The work feels scattered. You may even be writing about the same topic week in week out but after a while you are not sure if this is really going anywhere.

This is where a lot of intelligent people start second guessing themselves. So they rightly take a step back. Think things through and then start writing again but within a few weeks they are back to questioning their direction.

The problem is they haven’t answered the deeper question that sits right at the root of this the issue.

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Not many people know this but this is not the first Substack I started.

The first one was attached to my YouTube channel. At the time I was surrounded by people telling me that every creator needed a newsletter.

“Build an email list. Own your audience. Future-proof yourself.”

It sounded like a sensible strategy and I enjoyed writing so I decided to give it a try. To cut a long story short - It didn’t go anywhere and I eventually decided to call it a day.

For a while I assumed the problem was the topics I chose to write about or the writing itself. Perhaps I needed better headlines or more consistency. Maybe I should just try writing about the same thing or maybe I just needed more time.

But the the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I wasn’t struggling because I lacked tactics or strategies it was really because I lacked a clear direction.

I had never really stopped to ask what this thing was supposed to become. That may sound like a small distinction but it changes everything. Because you can be building a creative outlet, an audience, a business, or some kind of second path and although they overlap, they are not the same thing.

The problem is that most people unconsciously try to build all of them at once.

They want the freedom of a creative outlet, the growth of an audience, the income of a business and the fulfilment of meaningful work. The result is very often a constant sense of friction.

That is when I realised I had been asking the wrong questions all along. The question every writer eventually has to answer is this.

What am I actually building?

Not what platform am I using. Not how often should I post. Not what growth strategy should I follow.

What am I actually trying to create here?

The reason this question matters so much is that it sits underneath almost every single decision you will ever make.

Once you answer it, everything becomes clearer. Opportunities become easier to evaluate. Distractions become easier to ignore. You stop feeling pulled in ten different directions at once because you finally have a way to filter what deserves your attention and what doesn’t.

Until then, everything feels equally important. Every new idea looks exciting and every opportunity seems like something you should probably pursue. From personal experience I can tell you with absolute certainty that doing that is exhausting. I mean not just tiring but mentally and emotionally draining.

What makes me quite sad is that I see the misdiagnosis every day online. A large majority of intelligent professionals misdiagnose themselves as having a productivity problem, when it is almost always a clarity problem.

The interesting thing is that there is no universally correct answer to the question. There is nothing inherently noble about building a business. There is also nothing wrong with treating writing as a hobby. Writing a newsletter for fun, creating a personal brand for leverage or venturing onto a second path...because well why not, is also ok.

The problem begins when your actions and intentions drift apart. This is what I have called the power unconscious goals in the past.

You optimise for growth when what you really wanted was self-expression. You chase subscribers when what you were actually looking for was connection. You build a business when what you really wanted was a creative practice. Or, the most common one of all, you tell yourself you’re just doing this for fun, while secretly hoping it will one day become something more.

This simple misalignment of values and goals is what kills the majority of hopes, dreams and aspirations on the internet. It is why you get whole genres of content based on nihilistic cynicism because people just fundamentally misunderstood this issue of alignment and think the world is against them.

You end up pursuing goals that belong to the person who told you to pursue them, and slowly, imperceptibly, you find yourself climbing a ladder only to realise it is leaning against the wrong wall.

Not only that but the deeper issue is that every meaningful project eventually becomes a reflection of the person building it.

Which means that if you are unclear about what you are creating, there is a good chance you are also unclear about who you are becoming. And so even if you have some traditional success, maybe a post goes viral and brings in a huge amount of subscribers…this will eventually tear you apart if you are not clear on the answer to this deeper question.

Most people spend years asking questions like

How do I grow? What should I write about? Which platform should I focus on? What strategy is working right now?

These are not unimportant questions. In fact, they can all be useful. The problem is using them as a starting point before you have addressed the underlying question of what am I actually trying to create here?

A business? A second path? A creative outlet? A body of work? A community?

The answer will be different for everyone, which is exactly why it matters.

The moment you become clear on what you are building, many of the other decisions get answered by default…in fact you hardly need to even ask them because it becomes obvious very quickly.

So before you worry about growth, monetisation or optimisation, spend some time with that question. It may be the most important one you ever answer.

This is something I have wrestled with for years and so I understand that it is not an easy process. In the next article I will breakdown how to make progress even when you are not sure of what you are actually building.

If that sounds interesting make sure to upgrade.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of your day.

Ben

In my experience this is mainly because that kind of advice was never meant for you in the first place. It assumes you already have a clearly defined path. You know exactly why you’re here and what you want to achieve and so all you need are the growth tactics.

