. The Power of And

6. Community is the Great Leveller

7. Think Like an Artist

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View

Click here to read the Overture and Movement 1.

It happens constantly. Someone asks what the book is about, or what my work is for, and the answer comes out incomplete. Messy. Lacking the polish of a rehearsed line.

The shortcut sellers would say I have a communication problem. They would have it scripted and ready, neatly redacting my past into a definitive promise about my future. And yours too, for a price.

And it’s a tempting solution. Why wouldn’t I want to settle into some certainty?

But this incomplete answer is not a failure of communication. It’s a failure of the question and the constraints it demands as it collides with a mythos it can’t contain.

People expect a clear and definitive answer. It gives them the security of being able to quickly categorise you and whether you are worth their time. They want to scan the bio line and make a split-second decision.

But I’m still mid-paragraph.

The context demands certainty. It wants me to define myself clearly, project a consistent persona, dominate a niche. This book defies all three.

And despite your best efforts, you do too.

There’s no problem with your story, you just don’t fit the template on offer. The beating heart of your practice isn’t out there waiting to be boxed in, wrapped in a sentence, or confined by an elevator pitch. It’s found on a limitless canvas where every fragment of your story can find its place.

But before we forge that path, we need to drop a bomb on the detour. And if you’re out there serving the work, you’ll have been drawn to its insidious invitation.

Personal brand.

Yay! I’m a brand

I’m calling it. Personal brand is a cult.

First, you submit to the gospel of a chosen guru or a trending framework, adopting their aesthetic and sacrificing your voice on the altar of their proven template. The promise of salvation, of visibility, revenue, and relevance? Simply a matter of compliance and relentless hustle.

You can even ascend closer to the founder themselves, for a nice juicy fee.

Here’s what they don’t want you to know (and perhaps can’t admit themselves): this ecosystem is a lottery disguised as a meritocracy.

It requires hundreds to burn up just to produce the handful of glossy testimonials used to recruit the next batch of lost souls. When the formula inevitably fails to capture the nuance of your actual life, the cult doesn’t take the blame. It simply tells you that you didn’t grind hard enough.

And it gets worse. I’ve seen countless creators become evangelists for personal brand. They continue to carve themselves down to a recognisable silhouette, discarding the messy, vibrant pieces of their humanity that didn’t fit the algorithm, and choosing quirks in their story that get clicks. They trade the service they once provided for systems that ‘guarantee’ results, willing hostages to the dogma of their own self-appointed niche.

Congratulations, you’re a cult leader.

And here’s its darkest joke: it doesn’t even matter if anyone actually follows you. Whether you command an audience of ten thousand or speak entirely into the void, the trap snaps shut all the same. You become the undisputed king of your own prison empire: trapped by a story you must maintain, and enslaved by the idea that if you can just cling on long enough, grind hard enough, and be consistent enough, eventually they’ll recognise your magnificence.

This path demands that you trade the wild, unpredictable terrain of a true calling for the sterile, predictable safety of a rigid system and a paint-by-numbers story. And that’s great, assuming you want everyone in your field to feel like a threat (because you all sound the same), to self-censor, and to befriend so you can pitch. It’s the right call if you’re willing to bury the weirdness that makes you compelling because it doesn’t fit your designated content pillars.

You can try, but you can’t dance while chained to the spot.

The shadow of all this is that these middle managers of the Isolation Economy know you almost certainly won’t make their testimonials board, but they’ll willingly extract wealth, security, and valuable time from you all the same. The good news is that the security of the corporate climb is already waiting with loving arms.

To follow this path is to lose yourself to the exhausting project of remaining “on brand” and convincing others to follow you. It will suffocate your story as you maintain the illusion that you have resolved your past and figured out your future.

To break free you have to walk out of the temple and leave your polished avatar at the altar and give yourself permission to be a moving target: a complex, evolving human being whose best work is found outside the categories the market wants you to choose.

Personal brand can work, for some people, for some of the time, but it demands a brittle kind of certainty that’s destined to shatter as your mythos tries to break free.

The Mosaic Self

In 2011 I was standing on Parker’s Piece in Cambridge with a friend, staring down the barrel of my first redundancy.

Using the geometry of the park, he asked me to think of my life along a line, with the present me standing in the middle. We walked backward to speak to my younger self. What does your unwounded, uncynical self have to say to you? Then we walked forward to meet the future version. What does the one who has made it through have to say?

The present Dan was sitting with grief and dead ends, feeling like a failure. But Dan junior had a wide-eyed reminder: the world is big and full of surprising things to explore. And Dan senior had made it through to the other side. Those experiences were so long ago that he barely thought of the specifics anymore. But he was grateful for them, and for how they had shaped the steward he was to become.

It was the first time I understood that my storyline is not a fixed narrative.

