Earlier this year, around the end of February, I had spent my third sleepless night in a row tossing-and-turning on my couch. I usually fall asleep around 9pm (don’t judge me) without any hassle. But this week had been different.

In my head I was replaying customer conversations that could have gone better, due dates that had slipped, staff that needed to be paid, and dreading what tomorrow’s day of cold calls would entail. The last of which was one of the biggest stormclouds in my head.

I am no salesperson - I am a self-taught extrovert, coming from a family who loathed socialising - and instead viewed myself as an engineer, a “doer”, and a problem solver. Yet this is what my job had become. I had two introverted engineers and an introverted marketer working for me. If I didn’t sell, we didn’t get paid.

I spent all my waking hours consuming sales content. I would constantly hype myself up to send those cold emails, make those cold calls, and try to convince customers to buy what I was selling. But it was pulling teeth for me. And, after around 12 months of banging my head against a wall, I finally decided to throw in the towel.

On that third night, I decided to get up. I recorded myself a voice note. I poured my heart out into my phone and explained that I no longer found any pleasure or joy in my business and, rather, wanted it to end. This was different to all my other times of doubt and fear which come so often when running a business. This time I wanted out.

The next day I went into the office and broke the news to my marketer in the business who also happens to be my (beautiful) wife. I told her that she wouldn’t have a job in April. And over the next couple days, I broke the news to both my engineers and gave them the same deadline: by April 1st, Titan Analytics will cease to exist and Prometheus AI will go back to being a one-man-band.

April has now come-and-gone. I’ve made the announcement to my customers, to my staff, and on my LinkedIn. The dust has settled. Funnily enough, in a cruel twist of fate by the universe, my announcement actually surfaced new opportunities for me. I’m not only doing freelance fractional executive work and day-rate engineering, but also more fixed-price projects have come down the funnel. I’m enjoying “doing” again.

This article is not a sob story. I don’t want my readers to see this and pity me. I also don’t want them to feel sorry for what has happened. Rather, I see these events as the catalyst for my “Fallow Season”.

Fallow Season

“Fallow” is a very old-school term that you might not have had the opportunity to stumble across, so let me take a moment to explain what that is.

In farming, you leave a field to “fallow” when you leave the land unsown. The idea is that it allows the field to regenerate. A field left to fallow will regenerate essential nutrients, interrupt pest lifecycles, and starve any disease or fungus that may spoil a future crop. In industrial farming this isn’t really required - we have chemical fertilisers and commercial pesticides for these issues - so it wouldn’t surprise me if many people hadn’t heard of it.

I think this concept translates well to where I am in this period of my life. After 10 years of “pushing” I am finally deciding to take a step back and recuperate.

Decade of Doing

I have defined the last 10 years of my life in terms of ambition, effort, and achievement.

High schooling was marked by achievement. I was never the smartest child in the classroom. Rather, I always had to work 5x as hard as my peers to achieve what they achieved. But I wouldn’t let that define me. I took on the hardest classes and pushed myself for the highest grades. Ultimately, I did achieve my goals got a great grade at school.

University was no different. I made the somewhat foolish decision to pick one of the hardest degrees: physics. I accidentally fell in love with physics during my schooling; I assume it’s because spending every day after school studying the textbook because you don’t know WTF is happening will cause you to develop a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. So I decided to continue with that pain into my university and did it as my “passion” degree alongside my electrical engineering studies.

Again, I was never the smartest but I worked incredibly hard during my studies. I also had some amazing professors and friends who helped me through my degree. I also did this while holding down about 5 one-day-a-week casual jobs and my own tutoring business to make ends meet.

Upon finishing my Bachelor degree, I was staring down the barrel of my future. All my peers with any kind of gumption were pursuing their Masters and PhDs. But I couldn’t justify another $25k (or more) on my HECS debt for another degree. So, instead, I decided to follow my passion of software engineering.

I learnt to code during university. I was lucky enough to do some research during my studies, and was thrown into the computational physics group. I thought “I love computers! How hard can this be?” and immediately fell in love with programming. Software Engineering even had a precedence of top engineers being “self-taught” and self-made. If they did it, why couldn’t it?

So I spent the next year doing unpaid internships, writing technical articles on the internet, publishing open source code on Github, and spending thousands of dollars to fly across the country to interview and attempt to secure a job on the east coast of Australia where prospects were greater. Looking back, I think that was the strongest I’ve ever been. I don’t think the Kale of today would be as strong as that Kale.

After a year of learning and searching, I eventually got a job in Sydney - albeit unrelated to software engineering, a story for another time - and made a name of myself there. I continued to network and secured myself my first software engineering job as a consultant data scientist. I hopped across industries, projects, and teams and continued to push myself to do more, be more, and achieve more. I am so grateful for this period of my life. I was given the space to flourish when no one else would believe in me. Sydney was the first time in my life I felt like I was surrounded by people of ambition rather than people who wanted to keep you in your box.

In 2020 I took the plunge and pushed myself to start my own consulting firm, Prometheus AI. Again, I continued to push myself to learn more and be more. A boy of 24 years old shouldn’t be given the opportunity to prove to the world that he “can”. But people did. And I, again, am so grateful for their belief in me. I successfully run that business for years, jumping between clients and engagements, and experienced more of life than I dreamed possible.

I eventually decided that I wanted to return back to Perth for a mixture of personal and professional reasons. In 2024 I packed up my things and headed back home. I wanted to make my life hard again and pivot the business. Rather than servicing the enterprise clients, I went the other way. I decided to help small businesses get started with data and AI.

Eventually I realised that my charge-20k-for-a-project wasn’t going to cut the mustard. So I started up Titan Analytics with the vision to offer a SaaS-style version of my consulting. I was running this alongside Prometheus AI at the time. I was simultaneously trying to scale up two businesses, neither of which had a strong product-market fit in my new city, and eventually it all became too much.

It was at this moment that I finally burned out in February 2025, leading the the story at the start of the article.

Making Space

It was on that third sleepless night that I realised that I hadn’t taken much time for myself in more than 10 years. I have been pushing so hard, and worrying about “future me” for so long, that I realised that I had neglected “today’s me”.

And this leads me to now. I have officially entered into my “Fallow Season”. I’m using this time to not be productive or ambitious. I have brought my work down to 2 x days per week (for now), with the extra days being reserved for projects that interest me or energise me. That may mean paid work or it may mean doing things like writing in this blog, building out my portfolio, recording the podcast, or just tinkering with new tools and technologies that I never got the time or energy to play with.

I am seeing this time as necessary rest before I undergo my next decade of ambition, hopefully with goals and dreams bigger than the last decade.

I won’t lie, it has been hard. Already I’ve filled my schedule for the next few months with paid work(!!) but I am trying to only do things that bring me joy. But don’t let that discourage you, the reader, if you’re interested in working with me. My current strategy is to give away my secret sauce for free because I don’t want the work anyway 🙂

No Grand Declarations

When I was drafting up this article, I was trying to figure out what the “so what” will be of this post. I think that’s, again, a decade of training to be a good presenter and communicator. So, what did I want my readers to get out of this?

In the end, I decided nothing. I am not going to give some life-changing learnings. At least in this article. This is mostly just an announcement for me and for the world.

I’m resting, reflecting, and letting this field lie fallow for a while. And, in doing so, I hope that the next season’s crops will grow stronger and healthier than the last.

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My name is Kale Miller and I’m a freelance engineer and fractional CTO. I work with companies of all sizes realise their technology visions.

If you’d like to chat to me about how I might be able to help you and your organisation, reach out to me at contact@prometheusai.com.au or connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a DM.