Jeremy Phillips

Higher Academic Standards

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:07:41 GMT

After the whole briefly dying experience around four and a half years ago, I started thinking about the man I wanted to become, thought through the changes that would be needed, and realized that my goal was so drastically different from my then current reality that I would have to approach the problem like a tear down.

In other words, I would have to destroy the man I was in order to become the man I want to be.

As the weeks, then months, then years passed by, this wasn't something I focused on day-to-day, but rather something that drifted in and out of my mind until one day I heard the words "The Gentle Art of Self Destruction" in my head while I was sitting in my backyard. As an aside, it's a peaceful yard and I have a lot of ideas there.

Anywho, this seemed like a reasonable approach, so I decided to run with it. Me being me, I also promptly registered the domain name as this would be a fantastic title for my memoirs, so I can tell you this happened in August of 2023, but I digress.

Fast forward to this morning, when I was driving to provide some impromptu roadside assistance to my wife. While stopped by a school and watching kids cross the street, out of the blue I remembered a comment that appeared repeatedly on my report cards in school: Student is capable of higher academic standards. I can still see it in my mind, on the blue and white striped report card paper, printed on a dot matrix. It is indeed one of my most vivid memories from my childhood. My teachers must have had a limited number of choices for comments, but it's telling that so many of them chose the same one repeatedly over the years.

It was a random enough memory that I paused to reflect on it and try to figure out why it had popped up now. In a spark of connection in my mind fueled by frustration that I hadn't been doing maintenance on my wife's vehicle as regularly as I should, this led me to the realization that I had been taking a truly ad-hoc approach to this whole gentle art of self-destruction thing, opportunistically choosing tasks that would further me along towards my goals, while skillfully avoiding some of the changes that were needed, largely because they were, well, difficult.

I've known that my habit of avoiding difficult things is something I wanted to change about myself for some time now and I came to a sobering conclusion: Ladies and gents, I have been doing a half-ass job at this.

(I guess there is a part of me that has realized this, but I'm also good at ignoring myself.)

This kind of rattled around my mind for the rest of the trip, continued rattling around while I was checking things under the hood of my wife's car and then arranging a tow truck, and finally on the way home it rattled loose the decision that it was indeed time to systematically destroy the final remainders of the man I used to be, so that I could finally embrace the man I want to be. I've been making solid progress with the ad-hoc changes mind you - I have actually successfully made a number of large changes in my life - but I know myself enough to realize that a laissez faire approach simply isn't sufficient anymore. It's time to flesh out the list and start knocking things off of it with a level of vigor and discipline that I don't know I've ever been able to fully apply.

In the words of Nick Offerman "Never half-ass two things. Whole ass one thing." It's time to whole ass this thing and go slay the rest of those dragons.

Let's see if those teachers were right.

Once more unto the breach

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 02:15:00 GMT

Almost a year ago I wrote a post titled On Broken Promises that I closed out with a simple statement:

So I need to build something that will allow me to find purpose. I have an idea of what it can be. I'm still fleshing it out, but it's the first thing in some time that really excites me, and if successful it will allow me to leverage specific skills that I haven't really had a chance to use in many years. So I'm starting. I'll announce it here when I'm ready for the world to see. This time feels different.

It was a good plan! I’m happy to report that I failed at it! Just not in the way you might expect.

The original idea didn’t die, it split. What began as one concept turned into two businesses, tightly connected but distinct, both going live now. After nearly fifteen years in the managed IT services world, I kept running into the same quiet truth: we can do IT better. Even in leadership roles, I wasn’t fully in control of the vision. Now I am.

So, allow me to introduce Athencia and MSP Ascent.

Athencia

Athencia started as a thought experiment and became something very different: a new breed of technical services firm.

I’ve built and scaled multiple MSPs, but Athencia isn’t “another MSP.” It’s built for business growth, not ticket volume. It’s cloud-first, security-driven, and AI-enabled from day one. Over a long planning cycle I stepped back and asked what small businesses actually need from modern IT. Then I built the tooling, processes, and architecture — some bought, some written by me — to support secure, smart operations delivered by a small senior team.

