This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to build something like Tomek Beyond Sea. I tried once before, during COVID, and it didn’t work. I stopped writing after a few weeks. The idea was right. I just wasn’t.
I’m telling you that upfront because it matters for what comes next. This isn’t a motivational quote stretched into a thousand words. It’s what I actually learned from failing at this once, sitting with it for a few years, and then deciding to try again anyway.

The First Attempt — And Why It Didn’t Work

During COVID, like a lot of people, I had time to think. Contracts changed, routines changed, and somewhere in that I had the idea to start writing about money, sacrifice, and life at sea. I opened a blog, wrote a handful of posts, and told myself this was it.
It wasn’t. My head wasn’t in it. I was writing because I had spare time, not because I’d actually decided this mattered. There was no plan behind it, no real understanding of what I was trying to build or who it was for. As soon as life at sea picked back up and the spare time disappeared, so did the project. Nobody stopped me. I just quietly let it go.
For a long time I filed that under “didn’t work out” and moved on. It took me a while to see it differently, it didn’t fail because the idea was bad. It failed because I hadn’t actually committed to it. There’s a difference between wanting something and deciding it.

What Nearly 30 Years at Sea Taught Me About Starting Over

I started as a motorman and worked my way up to Chief Engineer. In between there were newbuilds, drydocks, breakdowns at three in the morning, and crews from every corner of the world. Almost none of that went smoothly the first time.
You don’t become a Chief Engineer by getting everything right on the first attempt. You get there by fixing what broke, working out why it broke, and doing it differently the next time. Every rank I moved through, I carried forward whatever the last one had taught me, including the mistakes.
Especially the mistakes.
Starting Tomek Beyond Sea again is no different. The version of me who tried this during COVID didn’t have a plan, didn’t have the skills, and didn’t have the reasons sorted out yet. The version of me writing this now has spent months learning things I’d never touched before, building a website, setting up automated email systems, writing consistently, and getting honest about why this matters to me. Same idea. Different engineer running it.

How Your Mind Actually Works — And Why You Can Change It

Here’s something I didn’t understand the first time around, your brain isn’t fixed. It physically changes based on what you repeatedly do and think. The scientific term for it is neuroplasticity, but you don’t need the term to understand the idea. The pathways in your brain get stronger the more you use them, the same way a path through grass gets clearer the more you walk it.
That works against you if you keep repeating the same doubts. Tell yourself often enough that you’ve already failed at this, that you’re not the right person for it, or that it’s too late, and your brain gets efficient at producing exactly that thought on demand. It also works for you. Repeat a different pattern, showing up, doing the work, following through even when you don’t feel like it, and that becomes the easier path instead.
This isn’t about positive thinking or telling yourself everything’s fine. It’s about deciding, deliberately, what you want to become automatic, and then doing the repetitions that get you there. The first time I tried this, I hadn’t rewired anything. I was running on the same old pattern of starting things and letting them fade when they got inconvenient. This time, the routine itself came first, and the mindset caught up with it.

Consistency Is What Gets You There, Not Motivation

Motivation is what gets you to start. It’s unreliable for almost everything after that. I’ve never met a Chief Engineer who felt like doing an engine overhaul at two in the morning on day forty of a contract. It gets done anyway, because the job doesn’t run on how you feel that day, it runs on the discipline you’ve built.
Building this website worked the same way. There were plenty of evenings, after a full day of getting the nursery ready or running errands, sorting things out, phone calls, email, during vacation away, at home…
I did it anyway, in smaller pieces than I would have liked, because the version of this project that survives isn’t the one built on inspiration. It’s the one built on showing up when it would have been easier not to.
“Consistency doesn’t feel impressive while you’re doing it. It only looks that way afterward.“

The Wind in Your Face — Why Hard Days Don’t Mean You’re on the Wrong Path

There will be days, weeks even, where progress on something new feels like walking into the wind. You put the effort in and it doesn’t feel like you’re moving. That’s not a sign to stop. On a vessel, you don’t turn the ship around because the sea got rough. You adjust, you hold your course, and you keep going, because you know the conditions change and the destination hasn’t.
The COVID attempt fell apart the first time conditions got difficult, when normal routines came back and the easy excuse to stop showed up. This time, I’ve expected the hard days going into it instead of being surprised by them. That alone has made the difference between quitting quietly and pushing through.

Why This Attempt Is Different

I’m not doing anything dramatically different in terms of raw effort. What’s different is that I finally understand why I’m doing it. Nearly three decades at sea taught me that most of us are good at earning and not always good at turning that into something lasting. I’ve lived that gap myself, and I wanted to build something for the people living it right now, seafarers and anyone else working away from home, making real sacrifices for a future they haven’t fully planned yet.
That reason is what the first attempt was missing. Wanting to write something is not the same as knowing who it’s for and why it matters. Once I had that sorted out, the rest, the learning, the late nights, the mistakes along the way, became worth pushing through instead of something to quietly abandon the moment it got inconvenient.

Final Thoughts From Tomek Beyond Sea

I failed at this once. I’m not the only one. Most people who eventually build something worth building have a version of this story, an attempt that didn’t survive contact with real life. The difference between the people who stay stopped and the people who don’t isn’t talent, and it isn’t luck. It’s whether they decide to go again, wiser than the first time.
If you’ve started something before and let it go, that doesn’t disqualify you from trying again. It just means you now know more than you did the first time. Your mind can be trained toward persistence the same way any other skill is trained, through repetition, not willpower alone.
Wherever you are, whatever you’ve already tried and put down, it’s not too late to pick it back up and do it properly this time.