You are no doubt trying to build something part time on the side. You’re writing in lunch breaks after work and late at night. You don’t have it all figured out and don’t have hours to spend commenting, DMing and posting. Not only that but you refuse to outsource your thinking to machines or other people.

The reason why most growth hacks and tactics fail you is obvious when you think about it. They are based on a simple premise. They assume you have existing positioning and absolute certainty on what you are trying to achieve.

The irony is that if you do have clarity and strong positioning then the usual tactics and strategies that you hear repeated ad nauseam can actually work quite well. Specifc tactics can amplify clarity but they cannot create it. Clarity has to come first.

That is where a lot of people get stuck, myself included. I thought that all I had to do was just post, comment, network, keep showing up and growth would happen. But when you do not have that essential clarity more tactics, instead of creating momentum, will just create more confusion.

You can post three Notes a day and still feel scattered. You can comment relentlessly and still attract the wrong people. You can send DM’s, join engagement pods, Notes boosts and follow every growth strategy on the platform and still inadvertently feel like none of it is building toward anything meaningful. This is why I focus so much on identity, world view and clarity.

I can usually tell within a split second who is a genuine human being in the comments section and who is simply trying to gain exposure…I’m sure you can too.

You can feel the difference almost immediately. The way the comment is structured gives it away. There is this kind of generic praise. It references something in your post but only in vague general terms and if you look closely, it is often your own note or post with the same words rearranged differently.

And I understand why people do it. It is probably the number one tactic out there.

Comment 30 times a day. Engage hourly. Send 1o DM’s after every post. Increase surface area. Be everywhere.

But if you are trying to do this strategically at scale, you do not have the time or attention to properly read what people are writing.

The interaction is performative…very often it feels like it is machine generated automations which also is not surprising given that this is how many people make money right now. By selling A.I. agents to 10x your growth in 30 days.

I think this matters here on Substack more than elsewhere because we are no longer living in the early internet where anonymity was part of the culture and nobody expected much depth.

The digital and physical worlds are increasingly feeding into one another. People are meeting in person. Writers are hosting live events. Communities are becoming tangible. Readers are becoming collaborators, customers and real relationships.

The internet at large is becoming both more alien and more human at the same time. I know that sounds like a paradox…because it is, but it changes the kind of work that actually resonates.

Last week I met another Substack writer — who writes Serapex — in person for the second time. We geeked out over substack for about 3 hours. I cannot adequately express what this was like in words, all I can say is that the human face to face experience cannot be, and will never be replaced.

Even if you are both wearing VR headsets and touch sensors it is just not the same as casually meeting for a walk in the park on an early summers evening. Neither of us felt the need to get our phones out.

We did not take a selfie of scroll through substack. We met outside in the park which borders the University campus were I live. It was full of students drinking cheap Vodka and coke. The sun came out after an early summer shower and the air smelt so fresh you could almost taste the sense of promise and potential in it.

This is the kind of experience that makes life worth living. Not spending 10 hours a day in front of a screen, desperately trying to get noticed.

People are increasingly overwhelmed by automation and surface-level engagement. There is more content than ever, more synthetic interaction than ever and more pressure to stay visible than ever.

But underneath all of that there is also a growing hunger for signal, sincerity and real thought. I know that I am craving real perspectives that feel embodied and earned…so I’m sure others are as well.

This is why I think so much of the old optimisation advice feels incomplete now. You do not need to become louder than everybody else.

You do not need to automate every touchpoint. You do not need to force constant visibility. What people remember is still surprisingly simple.

A clear point of view. An unapologetic and embodied take, and a sense that there is a real person behind the words.

That evening reminded me why I still care so much about the culture on this platform. It still creates opportunities for real connection and real world relationships to emerge, but only when you have clarity on what you are building and the patience to let it compound.

That is exactly why I wrote How to Build a Coherent Online Identity When You Have Too Many Interests for paid members. If you are struggling to gain clarity (most people are) you can access that guide with a free a trial below

How to Build a Coherent Online Identity

In my experience making Substack work—whatever that ends up meaning for you—starts with clarity of voicer, message and long term goals.

Once that becomes clear, the tactics finally have somewhere meaningful to land.

Greetings from a sweltering Germany.

Cheers,

Ben

P.S. If you found this interesting consider sharing it with a friend.

So you write about productivity one week. Burnout the next. A book you read that changed your life, then share a personal experience, then a reaction to something happening online, then maybe a practical post about mid-life, careers, creativity or A.I.

This is a problem…and also an unfair advantage at the same time.

In this piece I want to show you a framework for how to integrate this contradiction into your work without having to self censor, self edit or create an online persona that leaves you feeling drained.

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The person is always in incredible shape.

Their muscles flex as they move through the workout and somewhere between the protein powder, supplements and energy drink they casually imply that if you follow their routine closely enough, you can eventually look like them too.

