🎂🔥 Today is the day. I’m 60. Final episode is live. 🔥🎂
Title: “Happy Birthday… and What’s Next?”

Tone: British comic (Jerome K. Jerome + Douglas Adams + one Monty Python coconut), curtain call by Shakespeare—because “the readiness is all,” even when the cake looks like a small volcano.

What’s inside (swift, silly, true):

A birthday roll call (turns out 25 August is a crowded cake).

“What else happened on 25 August?”—from Paris breathing again to Voyager waving from very far away.

My Chinese zodiac lap reset: 60 years later, back to Wood Snake. Yes, apparently I’m a strategic reptile with a bookshelf.

The future, unvarnished:
A) keep doing the work that actually works (identity, continuity, takedown) and grow the after-hours joys (writing, teaching, guitars).
B) win the lottery and retire into hobbies (tiny snag: I don’t play).
C) inherit a fortune from a benevolent Nigerian prince\princess (Inbox → Trash, with love).

A toast to boring things that save weekends, plain words, and grown-ups in the room.

If you’ve followed Parts 1–4, grazie/muchas gracias/thank you. This final post is for anyone who still wants to build—and laugh while doing it.

👉 Read Part 5 (link below).
Tell me your own “what’s next” plan—serious, funny, or both. Bonus points if your birthday shares wild calendar neighbours.

previous post:
PART 1: https://lnkd.in/dfTNZimd
PART 2: https://lnkd.in/d-A2aJJQ
PART 3: https://lnkd.in/datMGgCN
PART 4:

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🎂 Countdown to Sixty – Part 5: The Last One, Because Today I Actually Turn Sixty 🎂

August 25, 2025

🎂 Countdown to Sixty – Part 5 (The Last One, Because Today I Actually Turn Sixty) 🎂 (Language inspirations holding hands for the curtain call: a wink from Jerome K. Jerome, a splash of Douglas Adams, one small Monty Python coconut; and, hovering in the wings, Shakespeare reminding us that “the readiness is all,” even when the cake violates several fire codes.)

Cold open — cake, candles, context

Today is 25 August, which makes me officially 60. No “nearly”. No trailer. No cliff-hanger. Just sixty—right here, right now—august as only August 1965 → August today can be. Which means this is the last article of the countdown. You cannot count down past zero without inventing a new physics, and frankly the cake is already emitting a heat signature that could guide a small satellite and at least one worried neighbour with a garden hose.

At sixty I discover I am, inconveniently, too young to retire and too old to be an intern. Worse, we live in a market where competence sometimes behaves like contraband: admired in private, suspected in public, confiscated by procurement on sight. I’m delighted that younger colleagues must find their way; I simply maintain that those of us who’ve been around the block (twice, with receipts) should still be useful—if only to stop people announcing email outages by email.

If you trudged with me through Parts 1–4—Ikigai and cheerful heresy; the rise of weaponised stupidity; the boardroom western with the Genius, the Charlatan, and the Instant-Pizza Manager; and the library of languages, travel, law, and care—grazie. Part 5 asks the simple, insolent question: what now? But before futures, a birthday detour to see what else shares this date and why the calendar itself has a sense of humour.

Birthday roll call (vanity disguised as research)

I like to pretend the calendar and I are on speaking terms. Every year it taps me on the shoulder and whispers: “Your cake is crowded.” It is. 25 August belongs to a noisy club: Leonard Bernstein (1918), Sean Connery (1930), Gene Simmons (1949), Rob Halford (1951), Elvis Costello (1954), Tim Burton (1958), Billy Ray Cyrus (1961), Claudia Schiffer (1970), Alexander Skarsgård (1976), Blake Lively (1987). If birthdays confer superpowers, mine appears to be arguing for email continuity while quoting lyrics, humming a film score, and trying not to buy another guitar.

Then there’s my exact vintage, 25 August 1965: an eclectic and pleasing squad including Mia Zapata (the fierce voice of The Gits), Sanjeev Sharma (Indian cricket), Kathleen Horvath (tennis), Cornelius Bennett (NFL, the sort of linebacker you do not argue with), Barrington Patterson (kickboxer/MMA), Kim Kold (actor/bodybuilder who looks like he could bench-press a small car), and David Taylor (Welsh football—goals for breakfast). If sport is a metaphor for life, 25/08/65 specialised in defenders, counter-punchers, and people who can find the exit even when the map lies. I approve.

