Do less.
The future of solopreneurs.
Everything you've been told to do to survive the AI revolution as a solopreneur (and a knowledge worker) is exactly what will make you obsolete.
I’m not a technology-first person, I’m a strategy-first person, so I’ve been careful about discussing AI.
I’ve always considered it in the frameworks I give you, but I never went out to talk about it.
But the thought of how fast AI is moving has been nagging me.
Lately, instead of doing more to get attention, I’ve been sitting here, in the quiet, reading, thinking and talking to Claude about the future of solopreneurship in a world of highly advanced AI.
What it would look like. When it would come. What we can do to prepare for it.
You’ll want to read those revelations.
What woke me up
This letter from the future (2029) when AI won’t need us anymore. (Yes, you read that right. AI won’t need US anymore.)
“Every time you got better at prompting, the AI got better at not needing prompts.
The thing that made you valuable — your ability to translate intent into instructions the AI could follow — was the exact thing the AI labs were working to eliminate. You were building expertise in a gap that was closing. The better you got at bridging the space between what you wanted and what the AI could deliver, the faster it learned to close that space on its own. You weren’t developing a durable skill. You were perfecting the art of operating a machine that was actively learning to operate itself.”
The backwards intuition
So what’s a solopreneur to do? Let’s talk about leverage points a little.
In her essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, Donella Meadows writes:
“Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”
The idea of leverage points isn’t new, but the problem is that most people apply it intuitively. And intuition can lead you on.
Here’s an example from Meadow’s essay:
“Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!”
Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global problems — poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment — are related and how they might be solved, Forrester made a computer model and came out with a clear leverage point: Growth.
Not only population growth, but economic growth. Growth has costs as well as benefits, and we typically don’t count the costs — among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, etc. — the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth! What is needed is much slower growth, much different kinds of growth, and in some cases no growth or negative growth.
The world’s leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.”
Apply this lens to solopreneurship in a world of highly advanced AI, and something uncomfortable comes into focus.
What we’re all pushing
The almost universal advice across business and creator communities right now is to use AI to push on capability and output. Use AI to produce more. To produce better. To produce faster. Niche deeper. Grow the audience.
This feels like the leverage point because it has always worked historically. More skill, more value delivered, more economic result (for you and others).
But in a world where AI has essentially infinite capability and infinite output, pushing harder on capability and output is exactly Forrester’s backwards intuition. You’re pushing growth in a system where growth is precisely what’s been commoditized.
The leverage point looks like productivity and skill, but it isn’t.
The actual leverage point
The highest leverage point in any complex system is changing the shared idea underneath everything (rather than the flows and stocks that everyone can see and measure).
The paradigm everyone is currently operating from is: value comes from what you can produce. That paradigm made complete sense in every previous economic era. It’s so deeply embedded that questioning it feels almost absurd.
The actual leverage point right now is the source of value itself: you. We’re shifting from production-based value to existence-based value. Not what you make, but what you are, who you’ve become, and the irreplaceable specific human reality you inhabit.
This is a paradigm shift that’s violently resisted because it requires abandoning the mental model that got everyone to where they are.
It also feels vague, grey and mushy. What does that even mean, to be valuable simply for existing? What should you do with it? (See, we have a problem with just being. We always need to do.)
I’ll give you some pointers below (derived from system thinking) about what that would look like and what you need to focus on.
But now, let me tell you why I think that in a highly advanced AI world…