J. Bruce Eickelman · 12X & Co.
I have spent fifty years running things.
The paid work at 12X Decision funds the free work at 12xedu. If you need direction and cannot pay for it, the academy is for you. Everything on it is free. It stays free.
Read what’s freeSix doors. Some free, some paid, none hyped.
- 12xedu.com The Academy. Free essays, tools, and questions worth sitting with.
- 12xdecision.com.au The Practice. Decision architecture for founders who are structurally stuck.
- 12x.au/bench The Bench. Small-scale work for owner-operators below advisory scale.
- 12xmediapress.com The Press. Books, some written, most still being written.
- guardrails.12x.au Guardrails. The personal operating framework, free to use.
- whatthesongsknew.com What the Songs Knew. A wisdom series told through music.
I write and build for people who want direction, not motivation. Free where it can be. Paid where it has to be.
About
What this is, and why.
I am Bruce Eickelman. I have spent fifty years running things. Some of them worked. A few of them broke in ways I still think about. What follows is what I now believe, after all of that, about wisdom, information, decisions, and how a working life is supposed to hold together.
I put it here because if you are going to read anything on this site, I would rather you read this first. Everything else on 12x.au is downstream of it.
I started working before I was old enough to make my own decisions about it. I have run a pizza delivery business at twenty-one, a Subway store in Illinois, a construction outfit, a mortgage origination business through the Global Financial Crisis (I lost the family home when that one went), a remote mining camp in Queensland for Origin Energy, a recruitment operation across Australia and Asia, a hospitality business, a real estate practice, a skydiving school (over 1,300 jumps, jumpmaster and instructor), and now an SME advisory practice and a small publishing house on the Central Coast of New South Wales.
Ten industries, two countries, five decades. That is not a résumé. It is a way of learning.