An engineer who thinks work should fit the person
Michael Worthington runs every coaching session and every weekly call, and builds his own house on the first street, on the same rules as everyone else.
He knows the mismatch from the inside. His father died when he was seven, in Uganda, and much of what followed he had to work out for himself. He could not read until he was eleven, and he struggled on for years without knowing why. The dyslexia was not named until his mid-twenties. School wrote him off early, and he went on anyway.
Then he collected every credential you are told to collect. A paper round, a McDonald’s kitchen, a nightclub stage he danced on. A degree that started as astrophysics before he switched, then industrial engineering. Jet engines at Rolls-Royce, engineering at Honeywell and Pilkington, banking at Canary Wharf, L’Oréal’s UK head office on their graduate scheme. An account manager at MathWorks, working with the big car and aerospace makers on their problems. Head of business development for Alcimed, a French biotech and pharma consultancy, sent to open the UK market from Paris. Postgraduate study at Cambridge, awards in its entrepreneurship competitions, and HubCiti, a social enterprise he founded through the Judge Business School’s Accelerate programme and later sold. Along the way he helped launch Deliveroo in new cities across the UK, back when it was just getting started. He left employed life at thirty, and he has been to and lived in more than a hundred countries since, on every continent except Antarctica.
A hundred countries, every continent with a coastline. Of course, Michael still cannot swim.
Here is the honest thing about that list: every one of those jobs was beautiful, and not one of them was built for him. He spent years fighting his own grain, wondering why work that other people managed left him flattened, until he learnt to accept how he works and to build around it. That is the whole lesson he teaches now. Learn how you work. The fault was never your effort; it is the one-size way you were taught, and a feed that punishes anything half-built.
Everywhere he worked, kitchen to boardroom, he watched capable people stall the same way. The people who ring him to think something through run departments and companies. Not because he is cleverer than them, but because when you are the one everyone else asks, you run out of people to be unsure in front of.
He has mentored influencers through the loneliest version of this work: making things in public, alone, before the results arrive. More hustle was never the missing piece. Pride in the daily brick was, and a rhythm they could keep.
What he builds now
Today he runs RentPAID, the UK’s leading rentals proptech agent, rewriting the old rules of UK renting: clear pricing, straight dealing, and one service built to work for tenants and landlords at the same time, instead of playing them against each other.
Xissed is his platform for honest opinions. It helps influencers earn directly from the people who value their word, with no need for the sponsorships that pull against their own audience.
The chapters that built it
Years before the boardrooms he was head play worker for Hull City Council, running play for children in the city’s less well-off areas. He learnt more on those floors than in several of the offices that came later.
HubCiti, the social enterprise he founded at Cambridge and later sold, built crowdfunded businesses in developing countries, putting real capital behind people the system usually walks past.
And he was COO of Crypto University, a blockchain education company. Inside that world he learnt the expensive lesson first-hand: the technology is a legitimate business, and the get-rich-quick promises swirling around it are a trap that takes people’s time and money. It took $250,000 of his in three months. He names no scheme and gives no investment advice. He keeps the number because it is the receipt for what this place refuses to sell.
The 30-Day Sprint exists because of all of it. He has seen every temptation from the inside: the credentials that promise a path, the feeds that sell shortcuts, the pipe dreams that quietly take your money on the way past. None of them was ever the missing piece. A way of working that fits you, one small piece done today, and somebody who notices. That is what was missing every time, and it is what he built this place to give people.
This is a structured working format. It is not therapy or medical treatment, it diagnoses nothing, and nothing on this page is a promise about what you will earn.
What is built, and what is not
Built, and running today
- The cottage, 21 parts, generated from your own record.
- Your colour on every wall panel, the door and the roof, chosen as each part lands.
- The nine extensions that arrive past the roof, one for each day.
- Video on every post, and a street page you can send to anyone.
- A pixel version of you, drawn from your face photo. Three drawings come back and you pick the one that reads most like you.
Planned, and honestly not built
- More house shapes, each one earned by finishing another sprint.
- Animals around the street.
- Streets joined into a city you can walk, with your neighbours on it.
- Coach training: members who finish sprints will be able to qualify to coach new streets, and set their own rate.
Nothing in this second list is included in what you pay for now, and none of it is a date.
How the pixel you works: Michael’s photo, and the character drawn from it. Same shirt. His photo is here because he chose to show it; yours stays private.
Some dream of castles in the air. Some build castles made of sand. Ours are brick.