The same story can be true in multiple ways simultaneously. Dan junior, present Dan, and Dan senior were all looking at the same life, and all of them were right.

Life. Viewed as a mosaic. A collection of disparate pieces working together to tell a different and evolving story. Each version of myself holding different fragments that revealed a clearer picture, not of who I was, but who I was becoming.

It’s actually a skill we’ve all practiced. One that personal brand hijacks.

Think about the last time you updated your CV (Resume for my international readers). You read the role specification and tailor your story for a line of best fit. You amplify what is relevant and turn the volume down elsewhere. You tell a curated version of the truth in order to support your ambitions. Applying for a job gives the story of your life permission to become fluid.

A personal brand demands the same thing. But in that world, the context doesn’t end when the business closes its doors at the end of the day. And you can’t just hand in your notice when you’re ready for a new challenge.

And it carries the same risk too: if we are successful (but not careful), that curated version becomes canon. A professional brand with new walls to live within.

Here is the difference. A brand is a monument. You carve it, maintain it, and occasionally update it. The cracks and imperfections that don’t immediately support whatever story we’ve decided to tell are scrubbed from the record.

But you are not a brand, you are a mosaic. Still placing the pieces. Every fragment feels lost: the redundancy, the false start, the career that looked like chaos, until you stand back far enough to see the story unfolding. Where everything finds its place.

The mosaic is your personal mythos: the living interpretation of your story that holds every fragment, true in multiple readings at once, discovered rather than decided, and the antithesis of personal brand. It’s not something you build, project, and protect. A personal mythos is something you find by looking honestly at everything you’ve been.

By now, you know my story. Some would say that I’m a failure. And honestly, from certain angles, it is true. Others see a survivor, someone with extraordinary breadth, and a resilience that only comes from fighting for your feet when the ground has fallen away. Someone with the capacity to sit with people in their difficulty and give their experience a name precise enough that it loses some of its grip.

Two completely different ways to see the same story. Both are true. The question I need to ask, and you do too as you consider the fullness of your story, is: which one do I want to live in?

And if you need a second opinion, what would future you have to say?

Honour Every Fragment

Imagine standing where I stood on Parker’s Piece. The work you’re serving today, a person waiting just ahead of you on life’s line. They are disinterested in who you are today, chained to the moment and all its worries. No, they’re asking something different.

Who are you becoming.

The answer is unlikely to fit on a business card, or be pithy enough to impress the scrollers. Your personal mythos contains too many fragments, too much depth, breadth, and possibility for that, and that’s exactly why it’s something you can build your practice around.

So unlike the certainty sellers, I’m not going to ask you to define anything. Instead I’d like to offer three questions to help illuminate the mosaic. Not to build something new, but to see what’s already there:

A question of your heart: What do you want to do?

Forget should/must/need to do. This is a question of emotional pull and what moves you. The pathos or ‘itch’ of your story.

A question of your history: What have you experienced?

This is not about credentials and what you’ve achieved, it’s about your credibility and the scars you’ve earned. The ethos or ‘stitch’ of your story.

A question of your mind: Where can you serve?

This is about how your experience, skills, and gifts can rise to meet a real problem others are facing. The logos or ‘pitch’ of your story.

Yes, I know, this is begging for a Venn diagram where the answer is revealed in the middle, but that would only serve to stylise and sanitise a searching of the soul that simply cannot be contained by a template. Instead, imagine the endless canvas, notice a few fragments, and consider where you might place the ones you didn’t think had a home in your story.

Ultimately, you do not need to have made a final decision about your past before you can offer something real. You do not need to have sectioned things away into neat, marketable boxes. The full story? The grief, the resilience, the apparent chaos? It’s not a liability.

It is the thing.

Today, you are not a conclusion.

You’re mid-paragraph.

And you can choose the next line.

Where We Are:

This is Week 20 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be

4. Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader ← You are here

5. The Power of And

6. Community is the Great Leveller

7. Think Like an Artist

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View

Next we explore Movement 3: Action - eight weeks on actually serving the work, thrings to try, and learning from friction.

We often spend our lives mourning the versions of ourselves we expected to become. We grieve the power, the clarity, the career path we were promised, believing that unless we can recover some former state, we have nothing left to offer. This obsession with what has been lost acts as a wall, separating us from the reality of the work that is waiting right in front of us.

The business world pressures us to seek external validation and wait for perfect conditions before we take our next step. It tells us that if we cannot fill the cathedral, we should remain silent. This is a lie. When we stop trying to reclaim a past that will not return, we discover that our current circumstances, no matter how rough or broken, have granted us a new, more authoritative voice.

This episode is an invitation to stop waiting for restitution. Your purpose is not found in the rear-view mirror of what you have lost or the hypothetical future you were told to chase. It is found in the simple, honest act of serving the person in front of you. You do not need to be perfect to begin; you only need to notice that you can.

