I had the wrong idea about this site

What I got wrong

I built personal-presence-os to make myself easier to find online. The idea: structure the content, set up files so LLMs can read it, link the domains. Over time, strangers find me, read me, trust me.

That is not how trust works. The site is not broken. I just had the wrong idea about what it could do.

When someone meets you — in person, or through a page about you — they read two things first. Do you mean well? (Warmth.) Can you do what you say? (Competence.) Everything else comes after. Susan Fiske and Amy Cuddy have shown this across cultures for twenty years. Full version, with sources, on unseizable.fyi.

Neither one travels well through a personal website.

What warmth and competence really need

Warmth needs time. It is built in small interactions, repeated over years. A site can carry hints — how you write, a photo, plain language — but it cannot make up for those years of small contact. I have not been online to be kind to strangers, because I have not been writing in public.

Competence needs other people. Citations. Mentions. Things others have said about my work. Showing up in places I don't control. ChatGPT pointed out that I don't show up much on the wider web. Anyone can write a site about themselves. Strangers know that, and don't take it as evidence.

The site can't fix either. Both have to come from somewhere else first.

I'm not going to fake them

There is an easy way to fake both. A confiding tone. Vulnerabilities that aren't really vulnerabilities. More certainty than you have. Small wins dressed up as case studies. The internet is full of this. I am not going to do it — and not as a principle. The habit travels. Once you fake it with strangers, you start faking it with people you love.

Two kinds of validation is the longer version of why.

Where warmth and competence are already real

With people who already know me. Family. Friends I owe a call. Clients I've worked with for years. The Wardley Mapping community I've been part of since 2013. None of this works for strangers. All of it matters.

Competence — strategy work with real clients, code that runs, maps I drew under real conditions — only reads to people who have worked with me. The audience that can verify it already exists. They are also the people who can tell me, honestly, where my competence is actually useful right now.

What changes

1. Put warmth where it is real. Calls. Replies. Time with the kids.
2. Work first with my small circle of people I know — find where my competence is actually helpful. Then do that work.
3. Let the site collect what falls out. If outside signals ever show up, it will be ready.

The site is not being put away because it's wrong. It's being put away because what it needs has to come from somewhere else first. The mistake was thinking the site was where the work happens. The work is with the people I already owe a call.