For a while, I thought I was supposed to find the one thing that tied everything together.
At UCLA Anderson, a class on personal branding made me think about this more seriously. In one conversation, I asked Sasha Strauss whether all my writing needed to point in the same direction.
His answer made sense: breadth can keep you in people's minds; focus can make you known for something.
Then I need to figure out my thing.
I tried.
An early attempt at putting the “me” into one sentence.
Some of it felt right. Some of it felt like an answer because the exercise needed an answer.
And then I kept doing almost exactly what I had been doing before: writing about whatever stayed with me long enough.
Data centres
Dogs
AI
Family
Climate
People
Work
Boredom
This did not look particularly focused. Sometimes I was trying to understand something. Sometimes something bothered me. Sometimes it was simply a story I did not want to forget.
I kept starting things too. Conversations. A podcast. Small experiments. Ideas that became projects, and ideas that did not.
Some found an audience. Many did not.
A harder lesson: response could not become the reason I wrote.
For a while, I wondered whether that meant I still had not found the thread.
Looking back, I am less sure the subject was ever the thread.
Maybe the repetition is somewhere else: noticing something, returning to it, asking another question, talking to someone, changing my mind, and occasionally writing it down.
Even that may be too neat an explanation.
Through My Quiet Lens came later.
I needed somewhere to keep some of these things together. So I made one.
Eventually, I needed somewhere to put it all.
A piece about AI can sit next to something about a dog. A conversation can sit next to a half-formed project. Something serious can sit beside something quite ordinary.
