It’s something I do as a way of keeping myself accountable and also helps with future direction. But I hadn’t done it for a few months.

What I found caught me off guard.

It was a little painful but highly instructive. Like when you finally get your results back from a test you took and you got a B when you were expecting an A+.

I realised I had been writing the same piece over and over again without fully being aware of it.

I came at it from different angles but the underlying idea of “building something slowly on the side” was identical, as if I was circling it without ever actually moving through it.

It felt like progress because I was writing and publishing. But if I’m brutally honest the last few months have not been my best.

The frustrating this is that I ran into a similar dynamic on Youtube 2 years ago but from a different angle.

I started with a narrow niche, stayed within it, and tried to build momentum by keeping myself strictly within these limits. And it worked. Views and subscribers came…but a year in, I had lost interest in the topic and felt like I had said everything there was to say on it.

So I tried to pivot. I gave myself six months to shift towards what I was actually interested in thinking and talking about.

The response was immediate. Over the next 6 months I lost 90% of my distribution. It was like exponential decline and that experience forced a difficult realisation.

If you don’t quit, and you don’t pivot, and simply continuing to produce more of the same is not the answer, then what exactly are you supposed to do with your work over time?

Is your expression translating?

The first thing to say is that you need to review your work regularly.

Don’t wait until something feels off. Do this deliberately, at set intervals. For me, that’s roughly every three months, long enough for patterns to form and short enough that you can still do something about them.

One key action I am taking off the back of this is a rebrand and repositioning of my newsletter (I’ll go into more detail in either next week or the week after next.)

But before you sit down and start reading and re-reading your work back, there is a more important question to answer.

What exactly should you be you looking for?

Because without that, you will default to surface-level judgments. You will decide that something is “good” or “bad,” based on your mood. You will find things you like and don’t like, and you will miss the only thing that actually matters.

What your work is doing over time.

If you step back and look at most writing advice, it tends to focus on surface behaviour. Choose a niche. Write consistently. Keep showing up.

All of that has its place, but it doesn’t explain why so many people can follow it closely and still feel like nothing is actually building.

It’s critical to understand that there are phases of development that we all go through.

There is the experimental phase which is expansive. You’re learning how to write and build some habits.

Then there is the shift to accumulation and progress. This is restrictive. What matters here is your goal, direction and positioning. That shift is rarely made consciously, which is why so many people stay stuck in a pattern that looks productive but never quite moves forward.

So I want to share my thought process on reviewing your own writing and which important conclusion to draw from it.

I am making at least 3 changes to my own work that come directly out of this realisation.

They are simple, but they change the structure of everything that follows.

Before making changes you must understand which stage you are in.

1. The first 6 months are for you, not your readers

I say 6 months as a loose guide but it can be les it can be a lot more. This is the beginner phase and my take on what you should do here goes against every marketing guru and business book out there. So take it with a pinch of salt.

Most people try to impose structure on their writing too early, because that is what the experts say…what no one tells you is that this advice is not wrong its just not for beginners.

At the beginning you don’t yet know how you think on the page. You don’t know what holds your attention long enough to be developed. You don’t know which ideas you can sustain for years to come. You don’t know what your natural rhythm looks like, or how your thinking behaves when it is given space.

All of that has to be discovered.

If you skip that stage, you end up building structure on top of borrowed assumptions. You follow what works for other people, you stay close to ideas that are already validated, and you begin to optimise before you have anything that is truly your own.

The first six months should be about you. Your own internal goals, your thought process, your writing. It might sound selfish, but it has to serve you before it can serve anyone else.

• What do you want to write about?

• What is interesting to you?

• How do you feel when you write?

• Do you want to publish this or not?

These are the questions to ask yourself repeatedly in the beginning.

This might sound like a red flag to you. It’s very much the antithesis of what every marketing and business book will tell you. Believe me I’ve read quite a few.

They are unanimous in their advice that you must constantly be thinking of your target audience.

• Customer avatar - Who are you writing for?

• Agitate pain-points - How are you providing value?

• Sell the solution - What problem are you trying to solve?

Let’s stop the broken record and change track. This is fundamentally the wrong approach for beginners.

As a beginner you want to experiment and follow your own curiosity as much as possible.

You want to try stuff and see how it makes you feel. If you can’t evoke emotion in yourself how can you do that for your reader?

If something gets results but leaves you feeling stressed and anxious - that’s not sustainable.

By constantly focusing on a customer avatar or trying to write about an arbitrary problem that the market tells you is profitable you loose your edge. You constrain yourself to fit into a box. You narrow your focus, you limit your potential and 99% of people who take this approach end up quitting within 6 months of starting.

If you are in the early stages stop strategising. Start internalising.

Once you have enough volume behind you, something shifts.

That is when the work stops being exploratory. And that is where most people make the mistake of continuing in exactly the same way.

2. I’m begging you, Prioritise clarity

This is where the majority of online advice becomes actively misleading.

“If you are not experiencing growth -force it! Write more. Post more. Engage more. Keep showing up and you give yourself no other option than to succeed.”

The assumption is that more output will eventually lead to clarity, growth, and traction.

This may work for some. If you’re brand is all about growth, then you kind of have to spread this message.

Anything else would be bad for business which is why you never hear a simple sentence like “take a step back” from any of the growth gurus.

A few years ago I had fixed myself into a narrow niche on Youtube, because, well that was the dominant advice at the time. I tried to pivot out of it but failed miserably. After trying very hard for over 6 months I took a step back. It was the only logical thing for me to do. I stopped publishing for a couple of months to give myself some time to think and work out what my next move should be.

I used that time to write, plan and record videos in isolation. No audience feedback. No “what would you like me to make next”. I regrouped and re-centred on what it was that I really felt called to put out.

In the beginning there is no pressure, no expectations, you are free and uninhibited to do whatever you want, that is the raw power the beginner has.

However this changes once you have been producing for several months. The audience or readership is a new aspect, but not only that. If you are working from the same set of ideas, at the same level of thinking, then writing more simply produces more of the same.

Most people never fix this. They keep writing, keep publishing, keep circling the same ideas, convinced that “consistency” will eventually break the pattern.

But it never does. It just reinforces it.

When I get stuck or feel myself stagnating, this is the process I follow to regain direction….

Read more

Some swear by going narrow. Some swear by staying broad. Most people are tired of both camps so I’m not interested in re-running that debate. I want to talk about something that sits beneath it.

Your niche is how you see, not what you write about.

I think this used to be obvious but years of gurus screaming to “niche down” and focus on “specific problems” has drowned it out, so maybe you haven’t heard this idea before.

Two people can write about the same topic and be operating in entirely different niches because they are noticing different patterns, asking different questions, and organising reality through different internal lenses.

One person looks at work and sees optimisation where another sees identity. One looks at money and sees suffering the other optionality. The internet can be seen as freedom or control depending on where you choose to look.

The same topic categories but different ways of approaching them lead to vastly different outcomes for yourself and the quality of people you want to attract.

Over time, readers don’t follow you because you “cover a topic,”but because they recognise a mind at work that keeps naming things they already feel but haven’t been able to articulate yet. That is a perceptual niche, not a topical one, and it’s the only kind that doesn’t trap you.

None of this is to say that narrowing never works. Of course it can.

Entire companies are built around a single product. There are creators who choose a tightly defined lane early on and build remarkable businesses by staying inside it for years.

In certain contexts narrow precision can be an advantage. But those cases share something that usually gets overlooked. The constraint fits the person and their goal. The product aligns with a long-standing interest and the topic maps onto an existing depth of experience.

The crucial part is that the narrowness doesn’t feel like restriction, or discipline or “brand building” it feels like natural focus.

That is very different from selecting a “profitable niche” because you were told it would optimise growth. The first emerges from identity. The second attempts to manufacture one.

When narrowing grows organically out of what you cannot stop thinking about, it can be liberating. When adopted as a tactic before that internal centre has stabilised, it becomes a form of self-censorship and that’s where everything starts to go wrong.

Market categories vs. Perceptual orientations

If this sounds abstract, it’s because we’ve been trained to think about niches as market categories rather than perceptual orientations.

A niche, in the way it is usually discussed, is a subject area. Productivity, crypto, parenting, fitness, relationships, AI, Stoicism etc. Each of these becomes a label under which a person is expected to remain stable, consistent and predictable. Any deviation from that topic causes confusion and usually results in lower engagement which translates into less leads and less money.

The tragedy of modern internet advice is that it treats identity as a prerequisite. As something you are supposed to possess before you begin.

Historically, this idea would have sounded strange. For most serious thinkers, identity was never a starting point. Putting yourself or your brand into a box means you are limiting your potential and intellectual development from day 1.

“Pick an identity” and watch your mind, soul and spirit contract

Carl Jung described individuation as a lifelong process of becoming. It is a gradual integration of the parts of yourself that reveal themselves through lived experience. It doesn’t arrive with a flash of insight. It’s not like you just decide you’re the finance guy, or philosophy guy, or mental health persona and that’s it.

In Jung’s view, the psyche speaks in symbols, patterns, and repetitions. Certain themes keep surfacing. Certain questions refuse to leave you alone and particular tensions return across different stages of life.

You are not the same person at 30 as you are at 40 and you are not the same person at 9am and 9pm. We are not static systems set in stone. We are living organisms who change, develop and adapt as we progress down the path of life so why would you set up a system and an environment in direct opposition to that basic biological fact?

I’ll leave that question for you to answer yourself.

The real task is to stay in relationship with these recurring themes long enough to understand what they’re pointing toward.

Viktor Frankl approached this problem from a different angle but arrived at a parallel conclusion. Well, he never talked about niches but what I’ve interpreted from his writing is that meaning, as in the purpose of your work, emerges through responsibility. You commit yourself to something outside your own comfort, your writing, business, side project or even a relationship and in carrying that weight, a sense of purpose slowly forms.

This is more important than you think. Frankl does not say.

“first feel meaningful, then act. He says: “act, and meaning grows as a consequence”.

This demolishes the entire “find your niche before you start” premise, because that premise assumes that clarity precedes commitment and every serious psychological tradition says the opposite.

All of this points to the fact that unless you have one singular burning passion (I’m guessing if you’re reading this you don’t) you must express yourself long enough for a pattern to become visible, that pattern may then be developed into your niche.

Try to think of this as a psychological orientation rather than a market category. It’s the kinds of suffering you feel compelled to examine and the lens through which you keep interpreting events, even when you try to write about something else.

From this perspective, most niche anxiety is actually not about strategy, It’s existential. Which is why this question never goes away. On the surface it might look like “pick a profitable niche” is just about making money, but underneath that is a desperate attempt to be seen heard and understood. In other words people are trying to secure an identity before they’ve lived into one.

They’re asking branding questions to solve developmental uncertainty, and because the internet loves answers that sound concrete, they’re handed frameworks that promise certainty where only process can actually get you there.

Your niche is something that crystallises through repetition, friction, and time. Writing simply makes that crystallisation visible, which reframes the entire problem.

So I want you to understand that you’re not behind, or broken and you haven’t failed to “pick correctly.”You’re in the only phase that ever actually existed, which is the phase where you become.

This all takes time

If identity emerges through repetition, then the real work is building a container sturdy enough to hold sustained expression.

Most people skip this step. They jump straight to tactics, cadence, platforms, and growth loops, while the underlying environment in which their thinking is supposed to mature remains unstable.

So the practical question becomes this.

What kind of structure allows a pattern of self to be revealed over time?

This is obviously very personal and individual. Only you have had the life experiences that you have had, but if you have been struggling with the question of finding your niche here are five conditions that matter more than any “niche market” research.

1. First choose a finite exploration horizon.

Decide for yourself, (no need for an announcement), that the next three to six months are not about traction, monetisation or positioning.

They are about paying attention - to yourself. This single decision removes the psychological violence of needing every piece to “work.” Stop performing. Start observing.

What I mean by this is observe what you feel compelled to write about. What kind of writing comes easy and what is difficult? Where does resistance build up? What kind of writing do you like to read? What draws you to certain works of art or people or ideas? Why do you think that is?

These questions cannot answered at the intellectual level. They are felt at the emotional level. You must allow them to reveal themselves through writing and publishing regularly which leads us onto part two.

2. Establish a sustainable publishing rhythm.

This is a pace you can maintain even during busy weeks. Forget what you have been told about audience avatars, content calendars and publishing schedules. That is not relevant at this stage. You also don’t have to publish everything you write. This is primarily for your own development. Ideally in this stage you would publish once a week but if that is unsustainable do it twice a month, or even just once a month. If Long form is too challenging start by posting notes. The important thing is to get the ideas out of your head and onto the page.

The function of this rhythm is sustainability and continuity because continuity is what allows patterns to appear.

3. Treat writing as a diagnostic tool.

The writing is stage one but you also have to take time to look back at what you have written to re-live those words and notice patterns.

At the end of each month, look back and reflect on which pieces felt clarifying to write? Which ones left you strangely energised? Which questions keep resurfacing in different disguises?

At this stage likes and engagement are counter productive. You are measuring your own internal signal. The analytical layer of “this got more likes than normal I need to replicate it again”is what kills beginners before they’ve even started.

4. Introduce gentle constraint.

Once you have been doing this for a few months you will start to notice some gravitational themes. So the next stage of development is to deliberately stay inside them for the next window. Treat this as a focusing lens. This is not a decision on “your niche” you are just leaning into what resonates (with yourself).

This prevents drifting while preserving discovery. In this stage you can begin to experiment with story arcs and building a cohesive narrative over multiple pieces, kind of like chapters in a book. This is where you sense the beginnings of something important and pushing that can be intoxicating.

5. Resist premature naming.

The urge to label yourself is usually a fear response, and also because everyone says you need to be as specific as possible like “I write for middle income mid life management consultants who want to leave their job but retain their income bracket”…can you honestly imagine doing that for even six months let alone years?

I know this might sound counter intuitive, and you want to get results now but honestly most jobs of any meaningful complexity take several years to get good at.

Let the work accumulate before you try to explain it. Over time, something subtle happens. You start recognising what you already write about, you have the beginnings of a body of work and it is much easier to then determine in which direction it should go.

It means you are slowly shaping a centre of gravity. Growth that emerges from a centre of gravity behaves differently to growth that comes from engagement bait, hacks and viral hooks. It is the essence of a stable identity, which is exactly what sovereignty actually looks like in practice.

I hope this was helpful.

If you struggle with short-form writing. If you find that it fractures your attention, makes it difficult to focus and you’re not getting traction this will help:

The 15 Note System

If you want to go deeper into sustainable systems and long term strategies consider upgrading to the yearly or founding membership plans here:

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Take care and don’t forget to have fun with this.

Benjamin

Not slightly off. Fundamentally misdiagnosed. You’ll hear the same mantra repeated everywhere.

Write daily.

Create a content calendar.

Be disciplined.

Just keep showing up even when you don’t feel like it.

The implication is that consistency is a matter of effort.

This has now been parroted so pervasively that we just take it as fact. It’s one of several illusory truths perpetuated in the creator economy. Consistency means frequency.

But you can publish every day and be extremely inconsistent. You can show up on schedule for months and produce work that resets each time it appears.

If your metric is “frequency” you are doing everything right…so why does nothing compound? Why do so many people who post consistently not end up building anything?

We must go several layers deeper.

Frequency is just one aspect of consistency. It is parroted because it is easy to understand and easy to articulate. The other dimensions are harder to tease out. But they actually make the difference.

Have you ever read writing and thought this sounds like X author, checked to see who the writer was and have your suspicion confirmed?

That is the real power of consistency. Consistency of tone. Consistency of language, consistency of length, quality, ideas, structure. The very essence of the writing is consistent over time so that it becomes unmistakably you.

Consistency is about coherence. Most people obsess over output when it is actually “how they see” that is the real differentiator.

Until that shifts, it doesn’t matter how often you publish. Nothing will accumulate.

The issue with focusing on frequency is that you are not in the correct mental space to build and develop coherence. And no, this is not a “you can just do both” situation.

When frequency is the metric each piece is written as if it exists on its own terms. It introduces its own context, adopts its own tone, reaches for its own angle, and then disappears.

You deprioritise quality by default because you have to “ship it”. It’s post day and you are consistent so you don’t miss post day. All the talk of anti-perfectionism has made you think you just need to post and something will happen.

So you post forgetting where this was meant to lead and how it relates to your vision and why you started writing in the first place.

When frequency is the goal there is no continuity between pieces, no shared foundation, no sense that anything is being constructed across time. The writing exists as a series of separate events rather than as parts of a larger whole.

If this is your life’s work it must be treated with care consideration and respect. Do focus on the details. Do reread it 10 times. Do cross examine your arguments. That’s not perfectionism, that’s just caring and it is the one thing that can differentiate you in a sea of mediocrity.

Focusing on just showing up is like building a house with no foundations.

Walls are erected, adjusted, abandoned and rebuilt again elsewhere. Materials are used, but nothing is anchored. From a distance, there is activity. Up close, nothing is actually being built. There is no structure that can hold the weight of your ideas.

In that kind of environment, effort cannot accumulate.

Every new piece has to do all of the work again. It has to establish a voice, define a position, create meaning in isolation. Nothing carries forward because nothing has been fixed into place in a way that allows it to support what comes next.

This is where the exhaustion begins to make sense.

It is not the act of writing that drains people. It is the constant restarting. The repeated attempt to produce something meaningful without any underlying structure to hold it.

Over time, the work begins to feel scattered, because those ideas are not being organised into anything that can persist. Once you are operating in that mode, increasing frequency only intensifies the problem.

More output simply means more fragments. More walls without foundations. More visible effort with nothing underneath it that can carry the weight of a body of work.

This is not a question of habits. It is not a question of discipline or time.

It is a design problem.

Most people approach writing as a series of individual acts. Sit down, produce something, publish it, move on. Each piece is treated as complete in itself, with no obligation to connect to what came before or to support what comes next.

That is not a failure of consistency. It is the absence of any structure that would allow consistency to exist in the first place.

You can lay bricks on top of each other but without building plans or a guiding vision you cannot build a structre that stands by itself.

For something to hold, there has to be an underlying design that determines how each part relates to the others, how weight is distributed, and how new additions attach to what is already in place.

The writers whose work accumulates are not deciding from scratch each time they sit down. They are operating within a structure that already exists. Each piece is one part of a greater story unfolding over time.

Each idea extends something that has already been established. The work carries forward because it is being built into something that was designed to hold it.

That is why their output appears consistent without requiring constant effort. The structure is doing the work.

Once that is in place, frequency becomes secondary. Your goal is not to flood the feed in a desperate attempt to stay top of mind. You have no desire to do that because you only post when you have something worth saying.

Writers whose work accumulates operate differently.

They are not asking what to write about in general. They are returning to a set of questions, tensions, and observations that remain constant beneath the surface of their work. The material comes from lived experience, but it is filtered through their unique lense, their specific vocabulary and tone of voice. That is what gives the writing its coherence.

From there, everything else begins to align.

Tone stabilises because it is anchored in a consistent perspective rather than adjusted for each piece. Language becomes more precise because it is being used to describe the same underlying patterns from different angles.

Even the structure of the writing begins to converge, because the writer is no longer searching for form each time. They are working within one that has already proven itself capable of carrying their thinking.

