Previously at the Volcano Base I was thinking about the costs associated with change and inaction. Since then I migrated from Ghost to beehiiv - website, newsletter, digital products and testimonials. It was a lot more fiddly than I’d anticipated but I’m fairly pleased with the result.

Most people think freedom means the absence of rules. Those people have never tried to invoice a client using vibes.

Chaos is exhausting. Structure, on the other hand, is a trick you play on time. It’s a scaffolding that holds momentum in place long enough for you to actually finish something. Even Tai Chi, arguably the most graceful form of slow-motion combat, starts as a rigid series of steps. Angles. Repetitions. You move like a broken robot until one day the shape starts to sing. That’s not restriction. That’s mastery.

Creatives love to moan about constraints. But the real creative killer? An open brief. A vast ocean of possibility where the only thing drowning is your sense of direction. First time I saw it happen, I was in an agency. The smartest person in the room spent three weeks drawing mind maps that looked like conspiracy boards. No deadline. No format. No chance.

The first boundary you draw is a lifeline. It gives you something to push against. It’s how you say “no” without a full existential crisis.

Constraints are not the enemy. They are the oxygen mask on the plummeting flight of your attention span. Fewer colours make for stronger choices. Word limits force metaphor to do press-ups. A deadline teaches rhythm. A well-designed system is just a constraint that pays rent on time and doesn’t complain about the dishes.

Systems work the same way. Especially when automation is involved. If your data is a carnival of mislabelled gremlins, good luck chaining actions without summoning a demon. Names should be names. Dates should be dates. States should not shapeshift midweek. Once you learn the form, the tool disappears. The flow starts to feel like magic.

Real freedom arrives when rules take the dull decisions hostage. If every invoice lands with the same fields, your reconciliation isn’t a Dan Brown novel. If tasks carry consistent statuses and your system nudges them along like a polite bouncer, you can stop herding cats and start timing sprints. Encode the expectation. Let the computer do the nagging. You keep the dignity.

You don’t need a PhD in systems architecture. Just a few durable concepts:

It’s pocket-sized Tai Chi for operations.

Bad bureaucracy is a cult of forms. Good structure is a butler who tidies up after you, then vanishes. You name files properly because you like your future self. You tick a box because five things will happen later without you having to remember them. The system should feel like silence, not surveillance.

Automation isn’t magic. It’s algebra. Garbage labels in, gremlin predictions out. But get crisp with your schemas (consistent names, reliable tags) and you unlock a form of wizardry. You can chain actions, schedule outcomes, and stop reinventing the process every Tuesday.

Some interesting stuff I discovered on my adventures.

A card game for making up lives for the people you see on trains, in queues, or vanishing into office blocks. Eighty prompts to invent motives, memories and desires out of thin air. Use it to practice radical empathy, build characters, or simply remind yourself that everyone around you is probably hiding something delightful.

From Fortune 500 CEOs in the US to cattle farmers in Brazil to elderly GLP-1 patients in the UK - Ditto's panels of Synthetic Personas give you access to audiences traditional market research simply can't reach.

COCOON is a decentralised AI inference platform on TON that securely connects GPU owners who provide compute with privacy-conscious applications that need to run AI models. For GPU Providers, it defines how suitable hardware can become part of a confidential, attested compute layer – for Developers, it is the backend that executes model requests and settles payments on-chain.