I am a not a spiteful man. I try not to be an unpleasant man. I am confident my liver is not diseased. However, – some people just don’t like me.
“Toy”, tourist”, “all gear, no idea” and my personal favourite “chameleon” are all terms that a small subset of individuals have used to describe me over the years. It’d be easy to disagree with these hypotheses, but I don’t. I have my feet in many camps, perhaps too many. But then again, I’ve never met another generalist that doesn’t.
I’m a generalist in the sense that within the domain of technology, arboriculture, forestry, woodworking and the kitchen I’m comfortable wearing most hats and getting stuff done. Maybe that’s what rubs that small subset of people up the wrong way? To be clear though, I find it easy to get on with people and most people get on with me, or at least act like they do. Either works for me.
In 2022, after 10 years in a senior leadership position in a technology scale up, I quit my tech job to retrain in arboriculture and woodland management. I thought it would be a forever quit with a new profession ahead of me. I realised it wasn’t. It was a timeout. At the end of 2024 in the darkest hours of the year, I realised my future was in a return to techworld but this time – with a fresh perspective. So I that’s exactly what I did.
mix phx.new hello_again_worldMaybe I’ll tell you more about the reasons for the return to techworld as time passes, but let’s just say for now that the three year sojourn into treeworld taught me a lot about myself, my mortality, my identity, my abilities, my potential and my future.
This substack is called Tree Jamie. It’s called that because trees have lots of things to teach us. I understand that now. But Tree Jamie is an awkward name for a man approaching his fiftieth birthday, so you can call me Jamie.