At this point, the work now behaves differently. Frequency is not something you even think about. You find a rythm that suites you and you follow it, there is not force or discipline necessary.

That is what consistency looks like in practice. It’s a body of work that is being built deliberately enough that it can support itself over time.

And once that is in place, the question becomes unavoidable.

If consistency is structural, and if that structure is what allows work to accumulate, then it has to be something that can be built deliberately.

It cannot be accidental, and yet this is exactly where most beginners remain vague.

They feel the difference when they read someone whose work carries weight. They can recognise the coherence, the continuity, the sense that everything belongs to something larger. But when they sit down to write themselves, that clarity disappears. They are back to choosing a topic, finding an angle, trying to make something land in isolation.

The gap lies in translation. They have not turned what they are noticing into something they can operate from.

In practice, the structure is simpler than people expect, but it is also more demanding.

It requires deciding what sits at the centre of your work and returning to it consistently enough that it begins to organise everything else.

It is your world view, your values and beliefs. The veryx things that make you you. These are not things that you always automatically know. It takes time to develop the right words to articulate them and evolve your own unique lens. This is another reason why the mantra of just keep showing up and post daily is so moronic. It keeps you stuck in the hamster wheel of production. In that setting you will never develop your world view and so cannot even begin to build a foundation.

Without that centre, every piece floats. With it, each piece has orientation. Around that centre, patterns begin to form.

Certain ideas repeat. Certain tensions keep resurfacing. Certain observations prove more generative than others. Instead of discarding them in search of something new, the consistent writer stays with them, turning them over in his mind, approaching them from different directions, allowing them to develop into something more precise.

This is where continuity emerges. And from continuity, something else follows.

The work starts to connect because it is being built from the same underlying material. One piece strengthens another. A reader who arrives through one idea finds their way naturally to others and the writing begins to carry its own context.

At that point, accumulation is no longer something you have to force. It becomes a property of the structure itself, and this is the part that changes how writing feels.

The question shifts from what should I write next to where does this fit within what I am already building. That is a very different starting point. It removes a large part of the friction that people experience, because the work is no longer being generated from nothing each time.

It is being extended. If you follow this all the way through, the meaning of consistency changes quite drastically.

Over the past year, I’ve been working through this problem in my own writing. Trying to understand why some pieces seemed to connect and carry forward, while others disappeared almost immediately. What started as an intuitive process gradually became more deliberate.

I began to see the same patterns repeating, the same ideas returning, the same underlying structure forming beneath the surface of the work.

That is what this entire sequence has been pointing toward, a way of organising writing so that it accumulates instead of resetting.

But when you layer short form notes on top of long form articles it can start to get a little overwhelming. I used to hate writing short form, it sapped my energy and fractured my attention which is why I had to build a system for it to work for me.

You can check it out here if you are interested:

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If you want something more concrete—the structure that stops everything from resetting, personalised feedback, and proven systems—that’s what the paid tier is for. Consider upgrading below

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Take care,

Ben

This is something I’ve been developing alongside my own writing over the past year. A way of looking at someone’s work not as individual pieces, but as a structure that is either holding together or resetting each time.

By clicking the link below you will be prompted to explain yo…

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Even when the intent is there, the structure of those environments tends to work against you. The effort goes in, but very little of it carries forward and each week feels disconnected from the last.

There is something more fundamental underneath that which is what I want to talk about today.

Most forms of work are designed to reset.

A project manager coordinates people and tasks making hundreds of micro decisions. Once that project is finished they move onto the next one. A sales rep strives to hit benchmarks that reset every month or quarter. A consultant solves a problem, hands it over, and leaves the value behind.

Yes, they get better. But improvement is not the same as accumulation. Their skills may compound but the work does not.

In most work environments the value of what you produced remains where it was needed. It becomes part of a system that continues without you, and very little of it carries forward in a way that compounds over time.

Over the years, this creates a kind of asymmetry.

You accumulate experience, but very little that you can point to as your own. You might get better at what you do, but the output of that work is absorbed into the structure you are operating within. Most of us have no idea how the businesses we work for actually operate.

Writing sits outside of that pattern.

Part of the reason is cognitive. When you write something down, you are doing more than recording a thought. You are translating it into a structured form. Vague impressions are forced into language, and in that process they become more defined.

Neuroscience has shown that this kind of active encoding strengthens memory and improves recall. The brain treats written information differently from something you only think about briefly. It is processed more deliberately, which makes it easier to return to later.

There is also an external dimension to this.

Once something is written, it no longer depends entirely on memory. It exists outside of you. You can revisit it, question it and extend it.

Instead of trying to reconstruct a line of thinking from fragments, you continue from a fixed point. That reduces the cognitive load of starting again and allows your attention to move forward rather than retrace the same ground.

Philosophically, this is not a new idea.

Writing has always been a way of stabilising thought. It allows ideas to persist beyond the moment in which they were formed. What would otherwise pass becomes something that can be returned to, developed, and connected with other ideas over time. In that sense, writing is not just expression, it is preservation.

In practical terms, this changes how your effort behaves.

A paragraph becomes something you can return to a week later and continue from. An idea that would normally disappear at the end of the day stays available.

Writing is the vessel for your world view. It reveals how you see the world and what you value most.

Laid bare it attracts the right people and repels the wrongs ones.

But it’s not that simple

Just writing things down is not enough.

That is the first step but it is not sufficient to build something that compounds beyond your own self.

Most people approach writing as a way of processing their thoughts. They write about their day and what they are feeling. Or if the’ve listened to the gurus they pick a niche and just write about the same topic day in day out. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it’s how most of us start.

But if you look at it a few weeks later, very little has developed.

The pieces don’t connect. They don’t build on each other. They remain tied to the moment they were written in.

That is why most people never build anything through writing. Everyone screams about volume and consistency but that’s not the key differentiator. The one thing that guides you is intent.

Why are you doing this?

There is a difference between writing to process what you are thinking, and writing to develop something that can stand outside of yourself.

It is the difference between journaling and writing with a specific goal in mind. There’s nothing wrong with journaling, the issue is journaling with the vague hope of building something you still haven’t yet defined. There is only one end to that trajectory - disappointment.

I ran into this problem almost immediately when I started writing here.

I knew that I wanted to pushback against hustle culture and mindless productivity but that was it. I would sit down in the evening with the intention to write something meaningful and maybe it was at the time. It felt like progress, after all I was putting something out into the world.

But there was a frustration underneath it. Each time I sat down to write, I was starting again. There was no sense of continuation. No clear thread running through the work. Just a series of pieces that reflected how I was thinking in that moment.

If you had asked me what I was building, I wouldn’t have had a good answer, and if you looked at the writing itself, it didn’t help.

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There was no structure behind it. No plan beyond the next post. No sense that one idea was leading into another. I wasn’t developing anything, I was reacting to whatever felt most immediate.

That shows up in the writing. It feels personal, but not particularly useful. A reader might recognise the feeling, but they have nothing to take away with them.

When you realise that you are writing regularly, but nothing is accumulating, that is the moment to take a step back and reconsider how you intend to approach the next six months.

This can be extremely uncomfortable but maybe all it takes is one simple question.

When I first started writing I joined a mastermind. It was my turn to have my publication audited (shredded to pieces) by the group. One simple question left me speechless.

Where is this leading?

He then went on to ask out of genuine interest, what is the point of your publication? Why are you writing about anti-hustle culture? What is the goal? What is the reader supposed to do next? It was awkward because I didn’t have an answer. At the time I was not thinking in those terms. I was merely thinking of how to best articulate my own thoughts.

That was the point where I started to see that I was writing, but not building anything.

I say all this to demonstrate how important the framing and angle is. You may not need to change the actual content or topic matter of what you write about. Just the intent behind it.

Writing to process vs. Writing to build

You may have a frustrating situation at work and so you write about it. You describe what happened, how you felt and why it annoyed you.

That is writing to process. It may be honest, but it stays close to the experience. Once the moment passes, the piece loses relevance.

The same situation can be approached differently. Instead of describing what happened, you step back and isolate what is useful.

What was the pattern? What kept repeating? What did you learn about how these situations unfold? How does that tie into the larger narrative that you are weaving?

Now you are no longer writing about the event. You are writing about the idea inside it. That is where the shift begins, and it can be made more deliberate.

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I think of this as the Expertise Conversion Model.

It is simply a way of turning experience into something that can be developed over time. In a way this requires a certain amount of self excavation. Writing to process is the first step through which valuable insights can be transformed into something of actual use which can then me transmitted to the reader.

The first step is to notice and isolate.

During the week, something stands out. A pattern or a way of thinking that works better than the default.

Instead of letting it pass, you reduce it down to one clear idea. Not everything that happened, just the part that is useful.

The second step is to shape it for someone else.

You write it so that another person could recognise it. That means removing certain specifics to your unique situation and keeping what is transferable. The focus shifts from “this is what happened to me” to “this is how this tends to work.”

This is where the writing becomes more precise and where you start to develop your voice.

The third step is to return and develop.

Most people stop after writing something once. This is where the work actually starts. You come back to it. You refine the idea. You connect it to something else you’ve written and this is how the writing gradually begins to accumulate.

We know that to actually learn something you have to be exposed to it multiple times and approach it from multiple different angles for it to land as useful insight.

Once you start working this way, the difference becomes obvious.

You are no longer asking what to write. You are looking for what is worth developing. The material is already there. It comes from your work, your decisions and your experience.

The change is in how you treat it. This is why most people never build anything through writing. They may write consistently, but nothing carries forward.

The moment you make that shift, the work starts to behave differently. Each piece has a role. Each idea has somewhere to go, and over time, what you are building becomes visible.

Once you start working this way, the timeline begins to change. In the first few weeks, very little appears to happen.

You are isolating ideas, trying to write them clearly, learning how to move from experience into something more structured. Most of the work is invisible. It feels slower than simply writing whatever comes to mind.

After a month or two, something begins to take shape. You are no longer starting from zero. You have a small set of ideas that you can return to. You recognise where new pieces fit. The writing becomes easier, because you are continuing something rather than initiating it.

This is where most people stop.

The results are not immediate and there is no external signal telling you that it is working. Most people drift back to writing in a way that feels easier.

But when you continue, the shift becomes more visible.

A body of work starts to form, there is a visible through line, not a collection of isolated posts, but something that has direction.

You can point to it. Other people can move through it. Your thinking becomes easier to recognise, both for yourself and for others.

At that point, the effects start to appear. Someone reads more than one piece. They resonate not just with one article but with your complete approach.

Think long term.

All of this starts with the 20% shift. With investing your best strategic energy into your writing and building your creative practice up into something that resembles a personal business.

What you are building is not just a collection of ideas, but something that reflects how you think and what you know. Something that can be returned to, explored, and extended over time.

That is where writing starts to move beyond self expression. It is the vessel for your world view.

If experience can be converted into ideas, how do those ideas become something more durable, something that behaves like an asset rather than a passing observation?

That’s the part most people never figure out.

I’ve been working on a way of structuring this so it actually holds over time, and I’ll open that up next week.

Until then, have a great week.

That conscious action of directing a part of your best strategic thinking and energy away from your career into building something which compounds outside of it.

Over time those ideas start attracting opportunities that would never appear inside a single career path.

I’ve been writing on substack for about a year and half now.

I’ve been through many ups and downs. I wrote into the void for 3 moths without hearing so much as an echo back. I’ve had several notes go viral which brought in so much attention I considered deleting them.

In between those two extremes I’ve experimented with almost everything the ecosystem encourages. I’ve joined and left masterminds. I’ve done coaching calls. I’ve launched products. Some failed. Others made thousands of dollars.

At the moment I’m in the process of developing a paid tier, and along the way I’ve watched the platform move through several cultural shifts — waves of optimism, waves of cynicism, and tsunamis of new strategies and anxieties around growth visibility and traction.

But underneath all of that movement, one pattern appears again and again.

The people who already have demanding full-time careers struggle the most with consistency. Writing well and writing consistently requires time, energy and attention. After a full day of meetings, finding the time, and more importantly the mental energy, to sit down and think clearly enough to write feels impossible.

I recognise this pattern in myself as well. Some evenings the last thing my brain wants to do is think clearly enough to write a paragraph, so most of my essays take shape in the mornings before work.

The tension here is not just about time and energy. It is also about intent. Writing can remain a private act of expression, or it can become a way of building something that extends beyond the page, something which leads to other opportunities and creates a form of optionality.

As things have developed many of the major platforms require so much time and attention that it is very hard to grow anything part time. Most of them reward constant output making it extremely difficult to build up anything in the evenings and weekends.

It is easy to conclude from this that you must develop a content schedule and post repeatedly even when you have nothing to say. But that assumption is largely a reflection of how most modern platforms are built.

Substack, in an interesting way, was built around a different rhythm, one that, favours those who write slowly and with more deepth.

The Internet Learned to Reward Speed

This is not really an essay about Substack. It is an essay about how different media environments shape the people who participate in them and who your own behaviour attracts.

Most of the platforms that came to dominate the past decade were built around speed, novelty and dopamine loops.

Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn all reward the same basic behaviour of attention seeking.

Algorithms amplify what is trending in real time. The more extreme and sensational the more likely it is to spread.

Inside that environment it is the influencer who thrives. The person who can turn anything into content in real time and add just the right amount of controversy to keep engagement strong.

Over time this architecture reshaped our expectations of creative work online. We began to assume serious participation required constant output.

For writers this creates a peculiar kind of psychological pressure.

Writing is not a real-time medium. Ideas tend to develop slowly through observation, experience and reflection rather than reaction to the news cycle.

When you try to write inside a system designed for speed, the mismatch becomes obvious. You begin to feel behind, because the rhythm of your thinking does not match the rhythm of the platform.

This dynamic is not entirely new.

When newspapers industrialised in the nineteenth century, speed began to dominate the economics of attention. Telegraph networks and faster presses created an environment where being first mattered enormously.

The publication that reported an event fastest controlled the conversation. Magazines evolved partly as a response to this pressure.

They appeared less frequently, often only once a month, but offered something different. Instead of controversy they offered interpretation, reflection and deeper arguments. Readers were willing to wait for depth.

That distinction matters because the modern internet rebuilt the newspaper model. Feeds reward novelty, reaction and velocity.

Subscription writing belongs to a different structure. It changes the relationship between writer and reader.

The central unit is no longer the passing impression inside a feed. It is what you might call “the return”. Where a reader chooses to come back. They opt into a voice and a sensibility. The writer is no longer competing only for a moment of interruption. They are building a relationship organised around continuity in a semi-private space.

That difference sounds subtle, but it changes the incentives in a profound way.

This article of mine from 2024 still gets comments from new readers and they are overwhelmingly constructive comments.

If you’ve spent any time on other platforms you will realise how unusual that is. First of all, that an old article still surfaces, and that it is not attacked by bots or cynics or just people having a bad day.

A subscription environment allows both the reader and the writer to slow down take a deep breath and articulate ideas without having to scream at the top of your lungs.

This does not mean that every newsletter platform is pure, or that the internet has suddenly become hospitable to depth in some uncomplicated way. Every platform develops its own status games, distortions and pressures. But what I have noticed here is that the culture is more introspective and less aggressive.

That is why the 20% shift begins to make more sense here. Because, in at least one corner of the online world, the architecture has moved a little closer to the actual rhythm of writing. Meaning that your ideas can accumulate into something that resembles intellectual assets.

Writing is the process through which experience becomes intellectual capital.

Nothing changes, then everything changes. What I’m trying to get across here is that over time ideas that accumulate begin to behave like leverage. Your writing attracts conversations, relationships, and occasionally opportunities that would never have appeared otherwise.

Writing has changed how I see the world.

Conversations that would once have faded from memory now stay with me a little longer. My interactions at work with colleagues and customers, synthesised with what I read, feeds into my world view and become potential material for new stories.

The act of writing doesn’t just capture experience. It sharpens the way you notice it and in that way writing is the process through which experience becomes intellectual capital.

Most people move through life accumulating experience passively without ever taking the time to reflect and capture key moments of insight. Meetings happen, patterns appear, frustrations repeat, but the insights remain implicit.

Writing interrupts that process.

When you write regularly, experience stops dissolving back into distant memory and begins to accumulate as ideas. Conversations, observations, and small moments from daily life start to reveal patterns. Over time those patterns turn into perspectives.

That is the real function of the 20% shift.

You are not trying to become a prolific creator overnight. You are simply redirecting a small portion of your attention toward extracting ideas from the life you are already living.

In practical terms this usually means three things.

First, you start paying attention differently. Work, institutions, culture, conversations all of this becomes potential material.

Second, you begin capturing ideas as they appear. Notes scribbled between meetings, observations during the week, fragments that slowly develop into essays.

Third, you publish at a rhythm that matches the natural speed of thinking rather than the speed of the feed. For many people that means writing once a week or even twice a month.

None of this requires abandoning a career. In fact the opposite is often true.

Many of the most influential thinkers used writing simply as a tool for organising their thoughts. Paul Graham built and sold companies long before his essays became widely read.

Naval Ravikant’s writing expresses a life spent investing and building businesses. Even further back, Marcus Aurelius wrote what later became Meditations while leading the Roman army on campaign.

None of these people set out to become writers. They wrote because writing helped them think.

Seen from that perspective, the 20% shift begins to look less like a career change and more like a cognitive practice, a way of extracting ideas from the life you are already living.

You are not starting from a disadvantage. A person embedded in real life. Someone who is working a job and raising a family is surrounded by raw material. Writing simply becomes the mechanism that extracts ideas from that material and turns them into something structured and shareable.

Over time those ideas begin to accumulate, and once they accumulate, they begin to behave like leverage.

Ideas → Articulation → Leverage → Optionality

None of this happens overnight. But over the years something subtle begins to change. You are no longer relying entirely on a single structure for your identity or your future. You are building something alongside it.

That is the real meaning of the 20% shift. Not an escape from work, but the gradual construction of intellectual assets that compound over time.

I’ll start to open up how I’ve been structuring this in the weeks to come, because there is a repeatable process through which experience becomes expertise, and expertise becomes intellectual assets.

Until then, have a great week.

Ben,

You’re good at your job.

Your colleagues trust you and the pay is solid.

From the outside, everything looks as it should.

Nothing is obviously wrong with your career and that’s what makes the unease so hard to justify.

The difficulty is that competence has its own momentum.

Once you become good at something, the system naturally pulls you further into it. Responsibility and expectations grow and your identity adapts to the role you perform well.

This is why when something inside you begins to question the direction it feels disorienting. In many ways you are succeeding and the unease appears precisely because the structure is working.

When I was managing teams in luxury retail, performance reviews revealed something uncomfortable.

Every year there were a few employees who were clearly stuck.

They were competent, experienced and well paid, but the energy had shifted. Leaving felt financially risky, while staying felt increasingly misaligned. They were still doing the job properly, but internally something had already thinned.

Those conversations forced me to confront a deeper pattern, which was that their entire professional life had become concentrated in one place.

Income, identity and forward momentum all depended on the same organisation. If that structure changed, everything in their lives would have to be renegotiated at once.

The more I reflected on it, the more I realised I was living inside the same structure myself.

This is what I now think of as the 40+hour allocation problem.

