Last week I read a message from someone who’d reached the end of their rope.
A corrupt system had hollowed his life out. Liquidators stripped his business over a billing error. Lawyers circled. He contacted hundreds of people over two years. Nobody could tell him what it feels like to watch your life's work get erased by forces you couldn't touch.
He needed someone who'd been through it.
I wrote back because I know that feeling. Watching it crumble. Being unable to stop it.
The Collapse
Almost a decade ago, I arrived in Australia from South Africa. I thought I'd do what I'd always done: start a new business. I overestimated my abilities and sunk my family so low that my wife asked for a separation. Two years later, we divorced.
Before that, I'd battled MTN, Eskom, and the South African government when they installed a cell tower 3.5 meters from our bedrooms. I tried to get these big players to change their minds. I was featured in newspapers, on TV, trying to add voice to reason. The battle nearly destroyed me. We left South Africa with four bags, two car seats, and a one-way ticket. I lost over 45% of the value of our family home. We left without seeing justice served.
I arrived in Australia already beaten and broken. I had promised my wife a better life. I broke that promise.
I had to take jobs I'd never imagined. Two part-time roles so I could have afternoons with my boys. That choice, to structure my life around being present for them, slowed everything down to a routine. Routine keeps me sane.
What Saved Me
I needed a mentor. Someone who'd survived catastrophic failure and could show me how to keep breathing.
I couldn't afford one.
So I started building one from what I consumed.
At 3am, walking to work, I discovered David Senra's Founders podcast. He wasn't summarizing biographies. He was extracting patterns. The decision rules the greats used when everything was messy. The standards they held when nobody was watching.
That's when something clicked: the problem wasn't lack of information. I'd consumed thousands of hours of content. The problem was I retained almost nothing.
Information flowed through me like water.
Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness helped me understand that randomness destroys lives regardless of your decisions. A random event, other businesses tapping into someone's electrical meter, can cascade into life-destroying consequences.
A therapist (three sessions, all I could afford) let me vent for 2.5 sessions. Then in the last half of the third session, she forbid me from ever using the word "failure" again.
She said my new word is "struggle."
Nothing we do is a failure. That's a dead end. Struggle is a continuance. We will struggle, but some days feel less painful than others. Just keep doggy paddling.
That reframe saved me.
Why This Exists
I'm building Wisdom Reboot as my laboratory. A place where I slow down enough to think deeply, act with intention, and wrestle with what actually matters.
Most weeks, that happens on Sundays. After my ex picks up the kids and the house falls quiet. That's when I get space to breathe, reflect, untangle the noise of the week. Sundays are when I remember who I am and what I'm building.
I'm learning to extract instead of collect. To find the teaching moments buried in what I consume. To build depth instead of chasing volume.
This site is me making that learning public. Making myself accountable to the path of understanding versus consumption.
Every essay is me testing what I'm learning to extract. Taking the patterns I'm finding across founders, thinkers, systems, and working to polish them until they reveal something worth keeping.
This is early. Experimental. Messy.
I don't finish most of what I start. I protect my routines fiercely, because without them I'd unravel. I'm not a man of endless action. I'm a man who keeps showing up to wrestle with questions even when the answers stay out of reach.
I'm not teaching from expertise. I'm learning in public and inviting you to learn alongside me.
What You'll Find Here
You won't find neatly packaged solutions or tidy formulas.
What you'll find is messier, and more real.
Fragments: quotes, mantras, sparks of clarity I've picked up along the way. Me holding up a mirror to my own failures, turning mistakes over until they reveal something useful. Patterns buried in chaos, dots joined between ancient wisdom, modern noise, and the daily grind of trying to live deliberately.
My Values page explains how I work: extraction over collection, depth over speed, synthesis over summary.
I had to learn this the hard way.
When I overestimated my abilities, when everything I built disappeared, when I watched it unravel and couldn't stop it, the ability to extract wisdom from what I consumed became the difference between drowning and doggy paddling.
I'm building the mentor I need. You're watching me do it.
If you're building yours too, you're in the right place.
Jonathan