Now genetics aside, there is an asymmetry there that we knowingly ignore.

These people are doing “fitness” full time.

Their day is structured around training, nutrition, recovery, sleep, content creation and optimisation. They get paid for it. They receive status from it. Their entire lifestyle reinforces it.

Then there’s you.

Working a full-time job. Running a household. Looking after the family. Trying to squeeze in a workout three times a week after work while the gym is so overcrowded you spend half the session waiting for a machine to become free.

The creator economy is full of these asymmetries.

You have twenty-year-olds who have never worked a serious job giving advice to exhausted professionals in midlife about “just posting more content” or quitting long careers to “go all in” online.

That’s fine. It’s just that most of this advice was never designed for your actual life structure.

Which means if you are building something online part-time, you need a completely different operating model and different expectations.

So what does that actually look like?

How do you grow consistently while still keeping the job going? How do you write, post, build products, maintain relationships and stay psychologically sustainable without turning your entire life into a performance treadmill?

I have been building online part time for almost five years now, and the biggest confusion I see comes from people dramatically underestimating how much energy full-time creators pour into growth, then wondering why trying to imitate this leaves them overwhelmed, fragmented and discouraged.

To make this simple, I need to be direct.

Things rarely move until you know exactly who you are, what you want to build and who you are actually trying to reach.

Stop trying skip Developmental Stages

Back in the 1970s, Noel Burch developed a model describing the four stages of competence. This framework explains something critical.

Professional full-time creators are usually operating from the final stage. You are still somewhere near the beginning, and the distance between those two realities is significant.

This is also why I believe it is so important to build around problems you are actively experiencing in real time.

The most useful systems and frameworks usually emerge from trying to solve problems you are actively experiencing yourself.

As you read through the model try to accurately assess which stage of development you are in….not which one you would like to be in.

1. Unconscious Incompetence

You do not know what you do not know.

This is usually characterised by high energy, confidence and complete ignorance of the complexity ahead of you.

This is a good thing because if most people fully understood how difficult building something could become, they would never begin at all.

This is what I call the honeymoon phase. Everything still feels exciting because reality has not challenged your assumptions yet.

2. Conscious Incompetence

Then reality arrives.

You begin creating consistently and slowly realise how much you lack. You become aware of skill gaps, weaknesses, inconsistency and complexity.

This stage is painful because awareness replaces fantasy. This is where the vast majority of people quit.

Being consciously incompetent does not feel good at all. But it is completely normal.

Think back to your first serious job. There were new systems to learn. New software. Office politics. Team dynamics. Expectations you did not fully understand yet.

Nobody walks into a professional environment already fluent. Competence is developed through repetition, friction and time.

So why do people expect building online to feel different? Why do they assume discomfort means they are failing rather than developing?

3. Conscious Competence

This is where things begin to take shape.

You can perform reasonably well now, but it’s still not fluid. You need systems, structure and focus, but you can feel yourself improving.

This is where frameworks and rhythm start mattering.

In practical terms, this is usually the point where you finally know:

• Who you are

• Who you are trying to attract

• What your writing is actually about.

You are no longer posting random thoughts into the void hoping something resonates. You begin noticing patterns. Certain themes consistently connect and certain topics attract the wrong audience entirely.

You start understanding the difference between attention, alignment and conversion.

But you still need structure because without it your work can easily drift back into vagueness or inconsistency.

This is why full time creators eventually develop systems.

Ironically, this is the stage most beginners wish they could start at. A huge amount of unnecessary suffering comes from resisting the earlier stages instead of accepting them.

4. Unconscious Competence

Eventually the skill becomes embodied. You stop consciously thinking through every action. The process becomes instinctual, integrated and automatic.

This is the very essence of fluency. It is also where many professional full-time creators now find themselves. They can now afford to experiment with every growth strategy under the sun because they know exactly who they are, who they are speaking to and where this is all leading.

At this stage it becomes very easy to forget what confusion actually felt like. I am not yet at this stage in “creator land” but I experience this with German now.

As I have lived here for so long I often know which word sounds correct or which grammatical case to use instinctively. But if someone asks me to explain the exact rule behind it, I struggle to because the process no longer feels intellectual. It’s become instinctual.

Join The Work That Holds

This is the realisation I had with my rebrand. If you want to help others it is essential to document your journey while you are still inside the friction.

Do not wait until mastery arrives. Those things are so easily forgotten six months from now. By that point you are often emotionally disconnected from the actual pain beginners are experiencing.

My first product was free. It was a basic Notion template built around problems I was actively struggling with myself at the time.

The same thing happened later with The 2-Hour Starting Point and eventually the 15-Note System.

