Enough
”He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.” Lao Tzu
Previously at the Volcano Base, I was cataloguing the systems I personally use to run it. Since then, I’ve been doing lots of staff interviews, system diagrams, and automating business processes.
Mission Briefing
Enough
Most (maybe all) of my clients talk to me because they have too much on their plate. Projects multiplying like randy geckos. Scopes being creepy. Inboxes resembling archaeological digs. The background hum of panic that’s only audible once you’ve stopped having meetings long enough to notice it. Their instinct is predictable: get better systems, so they can handle even more.
But for Volcano Base, I’ve been doing the opposite.
Somewhere between the colour-coded calendars and the productivity dashboards, I tripped over a meek, endangered creature: enough. Not the version of “enough” you find in corporate strategy decks, where it means “not quite infinite never-ending growth, but close.” No, this is the stubbornly human kind. The sort of enough that says: actually, this is fine like this, thank you, no need to pile more bricks on the cart.
For the first time since starting Volcano Base, I’m running multiple projects at once. It feels close to the edge of my capacity. Pleasantly full, but not spilling over. This is my threshold. Beyond it lies burnout, broken sleep, fizzing skin, and the kind of email etiquette that requires formal apologies. I’ve been down that road, Neo. Never again.
My work isn’t really about helping clients juggle faster. It’s about showing them what happens when you stop auditioning for the role of Atlas altogether. When you notice that “enough” is not the enemy of ambition, but its boundary line. A fence post in the fog, whispering: this far, and no further.
Once you see enough, you can’t unsee it. It doesn’t glitter. It doesn’t scream. It just sits there in the corner of your week like a satisfied Porg.
Could I take on 20% more work? Easily. Will I? Probably not. I use AI and automation to do less work better, not more of it.
Classified Intel
Some interesting stuff I discovered on my adventures.
The New Normal: The Future of Entertainment
Jade McQueen of Box talks AI, distribution shifts, and how entertainment is being rebuilt from workflow to wallet at an October Shoreditch event.
Why it matters: an industry that once worshipped scale is now wrestling with focus, security, and saner pipelines. The question isn’t how to make more, but how to make what matters.
A personal knowledge foundry that ingests articles, videos and PDFs, then spits out summaries, cross-links and a searchable memory bank. Think “read, distil, retrieve” rather than “hoard and forget.”
Why it matters: it trims the informational hedges, leaving a knowledge garden you can actually walk through without a machete.
Google’s new UI co-designer turns prompts and sketches into interface layouts and exportable front-end code, with variants you can kick into Figma when you want human taste back in the room.
Why it matters: it’s a reminder that speed isn’t the prize; clarity is. If Stitch removes the grunt, you still have to decide what deserves to exist.
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