Where it all started

It started in 2016

The feeling came first. Years of it — strong, wordless, pushing at me from the inside with nowhere to go. In 2016 it finally spilled over: I switched on a camera and let it out. I was younger then. Rawer. No plan, no polish — just a man with a wire in his chest, trying to work out whether he was going mad.

The whole idea is already in there, rougher than I’d say it now. A comfortable life with something quietly missing. A search through the people who made it, looking for their secret. And a single word waiting at the end of it: madness — the obsession that lets a person ignore the world and chase the thing anyway.

The video closes on the name I’ve been growing into ever since. Andy. And I’m mental.

And then I did the only honest thing you can do with a diagnosis like that: I went and lived it.

I lived it — and it broke me

I got my own startup. Rode the e-commerce wave while it was still cresting. Chased the idea exactly the way the manifesto says to — mad about it, deaf to the world telling me to be reasonable.

The idea in my head was flawless. The execution wasn’t. The company I was building and the company I was imagining kept drifting apart, and every gap between them had my name on it.

I learnt my revops skills were bad. I learnt my sales skills were bad. And here’s the part nobody warns you about: every shortcoming I uncovered didn’t just teach me — it fed the fear. Suspecting you might be weak is uncomfortable. Knowing exactly where you’re weak is heavier.

So the startup didn’t end the way it had begun in my head. I broke. Properly.

The rebuild

I exited — not to retreat, but to go get what I was missing. If sales was the gap, go live inside sales. If revops was the gap, go run the machinery until it made sense. That became the unglamorous decade: building the skills the startup had exposed, shipping other people’s systems, learning how enterprises actually buy, deliver, and scale — all the way to running GenAI globally at Trigent.

I didn’t rebuild alone. I borrowed the nerve from people who had more of it than I did at the time:

Theodore Roosevelt — get in the arena

Roosevelt settled the question of whose opinion counts, and it isn’t the crowd’s. By then the dust on my face was real:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles... The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who errs, who comes short again and again... who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

The stands are a trap. Comfortable, safe, and full of people who’ve simply never risked being wrong. Dust on the face is not the cost of the work. It is the work.

Rudyard Kipling — hold the line

Kipling’s If— is one long instruction in composure — how to stay yourself while everything tries to knock you off balance:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same...

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

Triumph and disaster get the same nod and neither gets to own me. And when there’s nothing left, the will that says hold on is the whole game.

Kobe Bryant — Mamba Mentality

The night Kobe tore his Achilles, he didn’t post anything polished. At 3:30 in the morning, pain meds spinning his head, he vented the rage and the doubt out loud — did he even have the will to come back and be the same player? And then, mid-post, he turned on it: stop feeling sorry for yourself, find the silver lining, get back to work with the same belief and the same conviction as ever. A new career would begin. Just not today.

That’s Mamba Mentality stripped to the bone — we don’t quit, we don’t cower, we don’t run. The difference between a setback and an ending was never the injury. It was that one decision to get up.

Frank Herbert — face the fear

From Herbert I took the discipline underneath all of it: don’t flee fear, face it. Let it move through you and past you, and find that when it’s gone, only you are still standing. My fear wasn’t abstract — it was an itemized list the startup had handed me. So I turned his litany into mine, and put it where I’d read it every day. It lives in the manifesto now.

The one I earned: exploit yourself

The last piece I didn’t borrow. I earned it the hard way, and I believe it more than all the rest: exploit yourself.

Not the way the word usually lands. I mean push yourself to the point of breaking — on purpose — because the breaking point is the only place things start to make sense. Everything before it is theory. The break is where you find out what you’re actually made of, and what you’re willing to build with it. I know, because I found out.

Why now

In hindsight, I would have done a lot of it differently. That hindsight is worth something — but for ten years I never had the time to write it down. Building the missing skills ate the days. The work ate the years.

AI changed that math. The efficiency is real: I’ve built my own tools — agents, pipelines, a content engine that runs while I sleep — and they hand me back the hours. The writing time I never had, the machines now make.

So I’m doing it now. One drop a day, in public, at andymental.com. The creed that survived the whole arc is on the manifesto. The proof is in the archive.

Ten years of tuition. Now the writing. Let’s go Mental.