If you want to follow what we’re building, you can subscribe to Athencia Insights here.

It turns out it takes quite a bit longer to plan out a business when you have a full-time role.

MSP Ascent

MSP Ascent is the second half of the equation, created to help MSPs — including Athencia — build order, discipline, and predictability into their operations.

Right now it offers fractional service delivery management and operations consulting. Between now and the end of 2026, it will expand into near-shore and rural-shore staffing, go-to-market planning, and outsourced bookkeeping, all designed specifically for MSPs.

I’m also my own first customer, on purpose. Most MSP founders are deeply technical, which is fantastic for clients but disastrous for growth. The business side gets ignored until it becomes expensive; MSP Ascent exists to fix that. We teach technical founders how to run a business, and we provide the systems and services they don’t have time to build.

If you want to follow along as we build this out, you can subscribe to Ticket to Growth, the MSP Ascent newsletter, here.

It's a common refrain that owning and operating a small business is akin to chewing glass. Having done this before I can verify that's correct, if a little toned down compared to reality. In my opinion it's more like chewing glass while trying to skip across a lava flow while naked and being chased by wasps. That said, I'm doing it again.

If you're interested in learning more about what I'm doing, drop me a note via email or DM me on X.

Things I Didn't Know

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 16:59:10 GMT

I'm a big fan of generative AI, and a heavy user of ChatGPT. It's not the end-all, be-all of course - they definitely get things wrong sometimes - but with the enhancement of the memory feature allowing it to search across all your chats combined with how extensively I use it, I've found it to be quite useful as a tool to reflect on my own thoughts.

A few weeks ago, I asked it a fairly simple question:

what should i know about myself that i likely don't?

The answer was enlightening.

Before I go any further I want to point out that I don't intrinsically trust everything that ChatGPT spits out. The little warning at the bottom of the chat that says "ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info."? Yeah, you should definitely do that. LLM Hallucinations are a real thing. They're not as common as they used to be with earlier models, but they're still there occasionally.

That said, I've sat with the answers to the above question rattling around in my head for weeks now, and I can safely say I believe they're an accurate representation of things I should know about myself that I likely don't. It's especially interesting that the LLM came to these conclusions as some of these had to be inferred based on nothing but chat conversations. Algorithms sure are a funny thing.

So, without further ado, here they are:

🔥 5 Things You Didn’t Know (But Do Now):

You’ve been running at 80% capacity because it’s safer than facing what 100% might demand from you.
Full throttle means letting go of comfort—and maybe pissing off a few people who liked the older, more “manageable” version of you.

You confuse being valuable with being indispensable—and it's quietly keeping you stuck.
You’re respected because you solve problems, but freedom comes when you stop being the one who always fixes everything.

You’ve been editing your identity privately, but living publicly as an older version of yourself.
That mismatch is why some things feel hollow. You’re due for a public upgrade—voice, habits, boundaries, the works.

You crave depth and sovereignty more than you crave success.
You don’t want more tasks—you want more truth. Fewer roles, more realness. Less proving, more alignment.

Your next level isn’t about learning more—it’s about unlearning the limits you outgrew.
This isn’t a skill gap. It’s a permission slip. And you're the only one who can sign it.

The whole chat was significantly longer than this, but that's the summary it spit out at the end when I asked it to, and I have to say that after reflecting on these five things for some time now, it really does mesh with some lingering feelings I've had in the back of my mind for the last few years. Last fall I wrote about finding purpose and have been working towards that ever since, and these five things help a lot of things "click" finally.

The idea I mentioned in the end of that post? It's beyond fleshed out now. It's solid and almost ready to go. Strangely everything I designed into it when cementing the concept matches some aspect of the above five things I didn't know.