Most professionals spend forty or fifty hours each week solving problems, generating ideas and improving systems.

But almost all of that intellectual effort compounds somewhere else. Come Monday you realise that none of the effort you produced last week has accumulated into something that belongs to you.

The problem is not that you are employed, it’s that all of your strategic energy is employed.

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So what if even a small fraction of those forty hours were directed toward something you own?

What might exist three or four years from now that does not exist today?

The Psychology of risk aversion

The human animal is deeply risk-averse. Behavioural economists have shown repeatedly that people fear losses far more intensely than they value equivalent gains.

This is why leaving a stable career feels terrifying even when the long-term alternative might be more fulfilling.

The mind interprets the loss of stability as danger. It narrows your thinking toward short-term survival and under those conditions most people abandon exploration entirely.

But the solution is easier than you think. It does not have to involve some sort of radical action. There is no need for resignation letters, abrupt pivots or crazy reinventions.

All it takes is 2Hours of focused intention and that is what we are going to talk about here.

The 20% Shift and structural optionality

The paradox of building something meaningful is that almost nothing about it feels dramatic at the beginning.

Modern cultural narratives celebrate extreme reinventions, but most durable structures are assembled very slowly. It will seem like nothing is happening at first. You write a paragraph here, you explore a question there and it may, at times feel pointless.

But if you stick with it long enough these fragments accumulate into something substantial.

The research on what economists call hybrid entrepreneurship is clear. People who begin building while still employed are significantly more likely to succeed than those who quit first and attempt to build under full financial pressure.

To me this seems obvious - when your income floor is secure, you are free to learn, experiment and iterate before your ideas are forced to support you financially.

The goal of the 20% shift is to recreate that dynamic deliberately. In practice it unfolds through a few simple adjustments.

1. Create a Protected Block of Time

The first move is structural.

Most people treat their working week as fully spoken for. This is how institutions absorb human ambition, by occupying all available time.

Forty hours go to the job, and whatever remains dissolves into recovery or distraction. Week after week the pattern repeats, until it becomes difficult to imagine your effort settling anywhere else.

The 20% shift begins the moment you interrupt that pattern.

You decide that a small portion of your forward-looking thinking will no longer be absorbed automatically.

In practical terms this is a minor adjustment. In psychological terms it is much larger, because you are beginning to reclaim authorship over where your effort compounds.

When starting any new habit or skill we have to begin small and build gradually. That is part of the reason this newsletter is called the 2Hour Creator. Because 2Hours is all you need to make that first shift.

The important thing is to lock the habit in. Do not try to overextend or commit time that you do not realistically have. Start with two hours at the weekend and allow the rhythm to stabilise before expanding it.

What matters is that this time exists every week and that it belongs to something you are building.

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Open your calendar and block two recurring sessions this week. Treat them the same way you would treat a meeting with a client.

They are not optional. They are where your long-term thinking happens.

2. Identify the Problems You Already Understand

The second step is choosing where your effort should go.

Most people make this harder than it needs to be. They begin searching for business ideas or trying to invent something entirely new.

A better starting point is much closer to home.

Psychologists call it the curse of knowledge — once you become familiar with something, it stops feeling like knowledge at all. It simply becomes the way the world works. You forget that what feels obvious to you may be completely invisible to someone outside your field.

Years of experience produce what is known as “tacit knowledge”. The unwritten understanding of how things actually function beneath official explanations. The incentives that shape behaviour. The workarounds people rely on. The strange patterns that only appear once you have been inside the system long enough.

Your industry is full of these invisible structures. They might be inefficient processes, misaligned incentives or decisions that make sense internally but appear irrational from the outside.

Once you start paying attention to these tensions, you realise something important.

The most valuable ideas rarely come from inventing something new but from articulating something others have not yet learned to see.

Next step:

Take ten minutes and write down five frustrations you see repeatedly in your field or surroundings. These are not abstract industry trends, they are real situations you encounter during the week. Something that makes you pause and think:

Why does this keep happening?

Those observations form the beginnings of your perspective.

3. Turn Observations Into Ideas

Learn how to think with these observations.

Once you begin collecting these fragments, a pattern slowly starts to appear. But this only happens if you push the thinking one step further.

Insight begins when you interrogate the structure beneath the surface. In psychology and organisational theory this process is sometimes called sense-making. The mind tries to understand not just what is happening, but why the system produces that outcome in the first place.

This is where a few simple questions become powerful tools.

Why does this happen?

Who benefits from this structure?

What incentives are shaping behaviour here?

What would need to change for the outcome to be different?

These questions move you from experience to analysis. Instead of reacting to events, you begin examining the underlying logic that produces them.

Over time this is how perspective forms. Fragments turn into patterns, patterns turn into explanations, and explanations eventually become insight that other people recognise and want to learn from.

Next step

Take one of the frustrations you wrote down earlier and expand it into a short paragraph.

Describe the problem clearly.

Then ask yourself three things:

What is actually happening here?

Why does the system produce this outcome?

What do most people misunderstand about it?

You do not need a perfect answer. The goal is simply to begin practising a different mode of thinking, because the moment you start analysing the structures around you, your daily experience stops being routine work.

This will become material for your intellectual assets.

4. Allow Your Thinking to Exist Outside Your Job

This is the step where thinking begins to turn into an asset.

Most professional insight disappears because it never leaves the room where it was discussed. A useful idea surfaces during a meeting, someone articulates it briefly, and then the conversation moves on. The moment passes and the insight dissolves.

This is how most knowledge inside organisations behaves. It exists temporarily, performs its function, and then vanishes.

But something different happens when thinking is externalised.

This is the idea of extended cognition. The mind becomes more powerful when its thinking is expressed outside the brain in language, diagrams, or writing.

The act of articulating an idea stabilises it. What was previously a passing thought becomes something that can be examined, refined and built upon.

Allowing some of your thinking to exist outside your job changes the equation in a subtle but important way.

Instead of disappearing into the institution that employs you, your insights begin to accumulate under your own name.

This is the secret power of writing that the world seems to have forgotten. Writing is thinking and when done in structured manner in the form of a newsletter you are slowly assembling a body of thinking that belongs to you.

Over time this changes how your work compounds. The same experiences that once disappeared at the end of the day now become part of a growing archive of perspective.

Next step

Take the paragraph you wrote earlier and expand it into a 300–500 word reflection.

Explain the situation clearly enough that someone outside your industry could understand the problem and why it exists.

You do not need to publish it yet. Writing it down is enough.

What matters is that the idea now exists outside your head.

You have just created the first piece of intellectual property attached to your name.

5. Let Time Do Its Work

This is where most people sabotage themselves.

They expect something dramatic to happen quickly. A surge of attention, a sudden opportunity and clear path forward that confirms they are on the right track.

When that moment does not arrive, they assume they’ve failed.

But the parallel path operates on a very different logic.

Human beings are naturally impatient. Behavioural economists have shown that we heavily discount future rewards in favour of immediate ones. We want visible progress now. We want reassurance that our effort is working.

Compounding doesn’t behave that way.

At the beginning nothing happens. Progress is so slow it feels invisible, but continuity has a strange property.

Fragments accumulate, ideas connect, and a body of thinking slowly forms. The internal shift is as important as any visible external result because once that exists, your professional life is no longer concentrated in a single place.

Some of your effort is now compounding in a place you own.

Next step

Commit to producing one piece of thinking every two weeks for the next three months.

Twelve weeks. Six pieces.

Do not worry about scale or visibility. The goal of this period is simply continuity.

Six pieces is enough for patterns to begin appearing in your thinking and for the parallel path to start feeling real. Once effort starts accumulating in more than one place, the architecture of your professional life begins to change.

The deeper purpose of the 20% shift is not escape.

It is the creation if structural optionality and the gradual distribution of effort.

You remain fully engaged in your primary role. You continue to earn and to contribute but a portion of your thinking is now compounding somewhere else.

In the next piece I want to go deeper into what qualifies as an asset in the first place. Not every side project compounds. Some disappear as quickly as they begin. Others grow into intellectual assets that open opportunities you could not have predicted when you started.

Understanding that difference is where the parallel path becomes strategic.

Take care,

I will see you next week.

Ben

You feel it every Monday morning. The slow tightening in your chest when the week resets and you realise nothing fundamental has changed.

You are still trading time for money. Still operating inside someone else’s system. Still building something that does not belong to you.

And you tell yourself it’s fine.

The salary is good. The people are decent. The work is tolerable.

But tolerable isn’t the point.

You don’t want tolerable.

You want leverage.

You want autonomy.

You want to wake up knowing that your effort compounds in your direction, not just inside a hierarchy that would replace you in three weeks if it had to.

That voice in your head keeps whispering the same thing: if you were serious, you would leave.

Because that’s what real builders do.

They don’t hedge or cling to stability. They remove the escape route and force themselves to grow into the person capable of earning freedom.

You’ve seen the arguments.

Security is a crutch. Comfort is a drug. Employment is a psychological cage disguised as safety.

If you still have a job, it’s because you don’t trust yourself to “go all in”.

If you still protect your evenings, pursue hobbies, have a social life, it’s because you aren’t obsessed enough.

Real growth requires discomfort.

And the fastest way to eliminate distraction is to eliminate the foundation of your comfortable life.

Burn the boats. Cut the safety net.

Put yourself in a position where success is the only option.

Because when you remove comfort, you have no choice but to grow.

When your back is against the wall, you become who you were meant to be.

That’s the story, and it’s not stupid.

It’s powerful precisely because it contains some truth. Constraint does sharpen attention. Urgency can compress learning. Pressure can be a way of forcing decisions.

It also might be why you begin to feel silently ashamed for wanting stability.

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You start interpreting caution as cowardice. You start confusing financial security as a lack of ambition. You begin to suspect that the only reason you haven’t built something extraordinary is because you haven’t forced yourself into a corner.

Wanting security is not failure it’s a distribution curve

The issue is that while this leap might work for some, tt doesn’t work for most.

Some people have unusually high risk tolerance, a strong internal locus of control, and temperaments that genuinely metabolise uncertainty as stimulation rather than a threat.

They are risk-seeking and interpret volatility as opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that being extreme is by default rare and the narrative implies you must become extreme in order to “make it”.

Most people are not wired for voluntary instability and uncertainty and that is not a character flaw. It is a distribution curve.

It is also not the way for most people to achieve any kind of success. In fact instability and uncertainty create very predictable fear based behaviours which are not synonymous with any definition of succes

When people experience financial insecurity, cognitive bandwidth narrows. Studies in behavioural science show that scarcity consumes attention. It reduces working memory capacity and increases short-term bias.

People under financial pressure become more likely to prioritise short-term gains over long-term strategy. They have tunnel vision, and not in a good way.

The brain does not become visionary when the mortgage depends on next month’s revenue. It becomes vigilant.

Vigilance is useful for survival. But do you really want to live in survival mode?

Under sustained uncertainty, cortisol rises. Sleep quality drops. Decision fatigue increases. Risk assessment becomes distorted, sometimes you’re overly cautious, sometimes overly reckless.

You may believe you are becoming sharper, but in many cases you are simply becoming urgent.

Urgency and leverage are not the same thing.

Leverage requires patience, iteration, rejecting misaligned opportunities and, most importantly, saying no when something feels off. It requires positioning from a place of confidence and security. All of those behaviours become harder when your income foundation has disappeared.

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By quitting your job and going “all in” you are not increasing clarity, you are just increasing concentration risk.

You might be betting on yourself but if you are the CEO, CFO and CCO of your business, not to mention the actual product as well, you’re literally putting all your eggs in one basket.

You are not removing distractions. You are removing optionality, and optionality is what actually compounds.

Rather than seeing your job as something that needs a desperate escape from, why not take advantage of it. Make use of the time constraint it imposes, use it as inspiration, take note on what gives and takes your energy.

With todays technology you don’t need 8 hours a day to build a parallel path, you can start right now.

The best strategic decision you can make

This is why I advocate for building parallel a path while still employed full time. It is the first problem you have to solve. If you can’t create and ship something part time what makes you think you will be able to do it full time?

Keeping your job and building something on the side is not hedging or low agency or weak, it’s strategic.

So here are three things that are critical and will determine your ability to stay consistent while enjoying the process. Because that is what anyone who starts something new should be optimising for. This should be fun. It should give you more energy than it takes. Doing the thing should be enjoyable not a heavy task that must be done in order to achieve a potential result.

The struggle is guaranteed the result is not.

1. Energy

The first move is to consciously reserve a portion of your strategic energy for something that compounds outside your employer.

This does not mean “whenever you have time.” It means deciding that ten to fifteen percent of your forward momentum will no longer be reinvested exclusively into internal promotion cycles, performance reviews, and organisational politics.

You protect it.

It might be early mornings. It might be one weekend block. It might be one evening that is no longer surrendered to low-grade digital noise. The structure itself matters less than the intention behind it. This time is for building something that accrues to you.

I write for 40 minutes a day before work. Sometimes I will spend an hour or two on related activities after work and my weekends are for filming editing and posting.

Next week, I’ll break down how to think about this allocation in a way that doesn’t create burnout or domestic friction. For now, the important shift is psychological.

Stop treating your job as the sole container of your ambition.

2. Extraction.

You do not start from scratch but from where you stand.

Every professional sits on accumulated insight. You’ve seen patterns. You’ve had particular experiences, and felt certain tensions. You understand incentives. You have opinions about what works and what doesn’t.

Even the most basic things such as the language you speak, where you live, what you read and the knowledge you’ve accumulated make you unique. But most of that evaporates at the end of the week because it was never captured.

The mistake that most people make is thinking they need more input. At this stage you have everything you need, it’s already there it just needs to be extracted from you. So begin capturing it.

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Develop a note capturing practice. This does not require productivity hacks it just means recording your thoughts and experiences when they occur in real time. This has two benefits.

1. You retain more of what you write down

2. You are creating a map of your own thought patterns.

Don’t leave it until you sit down to “start writing”.

I have been using notion for the past few years and it’s become the easiest way for me to record notes but everyone has their preferred method. The method is not important. The important thing is that you start today.

Over time, patterns will emerge.

That material becomes insight which dictates your next direction.

3. (De)Attachment.

Once you are capturing daily insights and you’ve blocked off time to start creating you must begin the process of attaching your name to ideas rather than attaching your entire identity to a role.

As you allocate more of your time and energy away from your job and towards your own thing you will feel resistance. This is normal but it’s not an easy process which is why it is best done gradually.

Attaching your name to ideas may take the form of writing publicly. It may be a niche newsletter. It might be advisory conversations. It could consist of guesting on podcasts, or public speaking.

Many leaders or experts do not have their own podcasts or social media channels. They are regular guests on other peoples podcasts. This is how they are able to attract people to their cause without ever having to “build an audience.”

It may be a small digital product built around a problem you understand deeply, it might be coaching or a community…there are many ways to do this. Which one you decide to take depends on your own unique situation.

At this stage, revenue is secondary. You have your job to take care of that.

The priority is that something exists with your name on it that does not disappear if your company restructures.

That is the early architecture of leverage.

This is not quiet quitting. People are often worried that they will get fired because their performance will suffer at work.

The reality is actually the opposite. Once you begin building a parallel path it actually improves your experience of work and can improve your performance in a very real way.

When you start capturing ideas and insights it pulls you into the present, it awakens your curiosity and helps to make connections that otherwise would not have been important.

I take inspiration from the conversations I have with customers. They serve as real life examples for the human psychology and behavioural dynamics that I like to read about and weave into my writing.

When you are no longer psychologically fused to one structure, you negotiate differently. You show up with less anxiety. You make decisions from a broader base of identity and it builds your confidence.

You are still committed, just no longer concentrated.

The all-in narrative tells you to burn the boats.

The parallel path builds a second vessel before you consider moving harbours.

Instead of backing into a corner and treating yourself like a caged animal look outward. Build a second vessel that can carry not only your financial burdens but questions of meaning and purpose as well.

There is nothing shameful or weak about this path it is a strategic plan with long term sustainability built into its core.

In the next piece, we will go deeper into time allocation, what qualifies as an asset and why your first one is rarely a product but almost always intellectual capital.

For now, the only question that matters is:

Where will the next five years of your best thinking settle?

A series of coincidences led me down this road and it turned out I was pretty good at it. I understood people, I knew how to perform inside hierarchical systems. Like most people, I assumed that if I kept progressing everything else would eventually make sense. So I pulled the only lever I knew how to. I chased promotions and in my line of work the only way up was management.

I moved up every year. I took on more responsibility, larger teams, better titles and eventually, I was approached by a rival brand and offered a role with a 50% salary increase and generous commission structure.

On paper, it looked like success. Inside almost nothing improved, in fact I felt worse.

My income had increased but so had everything else. My responsibilities multiplied. My time at work expanded. The emotional weight of managing people grew heavier. The margin for error shrank. The expectations around availability increased, and worst of all the room to say no disappeared.

I had more money but also more stress, less energy, and fewer options. It was through this process where I learned that salary does not rise in isolation. It pulls other variables with it. In all fairness you learn a lot from moving through an institutional hierarchy but it also takes a lot from you, well at least it did from me. Time, cognitive load, emotional labour and stress exposure were all put under immense pressure.

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At some point, sitting in yet another management meeting, staring at a calendar I no longer recognised as my own, something became uncomfortably clear.

My options were not increasing, I was actually just becoming more embedded. More specialised, more entangled and more dependent on a system I didn’t control. All of this because I was optimising for income instead of something else which would have served me far better: leverage

Leverage as psychological sovereignty

When people talk about leverage, they usually mean it in an economic sense. The word gets used as a kind of shorthand for scale. That is the core argument in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Naval reduces leverage to a deceptively simple idea: fortunes are built when specific knowledge is paired with a scalable medium, whether that is capital, code, or media.

Long before that, The Sovereign Individual made a broader claim about the weakening grip of large institutions under technological and economic pressure, and the corresponding need for individuals to develop portable forms of power.

Even the more mainstream personal finance books orbit the same distinction in simpler terms. Rich Dad Poor Dad is essentially a long meditation on the difference between income tied to your time and income derived from assets.

All of these frameworks circle a similar insight, but they tend to stop at the same place. They treat leverage primarily as an instrument of wealth and a way of escaping the ceiling imposed by selling hours for money.

That is a coherent use of the concept. It is not what matters most to me. In that managerial role I felt that my entire future, not just money, was increasingly tightly coupled to a narrow set of conditions.

• A specific role.

• A specific organisation.

• A specific income stream.

• A specific version of myself.

When any one of those is threatened everything starts to wobble, because the architecture of that kind of life requires continued high performance inside a very particular configuration.

So when I talk about leverage I am talking about changing the structure of dependence and reducing how much of your psychological safety, identity, and future optionality is staked on your ability to keep functioning at a high level inside one narrow system.

Leverage, in this sense, is not a wealth strategy. It is a sovereignty strategy and it is relevant to the creator economy and all those operating within it.

So what does that mean in practice?

The creator economy can reproduce the very same architecture with even tighter restrictions. A creator who posts daily to remain visible, who studies algorithms obsessively and who measures self-worth through engagement metrics, may believe they have escaped institutional dependence. They are independent, after all. They are not salaried. They are building something of their own, and yet the structure can look strikingly similar.

