“I’ll sing you a song… then I’ll tell you the story.”
A few weeks ago I wrote an article called The Engineer in the Lakers Hat.
It was about a seventeen-year-old who believed music was going to be his life.
Software happened almost by accident.
The articles I’ve written since have talked about AI, Behaviour Engineering, bootstrapping companies and the future of software.
But tonight I realised something.
I’ve been writing about the same thing for over thirty years.
In 1994 I wrote a song called The Land They Call Paradise.
I was twenty-one.
I thought I understood the world.
I wrote:
A poet writes a line for a thousand hungry eyes.
This is the only road to the Land they call Paradise.
The song was full of questions.
Why do people build bombs to save peace?
Why does money become more important than people?
Why do we keep chasing promised lands?
It was my own Praying for Time.
Like most young writers, I thought I was writing about the world.
I wasn’t.
I was writing about people.
Thirty years later I found myself writing a reprise.
Not because I planned to.
Because life had changed me.
This time I wrote:
I’ve travelled down so many roads.
Searching for a land I could make myself a home.
But only as a man, can I see and understand.The price that I paid, and the lies I’ve been sold.
When I first wrote those lyrics, I didn’t realise they described the same journey I’d eventually write about in The Workshop.
The boy who searched for paradise became the man who realised he’d spent much of his life chasing someone else’s definition of it.
Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself ranting about AI gurus, Spotify pre-saves, LinkedIn growth hacks and software that promises to solve every problem.
They’re all different industries.
They all sound remarkably similar.
Every generation invents a new elixir.
A new shortcut.
A new secret.
A new algorithm.
A new miracle cure.
The promise never changes.
Only the packaging does.
When I was young, the promise was that the right record deal would change everything.
Today it’s that the right AI prompt, marketing funnel or algorithm hack will do the same.
The names have changed.
Human nature hasn’t.
That’s why I don’t get particularly excited when somebody tells me they’ve discovered the secret to the Spotify algorithm, or the LinkedIn algorithm, or the AI algorithm.
I’ve lived through enough cycles to know that most of these promises eventually disappear.
Craft doesn’t.
Perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to the same ideas.
Write software that genuinely helps people.
Write songs that mean something.
Build relationships instead of audiences.
Own your connection to people rather than renting it from platforms.
Take pride in your work.
Keep learning.
Keep creating.
Those ideas felt true to me in 1994.
They feel truer now.
One of my favourite lines from the reprise is this:
He takes his pen to change a mind,
And sings his songs for love to shine.
When I wrote The Land They Call Paradise, I think I wanted to change the world.
Thirty years later, I’d settle for changing one mind.
Mine included.
People often ask why I spend my evenings writing articles when I already run software companies.
Or why, after twenty-five years in technology, I returned to music.
The answer is that I no longer see them as separate pursuits.
Software.
Music.
Writing.
They’re all trying to answer the same question.
What actually matters?
Technology moves faster every year.
AI will change how we build software.
Streaming changed how we consume music.
The internet changed how we communicate.
But every time the world reinvents itself, someone appears promising a shortcut to success.
And every time, the people who endure seem to have something else in common.
They quietly keep practising their craft.
Maybe that’s what Nothing Changes really means.
Not that the world stands still.
But that, underneath every technological revolution, every new platform and every new promised land…
People are still searching for the same things they always were.
Peace.
Purpose.
Truth.
And somewhere to call paradise.