Skip to content
Jonathan Hazeley

Beyond the work

The parts that do not fit on a résumé. What I practice outside the job and, where it is honest to say so, what each one has to do with how I work inside it.

Rounds, mitts, and the bag

Boxing

Boxing is the most honest feedback loop I have found. Nothing I believe about my guard survives the round where I keep dropping it, and no amount of reading fixes it either: it gets fixed by going again on Tuesday.

It is also the one hour in my week with no laptop in it, which is most of the point.

Carries over

Composure is trainable. Most of what reads as calm when a production load fails the morning of an executive readout is just having been tired and behind before, on purpose, every week.

Partner dance, three ways

Salsa, Bachata, Merengue

Three dances, one underlying skill: lead and follow. A lead only works if the other person can act on it: signaled early, and in a frame they can actually read. When they go somewhere I did not intend, that is information about my signal, not about them.

The social half matters as much as the technique. It is a room of strangers of every age and background who will happily dance with you and then tell you exactly what you are doing wrong.

Carries over

I learned to read a room and adjust mid-sentence on a dance floor, not in a meeting, and the client-facing half of my job is mostly that.

Shop projects, documented like a platform

Woodworking

I build furniture, and I document the shop the way I document a lakehouse. The current run is ten stackable cubby benches (six at three feet, four at four) on a shared 17 × 18½ in section with recessed 2×4 bases, so they stack vertically and still sit flush in a row. Phase one is on the bench now.

The repository is the part I would actually show you. Shop inventory and hard-won lessons live in a structured knowledge format that an AI agent reads before it drafts a build plan, so every new project starts from the tools I own and the mistakes I have already made. It is the engineering catalog I maintain at work, scaled down to one person and a garage.

Carries over

A jig and a config-driven pipeline come from the same instinct: do the setup once, carefully, so the tenth one comes out as accurate as the first.

15 countries, 4 regions

Travel

15 countries so far, and the weight of the list sits in Latin America and the Caribbean. That is not a coincidence: it is where the dances came from, and following the music turned out to be a better trip planner than any itinerary.

Panama, Guatemala, and Seoul have close to nothing in common except what they teach you in the first hour: you are the one who has to adapt.

Carries over

Consulting runs on the same skill. I am always the outsider in someone else’s organization, and the work goes better when I treat that as my problem to solve rather than theirs.

On the map

15 countries across 4 regions, and a list that leans hard in one direction.

Latin America & the Caribbean

  • Panama

  • Colombia

  • El Salvador

  • Dominican Republic

  • Guatemala

  • Mexico

  • Costa Rica

  • Bahamas

  • Jamaica

Europe

  • Spain

  • Portugal

  • Germany

  • Ireland

Asia

  • South Korea

Africa

  • Ghana

Now the other half

If any of this is the kind of person you want on the platform team, the work is worth reading next, and the fastest way to reach me is email.