Income tied to platforms, visibility tied to algorithms and reputation tied to the volatile moods of a market that is not personally negotiable. At least in a job you can talk to your boss or colleagues or HR. In the creator economy there is not room for that. Creative output is all too often shaped by what performs rather than what endures. So in this case the dependency has simply shifted from employer to platform.

In both cases, effort is concentrated. It flows into one channel and is validated by one system. This is where leverage becomes more than a financial concept.

Leverage, in the sense that matters here, is the degree to which your effort leaves residue outside the system that currently rewards it. Residue means that something persists beyond the immediate transaction.

A body of work that can be discovered independently of a feed. An email list that is not subject to algorithmic suppression. A reputation that travels through word of mouth rather than trending pages or a small product that continues to generate income without requiring daily visibility.

Sovereignty, then, is not isolation. It is not the fantasy of being entirely self-contained. It is the reduction of single-point vulnerability and the capacity to endure shifts in one system because not everything you have built is anchored there.

In both cases, income can rise while manoeuvrability and optionality shrink. The question is not whether you are employed or independent. The question is whether your effort is settling in more than one place.

If your salary disappears when you leave the company, and your audience disappears when an algorithm shifts, the underlying architecture and result is the same. It may feel different but the underlying vulnerabilty remains.

This is why leverage must be understood as positional rather than merely financial. It is about where your stability resides and how many pillars hold it up. Once that shift in perspective occurs, the conversation changes. It is no longer about quitting or doubling down. It becomes about how to widen the base without collapsing what already exists.

That widening is what I mean when I speak about sovereignty, and it is the logic that leads naturally to what I call Dual Positioning.

It doesn’t have to be either or

Over time, the difference between these two trajectories becomes visible in how much friction surrounds the idea of change. I began to notice this first in myself.

Every meaningful salary increase I received, arrived alongside an expansion of responsibility, scope, and psychological load. More people to manage, more outcomes attached to my name, more problems to solve.

At a certain point, it became clear that I was optimising for income in a way that was reducing my autonomy and potential for change.

So I stepped off the path.

I took a pay cut. I moved into an adjacent industry and a role with less responsibility, less managerial scope, and significantly less mental strain. Few people understood this. From the outside it looked like a step backward, and in many ways it was.

I lost the status attached to my title and I was earning less. But the immediate benefit I experienced was cognitive. I had enough mental space again to think beyond the next operational problem. I could write, experiment, and begin directing a portion of my effort toward building things that existed outside a single employer.

None of this happened quickly. What changed was where I started to direct my energy and attention. This is what I have come to describe as dual positioning which is simply the decision to stop concentrating your entire future in one place.

You can keep the job, you can honour the responsibilities, but you no longer treat it as the sole container of your ambition, identity, and income.

At the same time, you begin building something that exists outside it, a body of work, a reputation, a small stream of independent revenue or intellectual property attached to your name rather than your title.

The point is not to quit, and it is not to double your workload for the sake of it. It is to widen the base beneath your life so that progress is no longer measured only by how far you can climb inside one structure.

Last year, I reached an amazing milestone (for me). I replaced the income I had given up when I left my previous career through a patchwork of sponsors, digital products, and platform revenue.

On paper, the income number is roughly the same as it was 3 years ago. Structurally, my life is fundamentally different.

Income is no longer tightly coupled to rising stress and widening managerial gravity. My options are no longer determined almost entirely by one organisation’s internal priorities. My creative business does not have to carry the full weight of my existence meaning I am not forced to compromise my integrity because the bills need to be paid.

This is why I am careful about treating leverage as a wealth concept.

For me, leverage has been primarily a positional and psychological shift before it has been a financial one. It changed how I relate to risk, how I relate to authority, and how I relate to my own time.

That, ultimately, is the distinction.

Income optimisation tends to move people toward lives that become heavier as they progress.

Leverage-oriented effort, imperfect and uneven as it is, tends to move people toward lives that become more flexible over time.

Both paths require work. Both involve sacrifice but they produce very different inner lives and once you have experienced the difference between earning more and becoming less dependent, it becomes difficult to return to the old definition of what progress is supposed to mean.

If any of this resonates, the shift that I am trying to articulate is not an abrupt flash of insight as it is almost always described. You must understand that this takes repeated micro decisions over a long period of time. It is a gradual process.

Most people organise their working lives around one central question:

How do I earn more?

Income-oriented thinking spends time in exchange for money.

Leverage-oriented thinking invests time in things that may not pay immediately but have the capacity to keep working after the initial effort has been made.

This is a subtle shift. It will not impress people at dinner parties. It will be wrought with frustration and self doubt, but over time it begins to change the texture of your life.

You begin to sense that you are building something that exists slightly to the side of the main current rather than being carried entirely inside it.

That is what leverage looks like at human scale. The gradual construction of a life that does not collapse if one pillar weakens.

Thanks for reading if this resonated why not send it to a friend.

P.s

I’m working on the paid tier of my Substack for readers who want to stay close to this line of thinking as they apply it to their own work and income. More to come soon

Are you inconsistent?

Do you lack motivation?

Has your output stalled?

Good. I have the solution. You need a content calendar.

I’m sure we’ve all heard this before, and to be fair, for some people, it may be the magic solution.

If you are naturally chaotic and tend to avoid any form of structure, a calendar can function as a forcing mechanism.

If you are producing content primarily as a marketing exercise — to promote a product, support a funnel, or fill distribution channels — a calendar can be a practical operational tool.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But if you are reading this, I’m willing to guess that isn’t the primary reason you write.

You write to explore your own thinking. You write to develop a clearer relationship to a subject. To understand something more deeply and to connect with others who feel the same tension.

If that describes you, the content calendar creates a very different set of effects.

On the surface, this automated systemisation looks like structured discipline. Underneath it, something more emotional is happening.

The content calendar tries to remove you from the equation. It attempts to build a system that will carry you on the days when you feel flat, uncertain, distracted, or unconvinced by your own ideas. Which is understandable, but it also reveals a deeper fear.

You don’t fully trust that your thinking will keep showing up or that you will know what matters next. So you try to pre-decide it. You try to lock the future into place while you are in a relatively clear state, in the hope that future-you can simply execute.

This is what automation promises. Predictability. A hedge against uncertainty. In a deeper sense, a bet against your own ability to think through discomfort.

The problem is that writing, or by extension thinking, does not break down cleanly into predictable units, and thinking is not a linear production process.

It moves in surges, stalls, returns, and long periods of quiet accumulation. When you impose a calendar onto that, the calendar doesn’t adapt to your thinking. Your thinking adapts to the calendar. That is where the first distortion appears.

Instead of following a line of thought until it deepens, you begin scanning for something that will fit the next available slot. It becomes about ticking a box or completing a check list. Even when you have something prepared, a low-level anxiety starts to build because tomorrow already exists in the calendar too.

Once writing is tied to dates, it becomes something you owe rather than something you enter into. You basically start the week in debt and every word written is an attempt to settle that content debt and get to zero again.

Energy and attention start to matter less than obligation. You show up because the plan says so, not because the idea is pulling you.

This might seem like an inconsequential distinction, but it touches the foundations of motivation and desire itself.

You cannot brute-force motivation or desire. It has to be cultivated. You can build a vague interest into something powerful, but it’s a delicate process.

Lighting a fire begins long before a flame appears. The kindling has to be arranged so that enough oxygen can move through the smaller pieces before the larger logs catch.

A content calendar is like getting a stack of logs built and ready to burn before you’ve even built the fire.

Over time, this creates a quiet resentment toward your own practice. A dull sense that writing has become another task you need to get done.

Almost everyone who started writing at the same time as me has disappeared. Some lasted six months. Others not even three and ironically many of them were writing about discipline, motivation and productivity. It wasn’t because they lacked talent. But because they oriented themselves toward output and an imagined end result rather than the lived process of thinking on the page.

People often mislabel this as a discipline problem. It isn’t. It’s a structural problem.

A content calendar trains you to think in outputs rather than in ideas or tensions. Which is why content calendars so often produce the opposite of what they promise. They are designed to manufacture consistency while gradually eroding coherence. And coherence, not punctuality, is what actually compounds.

The Alternative: Organise Around Ideas, Not Dates

If the problem with the content calendar is that it mechanises thinking, the solution is not to remove structure altogether. It is to choose a structure that respects how thinking actually moves.

Thinking does not move in straight lines. It circles. It returns. It deepens. It gets stuck. It re-emerges months later in a clearer form.

A rigid calendar ignores that. A rhythm accommodates it. The difference between rigid structure and rhythm is simple.

Rigid structure assumes that output should occur at fixed intervals regardless of internal state. Rhythm assumes that attention and energy fluctuate, but that certain ideas keep returning.

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This is an internal shift. If you are aligned to your natural rythm and energy then output is not a problem - that is the point I’m trying to get across. You don’t need productivity hacks or organisational tools because the output is the inevitable result of alignment.

Instead of organising your writing around Tuesday and Thursday, you organise it around a small number of ongoing tensions. Questions you are genuinely trying to answer. Ideas that refuse to leave you alone. Themes that resurface in different forms over time. That gives you continuity without forcing artificial punctuality. It also changes what “consistency” means.

Consistency stops meaning “did I publish on the agreed day?” It starts meaning “am I developing this body of thought in a coherent direction?”

That is a much harder metric. It cannot be automated. But it compounds.

When you organise around ideas rather than dates, your writing begins to feel cumulative. Pieces connect. Arguments evolve. Readers begin to recognise your terrain and you’re not filling slots.

You are building a body of work, and that body of work does not depend on whether it was published on Thursday. It depends on whether it deepens over time.

This is an internal shift with a focus on on longevity.

So to illustrate this further I want to share my journey with short-form writing

I didn’t arrive at this perspective because I have some ideological opposition to a content calendar. I tried content calendars, of course I did. But I found that it increased my stress level and did the opposite if what the productivity gurus were proposing.

I struggled with short-form more than I expected to. For a long time I actively resisted it. I didn’t enjoy consuming it and I had no desire to create it, largely because I could feel what it was doing to my attention.

It scattered me in a way that felt subtle at first and then increasingly obvious, pulling me out of longer arcs of thought and replacing them with a kind of surface-level grazing that left me busy but not particularly grounded.

When Substack introduced Notes, I decided to treat it as an experiment rather than a commitment. I gave myself a few months to see whether my initial resistance was pointing at something structural or simply at unfamiliarity.

What became clear fairly quickly was that my instinct had not been wrong. Short-form did scatter my attention. It did make it harder to remain inside a single line of thought for extended periods of time. But it also revealed something I had been avoiding.

The real problem was not short-form itself. It was that I had no organising principle capable of holding many small pieces inside a coherent whole.

Up until that point, even though I had done away with a formal content calendar, I was still operating under the same underlying logic. Post regularly. Keep things moving. Trust that volume and repetition would eventually produce momentum. That assumption turns out to be false. Momentum does not emerge automatically from activity. It has to be designed.

So instead of trying to get better at scheduling, I started paying attention to the internal structure of my thinking. I began asking a different class of questions. Not what I wanted to post tomorrow, but what I kept returning to over and over again. What tensions seemed to follow me across months and across projects. What ideas continued to reappear regardless of what I thought I should be focusing on.

Over time, a pattern became visible. There were only a handful of core tensions that I was actually exploring. Variations of the same underlying concerns showing up in different language and from different angles.

The friction between productivity and creativity. The tension between structure and chaos. The relationship between output and input. Questions about identity, authorship, and what it means to build something slowly in public.

Once I could see those, the organising principle became obvious. Instead of organising my writing around dates, I began organising it around those tensions.

That shift solved a number of problems at once. When something catches my attention during the day, I no longer ask myself where it fits in a posting schedule. I ask myself which tension it belongs to and whether it deepens a line of thought I am already in conversation with. Writing becomes less about generating isolated pieces and more about extending an ongoing inquiry.

I do use Notion. I do keep lists. I usually have multiple essays in progress at the same time. I have a rough sense of how often I want to publish long-form, typically somewhere in the range of two to four pieces a month.

What I don’t have is a rigid publishing calendar that dictates what must exist on a specific day. There is direction, intention and structure. But that structure is thematic rather than temporal.

This is what I mean by rhythm.

There is a shape to the work, and that shape comes from the continuity of attention rather than from externally imposed timestamps. It feels less like managing a production line and more like staying in relationship with a body of thought as it slowly clarifies itself.

That difference may sound subtle. In practice, it changes everything. Check out the 15 Note System for more on short-form

If you take one thing away, let be this:

The alternative to the content calendar is not chaos or waiting around for inspiration.

It is a different relationship to structure. One that starts from the inside rather than the outside. Instead of asking yourself how often you should post, you start paying attention to what you keep returning to.

Instead of deciding in advance what future-you must produce, you begin noticing which questions are slowly organising your thinking.

Instead of measuring consistency by timestamps, you measure it by continuity.

• Are you still in conversation with the same underlying tensions?

• Are your ideas deepening, even if unevenly?

• Are you building a body of thought rather than a pile of posts?

This orientation does not make writing easier. It makes it more honest. You still have to sit down. You still have to think. You still have to tolerate uncertainty.

But you are no longer trying to turn yourself into a machine in order to feel legitimate. You are building a rhythm that can stretch, contract, pause, and resume without breaking. Over long enough time, that kind of rhythm does something a calendar never can.

It produces coherence. And coherence is what people actually follow. Not because you showed up on Thursday. But because, slowly and unmistakably, a mind became visible on the page.

I know this might come across as an abstract shift but believe me it is huge. I can’t remember the last time I had writers block and I have zero anxiety around publishing. The ideas just keep flowing and I put it largely down to this.

Later this year I’m opening a paid tier for readers who want to stay close to this line of thinking as they apply it to their own work and income. More on that soon

I hope this helps.

Take care

Ben.

It was presented as the sensible option and the safest investment I could make in myself. Under Tony Blair’s government, higher education was aggressively expanded, participation targets were celebrated, and the message was clear: More education meant more opportunity.

At the time, it felt like a rational response to the world as it was described to me. And even now, it’s hard to say that the decision itself was wrong. Education does change how you think. It can open doors and, at least back then, it did still confer a certain kind of legitimacy.

But when something becomes almost universal it loses its signalling power.

What almost no one said out loud was that the system those instructions were designed for was already dissolving, and the world we were being prepared for no longer existed in the form we had inherited it.

The unsettling part is that the advice stayed the same long after the conditions that made it true had disappeared. And that’s where the trouble begins.

The Effort Myth (follow the social script…)

For much of the post-war period, particularly from the 1950s through to the late 1980s, a specific set of conditions made the old forms of effort a rational long-term strategy for large numbers of people. This created enough predictability for a shared social script to persist. One of those conditions was scarcity.

University degrees, professional credentials, and managerial skills were not widely distributed. When you invested effort into acquiring them, the signal was strong. A degree didn’t just demonstrate competence; it differentiated you. That differentiation gave effort leverage. It allowed time spent studying, training, or apprenticing to translate into status and income because there were fewer people competing with the same markers.

Another condition was the structure of internal labour markets.

Large organisations hired with the expectation of retention. Training someone was expensive. Losing them was costly. As a result, companies were incentivised to promote from within, develop people over time, and reward loyalty with progression. You could reasonably expect that showing up, improving, and taking responsibility would increase your value inside the system that employed you.

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That made effort legible. You could see how today’s work connected to tomorrow’s position. There was also the matter of restricted competition. Most people were not competing with the whole world. They were competing within national or local labour markets, protected industries, and relatively stable professional ecosystems.

Globalisation existed, but it hadn’t yet collapsed wage differentials or turned entire skill categories into commodities. Effort paid because the field it was applied to was finite.

The rate of technological change was still manageable. Skills remained relevant long enough for effort to amortise. You could spend years mastering a craft, a trade, or a profession without the underlying tools changing out from under you every eighteen months. This temporal stability mattered. It meant that effort had time to compound before being invalidated.

Put simply, effort worked because the environment allowed accumulation.

None of this implies that the system was fair. It wasn’t. Many people were excluded entirely. Others were trapped despite working relentlessly. But for a broad cohort, particularly those inside expanding middle classes and institutional careers, effort aligned with structure often enough to become culturally encoded as truth.

That alignment produced the powerful belief that If you followed the rules, progress would follow you.

Now before I start sounding like an old man romanticising the past this isn’t an argument about decline in values or work ethic. It’s an argument about altered incentives.

The surface rituals of the old system remain (degrees, careers, promotions, performance reviews) but what you have to understand is that the underlying mechanics no longer operate in the same way.

The important point is that the script didn’t update when the system did. The language of ladders, careers, and steady progression survived long after the conditions that made them reliable had eroded. We kept teaching people how to behave inside institutions that could no longer reward them proportionally.

That lag, between inherited expectations and present-day reality, is where confusion sets in.

The Silent System Shift (where the rules actually changed)

The first shift was from progression to scale.

In older systems, advancement was largely linear. You moved through defined stages. Effort accumulated as seniority, reputation, or responsibility. Today, many systems reward scale instead, not depth. Visibility outperforms mastery and distribution outperforms contribution. Being seen matters more than being good, because scale unlocks leverage.

This doesn’t make quality irrelevant. But it changes its role. Quality is now necessary but insufficient. Without a mechanism for amplification, it plateaus.

The second shift was from proportionality to asymmetry.

In linear systems, effort and reward were imperfect but correlated. In asymmetrical systems outcomes concentrate. A small number of people capture disproportionate returns, while the majority compete for scraps of attention, security, or income.

This is not a moral failure. It’s a property of scale. Once rewards are uncapped and distribution is frictionless, inequality becomes structural.

The result is a winner-takes-most environment in which marginal improvements in position produce exponential differences in outcome. Effort still matters, but position matters more.

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The third shift was from labour to leverage.

Platforms, algorithms, and global markets don’t reward how hard you work. They reward how effectively your work is multiplied. Someone with reach can outperform someone with ten times the skill simply because their effort travels further. This isn’t new in theory, but it is new in reach and intensity.

Most people were never taught to think in these terms. They were trained to be reliable, competent, and conscientious inside systems that now extract those qualities without reciprocating them.

This is where the idea of the hollowed-out middle becomes visible. Middle-income careers are squeezed as value concentrates at the top and routine work is automated or outsourced.

Mid-sized creators produce consistently and competently, but remain invisible without distribution. Generalists become interchangeable. Loyal employees discover that loyalty has become optional, on one side only.

From the outside, the system still looks familiar. From the inside, it behaves very differently, in short the system no longer rewards contribution but position.

Once that shift occurs, effort doesn’t stop mattering, but it stops compounding on its own. Without leverage, ownership, or distribution, effort becomes motion without momentum.

And because the change was gradual, many people didn’t notice it happening. They simply felt the pressure increase. More effort for the same return. More compliance for less security. More output for diminishing impact.

By the time the mismatch becomes conscious, the instinctive response is almost always the same. Push harder.

People Feel Burnt Out But Can’t Explain Why

What many people describe as burnout today isn’t the result of working too hard. It’s the result of working hard inside systems where effort no longer compounds in the way they were taught to expect.