00:00 - The Silence of the Lost Instrument
02:22 - Finding Beauty in the Gravel
03:01 - The Myth of Waiting for Restitution
04:29 - The Fierce Defiance of the Dance
06:41 - The Founder’s Dilemma: Who Am I Now?
12:01 - Three Reflections for the Week

What we cover in this episode:

• The Myth of Recovery: Why waiting for your old confidence or career to return is a trap that keeps you from your actual work.

• The Anatomy of the New Instrument: How your scars and failures provide a unique, gravelly resonance that technical perfection can never replicate.

• The Architecture of Defiance: How to ignore the need for external validation and choose to serve others right in the middle of your mess.

• The Identity Crisis of Success: How to navigate the silence after an exit or a major change, and why your next step is likely something quiet and real.

• The Servant’s Call: A reminder that your best work is found by looking at the person in front of you, rather than the crowd you hope to impress.

Notable Quotes:

• “The tide will not return what’s been washed away. It won’t repair what’s been broken, fulfill the prophecy, or restore lost confidence.”

• “The rougher edge is not your disqualification. It’s your resonance. Your invitation.”

• “You do not need to wait for the old soaring clarity to return. You do not need to claw back what you deserved or make up for what’s been lost before you are allowed to serve.”

Questions for the Campfire:

1. What old version of your career or identity are you still mourning that keeps you from starting today?

2. Looking at your current, imperfect circumstances, what unique texture or depth has your history added to your work?

3. If you stopped looking at the imaginary auditorium, who is the one person right in front of you who needs your help this week?

Join the conversation: Read the full written version and gather around the campfire on Substack: https://www.unremarkable.co

Start from the beginning: Watch Chapter 1 of the series here:

#Purpose #Authenticity #CreativeGrief #Service #TheUnremarkableEntrepreneur

What did you feel?

If today’s Stanza has helped you name something, resonated in some way, or made you feel like you want to belong, you might be ready to join a fellowship of practice I lead. If you’re curious to know more, drop me a reply and we’ll talk.

Where We Are:

This is Week 19 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power of genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be ← You are here

4. Personal Brand is a Cult

5. The Power of And

6. Community is the Great Leveller

7. Think Like an Artist

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View

Click here to read the Overture and Movement 1.

Once, her voice could fill cathedrals.

But it’s been decades since she sang like that.

The reality of what changed matters far less than the profound silence that followed. My mum’s instrument was more than a skill: it was part of her identity, part of the fingerprint she left on the world. The voice that taught my sister and me to harmonise in the back of a Mitsubishi Space Wagon as we rolled through Essex blasting out the latest Amy Grant cassette.

She got to decorate the lives around her with melody, and when words failed, she would sing. When it abandoned her, she didn’t just lose something others admired: she lost part of her ability to grieve, to express joy, and to serve others.

On her 75th birthday, the family gathered to celebrate, and my brother Michael pulled out his phone and played a recording. It was my mum, singing at a friend’s wedding in 1987.

To spend a few minutes with the composer of my childhood was, all at once, a reminder of what’s been lost and a sacred moment.

Recently, my wife, my son, and I went on a cruise with my mum and dad, and one evening I heard singing drifting in from the balcony.

It was soft. Unhurried.

I turned to see my son sat with his Nana, as she sang to him as she once sang to me.

It wasn’t the voice I remembered. The soaring clarity and raw power of the old days hadn’t returned. There was no healing here, this was something new. Rougher. Deeper. It caught on certain notes, carrying a gravelly texture it had never possessed before.

And it was beautiful.

My mum isn’t the singer she wants to be, but in her hands she holds a new instrument. It might not fill cathedrals, but what does that matter? This voice serves a new audience, carrying comfort, joy, love and grief as it always did.

And it can create new, beautiful memories for me and my son.

Instruments old and new

To live under the bitter weight of what we deserved, how things should have turned out, or what we’ve lost, is to raise the wall between who you are and who you’re called to be right now.

To live frozen in a story that has no right to control what you do next.

The tide will not return what’s been washed away: it won’t repair what’s been broken, fulfil the prophecy, or restore lost confidence, energy, or the career you were promised. It’s why your calling isn’t back there. It’s right here, right now, in the very next step. Whatever you’re facing.

If you wait for restitution, you’ll wait forever, and the new instrument you already hold will be left unplayed. And years from now you’ll say ‘I missed it, again’.

My mum sang regardless of the circumstance, the lost gift, and the grief of it. She sang without asking whether she was good enough. She sang to the person in front of her, simply because it felt natural to do so. She sang, not in the absence of the challenges she’d faced, the wounds she carries, or the things she’d lost, but despite them.

And you can too.