Those products emerged directly from lived tension rather than detached expertise and I think people can feel the difference.

Why Clarity Matters More Than Growth Early On

One of the advantages of having a 9-5 is that this constraint forces you to become more selective much earlier.

When you only have a few hours each day outside of work, family responsibilities and the general maintenance of adult life, you simply do not have the bandwidth to pursue every possible growth strategy at once.

You cannot realistically run a podcast, YouTube channel, daily livestream, long-form newsletter, consulting business, Discord community and post across six different social platforms all at the same time without having a nervous breakdown.

In my experience, that limitation produces better work.

The lack of time forces you to stop thinking like a content machine and start thinking more strategically about sustainability.

You begin asking different questions.

What actually fits my personality? What kind of writing feels natural for me? Which platform genuinely aligns with the way I think? What can I still realistically sustain three years from now once the initial excitement disappears?

Most people trying to build online are overwhelmed because the modern internet presents them with an almost infinite number of possible directions.

Every platform encourages expansion. Every algorithm shift creates another pressure to adapt. Every successful creator appears to be doing ten things simultaneously.

But part-time creators do not have the luxury of scattering their attention endlessly. Which means they are often forced into developing something more valuable much earlier.

Many talented people such as Carl Jung, Charles Bukowski and Franz Kafka wrote in the mornings and evenings alongside full-time, demanding roles.

That is why growth should be approached through strategic experimentation rather than permanent escalation.

Try different formats. Explore different rhythms. Pay attention to your energy and notice which forms of work create momentum naturally versus which ones constantly leave you drained.

Growth does not come from one dramatic action. It is the result of repeating a small number of coherent actions long enough for compounding to begin taking effect.

So before you start a podcast, or instagram page, or YouTube channel you should be prepared to do it consistently for at least a year before determining if it is really “working or not”.

Just because someone else has 10 things going on at once doesn’t mean you have to follow them.

This is also why I’ve been developing what I’m calling the Substack Clarity Framework for professionals building part-time as a way of helping people organise their experience, thinking and interests into a more coherent direction online.

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The Alternative Operating Model for Modern-Professionals

So what does growth actually look like when you are building online alongside a full-time career?

well, it starts by accepting something that many people resist for far too long which is that trying to imitate full-time creators will destroy any momentum you may build in the first place. You must start at the beginning.

1. Who are you and what do you want?

This is where the developmental stages become key.

If you are not sure of the answer to this question then just start writing and posting…seriously.

It is better to start somewhere than to spend months on planning. Treat writing and posting as your clarifying direction tool.

This is partly why I’ve become increasingly interested in helping professionals think more clearly about positioning and strategic direction rather than simply “growing faster.”

In order to even think about something like positioning you really have to have written for a few months to get a clear idea of your own voice, your goals and how you want to achieve them.

Growth usually accelerates when people can immediately understand who you are, what you believe, who you are speaking to, and why they should continue paying attention.

A recognisable identity compounds. Random content does not.

2. Build From Your Existing Life Instead of Escaping It

This is your unique advantage as a part time creator.

You have a whole life outside of what you do online. Your existing life is the raw material.

Your job. Your frustrations. Your expertise. Your interests. Your lived experience. Your observations. Your failures. Your perspective.

Professionals already possess something extremely valuable which is pattern recognition developed through years of real-world experience.

Those are not weaknesses online. They are advantages.

That depth often creates something much more valuable than trying to imitate whatever currently performs well online.

The goal is not to become a generic creator. The goal is to become more recognisably yourself.

3. Use Short-Form to Refine Your Thinking

Short-form writing is one of the highest leverage tools available to part-time creators right now, but it is deeply misunderstood.

Most people use short-form reactively. They post random thoughts throughout the day, constantly interrupting their own attention and slowly fragmenting their thinking in the process.

I think this is one of the hidden psychological dangers of modern content creation. Your attention is not designed to repeatedly context-switch all day long.

This is why I eventually stopped writing Notes impulsively and developed a system that actually deepens by thinking.

Short-form writing is not just a tool for distribution it is actually a mirror. A kind of feedback loop for your thinking, a refinement tool for your voice and ultimately a path to resonance.

This is also why I think short-form is so important for professionals specifically. You do not have unlimited time to endlessly produce content and hope clarity eventually emerges afterwards.

Short-form dramatically shortens the feedback loop between writing, positioning and audience response. It allows you to refine your thinking publicly in real time instead of disappearing for six months trying to perfect an identity in private.

But that only happens when you treat it with the same seriousness you give your long-form work. Not as a throwaway slot machine of random ideas, but as an intentional practice of building your presence in the minds of others.

The reason most creators fail at short form is because they think it’s about attention. It isn’t. Short form is about conditioning perception. It’s a way of shaping what people believe about you and your work every time they encounter your name.