When effort is misapplied, the body notices before the mind does. The first response is almost always to increase intensity. To become more disciplined. More organised. More efficient. Productivity tools multiply. Morning routines harden. Goals are refined. Output increases.

But the returns don’t. Promotions fail to change anything meaningful. Visibility plateaus. Income stagnates. The sense of progress becomes thinner and more fragile, even as the workload grows heavier. So people adjust the wrong variable.

They stack productivity systems on top of one another. They chase marginal gains inside structures that no longer reward marginal improvement. They post more frequently without changing how their work travels. They say yes to more responsibility in order to remain “relevant,” even when relevance itself has become unstable.

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This is how performance poisoning sets in.

Effort stops being a means to an end and becomes part of identity. Being busy becomes evidence of worth. Pushing harder feels virtuous, even as the emotional return decays. Rest starts to feel like failure rather than recovery.

At this point, exhaustion is often misdiagnosed as a motivation problem.

People tell themselves they’ve lost discipline. That they’re slipping. That others must simply want it more. The possibility that the system itself has changed rarely enters the picture, because the old rules still feel morally compelling.

When effort loses its multiplier, the result isn’t immediate failure. It’s prolonged friction. The slow erosion of energy. The sense of pushing against something that doesn’t move, without being able to name what it is.

That’s why burnout today often feels confusing. Nothing is obviously wrong. You’re still competent. Still capable. Still trying. It’s just that the returns have thinned, and once effort stops compounding, pushing harder doesn’t fix the problem. It deepens it.

The Core Diagnosis: Effort Lost Its Multiplier

Effort itself didn’t break.

That’s the mistake most people make when they try to understand what’s going on. They assume something is wrong with them because effort no longer produces the returns it once promised.

But effort is neutral. It always has been. What determines whether effort compounds is not intensity, but context. The surrounding structure decides whether work accumulates into momentum or dissipates into friction.

For much of the last century, institutions provided that multiplier by default. You didn’t have to think about it. Effort placed inside the right organisation, profession, or career path carried embedded leverage. Time served increased standing. Competence increased security. Responsibility increased authority. The system itself amplified your input.

That multiplier has been withdrawn. In many modern environments, effort still produces output, but output no longer accumulates into position. You can work harder without becoming more secure. You can become more competent without becoming more valuable. You can take on responsibility without gaining influence.

The connection between effort and outcome hasn’t vanished. It’s just weakened to the point where it no longer feels trustworthy.

Once you see this clearly, the usual advice starts to sound hollow. Work harder. Be more disciplined. Want it more. None of that addresses the missing multiplier.

And without a multiplier, effort becomes maintenance. It keeps things from collapsing, but it doesn’t build anything new.

This is the point where the question shifts.

Not “How do I work harder?”

But “Where does effort still compound, and why?”

That question changes everything.

The New Leverage Equation (there are Trade-Offs)

Once effort loses its built-in multiplier, it has to be paired with something else to compound at all. This is what I will call leverage.

That word tends to trigger the wrong associations. I’m not talking about growth hacks or exploitation. Leverage, in this context, is not about doing less work. It’s about ensuring that work has somewhere to accumulate.

In today’s environment, effort compounds only when it is paired with a small number of structural conditions.

1. Identity clarity.

I talk about this a lot. Simply because it is the step that is always glossed over, so much so that people don’t even see it as a step. They just assume they know who they are and what they want. It is only six months later that they start to have an existential crisis when what they thought they wanted doesn’t materialise.

When effort no longer compounds by default, focus becomes a form of leverage. Knowing what you are building, who it is for, and what you are willing to ignore determines whether effort concentrates or disperses.

Identity clarity reduces noise. It sharpens signal. It allows repetition to deepen rather than dilute. Without this all the usual advice of “just keep showing up” will not lead forward. It will keep you stuck in the same place.

The cost of a clear identity is real. You lose optionality. You disappoint people. You say no more often than feels comfortable. But without this constraint, effort fragments across too many directions to accumulate anywhere meaningful.

2. Distribution and ownership.

In asymmetrical systems, effort that cannot travel stalls quickly. Work that remains trapped inside structures you do not control may improve the system, the platform, or the organisation, but it rarely compounds for the person producing it.

This is easiest to see in employment.

You can be competent, reliable, and increasingly responsible inside an organisation for years and still remain structurally capped. Your effort improves internal outcomes but none of that necessarily increases your external leverage. The value you create is legible inside the institution, but invisible outside it.

When you leave, very little travels with you. The same pattern shows up in digital work.

You can publish consistently on a platform that controls distribution, ranking, and visibility. You can produce high-quality work for months or years and still be one algorithm change away from irrelevance. The platform benefits from your output. Your audience attention is rented, not owned. Your effort accumulates for the system, not for you.

This is why discoverability matters but it’s not enough. Discoverability determines whether effort is seen. Ownership determines whether effort stays.

Ownership doesn’t require grand independence or total autonomy. It simply means that when effort produces attention, trust, or connection, it has somewhere durable to accumulate. An email list you control. A body of work that remains accessible. A reputation that persists beyond a single employer or platform.

Without this, effort resets more often than people realise. Each job change. Each platform shift. Each restructuring or policy update quietly wipes the slate clean.

Of course, there are costs.

Building work that travels exposes you earlier than feels comfortable. You are seen before you are finished. You risk misunderstanding. You give up the safety of invisibility. And there are no guarantees. Distribution is uneven. Attention is volatile. Control is partial at best.

But effort that has no path outward has no memory. It can be intense, impressive, even praised and still leave you exactly where you started.

Effort that can travel, and has somewhere to land, at least has the possibility of accumulating over time. Not because it is louder or faster, but because it is not erased the moment the context changes. That is the difference between effort that compounds and effort that merely performs.

3. The slow construction of trust assets.

Trust compounds through consistency, coherence, and memory. People return because they recognise something. They stay because it feels reliable. Over time, that recognition reduces friction. Each new piece of work doesn’t have to start from zero.

The cost here is patience. This kind of leverage is slow. It resists optimisation. It cannot be forced without collapsing into performance. But without trust, effort remains disposable.

4. Creative sovereignty.

This is the ability to decide how effort is applied, when it is withdrawn, and what trade-offs are acceptable. Without some degree of sovereignty, effort is constantly redirected by incentives you did not choose.

The price is predictability. Safety. Clear ladders. You trade certainty for coherence. But without sovereignty, effort compounds for whoever controls the system, not for the person supplying it.

Taken together, these conditions don’t guarantee success. They don’t eliminate risk. And they are not available to everyone in the same way or at the same time.

But without them, effort becomes repetitive motion. Productive, sometimes impressive, but structurally capped.

Without leverage, effort turns into maintenance. It keeps things running. It rarely changes the direction.

And that is the quiet shift many people are feeling without yet having the language to describe it.

Ok this was a long one. I will get back to more practical letters in the coming weeks but the context matters.

If you need help with short form check out The 15 note System.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Ben

It’s the story of scale. That platforms crown a handful of winners while the rest perform endlessly in the hope of being noticed. For a long time, that story was largely true, in fact you could even say that in some ways, it’s become more extreme.

The major platforms are more consolidated than ever. Visibility is more top-heavy. Algorithms are less forgiving, less transparent, and far less meritocratic than they were a decade ago. A small percentage of creators capture a disproportionate share of reach, revenue, and cultural relevance. If your goal is mass attention, the game is harder, riskier, and more extractive than it’s ever been.

But beneath the noise something else has changed. Scale is no longer the only viable path because over the last decade, monetisation has decoupled from mass attention.

Subscriptions (e.g. Substack, Patreon or Ghost), direct payments (e.g Stripe, Gumroad, Lemon queezy), services (Marketing, copy writing, editing, coaching…), communities, and small digital products have made it possible to earn a living without winning the algorithmic lottery.

You don’t need millions of views. You need trust, clarity, and a small group of people who care enough to stay.

What’s actually emerging isn’t the end of scale, it’s a parallel economy. An internet middle class that isn’t defined by fame or reach, but by sovereignty.

Creators building small, coherent systems that don’t collapse every time an algorithm looks away. This isn’t a prediction about where the internet might go. It’s a description of what’s already happening, just not where most people are looking.

If this is the landscape, then the question changes. The question is no longer how to grow faster, or how to be seen by more people. Those are optimisation problems inside a game that is already stacked. The real question is what to build when attention is volatile, platforms are unstable, and visibility is increasingly concentrated at the top.

The answer, for me at least, isn’t more output. It’s structure. When mass reach becomes unreliable, coherence becomes the asset. This is why the most resilient creators aren’t chasing virality. They’re building small, durable ecosystems.

I. The Cultural-Economic Shift That Made This Possible

This rise is not accidental. It is a response to deeper social forces, forces many people feel in their bodies long before they ever name them.

Institutions are failing to provide coherence. Workplaces feel precarious. Media feels untrustworthy. Platforms feel unpredictable and the social contract feels thin.

When the external world destabilises, people instinctively seek stability elsewhere. This is why small creators with depth, clarity, and a stable point of view are becoming more important than the giant personalities the internet once celebrated. The cultural appetite has shifted. Scale feels hollow, authenticity feels rare and people crave guidance, coherence, interpretation.

We are entering an era where meaning decentralises, and wherever meaning decentralises, a middle class emerges.

You won’t find this story in headlines, because it doesn’t make for explosive growth charts. But the pattern is everywhere if you pay attention.

On Patreon, thousands of creators earn stable, modest monthly income, enough to create autonomy.

On Substack, the gravitational centre of the platform isn’t the stars, it’s the mid-sized writers with two thousand subscribers, deep resonance, and a loyal, trusting readership.

On YouTube, the channels that endure aren’t the viral giants, they are the creators with twenty or thirty thousand subscribers whose work is steady, and structurally sound, meaning does not require a huge amount of effort or force for them to publish their work.

Across digital platforms, the same phenomenon repeats: The most stable creators are not the biggest, they’re the best-architected. They are the ones who build slowly, deliberately and with clarity.

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II. How to Join the Internet Middle Class

Step 1: Define the Territory Only You Can Occupy

Start with identity. Not in the vague, personal brand sense, but in the neurological sense. Do not underestimate this step. If you have a degree of self awareness and some in demand skills then it will be relatively easy, if not this could be a long journey of reflection and self discovery.

The thing to understand here is that doing this has multiple layers of benefit. The very act of doing the work to define your territory, and to develop your unique point of view and how to articulate it is of huge benefit in and of itself. If nothing else it helps you to understand yourself better, and as the most important relationship you will evenr have is the one with yourself. This step should not be rushed.

Humans follow clarity. If you’re unclear on what you stand for, your audience won’t feel safe trusting you. Choose a theme, some kind of tension, develop a worldview, and stay there long enough for coherence to emerge.

This is your creative territory. Name it. Defend it. Build from it.

Step 2: Replace Adrenaline with Infrastructure

Most creators burn out because they rely on motivation instead of systems.

You need an internal architecture — a repeatable workflow for collecting, shaping, and publishing ideas without starting from zero every time. This is how creativity becomes a natural rhythm that does not require force or discipline. I have never understand the obsession with discipline. My goal is to set my life up in such a way so that discipline and force are not necessary.

I found (sometimes still do) short-form very difficult. Instead of avoiding it I developed my own System which has made it a key part of my creative process. Not just in terms of output but as an actual ideas lab, a way that develops my own point of view and speaks to the people who I want to attract.

Step 3: Build Trust Before Reach

Trust is the rarest and most durable currency in the post-hype era. Forget going viral. Write Notes that resonate (most importantly with you, not some imagined audience avatar).

Tell stories only you can tell…because you have lived and are still living life in the real world. You have private conversations, emotional experiences and glean insights from what you do on a daily basis. Be consistent enough to be recognisable, and honest enough to be respected. This will take time but it is far better to attract a few people who are fully aligned than a lot of people who will never open an email from you.

Real trust doesn’t scale fast it compounds slowly over time.

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Step 4: Monetise Through Meaning

Once trust exists, monetisation becomes ethical. It doesn’t feel extractive, quite the opposite, it feels like fair exchange, like you are actually helping someone come to important decisions and make a transformation they’ve been trying to achieve for years.

This is what the cynics and starving artists fail to understand. You must find a way to make an offer that feels authentic and fully aligned with your voice. The best offers are an extension of your existing work. and believe me I am speaking from personal experience here. I was so terrified of selling that I gave my first product away for free. As an afterthought I added the option to tip which changed my whole perspective on value exchange.

It is difficult to attach time frames to this as it depends on so many variables. I know people who started monetising from day 1 and others who spend 3 years developing their point of view and building trust before launching any kind of product or service.

What is your end goal and what are you willing to tolerate or sacrifice? Ultimately it all comes down to those two questions.

Think of your offer as a continuation of your writing, the reader pays not just for information, but for the deeper transformation. This is how small creators build income that lasts.

Step 5: Design a Sovereign Ecosystem

Don’t rely on any one platform. The new middle class doesn’t live in the algorithm, it builds from email lists, owned products, diversified income, and long-term relationships.

III. The Quiet Transformation Underneath All of This

If you read between the lines of this shift, something larger is happening, something cultural, not just economic.

People are turning toward individuals to make sense of the world. Not institutions. or corporations. Not mass media but individuals. People they trust. People who speak clearly. People who build with intention. People who are stable enough to offer meaning in an unstable age.

This is why the rise of the internet’s middle class matters. The sovereign creator is becoming a stabilising force in a world where almost every traditional structure is losing its grip, and this shift will define the next decade of online life.

If you want to begin building your own architecture the 15-Note System is what I created for myself. It turns scattered ideas into consistent, resonant short-form that builds trust, a clearly defined world view, and momentum over time….and even if you don’t check it out spend some time developing your own system that is tailored to your specific circumstances.

Enjoy the rest of you day,

Ben

The story was that you chose a career, committed to a path, trusted the system to reward consistency, and assumed the structures around you would hold.

But much of that has shifted. There is so much instability in all areas of life it becomes difficult to focus on anything real.

Companies restructure at the speed of a bad quarter. Governments lurch from crisis to crisis with no coherent strategy for the future.

Media institutions collapses under their own contradictions. Social platforms rise, fall, pivot, and reinvent themselves without warning.

Communities polarise, trust thins, norms dissolve…it’s a lot.

For many people, this instability feels personal, as if their confusion signals a private failure of discipline or direction. But the truth is far more structural because we are living through an age of institutional fragility.

The systems that once anchored identity are no longer strong enough to carry the weight of a whole life. And midlife adults feel this fracture most sharply, because we were raised to trust institutions that no longer resemble what we were promised.

It is important to realise that it’s not you who’s failing but the structure around you that is. And the question that emerges — the question millions of people feel but almost no one articulates — is painfully simple:

How do you build something meaningful in a world where the structures meant to support you keep collapsing?

To answer that, I need to tell you a story.

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I. When the Structure Beneath Me Finally Gave Way

For a long time, I didn’t question the system I was in.

Luxury retail rewarded ambition, precision, and performance. I worked hard, climbed steadily, took on responsibility, made myself useful in the ways the company valued.

That was the deal. You give the system what it wants, and in return, it gives you direction, identity, and a sense of belonging.

But the cracks revealed themselves long before I had the courage to acknowledge them.

I was brought into a new company with a broken team. There was a mix of entrenched dysfunction, misaligned incentives, and overlapping resentments. On paper, the task was simple: fix the culture, improve the numbers, bring clarity where there was chaos.

But beneath the surface, I encountered a truth most people never say out loud:

Institutions don’t fail because of bad people, they fail because the structure rewards the wrong behaviour.

The more clearly I saw this, the harder it became to pretend the system could be corrected from within. It wasn’t a matter of effort, or training, or even leadership.

The incentives were misaligned, and everyone inside that system was trapped by them — including me.

What followed wasn’t a brave pivot. It was collapse. Exhaustion arrived first. Then disillusionment. Then the slow recognition that the system could not give me what I had been taught to expect from it.

Leaving didn’t feel empowering; it felt like the ground had dissolved beneath me. And yet, that collapse became the beginning of something else, a quieter question:

If the institution can no longer hold me, what can? The answer was uncomfortable, but honest:

Only something I build myself.

II. The Modern Crisis: Building Lives on Shifting Ground

The instability we feel today isn’t just psychological; it’s also architectural.

• The workplace no longer guarantees continuity.

• The political landscape no longer provides coherence.

• The media no longer supplies a shared reality.

• The social fabric no longer ensures belonging.

• And digital platforms are designed for hype, churn, and novelty, not stability.

When institutions fail, the individual absorb the shock. You feel directionless because the narratives that once guided adulthood have collapsed, and anxiety ensues because uncertainty has become the default setting of modern life.

The emotional cost of institutional decline is that identity becomes something we must construct ourselves, not something the world hands us.

For midlife adults, this is especially destabilising. We grew up believing the steps were clear — get educated, choose a path, commit to it, move upward. But the ladder became a maze, and the maze became a collapsing floor.

The question is no longer How do I succeed within the system? It’s now How do I build something that outlasts the instability of the system itself?

And this is where sovereignty enters.

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III. Sovereignty: The Only Sustainable Response to a Failing System

Sovereignty is a word people misunderstand. It simply means building internal and external architecture strong enough to withstand the instability of the world around you.

It is the recognition that:

• Institutions will continue to shift

• Platforms will continue to change

• Economic cycles will continue to contract and expand

• Political narratives will continue to fracture

• Cultural norms will continue to accelerate

…and if your identity depends on any of these forces staying stable, you will always feel vulnerable.

At its heart sovereignty is a design principle. It means constructing a life where meaning, rhythm, identity, and creative work are not fragile extensions of failing systems but internally generated structures that can endure.

A sovereign life has three characteristics:

1. A clear internal centre: a sense of self that is not outsourced to institutions.

2. A personal system: architecture that stabilises your writing, creativity, work, and decisions

3. A body of work: Assets you own, that compound and that outlive platforms.

This trilogy is how you build something that lasts.

IV. What It Actually Means to Build Something That Endures

To build something that survives institutional collapse, you must shift the ground you’re standing on.

Most people build their life on external scaffolding, that’s normal but it is very much possible to remove the scaffolding.

What lasts is built from the inside out. This means beginning with identity, not branding in the marketing sense, but coherence.

The recognition of the emotional and intellectual territory you occupy. The questions you return to without forcing them, the themes that shape you and the voice beneath the persona.

When identity becomes clear, structure becomes possible. Systems don’t emerge from productivity hacks. They emerge from clarity and that all starts with identity.

A personal system is simply architecture that:

• reduces cognitive load

• stabilises your rhythm

• protects your voice

• preserves your energy

• filters your decisions

• holds you when the environment does not

Systems are emotional infrastructure. They give you a spine in a world that keeps bending.

Then we get to the work itself. I want you to erase the idea of a a content archive. That is not what a body of work is. It is the external expression of internal coherence.

It is the thing that carries your voice forward even when platforms pivot. It is the asset that compounds across time — not in viral spikes, but in trust, resonance, and identity.

A body of work, on that expresses your internal truth, survives because it is built on something the world cannot take from you.

VI. How to Begin Building What Lasts

Start by noticing where your life still depends on unstable systems:

Where does your identity rely on external validation?

Where does your direction depend on someone else’s permission?

Where does your confidence collapse when your environment shifts?

These are the fault lines.

