About the author
Maverick
Brenton
Diver, executive, founder — and, throughout it all, a writer trying to make sense of a decidedly unconventional life.
I've never been good at the straight line. Where others saw a career ladder, I kept finding trapdoors into entirely different lives — and every time I fell through one, I came out changed.
This journal is where I set those changes down in writing. It's not advice, exactly. It's closer to thinking out loud: a decade of notes on freedom, decisions, comfort, and the strange arithmetic of building a life you can actually live with.
If any of it is useful to you, wonderful. If it just keeps me honest, that's enough. Either way — thank you for reading. Come along for the ride.
Three chapters
Deep Sea Diver
It started underwater — years spent in the silence and pressure of the deep, where the only thing that matters is staying calm and paying attention. It taught me how to be alone with a problem.
Corporate Guy
Then came the suits and the spreadsheets. I climbed the ladder, learned how organisations really work, and slowly realised the view from the top wasn’t the one I’d been promised.
Tech Founder
So I left to build. Founding a company is the most unconventional education there is — equal parts freedom, terror, and the daily practice of betting on yourself.
“The unconventional life isn't a detour from the plan. For some of us, it is the plan.”