What else happened on 25 August? (because birthdays are only one kind of headline)

It’s a loud day in the calendar; it has range; it contains multitudes.

Paris breathed again on 25 August 1944, liberated at last—flags, tears, the collective exhale of a city that had been holding its breath far too long.

The National Park Service was created on 25 August 1916—bureaucracy at its most wholesome: signs that say “don’t feed the bears” and maps that tell the truth.

The Great Moon Hoax burst into life on 25 August 1835, when a New York paper informed the world that bat-men and moon unicorns were a thing. Viral nonsense predates Wi-Fi and wears a top hat.

Captain Matthew Webb swam the English Channel on 25 August 1875—twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes, no Uber, no gel packs, only stubbornness and salt.

Uruguay celebrates Independence Day on 25 August 1825—¡Salud! to sovereignty and well-timed football.

Voyager 2 waved at Saturn (1981) and Neptune (1989) on this very date;

Voyager 1 later slipped into interstellar space on 25 August 2012 and presumably looked back, unimpressed by our email chains.

As for 25 August 1965, the day I turned up: Gemini 5 was mid-flight, ticking toward a then-record in human endurance. A space-tinged Wednesday. A good day to be minted—ambition overhead, oxygen underfoot, and the general feeling we were going somewhere even if landing was a chapter still being written.

(References for the date-nerds are collected at the end; I’m not here to pick fights with historians before the cake is cut.)

The sixty-year return (or, why my birthday is a perfect circle)

The traditional Chinese calendar runs on a sexagenary cycle—a braid of 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches that repeats a precise combination every 60 years. Think of it as the world’s most patient playlist: your favourite track comes back around exactly when you’ve almost forgotten how it goes.

I’m a 1965 baby—Year of the Snake, more precisely the Wood Snake for births after the Lunar New Year that year. Snakes, so I’m told, are strategic, quiet, fond of reading, and suspicious of nonsense. Wood, equally flattering, brings flexibility, growth, and the ability to laugh at bureaucratic forms before filling them out correctly anyway.

Here’s the neat symmetry: 2025 is also a Wood Snake year. Which means this birthday doesn’t just tick a box; it completes a cycle and starts the next lap. Traditionalists call your sign-year your ben míng nián and advise a soupçon of caution, a splash of red, and a firm policy of not picking fights with dragons. Sound advice generally, and specifically relevant to comment threads on social media.

A brisk reprise of Parts 1–4 (because all roads lead to cake)

Part 1 put Ikigai in the driver’s seat and sarcasm in the glove compartment: what I love, what I’m good at, what the world pays for, what is needed. The overlap still reads practical resilience + clear language + cross-cultural humour. Part 2 toured the factory of confident error. Stupidity is not “not knowing”; it is “not knowing while pretending you do,” and then making decisions with the elegance of a pigeon on roller skates. Part 3 staged a western in the meeting room—the Genius (dangerously competent), the Charlatan (slides with stars), the Instant-Pizza Manager (thinks IP is edible). Moral: fund the boring things that work; applaud quietly when they save your weekend. Part 4 handed out library cards: languages as passports, travel as a school, law as a story about risk and fairness, and care as the teacher most of us never requested but needed. It also confessed my domestic language (Itanol, with strategic Japanese nouns), my talent for exiting the wrong side of Shenzhen Metro stations, and the way colon cancer rearranged my furniture and priorities with a barked order and a very firm stare.

All of that is context for the future: keep the bits that are boring and true; translate complexity into human words; put grown-ups in rooms where decisions happen; avoid karaoke disguised as strategy; bring snacks.

Futures without redundancy (one map, three doors, no echo)

I promised to trim repetition and I shall. The future is three doors, clearly labelled, mutually exclusive in spirit if not in calendar, and blissfully honest about probabilities.

Door A — “Do the work. Grow the joy.”

By day, continue the dependable fundamentals: identity that won’t hand out keys to strangers; email continuity so the company can breathe when the cloud takes a nap; takedown so malicious domains have short lives; backup/restore that works in practice and not just in ceremony. By weeknight or weekend (espresso on the left, guitar tuner on the right): more writing, more teaching, more languages, more travel with eyes open and superiority firmly switched off. This is the most likely door; it is also the most useful. It doesn’t inflate the CV; it reduces the cortisol. It delivers the blameless post-mortem nobody writes because nothing exploded. It protects people I will never meet. It leaves behind receipts rather than slogans. It is not glamorous. It is, suspiciously, fun.

Door B — “Win the lottery. Become a professional amateur.”