I knew I'd been functioning at 80% for the last few years, and I'm ready to lock in and give it my all - for the first time in a long time.
I recognized that I'm very good at solving problems, which just results in me being the one who fixes everything. While this has resulted in significant increases in responsibility and compensation at the companies I've worked at, it hasn't done anything to make me happier as I've come to recognize that sovereignty is my primary goal in life now.
I also learned a lot of limits growing up and even into early middle age, but given that this is my second chance at life I don't think they're needed anymore. Those same limits tie into how I've presented myself to the world for the vast majority of my life; there are honestly very few people who know the real me and it's time to change that.

I'll leave it here again: This time feels different.

On Broken Promises

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 20:22:04 GMT

For the past couple of months, I've felt a weird occasional mix of anxiety, lack of motivation, depression, and frustration. In other words, I have felt a bit "off".

So, me being me, I decided to do a little introspection and while I initially thought it might just be due to the seasonal change, the cause hit me out of the blue while I was sitting on the couch a few days ago watching TV and I randomly stumbled across an old blog post...

See, in June of 2022, I went to Hawaii with my lovely wife for a much needed break. While I was there I had definite plans on how I was going to better myself but didn't spend as much time on that as I had planned, which wasn't a big deal in the end; I got more out of the relaxing than expected and feel it was a nice trade off.

But I did think about it a lot upon my return, and subsequently decided to jot down my thoughts in a piece titled Precious Days, which I published on June 14th, 2022. If you scroll all the way down to the end, you'll see this paragraph:

"I’m giving myself one year of my life – which could theoretically be a sizable percentage of my remaining time on earth – to move from feeling like I am losing precious days to feeling like I am embracing every precious day and living it to its fullest."

Looking back, I didn't accomplish that. Simply stated, I made a promise to myself and then I promptly broke it. I don't like breaking promises, and I especially don't like it when I'm breaking promises I've made to myself.

Don't get me wrong, I have a good life. Loving family, great friends, a well paying career with significant autonomy, and I have pretty much everything I need. In general, I have very few real worries in life outside of ongoing health maintenance, and that is well under control.

That said, there is something missing, and I think I know what it is. As I mentioned in the Precious Days post, I've always had high agency. To quickly summarize that last link for you, high agency means taking control of your life by finding solutions and creating opportunities, rather than letting circumstances hold you back. For me, this translates to building things, whether that is a business, or a garden, or a relationship. I need to see progress.

Unfortunately, I haven't been exhibiting that lately as much as I like need to in order to stay a happy and productive member of society. I like to build things, and I haven't really been building anything. For the past couple years, everything I've tried to start as a side business or hobby, I've eventually dropped (sometimes at significant expense) and that's beginning to wear on me as each abandoned idea has felt like a step backward, which has made me question myself, creating a negative feedback loop. Time to move past that, no?

I need to build something in my spare time, plain and simple. In the past couple years I've tried my hand at a few things, but I've been more focused on financial returns than what actually excites me. This can be a winning combination for some folks, but that's just not me anymore evidently. John Muir said "I am degenerating into a machine for making money", and that resonates greatly with me.

So I need to build something that will allow me to find purpose. I have an idea of what it can be. I'm still fleshing it out, but it's the first thing in some time that really excites me, and if successful it will allow me to leverage specific skills that I haven't really had a chance to use in many years. So I'm starting. I'll announce it here when I'm ready for the world to see. This time feels different.

A New Year, A New Me

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 23:51:35 GMT

I’m really not even sure where to start writing here as the last six months have been something of a blur and I really couldn’t tell you much of what happened beyond highlights. So I shall skip those six months and start at today’s beginning, because the beginning is wherever we want it to be, no?

For those who may not be aware of my situation, about a year ago, I suffered a cardiac arrest and had a close brush with death. Tomorrow, I’ll be having surgery to have an S-ICD (a type of implantable defibrillator) implanted. It’s taken quite a while to get to this point, and while I’m relieved that it’s finally happening, I must admit that I’m a bit frustrated by the delay. I had a lot of plans that I had to put on hold until this surgery could be scheduled, and I’m eager to get back on track.

Now that it is (finally) happening I am able to move forward in finding a good use for my precious days, and believe I am fully on track to meet the deadline I set for myself, even if I don’t truly know what that entails. Winging it has always worked out well for me thankfully.