But if you approach it without structure, it can also completely destroy your ability to think clearly.

4. Build a Product Earlier Than You Think You Should

One of the best ways to clarify your thinking is to try packaging it into something useful. Even if it is free.

Most people delay creating products because they assume they need years of expertise first. In reality, trying to solve a specific problem for another person is often the fastest route toward developing clarity yourself.

The moment you build a product, vague thinking becomes painfully obvious.

You suddenly have to explain your process clearly. You have to organise information and think structurally instead of emotionally.

My first products emerged directly from problems I was actively struggling with in real time.

The systems only existed because I needed them myself first.

5. Protect Your Cognitive Environment

High-quality writing is often the downstream effect of high-quality cognition. Which means protecting your attention matters far more than most people realise.

This is partly why walking became so important for me after moving to Germany. The slower rhythm here changed the quality of my thinking.

Some of my best ideas arrive as I’m walking across the university campus and down into the historic Westend on the way to work or back home. Far away from screens and metrics and constant stimulation.

You cannot produce clear writing from a permanently overstimulated mind.

6. Ignore the Pressure to Expand Everywhere

The modern internet constantly pressures you toward expansion.

A podcast. A YouTube channel. Livestreams. Daily posts. Clips. Threads. Communities. Short-form video. If you are a full time creator then this is what you do. You look at where the attention is and expand your operation to capture as much of it as possible.

Just like the fitness influencer I mentioned at the beginning this is not reality for us. As a Part-time creator you need to be ruthlessly selective.

All you need is one relationship platform (Newsletter, Podcast, Blog) and one distribution Platform (short-form writing, vertical video). If you are thinking of starting a podcast or doing video is it really because you are genuinely interested in that…or is it because someone told you that’s how to go exponential?

The goal is not to dominate every platform. The goal is to build enough leverage, trust and readership that your future no longer depends entirely on a single employer or institution.

7. Prioritise Real Relationships Over Audience Metrics

One of the most valuable parts of building online has not been audience growth.

It has been the conversations.

Since writing on Substack I have come into contact with people living completely different lives to my own. Artists. Founders. Writers. Business owners. People I never would have encountered inside the normal structure of my offline life.

And those conversations have changed the way I think.

Yes, you can feed questions into A.I and receive highly competent answers instantly. But a real conversation with another thoughtful person often creates a completely different kind of insight.

Another person will challenge your assumptions, notice blind spots and introduce perspectives you simply would not arrive at alone or with A.I.

In the long run, the people around you shape the quality of your thinking just as much as the information you consume.

I think a lot of professionals assume they are “behind” online because they cannot move at the speed of full-time creators.

But maybe the real advantage is not speed at all.

Maybe the advantage is that you are forced to build more carefully from the beginning. More selectively. More sustainably. With stronger boundaries, clearer positioning and a life that still exists outside the algorithm.

The internet currently rewards intensity very aggressively. But intensity and durability are not the same thing.

And I increasingly suspect that many of the people building part-time, slowly compounding trust, reputation and audience over years rather than months, are the ones most likely to eventually build something that actually lasts.

Over the next few months I’m going to be developing this idea further inside the paid membership through deeper essays, systems and the Part-Time Creator Operating System itself.

I genuinely believe professionals need a completely different model for building online than the one creator culture currently promotes.

This is also why I’ve been developing The Substack Clarity Framework for professionals building part-time.

A deeper guide to helping you figure out who you are, what you want, and how to build a coherent body of work online without turning yourself into a content machine.

Click to Unlock

Take care,

Ben

I was fed up with the state of work, the internet and productivity. My initial goal was to take a stand against hustle culture, quick hacks and disposable content.

And so I wrote about it. About the discipline spiral, about futile productivity and the lies of the creator economy.

After many months of writing into the void something shifted and certain articles started to take off. I received many heartfelt comments and was even invited into a telegram group with European writers and creatives of all shapes and sizes. It was really exciting and felt like I had found my people.

What struck me very quickly was that most of the people resonating with the work were not aspiring influencers or full-time creators. They were intelligent professionals in transition. People in their 30s, 40s and 50s who had succeeded in conventional terms but felt increasingly disconnected from the systems around them.

Many of them were consultants, leaders, designers, engineers, writers and creatives.

People with real life experience and expertise who didn’t want to spend the next twenty years trapped inside structures that no longer reflected who they were becoming.

That changed how I started thinking about my publication.

One thing I want to make clear is that your publication name and branding is not important when you first start. In fact I actively encourage people to just pick the first thing that comes to mind because it can be the source of serious procrastination.

It is very easy to change it later, which is now what I have done, so…

Welcome to The Work That Holds.