Then begin the quiet work of constructing your centre:

Articulate the questions that matter to you.

Name the themes that won’t leave you alone.

Build a writing or creative system that carries these forward.

Create rhythm, not intensity. Let your work accumulate slowly, deliberately, meaningfully. This is the architecture that lasts.

If you need a place to start the 15-Note System is the system I built for myself, when I realised the world wasn’t going to stabilise on my behalf.

It’s the architecture of sovereignty expressed through writing: a way to build your centre, stabilise your rhythm, and develop your best ideas through short form writing.

Take care and enjoy the rest of your day,

Ben.

The Creative Life explores the tension between making art and producing content and goes out to 2,000+ creators every Saturday.

The Creative Life

Two decades in music and film — I write weekly on creativity, overcoming blocks, and carving out a life in the arts. Resident artist at Berlin’s Mahalla — a global home for creative misfits and makers.

There’s a moment every online writer reaches where the illusion finally cracks.

You publish something you’re proud of, a piece that feels raw and honest and it actually lands. People engage with it and you feel like “finally…thank you”.

Then you publish again with the same level of care… and nothing happens. Just a flat line where the last piece rose.

It’s easy to interpret this as a personal failure, but the volatility isn’t personal. It’s structural. You’re trying to build a long-term creative life on foundations that were never designed to hold the weight of anything meaningful.

If your writing depends on the algorithm, then the results are very much out of your control and more akin to gambling than building.

Algorithms don’t care about your voice. They shift because of changing incentive structures and ultimately because platforms optimise for their own survival not yours.

This is where most writers begin to unravel. Because hidden beneath the surface of every online writing journey are three vulnerabilities that quietly dismantle a creator’s confidence long before they ever run out of ideas.

I. The Three Structural Vulnerabilities Every Writer Lives Inside

These vulnerabilities emerge from the architecture of the modern internet.

1. Algorithmic Volatility

Look, algorithms are not inherently bad. I remember when substack did not have their notes feed. There was no real way of meeting or finding new people unless you had external traffic sources or a few people who could recommend you.

But platforms behave like weather systems. They are unpredictable, indifferent to your goals and constantly rearranging visibility. The reality is that the engineers are just running experiments, they don’t always know what the results will be. and so volatility is built into algorithmic systems. It is also the nature of attention.

One week you’re carried by the wind. The next you’re dropped without warning.

2. Identity Fragmentation

Most writers lose or never manage to develop their voice because the environment keeps pulling them away from it.

When performance becomes the compass, your voice becomes reactive. You chase what might work instead of what matters and through this process your writing becomes a negotiation with potential rewards rather than a form of expression.

3. Cognitive Overload

Without a structure, your mind becomes the entire creative pipeline:

• Ideation

• Planning

• Editing

• Execution

• Analysis

• Evaluation

You’re carrying everything internally and that weight is unsustainable. Burn out is just an inevitable result of cognitive overload.

These three forces don’t simply slow writers down they dissolve them. And no amount of “trying harder” will counter vulnerabilities that are structural in nature. You neutralise them only with architecture.

II. When I Finally Understood That My Problem Wasn’t Discipline but Structure

For years, I mistook a lack of progress as a moral failure. I became obsessed with discipline and consistency.

It felt good to work really hard but when progress just never seem to come in the way I wanted it my confidence and energy levels dropped. I began looking at others and creating reactively, bending my voice toward whatever seemed to perform. There was no centre, no continuity. All that was left was the emotional whiplash of online metrics dictating my identity.

When I arrived on Substack, I hoped for stability and found confusion instead. The interface felt unintuitive; I didn’t understand how people met or how communities formed.

I wrote into a void because I hadn’t yet understood that Substack is a network, not a broadcast tool. And a network only opens when you have a structure strong enough for people to recognise.

My problem wasn’t output or commitment it was architectural. I had a practice but no system.

A writing system wasn’t something I built to become more productive. It was something I built because my identity could no longer survive without it.

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III. What a Writing System Is (and what it isn’t)

To understand what a writing system actually is, it is helpful to first go over what it isn’t.

Most writers misunderstand the concept completely.

A system isn’t a schedule. It isn’t batching. It isn’t a habit tracker or a workflow diagram. It isn’t a content calendar or a productivity hack.

Those things help with execution, but they do not protect your identity.

A real writing system is internal architecture.

It is the structure that:

• Stabilises your voice

• Reduces cognitive friction

• Anchors your identity

• Clarifies your direction

• Creates rhythm without force

• Makes your writing inevitable

It’s the spine that holds everything upright when the world around you is unstable.

Without this architecture, your writing is permanently exposed to volatility.

IV. The Architecture of a Writing System That Survives Any Algorithm

A resilient writing system contains five interdependent layers. These are structural elements that support one another.

1. The Identity Layer — Your Centre of Gravity

This is where every system begins. Before you capture ideas or publish work, you must know:

• What you care about

• What questions follow you

• What emotional territory you inhabit

• What you refuse to chase

Identity is not just branding it is the basis for building coherence for yourself and others.

When your own identity is vague, your writing becomes reactive. When it’s clear, your writing becomes magnetic.

Start by setting some non negotiables. What are you unwilling to tolerate? What is one foundational belief that your world revolves around? Start there.

2. The Input Layer — Your Idea Engine

Creativity collapses when writers depend on inspiration. I know this is controversial but I have yet to find anyone who can sustain creative work without a stabilising system.

A system helps you collect ideas continuously and without pressure.

Seemingly inconsequential things like scattered fragments, personal observations or mild contradictions become the raw material. This doesn’t mean you have to read book after book or cosnume every video on a topic, it just means you need to be present and capture your ideas as they form.

Inputs keep the system alive. Without them, rhythm becomes forced.

Start by developing some form a note taking habit. If you don’t write ideas down they will get lost. When this habit is set ideas flow much easier.

3. The Processing Layer — Meaning-Making

This is the layer most writers skip. It is the process through which ideas are sorted, shaped, sharpened, and refined.

It is where identity filters noise from signal and where coherence is built.

Without this layer, everything feels overwhelming.

Commit to a weekly shaping ritual. One hour where fragments become patterns and patterns become meaning. This is were you review notes, go over old posts and start to connect dots.

This ritual is where voice forms, with it, writing becomes a form of clarity rather than confusion.

4. The Output Layer — Rhythm

A system produces rhythm automatically. Rhythm is how readers learn your shape.

It’s how trust forms and how identity becomes visible over time. Consistency is not a discipline problem, it’s the natural effect of solid architecture.

Establish a rhythm that reflects your life, not your ambition. Rhythm builds recognition; ambition builds burnout.

The system should support you, not the other way around. If trying to post one article a week is a huge effort and requires a lot of sacrifices it will lead to burnout. Set the bar low and raise it slowly over time. One to two articles per month is a great place to start.

5. The Feedback Layer — Evolution

Feedback isn’t necessarily about which posts “performed.”

It’s about:

• what resonated

• what returned to you

• what sparked conversation

• what felt aligned

Feedback shapes the system without allowing it to drift. This is how you become anti-fragile.

Review your resonance, not your performance. This is difficult to articulate and even harder to understand. If you are fully aligned then performance and resonance might almost be the same thing. It is something you “feel” more than you analyse.

Try to look for ideas that stay with you. The ones that open something. The ones that feel like home. Let resonance be the compass. Let identity be the anchor. Let the system carry the weight.

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V. What Happens When You Build This Architecture

The volatility of platforms stops dictating the volatility of your internal world.

You stop writing reactively. You stop chasing trends. You stop interpreting silence as inadequacy and you stop relying on reach for meaning.

Your writing becomes:

• coherent

• stable

• grounded

• recognisable

• resilient

• your own

You move from survival mode to sovereignty. You stop trying to navigate the algorithm and start building something that outlives it.

If you want a structure that helps you build the identity, rhythm, and coherence described here, the 15-Note System is where I’d recommend you begin.

It’s the architecture I built to stabilise myself when the platforms around me kept shifting.

Take care and enjoy the rest of your day.

Benjamin

Most writers struggle on Substack because they’re building on the wrong foundation.

They believe the platform will reward good work.

They believe consistency alone creates momentum.

They believe the algorithm will eventually notice them.

It won’t.

Substack isn’t the kind of platform people think it is.

Sustainable long term growth here isn’t the result of performance, hustle, or volume. It isn’t a content lottery where one lucky post reshapes the curve, and it certainly isn’t the inevitable outcome of “showing up every week.”

Substack is a human network.

People, as in other writers and readers, create traction, and compelling persuasive writing creates retention.

Growth emerges when the two finally align.

Until a writer understands this architecture, they experience the platform as a confusing, inconsistent, and sometimes even demoralising loop.

They publish in good faith and hear nothing back. They write sincerely and feel invisible. They watch others seemingly take off overnight and assume they’re missing something critical.

But what they’re missing isn’t talent or discipline. What they’re missing is structure.

I’ve grown to 6000+ subscribers in a year and a half. Depending on your own trajectory this might seem like a lot but I’ve seen many others grow at much faster rates for several reasons which is what this essay is about.

“Growth,” as in growing your list, is architectural and requires focused attention but most writers are building without a blueprint.

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When I first joined Substack, I didn’t understand any of this.

The interface felt really clunky. Even logging in and out was tricky. There was no obvious place to meet people.

Contrary to many others who joined with the specific goal of growing their existing business here my first goal was not growth.

I did not start, desperately wanting to go viral. My initial goal was to just start writing. I wanted to see if I could publish two essays a month, say something of meaning and contribute to the culture.

I wrote into the void for a long time and it was only after I had developed some clarity on my message, my rhythm and tone of voice that I started to think about growth.

I started messaging random writers in an attempt to start a conversation and get a feel for the social landscape. This wasn’t so much a strategy as it was just genuine interest and curiosity.

The turning point came slowly, I began noticing patterns among the writers who were quietly growing.

They weren’t necessarily writing more or better.

They were building an architecture.

Identity → Resonance → Rhythm → Relationships → Surfaces.

Once I saw this pattern, I couldn’t unsee it. And once I applied it, everything changed.

The Architecture of Substack Growth

I want to give you a high level principles based view of how growth works here. This will not cover growth hacks or short term solutions (you can grow quickly by implementing hacks but that is not what I’m interested in).

I want to give you foundational pillars that you can work towards with slow intensity and strength one by one.

This will take longer than trying to go viral but going viral never brings in the right people anyway. The very nature of virilaty is that it brings in everyone for a short spike after which most of them just leave again.

If you want sustainable, meaningful growth on Substack, you need five pillars. Weakness in any one creates structural collapse. But do not try to master these all at once.

They must be tackled in sequential order.

This is the architecture that successful writers build whether they do it consciously or not.

1. Identity — The Differentiation Layer

Identity is the first pillar because it determines everything downstream.

Readers don’t share “content.” They share perspectives, voices and people.

Identity is what makes your work recognisable in a crowded space. Without knowing who you are on the page your writing becomes easy to skim, easy to forget, and impossible to amplify.

Identity is the architecture of recognition. It’s the reason people say, “You need to read this.” This is why developing an unmistakable voice across your writing is essential.

This is not something that can be done over night.

The very idea of an identity is that it is constructed over time, through many different touch points, and so you are going to have to spend several months on this to build the base. Furthermore, this is an ongoing process which you are never “done” with.

2. Resonance — The Retention Layer

Writing matters, but not in the way most people think.

Strong writing isn’t a growth engine. Strong writing is a retention engine.

It’s what turns a curious visitor into a devoted reader. A recommendation into a long-term relationship. And It’s what shapes your reputation as someone worth returning to.

When resonance is weak, no amount of networking or exposure will convert.

When resonance is strong, every new visitor carries the potential for compounding trust.

Resonance has much more to do with emotional clarity than it does with literary flourish. It’s really about the ability to articulate something someone has already felt but never had language for. That is what creates loyalty.

In order to create resonance you need to understand what you are writing about and who you are writing for at an emotional level. You have to feel it, not just understand it intellectually.

This is relevant for every niche and it is why I advocate to write for your former self because nothing beats personal, lived experience.

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3. Rhythm — The Trust Layer

Publishing rhythm is not an algorithmic hack.

Rhythm creates predictability.

Predictability creates trust.

Trust creates loyalty and the desire to help spread your message.

A writer with rhythm becomes part of a reader’s mental landscape. When you show up consistently, you become familiar. Familiarity lowers resistance. Lower resistance increases willingness to share.

Rhythm is the architecture of expectation. It’s how you become someone readers rely on, not someone they rediscover.

But rhythm is useless without a strong identity and without resonance. This is what makes me want to tear my hair out (if I still had any) when people talk about consistency, or “just showing up” because most people who spread this message have skipped the difficult and challenging work required for steps 1 and 2, making “just showing up” a complete waste of time.

I recently listened to a podcast from Colin and Samir where they interviewed Rachel Karten (link in bio) about her substack journey.

She only turned on paid after she had been writing for over two years and built a following of over 20,000 free subscribers.

Her goal was to first develop her rhythm and make sure she could develop consistent value at the same pace every week before even thinking about growth or monetisation. I know there are plenty of people telling you to monetise from day one but it is my belief that the slow and measured approach is the right one.

4. Networks — The Traction Layer

This is the pillar that short term growth hackers immediately start at and that deep thinkers and serious writers never get to.

Here’s the truth:

Traction comes from other people sharing your work and growth comes from entering networks, not writing in isolation.

Your work may be profound, but if no one hears it, nothing happens.

Your ideas may be exceptional, but if no one passes them forward, your growth stagnates.

Readers amplify you, other writers connect you and recommendations carry you.

You don’t need to play politics. But you do need to participate in the human ecosystem.

There is no getting around this.

Substack is a networked environment. Visibility moves from person to person. Networking here is not transactional (yet). It’s relational.

Thoughtful comments. Genuine engagement. Small conversations. Shared perspective. Parallel journeys.

This is how writers discover one another. It’s how audiences spread and how networks form, and networks are the architecture of traction.

Everyone is different, I get that. But a good rule of thumb is to behave as you would in real life.

Would you approach a stranger at a coffee shop, shove a pdf into their hands and say “I would love your feedback on this”

Would you stop someone in the street and ask them to bring you clients?

No. I hope not. So just approach people with care and respect and lead with curiosity.

You get the idea.

5. Surfaces — The Visibility Layer

Substack has five primary discovery surfaces:

• Essays → depth, credibility

• Notes → visibility, first contact

• Comments → network building

• Recommendations → exponential reach

• Chat → community cohesion

When these surfaces work together, they create momentum. When used inconsistently, they collapse into noise.

Growth is not the outcome of one surface.

Growth emerges when your identity, resonance, rhythm, and relationships flow across multiple surfaces in a coherent way.

This is what turns a Substack account into an ecosystem. Essays and notes are non negotiable because you need to write both to lock in all the previous steps.

If you struggle with networking and socialising then focus on recommendations, this is largely passive and runs in the background. Also starting private conversations by DMing people is highly underrated.

Retention and Traction: The Honest Equation

At the heart of this architecture is a simple, uncomfortable truth:

Writing creates retention. Networks create traction. Growth requires both.

Most writers only build one half. Some publish in isolation and wonder why no one finds them. Others network aggressively but lack a compelling centre of gravity. Few integrate the two.

The ones who do create consistent growth. It may be slow but it is also relentless and it builds over time.

If you need a map to build the inner architecture that I’ve described here the 15-Note System might be helpful.

Check it out and enjoy the rest of your day.

You can feel it everywhere.

In politics, in culture, in the ways we communicate, and in the quiet private corners of your own mind.

The pace has accelerated and what used to hold people together—shared meaning and a shared sense of identity—has become extremely fragile.

This isn’t a new story, but it’s becoming impossible to ignore.

Most people are encased in an environment designed to divide and fragment their sense of self.

The internal disorder you feel mirrors the external disorder of the world around you. Without a stong structure to guard against this, you passively mirror the potent societal forces which are shaping political movements across disparate cultures.

Once you understand that, everything else becomes clearer.

We will get into the practical steps of how to build a cohesive identity that attracts the right people but first it is important to understand your individual experience within the wider societal context.

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Fragmentation Isn’t Personal, It’s Structural

Whenever a society enters a period of polarisation, the individual experiences it first as confusion.

Identity gets pulled in opposing directions. The narrative centre collapses and what used to be coherent becomes chaotic.

You can see this in the political landscape. Populism grows in spaces where institutions have lost coherence.

The centre hollows out. People migrate to the extreme edges because they no longer recognise the middle and because they have not developed their own internal identity.

The same dynamic plays out online.

As platforms shift their incentives, creators lose stability.

A niche that “worked” last year fails this month. Voices that were celebrated disappear into the feed without reason.

Everything is temporary because nothing stands still long enough to be understood.

When meaning becomes unstable at the societal level, it becomes unstable at the personal level.

This is why so many people feel scattered. They’re navigating an era defined by acceleration and fragmentation, and they’re doing it without a map.

There are too many inputs all competing for attention and trying to define who you should be.

Inside a fragmented world, identity becomes reactive rather than rooted. You absorb the shape of whatever is closest and you become a reflection of the inputs you consume, not the person you are capable of becoming.

No one can build a sovereign system inside someone else’s identity, and yet that’s what most people attempt.

They borrow niches, adopt trends, imitate voices, chase aesthetics, bend themselves toward whatever seems to work.

Each adaptation fragments them a little further. Soon the self becomes a collage of borrowed beliefs with no internal unity.

This is not a moral failing. It’s the path of least resistance in an environment built to scatter attention. But the cost is high: the loss of centre, the erosion of personal clarity and the sense that you are living sideways rather than moving forward.

The Architecture of noise

Noise is not a feeling. It is a structure.

News cycles escalate emotion because outrage is profitable.

Social feeds systematically fragment attention because instability keeps engagement high.

Brands and institutions broadcast constant urgency because it prevents long-term thinking.

Everything is designed to pull you outward, preventing you from constructing anything stable inwardly.

Noise consumes identity by keeping it suspended in reactivity.

And once reactivity takes hold, the self splinters into pieces: the professional version, the online version, the outraged version, the private version, the restless, distracted, ambitious but inconsistent version.

You don’t dissolve all at once. You scatter gradually. And because the scattering happens slowly, you start to believe it’s normal.

I lived inside that pattern for years. Before Germany, before Substack, before everything I have now, I drifted between versions of myself depending on which environment I was in.

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Retail management expected one performance. Social media demanded another. My quiet inner world wanted something different entirely. There was no architecture to bind the pieces and no internal structure to give direction.

In hindsight, the fragmentation wasn’t caused by lack of discipline. It was caused by lack of identity.

It is my belief that identity is not a philosophical preference, it is a practical necessity. Without it, you have no filter and no hard lines to guard against the noise.

Rebuilding identity is the first act of sovereignty. But before you rebuild anything, you need space. And that begins with subtracting the noise.

The Noise Audit

This is a simple process, but it will show you more than you expect.

1. List your weekly inputs

Everything counts: apps, feeds, people, conversations, notifications, rituals, habits, environments.

2. Tag them with three markers

• Strengthens identity

• Neutral

• Erodes identity

Most people discover that 80% of their inputs weaken their sense of self. It’s not because they’re “bad.” It’s because they’re misaligned with who you are becoming.

