Why I stopped posting content for a month, and what I found

The short answer to why I stopped posting content, in his words, is that he stops at every stage of anything he does and asks whether it is still right. Every hour, every half hour, sometimes every five minutes when he is working with AI. Then every day, every week, every month, the same question about the larger direction.

The reason he gives is worth more than the habit itself. When you are inside a routine you often do not notice the routine. The work continues, the schedule is met, and the direction quietly shifts a few degrees until it is no longer the direction you set out in. Stopping is the only way to see it. He does the same thing in the gym and in most parts of his life: stop, check, make changes, carry on.

Content makes this harder than most work, because the numbers arrive immediately. A video does a million views, so you make more like that video. For a lot of people that is the whole objective and he does not argue with it. It was never his. He did not set out to build an audience at all. He built one anyway, and it came with an obligation he had not planned for.

So he stopped completely and went back through everything: more than 200 videos, by his own count, every number, every comment, everything people had asked for. Three questions were on the table. Did this content serve the reason I started. Did it serve the people watching. Did it leave me comfortable with myself.

What the audit turned up was uncomfortable. Most of what he had made was advice. Advice drawn from real experience, and probably correct, but delivered as advice. He points out what anyone who has read a little psychology knows: advice on its own does not sit in the head and does not change behaviour. It has to arrive as a real story, a real experience, something a person can act on now.

Every second I take from you, I have to come back to you with more.

He describes the microphone as a contract, one that neither side actually signs. He is taking your time. If you are not getting more back than you gave, you should scroll on and carry on with your life. He is candid that he cannot stop anyone scrolling, and that he is part of the problem: he is a member of the generation that built these things, and he has worked on the reels that hold people there.

The risk he names is precise. It is not that people ignore him. It is that they watch, concentrate, and get nothing out of it. That is the failure he is trying to design out, and it is the reason the reach numbers stopped being the measure.

The rule that came out of the month is one line. If you will not benefit from it, he does not publish it. Everything he says goes onto the internet, so if he suspects for any reason that a particular piece will not help the people he made it for, it stays unpublished.

In practice that means less. The podcast moves to every two weeks instead of every week. Guests come on only when the guest genuinely has something the audience can use. Some weeks there may be one video, some weeks five, depending on what he has. The replacement for advice is stories: his own, at 45, from a life lived in several countries and some strange stretches, and stories from people he knows who have been through the thing you are stuck in.

It is the same distinction between being busy and being useful that runs through the rest of what we publish in our insights, applied by someone to his own output rather than to a client's.

He went into the break afraid of AI, mostly on behalf of young people, and the fear was well founded: the entry level jobs a graduate used to walk into are the jobs these tools now do, which is why people leaving university last year are not finding work. What he noticed during the month was that everything he had been reading pointed the same way, towards fear.

So he did the opposite for a month. He spoke to people who actually build these systems, read a stack of books, listened to podcasts making the opposite case. His conclusion is that neither side is right, because nobody knows. What he is sure of is narrower: the people who use these tools today will have opportunities the rest will not.

His argument for why that might favour Sudan comes from 2000. When he arrived, mobile phones were everywhere, and doing things he had not seen in England, such as sending credit from one person to another, which did not arrive in England until 2013. The networks in Sudan were better than the British ones. The reason was that in England every house had a fixed line, a condition of having a house at all, so the mobile had to climb over an existing system. In Sudan there was nothing to climb over, so it spread faster. The AI he uses here is the same one available in Atbara, in Kadugli, in Port Sudan, and the same one in New York, London and Jeddah. Andrew in Manchester and Ahmed in Merowe are working with an identical tool.

The first visible result is small and practical. People had asked for English subtitles for a long time. Before, that meant someone sitting and transcribing every video, so it did not happen. Now it costs him nothing, so it happens.