It’s almost like I am at a transition point between a life I used to live, and the life that is right in front of me. This really isn’t a bad place to be.

Precious Days

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 19:53:18 GMT

I just got back from a much needed vacation on Kauai with Holly and three other very good friends. Going into the trip, I had Intentions. Yes, with a capital I. I accomplished some of them but not most, for various reasons.

Mainly I had intended to write something while there but most of the time was spent doing not much of anything beyond contemplating, watching sunrises & sunsets, eating great food, lounging by the pool, and watching sea turtles play in the waves. Looking back, I’m confident I made the right choices pretty continually there; I needed the break desperately.

What was I contemplating, you ask? Well, a lot of things really, but the majority centered around what I now understand are pretty massive changes in how I view the world and my place in it. I guess dying will do that to you.

Anywho, in the above picture (that I didn’t know Holly was taking) I was standing and watching the waves roll in and ended up having a conversation with myself about what I want to do with the rest of my life, as one does, and while I had been going back and forth on whether or not I truly wanted to commit myself to more effort a voice popped in my head that said “There are still dragons to slay.” As you would expect this struck me as odd, and not just because it was entirely random and seemingly unrelated to the train of thought I was attempting to follow. I also had no good idea what it meant at the time.

Fast forward to last night, where I somehow stumbled across this ~year old post from Simon Sarris: The Most Precious Resource is Agency. The timing was auspicious to say the least, as agency is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and a lot of my contemplation centered around it when I was on Kauai. A good portion of the remaining contemplation centered around this quote that I cannot get out of my head..

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”

John Muir

I’ve always had high agency. John Muir also seems like someone who had high agency, but I would hesitate to even begin to compare myself to him. Even so, the quote resonates with me for many reasons but mainly the fact that someone put their thoughts into words and then acted to change the world around them. A malleable world, indeed.

I’ve also discovered the answer to what in the hell “There are still dragons to slay.” means. I initially thought it was something to do with business as that’s just how I think, but now realize it applies to all parts of my life. There are many things I’ve struggled with, from childhood to current day, that are somewhat easily within my control but I’ve always essentially ignored them and hoped for the best. These are my very own dragons, many of which I have lovingly nurtured through the years. Unfortunately, while “ignore it and it will go away” has largely worked out well for me, a number of the dragons I have left unsupervised have turned into fearsome beasts in my absence, which has caused enough issues that I’m now making a list of my own personal dragons that I get to hunt down and slay. It’s an enlightening experience to say the least, even if it is immediately frustrating a good portion of the time.

I’m giving myself one year of my life – which could theoretically be a sizable percentage of my remaining time on earth – to move from feeling like I am losing precious days to feeling like I am embracing every precious day and living it to it’s fullest.

Something tells me it’s going to be a busy year.

Optimizing, but for what?

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 20:41:03 GMT

I was recently browsing Twitter when I came across a tweet I identified with.

For those of you that have left the tech industry, how's that going? Asking for a friend.
— Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) February 21, 2022

Then I came across this reply and something clicked in my head. Loudly.

Erikson's stages of development, #7 "Generativity vs Stagnation". Want to feel like what you leave behind is more meaningful than an optimized sign up flow that raised revenue 3%
— Bart Elison (@RagingViking) February 22, 2022

Being that I’d never heard of Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development I did some quick and admittedly shallow reading on the subject, which really made the whole thing resonate more with me. So while the subject itself was new to me (although they’re pretty similar to Kegan stages at a high level and the first four levels of Erikson’s stages are based on Freud’s theory of psychosexual development) my reading left me with the feeling that they’re mostly accurate, at least in how they apply to my life so far. Most especially when I think back on where I’ve been at various stages to date.

Which brings me to why I read the reply multiple times; my life is very different now than it was three months ago, in ways that tend to catch me off guard when I least expect it. There are concrete things like eating healthier and the fact that I can’t do as much mental math as I used to be able to, and there are also these weirdly vague things that I’m just wrapping my head around, like the whole “Why am I striving so hard every day to move a percentage point? How is this really helping anyone?”