3. Remove three identity-eroding inputs for 30 days

Not forever. Just long enough to feel the absence of noise.

This could be muting a platform.

Reducing a social habit.

Leaving a group chat.

Filtering your information diet.

Limiting one algorithmic feed.

4. Add two deep inputs

This is where structure begins.

Long-form reading.

Reflective time.

Journaling.

Walking without headphones.

These aren’t aesthetic rituals. They are identity stabilisers. Deep inputs restore the part of you that noise dissolves.

Once the noise begins to drop, something interesting happens: your mind stops reaching for new versions of yourself and starts returning to the one that’s been trying to emerge for years.

This is the transition from fragmentation to coherence. But subtraction is only half the work. The next step is building the architecture.

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Identity Anchors

Identity is not a mystery. It is a set of patterns that repeat across time.

The problem is that most people have never articulated those patterns. They carry identity implicitly, so it cannot guide them. When life becomes noisy, they borrow someone else’s.

Identity Anchors bring that implicit pattern into language so it can finally stabilise you.

Here’s how to build them.

Step 1. List the last 5–10 creative or professional projects you attempted

For each, ask:

What was I actually trying to experience or express?

Patterns always appear.

Step 2. Extract the recurring motives

These are the roots of your identity. Not the roles you played, but the internal drivers that repeated behind them. Clarity, depth, stability, risk, belonging, meaning, exploration, curiosity…there will always be themes.

Step 3. Choose 3–5 Identity Anchors

Write them as principles.

These are not aspirations. They are the structural truths you’ve already lived.

Examples:

• I think best through long-form expression.

• I build slowly and deliberately.

• I value coherence more than momentum.

• I prioritise ownership over optimisation.

• I crave stability and structure.

These principles become the architecture of your centre. Bear in mind that these are examples based on my own identity. Your own may look very different and that’s fine.

Step 4. Use the anchors as filters

Every decision becomes clearer.

Every stray desire becomes easier to decline.

Every distraction loses power.

Identity reduces chaos by creating boundaries.

Step 5. Build one creative habit around these anchors

A weekly letter.

A single Note.

A short reflective practice.

Structure is not limiting. Structure is clarifying.

The Centre Rebuilt

When I look back at the early years of YouTube and Substack, the difference between then and now is simple: I stopped creating from a fragmented identity. I built a centre. I defined who I was becoming, and I aligned my work with that direction.

Everything became clearer.

That clarity is what most people crave but never articulate. They want to return to themselves but don’t know which version is real.

Rebuilding your centre is possible. But it requires space, structure, and a commitment to creating from identity rather than reaction.

This might sound simple but it requires continued effort and resilience.

In a world that profits from keeping you scattered, coherence becomes an act of resistance, and sovereignty becomes the only sustainable path.

If you want help building that centre the 15-Note System was designed for that exact purpose.

It’s an architecture for voice, clarity, and coherence in a world that pushes you outward.

If your mind is tired of noise, it will feel at home there.

Takes care and all the best.

Ben

Attention spiked, fear ballooned and money followed both.

Venture capital poured into “creator economy” platforms as if creators were the next wave of software startups (over $5 billion in 2021 alone, five times the previous year).

Influencer budgets skyrocketed. Audiences grew overnight. Everything inflated: reach, revenue, expectations, egos and most importantly - urgency.

For a moment, it felt like the golden age of independence had finally arrived. In fact many of the creators who dominate feeds today are simply the ones who caught the pandemic wave and managed not to drown.

But timing cuts both ways.

The boom carried them up. The correction has carried many back down.

By 2023, the story had shifted: funding retreated, sponsorship budgets tightened, and algorithms began behaving like unstable weather systems.

Trust, the quiet glue that held the entire ecosystem together, thinned.

Researchers who once predicted a thriving “creator middle class” now warn of volatility so severe that reach can swing wildly week to week.

Brands are shifting toward performance-driven spend, and audiences increasingly distrust anything an algorithm serves them without context.

But the most important thing about this moment isn’t the shift of money.

It’s the retreat of trust in platforms, algorithms, influencers, stability and the possibility that this might all be going in the wrong direction.

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The deeper question is this:

Where is trust migrating?

And how do you position yourself before the next wave hits?

This is the shift nobody is talking about. The advantage has quietly moved.

And if you’re a midlife professional, especially someone who’s tired of hustle culture and algorithmic dependency, this moment is full of opportunity.

So in this piece I want to break down why identity is the new moat — not niches or formats, why building “trust assets” is a must and how to thrive in this post-hype correction.

The Pandemic Illusion and the Post-Hype Correction

When attention exploded in 2020, creators were rewarded for quantity, novelty, and availability. Cheap reach made it easy to believe that the platforms were predictable engines of opportunity.

But cheap reach is always a temporary construction and corrections reveal the architecture beneath. What we now see is that Creators built their livelihoods on borrowed land.

What looked like stability was actually leverage held by platforms, not people.

The soil has now changed. Algorithms mutate without warning. Brands no longer equate reach with conversion. Audience trust fractures. The very signals creators relied on for direction have become unreliable.

And yet, beneath the volatility, something more fundamental has emerged.

A different kind of creator is beginning to win.

Not the fastest.

Not the loudest.

Not the most “optimised.”

The ones winning now are the ones building systems that cannot be taken away.

What I Learned From Accidentally Building the Right Thing

Over the past 3 years I’ve grown to around 40,000 subscribers on YouTube with minimal optimisation. I talk about things that interest me. I post one video a month. And still, the channel brings in €2k monthly.

This wasn’t strategy or some kind of algorithmic mastery. It was something far more durable:

Curiosity, voice and identity.

In hindsight, this small success was never a function of timing.

It was the result of trust compounding slowly in the background.

This is not the typical “creator story,” because it didn’t look like hustle. It looked like alignment. It looked like showing up with the same values across years. It looked like being recognisable even when my posting rhythm was inconsistent.

And this mirrors the shift happening now. The market is moving away from performance and toward meaning.

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1. Platforms Are No Longer Homes, they’re more like Highways

The creator economy’s first era rewarded those who built their homes directly on social platforms. The second era will punish them for that.

This doesn’t mean platforms are dying, it just means they’ve changed roles.

They no longer operate as growth engines but more like toll booths.

You don’t build a life inside a toll booth, you pass through it on your way to somewhere more pleasant.

Real autonomy now comes from designing an ecosystem that:

• captures identity

• compounds trust

• withstands algorithmic instability

• directs people toward owned surfaces

Email is digital sovereignty and community isn’t another Discord server, it’s relational resilience. This moment doesn’t call for better hacks.

It calls for identity architecture, the kind that survives cultural cycles and economic contractions.

2. The Real Scarcity Has Shifted: Attention → Trust

Attention is cheap again. Trust is not.

What broke during the post-hype correction wasn’t just reach but the quality of signal that makes audiences willing to listen, engage, buy, or follow creators off-platform.

During the boom, creators optimised for virality. Now, audiences crave depth.

They’re gravitating toward:

• Long-form storytelling

• Coherent worldviews

• Emotional resonance

• Creators who don’t shapeshift with trends

A recent meta-analysis confirms what many of us intuitively feel: smaller, mid-tier creators build deeper trust and convert better than macro-influencers.

Intimacy compounds. Reach rarely does and when audiences share values, not just interests, the relationship becomes self-sustaining.

That loyalty cannot be bought. It is something that is built through identity, not distribution.

3. Identity Is the New Moat

The performance economy rewards creators who behave like shapeshifters: change the niche, chase the format, do whatever “works” this week.

But that approach creates a fragile identity, and fragile identities cannot hold trust.

The new advantage belongs to creators who mature into narrators — people who interpret the world for their audience, not just produce content for them.

This is where midlife creators have a natural advantage:

• They have lived experience.

• They understand cycles.

• They don’t chase novelty for validation.

• They’ve already survived one or two identity deaths.

When a creator’s worldview is coherent, everything they publish becomes recognisable, even across platforms, even across formats and even across years.

4. The Creators Who Thrive Next Will Build Trust Assets — Not Content Pipelines

Most creators only build content assets and this is a good place to start. But it is not the end goal.

Trust assets compound in reach and value over time. They include:

• an email list with real attention

• a consistent philosophy

• a narrative world people want to live inside

• a methodology or mental framework

• a product ecosystem rooted in lived insight

• a long-form medium that holds memory

These are the foundations that survive volatility. Content pipelines depend on platforms. Trust assets depend on identity.

5. The Next Wave of Attention Will Be Human, Not Algorithmic

Every major shift in the creator economy has been triggered by a technological or structural force:

• mobile → YouTube’s rise

• social platforms → influencers

• short-form → attention inflation

• pandemic → hyper-growth

• correction → fragmentation

The next shift is psychological, not just technological.

People trust meaning more than performance. They trust humans more than platforms and they want interpretations, not just entertainment.

Although globalism is structurally still in place we have entered a period of anti globalist fragmentation. Not just in the creator economy but generally. You see this played out in the current geo political climate, in protectionist policies and narrowing markets. This era will be defined by:

• Micro-networks of trust

• Smaller, human-scale discovery

• Creators as guides, mentors and interpreters

• AI amplifying content supply, making human perspective more valuable.

In a world of infinite content, trust becomes the filter, and trust flows toward creators with identity, depth, and ownership.

Those who build foundations now will ride the next wave. Those who cling to the old metrics will drown in noise.

The Advantage Has Quietly Shifted

The creators who win the next decade will be the ones who:

• Treat platforms as distribution, not identity

• Build owned surfaces and trust assets

• Speak with a coherent worldview

• Show emotional depth, not performance

• Construct real architecture beneath their ideas

For midlife professionals — the ones who feel late, behind, or disillusioned — this is not a disadvantage. It’s a head start.

The wave is shifting toward the qualities you already possess:

Depth, meaning, lived insight, psychological seriousness, and the desire to build something that lasts.

The creator economy may be broke. But the discipline of meaningful work is not, and the next chapter belongs to those prepared to build with intention, identity, and sovereignty.

If there’s one lesson in this post-hype correction, it’s this:

Creators with strong identities and owned systems will outlast every platform cycle ahead.

This is why I built the 15-Note System.

It’s there to develop and deepen your own distinctive voice, to build a worldview people trust, and work that compounds, regardless of what any algorithm decides to do next.

If you’re ready to build the architecture beneath your ideas, the structure is already waiting for you.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of your day.

Ben

It’s pretty clear that this isn’t just about productivity or output — it’s existential.

In Germany and Austria, higher scores on ‘crisis of meaning’ reliably predicted higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms.

A global pew review survey found that In the U.S. nearly a quarter of adults could only point to one source of meaning in life, hinting at a shallow well of purpose in an age of many distractions.

We have countless examples from the ancient and modern world - Aurelius, Aristotle, Seneca, Cal Newport, Oliver Burkeman, Ryan holiday etc - who champion structure focus and meaning, and yet we still like to imagine that creativity and the meaning derived from it thrive in chaos.

We like to think that inspiration emerges when we finally break free from constraint, and that it is freedom which will finally bring us peace.

But it is, in fact, the very people doing meaningful consistent work who have quietly built something far less romantic: a structure that holds them when motivation disappears.

They developed architectural rhythm designed to carry the weight of something deeper. This isn’t just a creative philosophy, it’s a psychological necessity.

The human brain is wired to conserve energy and to default to what’s familiar. This is why starting something new often feels like trying to run through mud. You burn energy just trying to stay upright. But when you repeat something often enough, the mind begins to relax into it. Structure creates familiarity, and familiarity creates flow.

When your creative process becomes a practiced system, it stops relying on willpower, and that’s when the real work begins.

That’s what we are going to explore here. The invisible architecture behind creative lives that last and how you can start designing your own system today.

Why Meaningful Work Requires Invisible Structure

The paradox that very few vocalise is that the deeper your work aims to go, the more structure it requires to carry it. Meaning has weight and something needs to hold that weight when your discipline buckles under pressure.

The myth, of course, is that structure dulls creativity, systems make us mechanical and that real art emerges from freedom, spontaneity, chaos, or even by divine accident.

But that is just not the case. The pattern from studying people of history is clear. They all developed creative rhythms which kept them on track.

Charles Darwin, whose life was one long devotion to patient curiosity, lived by a strict daily rhythm — a long morning walk, deep thinking before noon, rest and reading in the afternoon.

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Churchill, even during war, wrote while in bed, dictating for hours before ever standing up.

Ryan Holiday has written a book every year for over a decade. That doesn’t come from occasional genius, it comes from systems that remove friction.

Cal Newport’s entire philosophy of Deep Work is rooted in the idea that serious thinking cannot happen without protected time and intentional constraints.

Oliver Burkeman writes about how meaning lives within limits and that time isn’t something to stretch endlessly, but something to honour and shape deliberately.

The most prolific creators aren’t surfing waves of inspiration. They’re anchored to a structure that carries them through resistance, doubt, and distraction day after day, season after season.

For me, the 15-Note System became that anchor. It’s a rhythm that stops my thinking from fragmenting and my voice from dissolving into the algorithm.

Every time I sit down to write, I’m not starting from zero. The system gives me somewhere to begin and somewhere to return to. It holds space for me to create sustainably and so over time this becomes an automated practice which I find difficult to stop.

Structure gives birth to meaning

When there is no structure to hold the work, every action becomes a fresh negotiation with yourself. It creates a kind of psychic friction. You spend your days assembling fragments of effort that never seem to belong to the same whole, which leaves you with the sinking feeling that you’re always starting again, always improvising, always one step behind the version of yourself you’re trying to become. And when nothing connects, your sense of identity begins to fray.

This might feel like a moral failure but it is a structural one.

The concept of “cognitive residue,” is particularly relevant here. That mental drag of constantly switching contexts is what is draining your energy and killing consistency. Anyone who has watched their own creative energy scatter across platforms knows how quickly intention can dissolve when attention has no anchor.

Without structure, your emotional life becomes entangled with chance and your creative identity becomes volatile, shaped more by reaction than direction.

You spend more time managing your energy than using it. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the joy drains out of the work, leaving you with a kind of spiritual exhaustion that no productivity hack can resolve.

This is why systems matter.

How to build your own internal architecture

There are many ways to do this and your preferred method will depend on your personality and personal circumstances.

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It will feel awkward and uncomfortable at first, don’t fight this feeling learn to accept it. Just like constructing a house it doesn’t start to look pretty until its near completion, but without that internal architecture the pretty facade will not stand.

from the Modern day explorer talks about similar systems but with very different words. I highly encourage you to check her out, especialy this article here on creative practices.

The Modern Day Explorer

Six Creative Practices I Return To and Why You Might Need Them Too.

In a loud world, clear thinking is one of the greatest assets. We live in a fast-paced reality where being reactive often outweighs being proactive, leading to a loss of clarity and a continuous loop. In these loops, ironically, the more we push ourselves to keep moving, the easier it is to…

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6 months ago · 28 likes · 10 comments · Alexandra Mateus

1. Prepare the ground with reflection.

Before any structure can rise, the land beneath it must be cleared.

This means honest observation, pattern recognition and a refusal to lie to yourself about what’s working. The brain needs repetition to form identity and without a reflective practice you’ll keep chasing noise instead of integrating your own thought.

Some good practices for preparing the ground are stream of consciousness journaling, voice notes or long walks without distraction.

Most people don’t need a new tactic they need a mirror and the best way of creating that mirror, without involving someone else, is some form of journaling.

2. Anchor your creative rhythm.

This is where most people fail in consistency. Because they haven’t yet built a rhythm strong enough to carry the weight of their ideas, they start from scratch each week. they fight the same resistance and bleed energy trying to summon motivation.

Structure eliminates the need for motivation.

The 15-Note System is the vessel that stops my thoughts from dissolving into the algorithm. It grounds me and lets me write without thinking about what to write. The result is that it has now become difficult not to write.

The system is the discipline and the discipline becomes the identity.

Experiment with formats, times and methods to find a system that slots easily into your existing life.

I would recommend starting slow and building up from there. If you can’t manage to write daily do it weekly or monthly. You have to start somewhere. Once you start you can slowly increase the intensity over time.

3. Develop a thinking practice that deepens with each iteration.

Writing is not just output, it is the infrastructure upon which human culture is built and passed on over generations.

Without a system for deeper thinking, your work will stay shallow.

Charles Darwin kept meticulous notes and followed a strict daily rhythm of walking, reading, and thinking. Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself every day. Churchill dictated from bed. Ryan Holiday writes every morning. Burkeman only touches one project at a time.

None of them relied on inspiration. They relied on systems of thought that preserved their energy and protected their clarity. This might be shattering your image of the “creative” but it works. You don’t build a worldview all at once. You build it piece by piece and the pieces are all stitched together with rhythm.

The best way to develop your thinking is to write long form articles. Obviously the end goal here would be to write books but that is something for further down the line.

Longer articles require you to wrestle with the ideas. The process challenges your thinking and forces you to decide what to believe and how to argue that case. The building blocks of this is note taking.

Capture your ideas as they emerge and integrate them later into your long form piece. How you do this is not important. I use notion for idea capture but the toll is not important, the act of doing it is.

4. Make connection a practice not a performance.

You will only know how sturdy your structure is when you come into contact with others. It doesn’t matter if they love or hate what you’ve built. If it doesn’t have strong foundations it will bend and sway with the shifting winds of attention. Stop thinking of “growth” as a reward, and start thinking of it as a relational system.

The creators you admire are not blowing up by accident. They cross-pollinate. It is the relational architecture they’ve built and it requires emotional labour — the willingness to understand what other people value, how to approach them with care, and how to stay in relationship over time.

Very few creators do this well. Most either chase visibility or avoid it altogether. But the real ones? They compound connection and simultaneously strengthen and develop their ideas into a grounded identity.

Start by reaching out to someone you resonate with. Lead with curiosity and the rest will follow.

5. Design for sustainability not volatility.

The most overlooked system is the one that protects your ability to keep going: income.

We are not talking about passive income here but sovereign wealth.

This means offers that emerge from your identity, products that reflect your actual process, and pricing that allows you to stay true to your values, even when life gets messy.

This is what makes the difference between creators who last and creators who collapse.

Make a product.

Creating something and trying to sell it will teach you more than any form of research ever could.

Most people never build their own architecture. They rent someone else’s system then wonder why it doesn’t hold.

So here’s the question:

What rhythms are you designing your life around?

Because meaning doesn’t just arise. It rests on a structure one only you can build.

Take care,

Ben

I had the title, the status, the salary, the stress, the worry and worst of all the deep seated feeling that I was dreadfully out of alignment with my true self…It was almost as if I were performing someone else’s life…in a system which did not serve me.

Performing inside someone else’s system can cost you your very self, and if you’ve lost the essence of “who you are” building back up can be a painful process.

In order to create a system which actually serves you, you must have a deep sense of who you are and what you want - this all starts with identity.

The uncomfortable truth is this:

Success, failure, morality, the good life: these are not fixed principles, they are cultural artefacts.

They are defined by the time, place, and system you inhabit. In one political system, ambition is noble. In another, it’s selfish. In one industry, burnout is a badge of honour. In another, it’s a sign of weakness. To one generation, staying in a secure job for 30 years is proof of integrity. In another, it’s seen as fear of change.