The phrase came to me because I realised that most modern work disappears almost instantly. Content gets consumed and forgotten and Platforms reward speed over depth.

I am not here to build more disposable output. My goal is to create work that survives changing platforms, changing algorithms and changing phases of life.

Work that stabilises rather than fragments. Work that compounds slowly over time instead of demanding constant reinvention. That is what I want to share with you and I encourage you to think in these terms.

The Work That Holds is the embodiment of this philosophy.

I help full-time professionals transform their expertise, ideas and lived experience into writing-based businesses that create leverage, income and long-term optionality outside traditional career structures.

A profitable Substack is not just an audience or readership. It is the beginning of a second life path.

In my experience most people join Substack with clear ideas about what they want to write about - in the form of traditional articles. But very few people give any thought to short form notes, collaborations, cross posts, and Email-Post ratios.

One thing I realised six months in was that the way I was writing also had to change.

I made a small but hugely significant shift which was to focus more of my attention on short-form writing.

Short-form forced me to sharpen ideas before they became essays. It helped me identify recurring themes, refine language and slowly develop a more coherent worldview.

I used to hat short-form. I mean truly despise it because I associated it with fragmented attention and disposable content. But when used properly, it can became a thinking tool, a positioning tool and a way of developing intellectual consistency in public.

In fact it changed my creative practice so much that I eventually built an entire system around it. It is the product that has received the most positive feedback and has made a real difference to how people approach online writing. I have decided to include it as one of the assets that paid members receive automatically when they sign up.

If you need direction and accountability this will help. You can check it out below.

Unlock the 15-Note System & Paid Tier

This year I turned 40 which put a few things into perspective. I do not believe in burning the boats and running for the exit ramp. I am not 20 anymore and have obligations that cannot just be ditched.

I believe in building something slowly that energises me and enhances my existing life. Writing does that for me. By wrestling with the words, reflecting on my days, my progress and struggles I become more present and more embodied in my own life and I really want to transmit the importance of that gift to more people.

Writing does this in a way that video cannot. I tried video documentation and it is a complete distraction. It pulls you away from the present so that you cannot enjoy the moment you are living in.

This is not about desperately racing towards an end goal, it is about building something of meaning that can be sustained for years to come.

Living abroad changed the way I think about almost everything.

I’ve spent years moving between systems, cultures and ways of thinking. Britain taught me narrative, humour and improvisation. Germany taught me structure, systems and long-term thinking. Working in precious metals during periods of economic instability taught me how differently people behave once something real is at risk.

Those experiences slowly pushed me away from the internet’s obsession with speed, optimisation and constant visibility.

Most people online are desperately trying to accelerate their lives. I am actively trying to decelerate mine and focus on the one or two things that truly matter.

Most people do not need another productivity system. They need a direction that feels psychologically sustainable.

My purpose here is to demonstrate that sustainable growth built around clarity, ownership and coherence is achievable for anyone who can apply structure focus and implement consistently on their vision.

I believe, and have already seen how a body of work can become a stabilising force in a person’s life, not just financially but psychologically.

And, even if they haven’t fully articulated this yet, I think more people are craving this and that is exactly what I am here for.

If you have any questions feel free to send me a message.

Take care,

Ben

It’s 2020 and the world goes berserk.

Covid forces people inside.

Screen time skyrockets and silicon valley takes action.

This was the moment that VC capital started to flood into the system.

Up until this point the internet was still a relatively loosely defined space.

The big platforms had emerged but it was still largely individuals publishing online, building audiences and experimenting with formats.

As covid shifted more of life online this became the next massive opportunity for investors. In many ways silicon valley saw this as the next wave of tech start ups.

The numbers tell part of the story.

Patreon raises $155 million in 2020, followed by another major round the year after.

Substack raises around $65 million in 2021.

Cameo crossed $100 million in transactions.

Clubhouse reached a valuation of roughly $4 billion at its peak, to name but a few.

Not only that but there were massive stories dominating the headlines like Spotify signing a deal with Joe Rogan reportedly worth over $100 million. It Later doubled down with creators like Emma Chamberlain.

Even on a smaller scale, people like Ali Abdaal and Dan Koe were perfectly positioned to take advantage of the covid surge and started getting algorithmically recommended on all platforms.

The groundwork was set. Creators were no longer just users of platforms, they became the assets. They were used to build hype and aspiration in an attempt to build not only the platforms but the industry as a whole.

And so you, as did I, bought into the dream that the creator economy promised. Freedom, autonomy and a life on your own terms. You probably thought this sounds like something I could do. Just write or talk about my interests, create a small digital product and get paid for it. That sounds achievable.

The reality is that there has been world class story telling around this space for several years now and it has built up an unrealistic ideal that has very little to do with reality.

