For most of my life I thought I wanted to be famous.
Not rich.
Not successful.
Famous.
I was seventeen years old. Obsessed with music. Obsessed with being heard.
At seventeen, time feels different.
You don’t think in decades.
You think in next year.
Next month.
The next gig.
The next opportunity.
I didn’t understand how much time I had.
I thought if it wasn’t happening now, it wasn’t happening.
Maybe if I’d realised how long the road actually was, I might have approached things differently.
But seventeen-year-olds rarely listen to that sort of advice.
Around that time I watched a South Bank Show documentary about George Michael.
It was released around the same time as Listen Without Prejudice.
I loved the album immediately.
Still do.
One song in particular stayed with me.
Waiting for That Day.
Not because of the production.
Not because of the chart success.
Because of the story behind it.
George sat in a studio explaining how the song came together.
A little Funky Drummer.
Some folk guitars.
A touch of Procol Harum.
Bits and pieces assembled into something entirely his own.
He wasn’t talking like a celebrity.
He wasn’t talking like a pop star.
He was talking like an engineer.
Pulling apart the machinery.
Explaining why it worked.
Showing the craft behind the art.
That fascinated me.
The song itself fascinated me too.
The honesty of it.
The vulnerability.
The lines:
Every day I see you in some other face.
They crack a smile, talk a while and try to take your place.
At the time we knew very little about the life he was actually living.
But you could hear something real in those words.
You could hear someone trying to make sense of themselves.
That’s what great songs do.
Years later, I realised that’s what great software does too.
People often see music and software as opposites.
Art versus engineering.
Creativity versus logic.
I’ve never understood that distinction.
To me they’ve always felt like the same thing.
A melody is a sequence.
Code is a sequence.
A song is built from structures, patterns, timing and emotion.
Software is built from structures, patterns, timing and intent.
The tools are different.
The process is remarkably similar.
Good engineers can often see the finished system before they’ve written it.
Good songwriters can hear the finished song before they’ve recorded it.
Both are acts of construction.
Both are acts of imagination.
Both require craft.
And craft is what I saw in George Michael.
Not fame.
Not celebrity.
Craft.
He’d been producing his own records almost from the beginning.
By the second Wham! album he already knew exactly what he wanted.
He wasn’t waiting for somebody else to create the sound.
He was building it himself.
I think that’s why the image stayed with me.
It wasn’t George Michael the star.
It was George Michael the maker.
The engineer.
The funny thing is I never bought a Lakers hat back then.
The hat came much later.
Earlier this year I was promoting Plastic Spoons.
One night YouTube suggested that same documentary.
I hadn’t seen it in years.
There he was.
Still sitting in the studio.
Still talking about songs like an engineer.
Still wearing the Lakers hat.
So I bought one.
Not because I’m a basketball fan.
I’m not.
Not because I suddenly wanted a new fashion statement.
Definitely not.
I bought it because it reminded me of something.
Or perhaps someone.
The version of myself that wanted to build things.
The version that fell in love with songs.
The version that believed craft mattered.
The version that hadn’t yet discovered algorithms, funnels, growth hacks and all the other modern obsessions.
These days everyone seems to be chasing immediacy.
The viral moment.
The overnight success.
The algorithm.
If a song doesn’t explode immediately it’s considered a failure.
If a product doesn’t grow at startup speed it’s considered irrelevant.
Nobody seems particularly interested in the long road anymore.
The learning.
The repetition.
The years spent quietly getting better.
But that’s where all the interesting stuff happens.
That’s where songs are written.
That’s where software gets built.
That’s where mastery lives.
I’ve lost entire days to code.
Fixing one thing.
Discovering another.
Adding a feature.
Testing.
Improving.
Looking up and wondering where six hours went.
I’ve done exactly the same thing with music.
Because they’re both expressions of the same instinct.
The need to create.
The need to make something that wasn’t there before.
The need to understand how things work.
People sometimes ask what the Lakers hat means.
The truth is that it represents aspiration.
Not achievement.
Aspiration.
It represents someone I admired.
Someone whose songs shaped my musical life.
Someone who demonstrated that engineering and creativity weren’t enemies.
Maybe even someone I could never become.
And that’s okay.
The point was never to become George Michael.
The point was to become more like the person I saw sitting in that studio.
Curious.
Craftsmanlike.
Obsessed with making things better.
Whether those things were songs or software.
So these days, when you see the yellow hat, that’s what it means.
Not basketball.
Not fashion.
Not nostalgia.
Just a reminder.
Build things.
Learn the craft.
Take the long road.
And try to leave behind something worth listening to.
Or worth using.
Or both.
Because a great man wore it once.
And I only ever aspired to be someone like him.