Sabbatical Reflections: Week 2 - Laying the Tracks While Riding the Train

The second week of my sabbatical was slower in some ways, but it was more real.

I launched my Substack newsletter, updated my personal website, and finally gave structure to something I’ve been circling for months:

I’m deepening my systems thinking across four domains—each one mapped to a book-in-progress.

Here’s the current scaffolding:

📘 Workplace Jiujitsu – subtle tactics for navigating power, politics, and performance in corporate life 📗 Leverage Maps – diagnosing misalignment and building strategy from the inside out 📙 Hard Guarantees – exploring Bitcoin as infrastructure, trust architecture, and social constraint 📕 Soft Dystopias – speculative fiction that reveals quiet system failure in human terms

Each book reflects a system I’ve experienced or studied firsthand. The writing is live. The ideas are evolving. The stakes feel higher—not because I’m trying to go viral, but because I’m trying to be honest.

This week, I also returned to FE exam prep. I studied fluid mechanics and thermodynamics. I noticed that the same systems logic I use to analyze organizations shows up in steady flow systems. That’s what I love about this work: different fields, same principles.

📝 Posts I published this week:

Soft Dystopias:

• The Gentle Option

Leverage Maps:

• Play The Right Game
• AI as a Mirror
• Realign Or Leave When Misaligned

Hard Guarantees:

• Bitcoin For UK TV Pickup

Workplace Jiujitsu:

• The Flexibility Of The Machine
• The Gift Of More Burden

If you want to follow the work as it unfolds, subscribe to my Substack newsletter Leverage Notes. You’ll get early access to essays, frameworks, and my short story collection, Minor Movements.

https://leveragenotes.substack.com/

Thanks for reading. Let’s keep building with clarity and intent.