The covid boom is over, but the advice from that era still lives on. By the end of this essay you will understand how the system dynamics have changed. Why it is not enough to just be consistent, and what is required if you want to make writing a sustainable long term option.

I’m curious. How long have you been operating in the creator economy? Do you want to make a living or is this your hobby?

I am full time employed. Part time YouTube since 2022 and I’ve been writing on Substack for almost 2 years. I have launched products that made 1000’s of dollars, and some that made zero.

This article is not a 5 step formula to 10K a month in 30 days. If you’re looking for quick wins, shortcuts, or a way to force growth, this won’t help you.

This is written for people who are thinking beyond that. Those who are trying to build something that lasts, even if it grows slower.

To understand why this is happening, I find it helpful to conceptualise the system in two phases.

The expansion phase, where everything was growing and almost any form of consistent output could find an audience.

And the consolidation phase, where attention is limited, distribution is controlled, and the same behaviours start producing the opposite outcome.

Most advice you see today was built in the first phase. You are probably operating in the second.

The influx of capital in 2020 and 2021 didn’t just accelerate growth.

It locked the story in. What had been a loose collection of people doing very different things online was suddenly packaged into something clean, comparable and, most importantly, investable.

I’ve already written about how much attention is placed on packaging and positioning Here

The Language of the Creator Economy

This might sound like hair-splitting but language is extremely important. Bloggers, YouTubers, Podcasters, Writers — all of these terms are tied to a format or medium and a specific way of working. But Around 2019 terms like the “passion economy” and “creator economy” started to gain traction.

They were attempts to describe a shift that was already underway. What was missing was a unifying frame and around 2020 is when that frame locked in.

As capital moved decisively into the space, platforms began to align. Media adopted the terminology. Investors repeated it, and the word “creator” became the default label for a category that was large enough, and more importantly, valuable enough to formalise.

YouTube didn’t erase the term “YouTuber” but replaced it at an institutional level. Internal channels like “Creator Insider”, “creator events” and tools for creators signalled a broader move toward a single, more flexible identity of the “creator”, across formats, audiences, and, crucially, monetisation.

TikTok launched it’s Creator Fund, not a Tiktok fund. Spotify positioned itself as “Spotify for Creators,” not podcasters.

Even Substack, the platform we still think of as niche, quiet and wholesome began to start framing writers as creators, in an attempt to attract bigger names to the platform.

Different forms of work, different mediums, different outputs all folded into a single term.

So why does that matter?

It might sound like a necessary simplification of a complex and messy situation. Maybe it is, but it’s also, to a larger extent, a standardisation.

Once everything is standardised, it can be compared. Once it can be compared, it can be ranked. And once it can be ranked, it can be optimised.

That shift is what made the creator economy scalable. But it is also what makes us replaceable.

Once your work is reduced to something that can be compared, ranked, and optimised, it no longer needs to be specifically yours.

It just needs to perform. That’s when the system stops being about what you make and starts being about how it performs.

In retrospect this does not appear to have been accidental.

This is where the dynamics fundamentally changed. Because once everything sits under the same label, the individual “creator” stops being the asset, and is replaced with the format.

You’re a creator inside a system that decides what gets seen and what doesn’t. People stop watching and following individual creators. They consume the feed. The platform becomes the asset. Not the individual person making the “content”.

And if the platform is the asset, then the individual becomes interchangeable.

This is the point that most of us missed. On most platforms you are not building something people come to. You are supplying something a system distributes. And once you understand that, a lot of the frustration starts to make sense.

By 2023, the hype around the creator economy began to cool. The Funding slowed down. Some platforms started to struggle and the initial narrative lost momentum.

According to this report the number of independent creators has stopped growing and actually started to decline. The expansion phase has ended. The system is no longer pulling people in at the same rate.

Countless studies show that the majority (75% - 80%) of creators earn less than 50K a year and only the top 5% earn over 100K per year.

Inequality is just as pronounced online as it is in the real world. The top 5% of creators continue to amass wealth and influence while the masses struggle to gain any sort of meaningful traction at all.

Funding peaked earlier and is now more selective. Investors are shifting to fewer, bigger bets and they are going with proven winners. The experimentation phase is over and the system is consolidating.

This is where the break happened. The behaviours that worked during expansion e.g consistency, volume and optimisation do not stop working. They invert. They produce more content, more competition, and less differentiation. Which is why so many people are working harder than ever and getting nowhere.

People are more resistant than they used to be. There is less patience for anything that feels overly engineered for attention and more awareness of how much of what they’re seeing is designed to perform rather than just say something of worth.

So now that you’re questioning everything you might be feeling like this is a lost cause.