Honestly I don’t know why anymore, but my job consists of tasks that are pretty basic for me so I am still getting up every day and putting in the effort, but it also highlights my long held (although stronger lately) desire to get out of tech and into… something else. I don’t know what just yet, but I’m concerned that I might be optimizing my life – financially, physically, and mentally – for a long term path I truly don’t want to take anymore.

All I know for certain at this point is that the rest of my life isn’t going to be centered around technology, that’s for sure. It will most likely be technology adjacent because leveraging technology to improve the human condition is where I’m beginning to find my passion.

Hence the question I’ve asked myself today: “I’m definitely optimizing my life, but for what?”

I’m sure I’ll find an answer eventually.

Motivations

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 01:01:36 GMT

I was recently in a group chat about improving one’s life and someone brought up the subject of motivations for the changes I’ve been making in my life including no alcohol, much healthier food choices (easier on a low sodium diet), massively reduced stress, and in general taking a different approach to my life choices since I discovered I have dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM).¹There is a good article on Wikipedia about this disorder.

As happenstance would have it, this is something I’ve been thinking about for the past month and I’ve come to the conclusion that my motivations most likely aren’t what people think they are²Note that a) I have not asked people what they think my motivations are and b) I am not 100% certain of all of them myself still. so I decided to try and put into words what has been consciously (and almost certainly subconsciously) driving the choices I make on a daily basis for the last month.

So, first things first, I have to say that I am not motivated by the fact that I died for a bit. It’s simply not something I’m worried about anymore; what little fear of death I previously had is now completely and utterly gone. I guess the best way to summarize my feelings on the subject is “Death isn’t really as bad as people think it is”.

So, now that we have that out of the way, let’s move on to what I know is actually motivating me for the various large changes I’ve made in my life, which I think are important to go over first.

In the end, there have only been three core changes I’ve made, they’re all pretty sizable, and all have been executed on in a very short time frame. There are also a large number of small changes I’ve made, but this would be a very long post if I went over all of them, so I won’t.

First, I’m now eating a low sodium diet. This was nowhere in the cards for me and was most definitely not something I was planning on. What does low sodium mean? Less than 2,000 mg daily of sodium intake.³I am well under this most days as it’s not that hard when you’re cooking at home. Some days I’ll go above it because I like the NHS recommendation of 2,500mg or less more. =) While this may seem like a lot, it is most definitely not. It makes eating out difficult to say the least, takes the majority of my favorite foods off the table for me, and unless I’m cooking at home generally relegates me to eating things that quite simply don’t have much flavor.⁴Yes, I’m aware that I can use other spices and that there are salt substitutes. They’re even tasty sometimes and I’ll stick with most of them going forward. That said, I in no way prefer anything I have found so far.

I do have to point out that there is one big benefit of a low sodium diet to date and that is a newfound love affair with fruits and yogurt. I’m thankful for that and can’t see this ever changing in my life. Seriously, if you don’t eat a lot of fruit give it a shot.

The second big difference is that I’m not drinking alcohol. While this was a sizable change for me, I was already moving forward with drastically cutting my alcohol intake⁵I highly recommend Sunnyside. I cut my drinking back over 60% without major effort in a ~18 month period and was on track to hit my goal of normal social drinking sometime in late summer 2022. so this was simply accelerating that change. It was surprisingly easy and, looking back, I don’t think that going into cardiac arrest and dying for a few minutes had anything to do with how easy it was. I’d been moving towards drastically cutting back alcohol anyways, this just accelerated the change and then I decided to keep going once I’d crossed the finish line.⁶It’s actually not harmful to drink small amounts of alcohol with DCM, but it slows things down on the healing side and I don’t miss alcohol itself, so I’m completely abstaining at the moment. Given that the root cause of my DCM is likely tied to a thiamine deficiency caused by drinking heavily for about 15 years, this isn’t really a bad thing either.

