For a year my site led with “escape velocity.” It sounded good. It also did not really say anything. So this week I rebuilt the whole thing around the actual idea underneath it: own the things that matter instead of renting them. Your mind, your health, your money. The homepage says that now, plainly.
The manifesto became Become Sovereign. Five pillars: body, home, data, mind, money. One belief applied to five fronts. I tagged each pillar live, building, or want, because most of mine are still building and pretending otherwise would be cosplay.
Then I wrote up my actual stack. The tools I run to own my life instead of renting it. The thing that surprised me writing it down was how cheap it is. Almost all the software is free and open-source. Immich for photos, Nextcloud for files, Vaultwarden for passwords, your own Bitcoin node, all of it, zero pounds. The software is free. You just buy one box to run it on, once, instead of renting clouds forever. A genuinely sovereign setup is about £550. One Umbrel Home. Not thousands.
The software is free. You buy one box, once, instead of renting clouds forever.
So I put it on the site as levels of sovereignty by price. £0 gets you started with a few swaps. £550 gets you most of the way. Everything above is optional depth. The price framing is the bit nobody does, and it is the bit that actually gets people to start.
I also built a bookshelf. Every book that left a mark, 108 of them, pulled straight from my Kindle highlights, with a graph that links them by theme so you can see what to read together. Owning what you read is part of owning your mind.
And I changed what I call the coaching. I am head Hyrox coach at Hitio Orpington now, running eight to ten classes a week, so the site says personal training instead of run coaching. Same data-driven approach, just honest about where I actually am.
On the training itself: half marathon on the 18th of July, going for sub 1:30. The speed is there, the endurance fell off over a quiet month, so it is back to long runs, two real rest days, and actually sleeping seven hours instead of six. The boring stuff is the stuff.
None of this is finished. That is the point of writing it down every week. Next week: probably buying the Umbrel and getting my photos and files off the cloud for real. I will tell you how it goes.