Building an audience online is hard. If you are feeling stuck, it is probably not a motivation problem or a discipline problem. It is a phase problem. You are applying expansion-phase behaviours inside a consolidation-phase system.

So what should you do next?

If you are someone who just wants to write and forget about the rest. You should stop reading here.

For those who are here to build something and actually want their work to get seen, this is how I’m thinking about this now.

I am not stepping outside the system. That’s not realistic. But I am trying to use it without letting it shape the work itself.

There is a reason people are drifting away from the larger platforms. I shared the numbers above but you can also just feel it, even without the data.

The intense competition, the generic phrases and hacks and the sense that everything is being shaped for the same outcome. People are tired of it. That’s why you’re seeing movement toward smaller, newer platforms such as Substack, Ghost, Bluesky, Mastodon and the rest.

This is not because they are fundamentally different, but because they still feel open and less optimised, for now.

That last part matters. Substack is a good bet at this stage, but it is a temporary window, not a permanent advantage. The same dynamics that shaped every other platform are starting to show up here as well. If you treat it as a long-term guarantee, you will make the same mistake again.

So the question becomes how to use this phase properly while it still exists?

Shift 1. Clarity.

What are you actually trying to build and who it is for? Because in a system where attention is fragmented and distribution is controlled, vague positioning disappears almost immediately.

If someone reads three pieces and cannot explain what you stand for, the work is not holding. And if it’s not holding, nothing compounds. Which means you are not building anything. You are just producing.

If you want a simple way to approach this, use the tools that are now available to you.

Take a piece of your writing and run it through an A.I model.

Use this Prompt:

Developing a clear voice and unique positioning is one of the few ways to stand out. Consider becoming a founding member and I will personally audit your substack. We’ll look at your positioning, tone of voice, consistency of messaging and overall strategy. Consider upgrading here:

Upgrade for long term growth

Shift 2. Output.

Most of what you produce will not move anything.

That is just the reality of it.

I have written over sixty long-form pieces. The majority have brought in one or two subscribers, if that. Less than 6 have done the opposite. They have reached new people, and pulled them into the rest of the work. That distribution is not even and it never was. It has been the same for me on Youtube.

Not every piece will hit. Not every post will lead to growth. Some things are written to grow. Others are written to develop ideas, to test positions, to push something further.

The problem is, you don’t know in advance which posts will be the ones that do the most work for you. This is why it is important to lead with curiosity and to keep experimenting. Trying to replicate one piece that might have gone viral last month is where you start to dilute your voice and the quality of your work.

Shift 3. Titles & Positioning

I wish this wasn’t the case, but it is.

You can write something truly groundbreaking but if the title doesn’t invite people in, it won’t be read. The title frames everything and will determine who you end up attracting. I thought this would be less important with Email than it is, for example with Youtube Thumbnails. I was wrong.

Try not to think of this as tricking people into clicking. It’s really about making your thinking legible. If someone cannot understand what you are doing from the outside, they will never get close enough to engage with the work itself.

I now spend a lot of time on titles. I regularly rewrite them, sometimes 20 -30 times before I even start the article.

I started this piece with “I don’t want to be a creator anymore.” I think it is a great title and would gain traction fast but it also felt reactive. I decided I don’t want to attract the kind of person who that would resonate with. Then I cycled through countless more accurate, but less compelling titles until I finally landed on the one that you clicked on.

That tension never goes away. How to frame what you are doing is extremely important. Not to manipulate, but to make it legible to someone who is third stressed and thinking about something else. The title is not decoration. It is the entry point. If you get that wrong, the rest of the work doesn’t matter.

Shift 4. Human Networks

Writing alone, however good it is, is not enough to grow anymore. If you already have solid writing and are clear on who you are and what your goals are then you will be thinking about growth.

In this consolidation phase a little more effort and creativity is required. The writers who grow the fastest are great communicators and collaborators. During the rapid growth stage relying on the algorithm to shoot you to the moon may have been enough. Today getting in front of other audiences requires reaching out to other writers. Collaboration will bring more growth than pumping out content.

If things are not working spend some time in shift 1. The value is not in the answers themselves. It’s in what they force you to confront.

Most people think they lack reach but reach only comes when you have some kind of clarity on who you are and who you are trying to attract.

This is also not something you just do once. I do this myself on a regular basis. I too am still figuring this out. I often feel the urge to mix things up or run some kind of random experiment and doing these kind of exercises helps to keep me centred and grounded. Run your writing through the prompt I provided and let me know if it helped.

Most people are writing without a stable direction, which means every piece resets the process. Nothing connects, nothing accumulates, and nothing becomes recognisable over time.

This exercise makes that visible.

Thanks for reading,

Take care,

Ben

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:

15 Note System

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