Remember, there is nothing to add, no external validation you need, and no flaw that’s deep enough to stop you from beginning.

Lord of the dance

In 1963, the English songwriter Sidney Carter penned a hymn that echoed through damp school halls and village churches for decades: Dance then, wherever you may be.

It sounds simple, almost naive. Yet beneath it sits a fierce, pastoral defiance.

To dance wherever you may be is to reject the idea that your contribution depends on some kind of external validation, permission, or the ideal conditions. It is the refusal to wait for a fair market, a supportive boss, a perfect platform, or an unblemished record before you begin.

You are called to dance wherever you find yourself right now. Not when the grief has stopped burning or the scars have vanished. Right here, in the middle of this mess.

So many of the practitioners I meet are still mourning the instrument they thought they were supposed to play. The corporate climb that ended in redundancy. The specialist career that fractured into a dozen unremarkable jobs. The exit that felt like a summit, but left them with too much time on their hands and not enough money in the bank. The business that built an audience but cost them their peace.

They look at their chequered history and find a verdict that confirms that they were not enough. Their voice too rough, too gravelly, too broken to fill a cathedral.

But nothing is wasted.

And your voice has not been silenced.

The failed climbs, false starts, and quiet years of rebuilding may have lowered your register, but they have also left you with a unique voice. One that catches on the hard notes, that fumbles the poetry, that drifts off key and yet carries a depth and an authority that technical perfection can never fake.

That rougher edge is not your disqualification. It is your resonance. Your invitation.

The right voice, for right now, and the people who need to hear it.

Found, not chosen

Just this week I sat with a founder who had achieved what many spend their careers chasing: an exit. He built something, sold it, and stepped out of the performance.

But performing for the dashboard, his team, and the company’s valuation, had kept him busy enough to avoid the question waiting on the other side. Who am I without the role?

He’s facing it now.

And in the conversation, almost as an aside, he shared an idea. Not a business plan. Just an instinct. To gather people for a dinner. Not to revel in the mythology of headline exits and catastrophic failures, but to serve those in the unremarkable middle: building something real, without fanfare, who need to know they aren’t alone in it.

He offered the idea as if it belonged to the future. The act of an artist who must wait until he’d found a new way to generate revenue. But the right instrument isn’t somewhere out there ahead of him, it’s already in his hands.

His challenge, and ours too, is to take action with what we’ve got instead of waiting for permission or certainty or what we deserve. When we finally serve the work in front of us we’ll find the next step, even if it’s not the one we expected.

Because our best work is found, not chosen.

Finding your feet

You’ll never find your feet in the story of who you should have become. Your ability to dance is found in accepting who you are. Incomplete, imperfect, and exactly what the work requires. That’s when years past stop feeling like chains, and become harmony lines in the song you’re composing today.

And around that campfire, you’ll notice the audience that needs you now.

It may not look like the life you trained for. It may not win the applause of the crowd or satisfy the people who measure human worth by the size of the bottom line. But it is enough.

You do not need to wait for the old soaring clarity to return. You do not need to claw back what you deserved or make up for what’s been lost before you are allowed to serve.

Take a breath. Feel the weight of who you are beneath your feet.

And dance then, wherever you may be.

Today, my mum gets the final word. This is The Servant Song by Richard Gillard, performed by Heather Dowman in 1987.

Lyrics:

I would love to be your servant
Let me be as Christ to you
Pray that I may have the grace
To let you be my servant too

We are pilgrims on a journey
We are travellers on the road
We are here to help each other
Walk the mile and bear the load

I will hold the Christ-light for you
In the nighttime of your fear
I will hold my hand out to you
Speak the peace you long to hear

I will weep when you are weeping
When you laugh, I’ll laugh with you
I will share your joy and sorrow
Till we’ve seen this journey through

When we sing to God in heaven
We will find such harmony
Born of all we’ve known together
Of Christ’s love and agony

I would love to be your servant
Let me be as Christ to you
Pray that I may have the grace
To let you be my servant too

Practice Note

Three small reflections to carry into your week:

• What are you still mourning? Name the old career path, project, or version of yourself that you are waiting to recover before you allow yourself to begin.

• What is the new instrument to hand? Look at your current circumstances - the scars, the generalist background, the small audience. What unique texture does this give your work today?

• Who is on the balcony with you? Stop looking at the auditorium. Who is the single person right in front of you who needs to know the comfort of your voice this week?

Where We Are:

This is Week 19 of a year-long practice.

Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.

1. Your Loneliness is a Business Model

2. I Forgive, Therefore I Am

3. Dance Then, Wherever You May Be ← You are here

4. Personal Brand is a Cult

5. The Power of And

6. Community is the Great Leveller

7. Think Like an Artist

8. You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View

Next we explore Movement 3: Action - eight weeks on actually serving the work, thrings to try, and learning from friction.