Minor blocker: I don’t play. The odds are therefore… what’s the precise mathematical term… zero. Should a golden ticket nevertheless flutter onto my espresso and announce itself, I will immediately become a full-time amateur: museums, chords, languages, breakfast meetings that accidentally last until dinner, and incident-response advice dispensed strictly in exchange for cake. Probability: fiction. Psychological function: comic relief. It keeps me honest about why Door A remains the plan.

Door C — “Inherit from a benevolent prince.”

He writes often. He is always dying. He always wants my bank details. Should his message survive the spam filter and prove genuine (spoiler: it will not), I shall create a foundation for boring things that save weekends: grants for well-tested backups, well-trained takedown desks, plain-language policies, and young engineers who can explain their architecture to their grandma without causing a nap. Probability: performance art. Psychological function: satire. It inoculates me against shiny distractions and keeps my thumb close to the “Report phishing” button.

And that’s it. No fourth door. No secret menu. Three honest possibilities, one realistic path. In a world that loves options stacked like tapas, restraint is my last rebellious act.

The world as it is (competence, goldfish, and the roller-skating pigeon)

A brief field guide for the decade to come.

Budgets tend to arrive flaming hot the week after a breach, and evaporate when the board’s goldfish memory resets. The Instant-Pizza Manager buys and un-buys tools with the grace of a pigeon on roller skates—heroic wobbling, limited steering. Legislators try to help; some do, some perform. In that circus, you cannot out-argue propaganda; you can only out-deliver it. So we do.

We show receipts: before/after timelines; restore screenshots with timestamps; takedown cycle times; runbooks that read like plans, not fan fiction; rota that leaves weekends for humans. We favour rooms that want adults, not mascots. We mentor loudly, because meaning accrues to those who share. We remember Brandolini’s Law and economise our rebuttals accordingly: never waste ten units of energy where one working demo will do.

A practical timeline (subject to cake and dragons)

Next 90 days Curate three public case studies (“here’s a weekend we saved”). Tidy the writing garden (Italian/English/Spanish). Define three offerings with adult scope and price. Shortlist EU/LatAm/Japan-friendly clients who prefer outcomes to karaoke. Test restores on a Tuesday (cake if it passes, cake if it fails—either way, we learn).

Quarter 2–4 Deliver three flagship projects; one public workshop where slides do not outnumber runbooks; a short book expanding this series into something a commuter can read without spilling coffee. Record a tiny reading series for those who like their sarcasm audiobook-style.

Years 2–3 Add one board-advisor seat with teeth; publish the book; keep the client roster deliberately small and rotate engagements by learning value, not only invoice size. Cement a rhythm where mentoring juniors is part of delivery, not a bonus round.

Years 4–10 Repeat the bits that bring joy + impact. Prune the rest. Arrive at retirement with stories instead of slides and with at least one guitar finally in tune (I live in hope; the guitars remain sceptical).

Guardrails (so future-me still likes present-me)

Health first. I tried the alternative; I do not recommend it. Colon cancer rearranged the furniture—painful, clarifying, unforgettable. Family time gets booked like revenue, not smeared across the week like hope. Travel is a privilege, not a personality trait. Loving Mexico City, San Francisco, Osaka, and their contradictory joys doesn’t make me a better person; noticing what they taught me might. Say no early to “strategy” that is actually theatre. Keep humour: it terrifies nonsense, comforts the good people, and makes hard truths portable.

Letters I’m writing (and answering)

To people in their 20s and 30s: take the keys. You do not need to be fearless; you need to be curious. Ask questions loudly. When the room rewards you for pretending, resist. If you want context, I’ll bring war stories—and, if you insist, a guitar diagram that has failed to become an industry standard for fourteen excellent reasons.

To the over-50s who still want to build: you are not done. Pick rooms that value adults. Don’t hoard craft—mentor loudly. You will get meaning; they will get momentum; the work will get better. Insist on receipts over rhetoric and restores over press releases. Bring biscuits.

To my future self at seventy: tune the guitar before you post. Also: remember to carry a pen. Your jokes are funnier when you write them down before coffee erases them.