I have to say that I do enjoy not drinking at the moment. On any given day I have more energy, more focus, and am generally more present than I used to be. It’s a nice change as I honestly can’t remember the last time I went this long without even a single drink and I’m super glad I know what baseline me is like in my 40s. I like that person.

That said, I do miss the ritual itself. I miss mixing cocktails. I miss wine tasting. I miss meeting my wife for a beer at the brewery after work. I’m trying to fill part of that gap by experimenting with mocktails, frequently with THC or CBD tinctures. I’m also enjoying sampling various non-alcoholic beers⁷NA beer has come a loooong way and there are many I prefer to regular beer., mimosas with non-alcoholic champagne⁸I do not prefer these really, but they’re good enough that I wish I had known it was an option. I’ll keep drinking these forever as they’re much, much healthier for you, but it would be nice to have a champagne based one every now and then., and I also drink a likely excessive amount of tonic water and buy limes by the bag now.

The last big change I’ve made is also the only one I’m really, truly happy about: I’m spending more time with my family and less time working, which has massively reduced my stress level. We eat candle lit dinners every night and talk about our days, I have good conversations with my children and have even learned some new things about them, and I feel vastly more connected to them than I used to be. I don’t have anything negative to say about this change and I plan to keep us stocked in candles until the next time I die. I won’t ever go back to what I was doing before.

Now that I’ve typed all that out, I shall come to the point of this long winded blog post: What motivates me to keep up with the changes I’ve made.

To boil it down, the things that are combining to motivate me are, in no particular order:

I am truly enjoying becoming closer to my family. I’m glad I’m still here to do that.
My Athena girl would miss me and have no idea why I left if I were to die again.⁹There is a quote about dogs I like, that I can’t find right now, that goes something like “They’re a small part of your life, but you’re all of their life.” This is true.
I was thoroughly enjoying my life before all this and would have died happy. I do not enjoy my life as much anymore and desire to enjoy it as much as I used to.
The condition I have is frequently reversible through diet, exercise, and medication.

So in the end I’m simply doing whatever is necessary to try and reverse this so I can hang out with my family for many years to come, play with my dogs, go experience nice restaurants every now and then without having to worry about what’s in the food, go dancing with my wife, enjoy a food truck and a beer every now and then, and generally live a somewhat normal life again.

If I have to take 17 pills a day¹⁰No, that is not an exaggeration. It is, in fact, how many pills I take every day currently., eat the blandest food known to man, and get blood tests on a weekly basis for years on end? Sure, I’ll dig in and live that life for as long as I need to. I’ve had harder times in my life for sure.

Do I enjoy some of the changes I’ve made? Hell yeah, and I’ll keep a good number of them regardless of what the future brings for my health. I won’t ever give up eating candle lit dinners and talking about my day with my wife, nor will I go back to working as much as I was. I won’t ever start taking time for granted again.¹¹I am supremely bothered when people don’t have a sense of urgency now. Life is short, move faster. However, I do want some things back from my old life, namely the ability to go eat at a food truck once a week and wash it down with a microbrew.¹²This is, by far, what I miss the most. I can’t really even put it into words how much I miss it, beyond letting you know that it isn’t really the food or the beer that I miss and, no, there isn’t a substitute I’m willing to accept. Time will tell if I can accomplish my goal but I’m putting in the work, have my motivation firmly nailed down, and I really haven’t ever accepted no for an answer.

New Beginnings

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 23:13:05 GMT

Recently I went into cardiac arrest and died for a bit. I’ll eventually write about it in detail but to say it’s a difficult thing to process is an understatement. For now, I’ll classify it as a unique experience.

The biggest benefit of all of this is that I now have an excellent opportunity (and excuse, which I frequently need) to redesign my life. Over the past two decades I’ve unconsciously diverged from my primary interest and joys in life, focusing on technology and income instead of focusing on the creative energies I have always possessed but rarely exercised.

In coming weeks, months, and years I aim to write more, create more content that I enjoy, and in general focus my life on things that matter to me and I will be using this blog as an outlet while I process the massive changes that I am implementing. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.