When the default path stops making sense

The sovereignty split and dual positioning. Your definition of success will change...prepare accordingly

I built my early career in luxury retail.

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.

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