Appendix of a sentimental kind (friends, languages, cities)

Thank you to the friends who behaved like family (the best kind, chosen). To Wangfred and Liuqinbo in China, who turned confusing streets into classrooms and myths into people. To the Osaka friends who are family in all but paperwork. To my grandma, who taught patience by existing, and to my mum, for whom caregiving is not a weight but a rhythm. To my daughter, whose battles are hers to tell, but whose courage and stubborn joy rearranged my compass more thoroughly than any architect. To my wife, friend, and accomplice, Rika, she is simply what makes things meaningful. And my friends here, too many to mention, were the framework of a life. I know I am lazy and should meet you more often, but next life I will be better 😉

Thank you to languages that widened the map: Italian for nuance and the right to scenic sentences; English for reach and for jokes that land on time; Spanish for warmth and rhythm; music for giving feelings a grammar; math & statistics for telling my optimism to sit down and show the working. Thank you to cities that taught verbs: Osaka (persevere), Mexico City (improvise), San Francisco (collide nicely), Milan (organise under pressure), Shenzhen (prototype), Rome (laugh while you wait). Thank you to the Shenzhen Metro for teaching me that Chinese/Cantonese/English station names are sometimes cousins rather than twins; my collection of wrong exits is now a small, curated museum.

What I’m taking into the next lap

Plain words over performance. Receipts over rhetoric. Restores over press releases. Curiosity over certainty. People over pamphlets. Guitars over guilt (but also scales; practice is love in 4/4). A promise to ask “who owns identity?”, “where does the data live?”, and “how do we talk to humans when the platform naps?” before we buy another acronym. A habit of writing things down so the future has minutes, not myths. A willingness to laugh, including at myself. Especially at myself.

The birthday moment (and a promise)

So here we are: 25 August, sixty candles, final article. Consider this a toast—to competence that isn’t shy; to the translation between languages, departments, and egos; to the astonished relief of a restore that works on the first try; to the stubborn sanity of facts; to the kindness that makes facts bearable; to street food that renews your faith in civilisation; to small libraries and human-sized laws; to guitars that refuse to tune perfectly and therefore force you to listen; to email continuity that makes Mondays survivable; to takedown teams who sleep after dinner instead of during incidents; to juniors who ask “why?” and seniors who answer with verbs.

If the next decade behaves, I will meet retirement not as an exit but as a small encore: fewer flights, better chords, and the occasional workshop where someone finally says, “We did the boring thing and it saved our weekend.” That is the job. That is the point. That—and cake.

Happy birthday to me. Same cake, new verbs.

Final curtain call (Shakespearean mischief)

Since I’ve dragged the Bard on stage for the bow: there’s a playful theory that Shakespeare may have had Italian roots—whispers of Florio, the cheeky “Crollalanza” hypothesis (a surname neatly translating to “shake-spear”), and enough coincidence to fuel several entertaining dinners. I won’t start that bar fight here; I simply note that if Will did have a little Italy in the ink, it might explain the dialogues and the drama. Either way, he left me the best line to end a countdown and begin a decade: “the readiness is all.”

Candles, careers, and whatever comes next: I’m ready.

Selected references (for the date & zodiac bits; quick, readable sources)

Paris Liberation, 25 Aug 1944; U.S. National Park Service, 25 Aug 1916 — Encyclopaedia Britannica “On This Day” and NPS history pages.
Great Moon Hoax, 1835; Captain Matthew Webb’s Channel swim, 25 Aug 1875 — History.com “This Day in History”.
Uruguay Independence Day (25 Aug 1825) — Uruguay government/cultural portals and widely cited calendars of national days.
Voyager missions — NASA/JPL mission pages and Voyager timeline (Neptune flyby on 25 Aug 1989; Voyager 1 entering interstellar space on 25 Aug 2012).
Gemini 5 — NASA mission summary pages detailing launch (21 Aug 1965) and mission timeline through late August.
Chinese sexagenary cycle — concise overviews in general reference works;
1965 = Wood Snake; 2025 = Wood Snake — widely available almanac-style summaries (e.g., China Highlights / TravelChinaGuide) showing Lunar-year boundaries (1965: 2 Feb 1965–20 Jan 1966; 2025: 29 Jan 2025–16 Feb 2026).

(If you need me to paste specific URLs, I’ll happily list them; I’ve kept the references human-sized for readability and to avoid turning a birthday into a footnote festival.)

A final greeting

To everyone who read, commented, argued politely, or quietly checked a backup after a paragraph made you wince—thank you. You’ve been my chorus and my editors, my friendly hecklers and my accidental teachers. If you see me online next week, I’ll be the chap with a slightly smaller slice of cake, a slightly larger grin, and exactly the same advice:

Do the boring thing that works. Speak plainly. Be kind. Bring snacks.