Most people live their entire lives inside inherited systems and never question who built them, or what they were designed to optimise.

But the internet changed something. It gave us the tools — for the first time in history — to build our own systems. To design lives and businesses that reflect our values. To opt out of default definitions of success, and construct something more sustainable and ultimately more sovereign.

And that’s what this essay is about. Because the creator economy is not just a playground for creativity. It’s a pressure chamber for identity and if you do not focus on a grounded vision it will reward the version of you that aligns with its own systems — fast content, performative visibility and hustle masquerading as entrepreneurship.

Without doing the deep identity work you will start to morph into that version without even noticing it.

Building the right systems isn’t just about output or being able to consistently publish a certain amount of content each week it’s about making sure you are becoming the person you want to be. The person you can look at in the mirror and feel a sense of pride.

You can grow in a way that doesn’t cost you your soul. That’s what I’ve spent the last few years learning. Not how to post more. But how to build better for trust and coherence. There are four systems that made this possible:

• A system for creation: protects your rhythm.

• A system for thinking: deepens your worldview.

• A system for growth: builds real relationships.

• A system for income: protects your sovereignty.

Once you build these for yourself everything changes.

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1. A System for Creation

This is the fundamental foundation on which everything else rests and is where all beginners must start.

It is difficult to put time frames on this as everyone is different but expect the development of your own personal system for creation to take months, not days…it is only after months of continued output that you can prove to yourself you’ve created a system which fuels your creativity and protects you from burnout.

For me, that structure became what I call the 15-Note System. It gives my voice shape. It stops me from second-guessing every idea. It’s how I publish consistently without resorting to content gymnastics or reactive posting. I know that many people hate the idea of frameworks and see structure as restrictive but the deeper truth is this:

Your brain needs a container.

From a neurological standpoint, the brain is a pattern-seeking entity. It thrives on structure because structure reduces cognitive load. It automates the familiar so that you can focus your energy on what’s new. That’s why you can drive home on autopilot but writing a new post still feels like climbing a cliff.

Without a system, everything feels novel. Novelty is exciting but also cognitively expensive. It burns attention, drains motivation and over time, it leads to paralysis.

A good creative system isn’t there to limit you — it’s there to protect your energy and preserve your voice. It frees up your attention to do the real work of refining ideas and deepening resonance, so that consistency becomes part of your identity.

In short the system isn’t there to stifle you, it’s there to hold you when you lose clarity, because you will. And when you do, your system is what carries you through the fog.

This all takes time. Most people start off very strong with a burst of energy which quickly fizzles out and dies. I recommend doing the opposite. Start off slow, find a rhythm that slots into your life relatively naturally. If that means only writing and publishing something once a month then so be it. That is your starting point. Do not force it. Creation is something you should look forward to, it should give you more energy than it takes. If you feel stressed or drained something is wrong and you need to take a step back.

2. A System for Thinking

“Writing, the process of transforming thoughts into symbols, is one of the most powerful tools for focusing attention, organizing information, and integrating new experiences.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

If short-form builds a creative rhythm, long-form builds critical depth. My thinking system is slower and messier but no less essential.

Throughout the week, I collect stray ideas, emotional threads, unresolved tensions, patterns I notice in conversations or in my own Notes.

They don’t always connect. Some sit in my Notion page for weeks before I touch them. But when I sit down to write a long-form essay, I return to them. I reread. I reframe. I rewrite entire paragraphs until they feel honest and until I’ve actually metabolised the idea.

When I first started writing, one of these posts took me at least 2 weeks, sometimes four. I’ve reduced that down to roughly one week per letter but sometimes I’ll have an idea and won’t be able to finish it for months because I’m still not entirely sure what my beliefs are.

This is what most people miss: writing isn’t just a way to share what you already know. It’s the mechanism through which you discover what you actually believe.

When we encounter ambiguity, or try to form new mental models, the prefrontal cortex lights up. That’s the seat of complex thought, working memory, and focused attention — and it’s also exactly what’s activated when you try to articulate something difficult on paper.

Writing forces clarity. In the cognitive, biological sense. It demands the brain stop running on autopilot and instead form connections between emotional residue and intellectual structure.

This is why the most coherent thinkers are often the most consistent writers.

Montaigne didn’t write essays because he had conclusions, he wrote as a way of trying to come to conclusions. Each essay was a testing ground for a different lens on the same question: How should we live?

“Only thoughts reached by walking have value.”

Nietzsche

You could just as easily say the same about writing. To write long-form is to walk slowly through an idea. To resist the temptation of instant reaction. To stay long enough inside an uncomfortable thought that it begins to evolve.

This is intellectual sovereignty.

A system for thinking gives you something deeper than quick takes or recycled opinions. It gives you weight, voice and texture. Over time, it sharpens your discernment, not just about what you want to say, but what’s worth saying in the first place.

And this is where systems matter. When you treat essay writing as a weekly ritual, not a random event, your thinking compounds. You don’t start from zero each time. You build a body of work that mirrors your own development, because you stayed with the questions long enough to outgrow your first answer.

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Key takeaways

• Capture thoughts on a daily basis.

• Prioritise writing something of depth regularly.

• Publish that writing - it is only through contact with the real world that your writing and by extension your thinking will improve.

• Thinking takes time, it can be slow and frustrating and it is also normal to encounter contradictions.

3. A System for Growth

The first two systems are focused on internal growth.

They are all about you and your own personal journey. The focus is to develop rhythms, structures and systems for yourself. Only when you have succeeded in that are you able to truly serve others and think about growing your influence and reach.

This is where most creators fall into one of two traps: either they avoid growth completely out of fear of “selling out,” or they become addicted to chasing it.

But real growth is neither passive nor performative — it’s relational, which is why it requires a completely different skill-set.

Full disclosure. This is a skillset which I have not yet fully developed, but I have been here long enough to understand how growth works and it has very little to do with the actual writing.

Everyone thinks growth is the fun part, but in reality, this is the part that breaks most creators because they never learn how to build real relationships in public.

The biggest creators don’t just randomly “go viral” they collaborate. They’re name-dropped, referenced and shared. Essentially they are invited into the conversation.

Look at the top of any platform and you’ll notice the same patterns:

They go on each other’s podcasts. They host conversations. They co-sign each other’s work. They get recommended, not just by the algorithm, but by other humans. None of this just “happens.” Even in the supposed meritocracy of the internet, social capital compounds, and if you’re not consciously building it you’ll stagnate, no matter how good your ideas or writing are.

That’s why I call this a system. Because it’s a discipline and very few people do it well.

So what does it look like in practice?

Step 1: Know Your World

You have to know who you’re trying to connect with.

→ Which voices inspire you?

→ Which creators serve a similar audience but speak from a different angle?

→ Who’s already in the room you want to be in?

This is about about positioning yourself inside a larger conversation.

If you don’t know what conversation you’re contributing to, your voice will always be background noise. This might seem obvious but choosing the right people to collaborate with is extremely important. Just because someone writes about the same topic, doesn’t mean they are automatically a good fit.

Step 2: Make Yourself Visible

Not with links to your posts, A.I comments or forced tagging, but with consistent, thoughtful engagement.

→ Reply to Notes with care.

→ Leave intelligent comments on their posts.

→ Link their work in your essays.

→ Highlight something they said and reflect on it.

Make yourself valuable without demanding attention in return, because the people worth connecting will always notice. You would not believe how easy it is to stand out in the comments section.

The people who I ended up collaborating with first started a conversation. This is just like dating. I, and I would argue you anyone of worth, find it a serious turn off when people want to go “straight to bed” with zero context. Why would I recommend your substack, if this is the first time I’m hearing from you?

Step 3: Build Cross-Pollination Loops

Once you’ve earned trust, collaboration becomes possible.

→ Offer a cross-post.

→ Invite them to an interview.

→ Pitch a live session or podcast swap.

→ Create something worth sharing and send it with no pressure attached.

This does not happen overnight, it takes months and years of concerted effort and is one of those things where nothing happens and then everything happens…all at once. The relationships that grow slowly tend to be the ones which last.

Step 4: Reciprocate Without Scorekeeping

Don’t just reach out. Lift others up. Recommend their work. Mention them in rooms they’re not in.

Help people get what they want. Sovereign creators aren’t in competition. They’re in conversation. The more people you bring into that conversation, the more you grow together.

This is what most people miss: Growth is not an event, it’s not a one-time hack. It’s a living ecosystem.

Unless you’re actively nurturing it, you’ll always feel stuck, even when you’re doing everything “right.”…do not forget that this comes after you’ve got your creative output and enhanced thinking systems in place.

This part is more social than strategic. It is extremely difficult especially for those of us who prefer the solitude of writing. But the good news is that sustainable growth is human centred, not algorithmic. When you treat growth as a relational system — not a performance — the entire experience changes.

4. A System for Income

Let’s be blunt: you cannot call this a business if there’s nothing to buy.

So the first step is simple:

Have a product. Even a small one. It’s not about making thousands overnight. It’s about closing the loop - moving from publishing to offering.

I am not going to go into detail here because this letter is getting too long and this deserves it’s own standalone article. These systems should be implemented in the order in which I presented them.

I know that there are many people saying the opposite - “monetise from day 1". “Prioritise growth” “you could be making thousands with just 20 subscribers”….maybe that’s possible if you already have a product and write for a specific high net worth market but for those of us figuring it out as we go it will take time and you cannot do this all at once.

Writing, growth and sales are three interrelated but altogether very different fields and it is unrealistic to think you can master them all at the same time. So take them one at a time and enjoy the process.

That’s it for now. We will talk about growth and income in the coming months.

If you are struggling to stay consistent and find short-form difficult check out the 15-Note system.

If you found this helpful consider sharing it with a friend

Whenever I try to gauge the direction of a platform I look at what it is doing in terms of new features, and set priorities rather than what it’s founders are saying.

It’s founders have said substack is different because it doesn’t optimise for time spent on platform but for connecting readers with what they want to read

However in the last few weeks and months they have rolled out bestseller badges, “rising” tags, Paid newsletter flowers, trending tabs, category leaderboards, go lives, and substack even sends you email nudges - congratulations on (insert arbitrary milestone here), or just a quick reminder that you haven’t posted in a month. It’s persuasion not coersion but the direction is clear.

These features are aimed at creators not readers. A top priority for Substack is to attract big creators to the platform and so the attention is still on trying to make it an attracting place for them to move their audiences to.

The truth is that every one of these new features is a dopamine lever. They are specifically designed with behavioural economics and human status seeking psychology in mind. Meanwhile behind the scenes features such as email sequencing. automation flows, deep integrations and CRM connectivity have not seen the light of day.

The paid newsletter flowers are there to signal status, the rising categories pressure you to pursue paid subscribers. The ever increasing analytics subtly nudge you to obsess over what seems to get views vs. what you want to create…none of these appear to be aimed at helping readers find interesting writing…

They are all there to serve one aim: To keep creators coming back, checking stats and craving hits. It’s the same psychology used in slot machines and other social media feeds. Variable rewards, performance cues and visibility spikes.

And slowly…quietly…the writing platform became a content platform…and then a media platform…and I fully expect the advertisers to land in 2026.

This might seem like a cynical take but it’s just realistic. I don’t see this as good or bad I just see it as what it is. I will get to how to position yourself advantageously in just a minute but first you need to understand how you are being groomed to feed the machine so that you know how to resist it.

I. Social engineering and behavioural economics

You don’t just notice these changes, you feel obligated to chase them. You’re told that if you really want to “grow” you need to start posting video clips. Host lives. Crosspost with bigger writers. Think about trending categories. Engage in Notes like it’s Twitter. Repurpose your essays into Reels. Film hot takes. Build a media flywheel, cross post to Linked-in etc etc.

This is known as digital nudging. Interface designs, reward loops and choice architecture are all crafted to guide your own behaviour without you realising it.

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Badges are not decoration. New “rising” labels are not innocent. They are steering mechanics. A study of the Q&A platform Stack Overflow found that badges create predictable behaviour changes, users contributed more when badges were at stake.

It is not a coincidence that every platform has them. Even YouTube, which is not technically a “social media” platform has a full suite of badges to segment and rank your audience members. It is social engineering through and through.

And so the quiet act of writing starts to fray because you’re now carrying the invisible weight of a thousand growth strategies that all contradict your original intention.

Substack doesn’t have to push these features, the fact that they exists and are constantly being mentioned and celebrated by others is enough to make you question your direction if you do not have a strong foundation.

You came here to write and to publish something of meaning and now the platform keeps whispering: That’s not enough anymore.

II. Substack Is No Longer Just a Newsletter Platform

For a long time, Substack was seen as the writer’s refuge, a quiet corner of the internet, immune to the noise and chaos of social media. It was email-first and Writing-first.

That has changed.

Substack has become a hybrid: part inbox, part algorithmic feed, part social network, part media platform. It’s no longer just a place to build a newsletter. It’s a full-blown attention ecosystem and it’s evolving fast.

If you’re new here, you might not notice the shift. But if you’ve been building here for a while, you’ve probably felt it in your gut.

Because the writers who are growing today are no longer just writers. They’re also performers, marketers, community managers, growth hackers, collaborators, video hosts, livestream guests, thumbnail designers, and headline optimisers.

They’re fluent in Notes. Strategic with mentions. Deliberate about tags. Aggressive about crossposts, and none of this is inherently bad, it’s just…not how it started.

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III. The Algorithm Is Not Your Business Partner. (This may sting)

The problem isn’t that Substack is changing, it’s that the way we relate to these changes is quietly breaking us.

I’ve seen this all before.

I was there when YouTube rolled out shorts. The same pattern unfolded almost word for word. Shorts were the supposed new golden ticket to exponential growth. Every “creator coach” was pushing them with evangelical zeal.

My inbox filled with emails from YouTube with case studies, success stories, and carefully crafted guilt.

“Look how this creator gained a million subscribers in a month just posting shorts”.

“Here’s how to make your first viral video”.

It was everywhere, the pressure was relentless, and I almost gave in.

But something about it felt wrong. The pace was extreme and the noise deafening. I didn’t want to turn my creative practice into a daily performance treadmill and so I stayed the course.

A year later, the tide turned. Those same creators who’d been preaching virality began to confess what had happened behind the scenes. Their subscriber counts exploded, yes, but their businesses collapsed.

Those shorts viewers didn’t care about their deeper work. Shorts had gamed the algorithm but destroyed the signal. Channels with millions of subscribers were suddenly pulling just a few thousand views on the work that once defined them…work that before the shift was getting millions of views.

That’s the danger of mistaking reach for resonance. So when I see the same pressure building here — to diversify, to livestream, to publish video, to be everywhere all at once — I recognise the pattern.

Do not mistake this for innovation, It’s anxiety inducing FOMO disguised as strategy…do not forget that it’s not just you who is trying to find your voice and build an audience…the platform is on the same journey just at a much larger scale. They are currently courting big video, audio and multi-media creators, in fact they’ve set aside $20 million exactly for that.

The push for video is specifically aimed at attracted big Tik-Tok and YouTube creators and it makes business sense. What makes less sense is a complete beginner trying to “grow” through daily reels (…maybe we should call them “short-stacks”?) on this platform.

If you love video, make videos. If you’re drawn to conversations, start a podcast. But don’t get confused about “golden tickets” to growth just because the platform is currently pushing video.

Create because it aligns with your rhythm, not because it feeds the machine. The work that lasts has no shortcuts. Only roots.

The question isn’t whether Substack will keep shifting. It will. The real question is: will you keep contorting yourself to match it? Or will you build a system that carries your voice through the noise, regardless of what’s trending this week?

What’s Worked in 2025 And What Will Still Work in 2026

By now, the pattern is clear.

Every few weeks, Substack changes shape. A new feature rolls out. A new badge appears. The algorithm shifts, the interface redesigns, the rules of engagement quietly evolve.

And with each shift, a subtle pressure builds: You should try this. You should do more. If you don’t adapt you will miss out.

But here’s what I’ve learned in a year and a half on this platform: You don’t have to play the game to stay in the game.

The writers who’ve grown sustainably didn’t chase visibility. They built systems. They focused inward and they found a rhythm that made sense to them and stuck with it, even when the platform moved the goalposts.

Here’s what actually works and will continue to work in 2026:

1. Build a system that doesn’t burn you out.

This is where most people fail.

They try to write more instead of writing better…the problem is the platform rewards them just enough to keep them trapped in that loop. They worry that if they stop posting they will loose momentum and visibility and so become addicted to that schedule even though it’s not serving them.

What works long-term is rhythm, structure, and voice. A repeatable output system that honours your energy and builds recognisability over time.

I used to hate short form and it was only after a lot of thought that I decided to give notes a go when they rolled the feature out. I quickly realised that it was not sustainable to try and post multiple notes a day without a system. That’s why I built the 15-Note System and why it continues to work even as everything else shifts.

2. Start real relationships.

Growth doesn’t come from shouting louder. It doesn’t come from posting more or writing better. It comes from building connections. This is what substack mean when they talk about their algorithm being optimised for connection. Algorithms are necessary. If you want to meet new people you will have to engage with notes, join chats and send people messages.

Real relationships are not obviously transactional. This isn’t just about growth but connection. If you have a group of substack friends who you can talk to and engage with it is much more likely that you will stay the course and still be here in six months time.

Collaboration is the most undervalued growth strategy on Substack, and the most human one.

3. Send emails, not just posts.

Your subscribers matter more than your followers.

Many creators post consistently but rarely send emails only (yes, it is possible to send an email to all your subscribers without posting it to your Substack). This is a mistake. Posts disappear. But when you send an email, you show up in someone’s inbox, their most personal digital space. This is where trust is built.

On a side note when I send emails only the open rate is about 20% higher, than my email/post essays, as are the views (I know…it seems counterintuitive). I have heard this from many other writers on the platform. It is tied to Substacks questionable delivery system and the drive to keep people on platform, not private email inboxes.

4. Download your email list regularly.

This is your insurance policy. If Substack pivots hard, implodes, or introduces pay-to-play visibility, and it might, your audience goes with it unless you’ve exported your list. Download it every month. Store it safely. Build elsewhere if you want, but never give up ownership of your connections.

5. Experiment

Approach these changes with curiosity and do what feels right for you. Substack will continue to roll out new features and it will not be possible to invest in all of them. By all means test and experiment but do so from a place of curiosity, not… will this by my ticket to explosive growth?

Growth takes just as much experimentation and persistence as finding your voice. Usually it is just 10% or recommendations, collaborations or cross promotions which drive 90% of growth and so it will take some time to find those collaborations that really fit and make sense.

5. Remember: you are not married to this platform.

Substack is a tool. It is not your identity. The minute it starts demanding more than it gives, you are free to leave — and the people who truly care about your work will come with you.

That’s the beauty of email. That’s the power of sovereignty. We are at a critical stage in the entshitification of this platform…the focus is shifting away from user experience and towards questions of growth and revenue, so be prepared.

If you feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start with writing short form check out my system for building consistency, voice and authority through short form - 15‑Note System.

Other than that, keep writing, keep reaching out to others and keep moving forward the next steps will reveal themselves as you go.

If this was helpful consider sharing it with someone else.

Take care,

Ben