About

I’m Jay McBride. I’m in my 40s. I live in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario — a small city in Northern Ontario that most people drive through on their way somewhere else.

I work in technology. I’ve worked in technology for most of my adult life. But this site isn’t about that.

This site exists because I hit a point where I didn’t recognize myself anymore.

Not in a dramatic way. Not a breakdown. More like looking up one day and realizing that the person I’d been presenting to the world — online, at work, even at home — didn’t quite match the person I actually was. And I wasn’t sure when that had happened.

I’d spent years doing what the internet rewards. Reinventing. Pivoting. Trying new angles. Building something, scrapping it, starting over. Every time it felt like progress. Every time it felt like I was getting closer to something.

I wasn’t.

I was just moving. And movement isn’t the same thing as direction.

So I started documenting it.

Not advice. Not a framework. Not content. Just observations about what I was noticing — in myself, in other people, in how modern life shapes who we become.

I write about identity — what it means to lose a sense of self slowly, through years of reasonable decisions. About recognition — the difference between being noticed and being remembered, and why most people optimize for the wrong one. About behavior — what earns respect, what breaks trust, and the patterns that repeat whether we notice them or not. About presence — what it means to actually be somewhere instead of performing being somewhere.

The phrase “Build for Recognition” started as something I was saying to myself. A reminder to stop chasing attention. To stop performing. To stay in one place long enough for something real to form.

Recognition isn’t just built in public. It starts with what you don’t move past internally.

I don’t have all of this figured out. That’s the point.

I am a person documenting the shift from reinvention to recognition in real time. The writing is how I think. The posts are how I process what I’m noticing. And if other people see themselves in it — people who feel like they’ve been drifting, performing, reinventing without arriving anywhere — then the work is doing what it’s supposed to do.

If you want to follow along, the blog is where the thinking lives. If you’re new, start here. And if you want new writing when it’s ready, you can subscribe to the newsletter on LinkedIn.

— Jay