I’m looking forward to learning from everyone and connecting with people who are building businesses around greater freedom, flexibility, and a better lifestyle. What are you currently working toward - more time, more income, more flexibility, or all three?

The best business advice you ever received will now DESTROY your business. … In case you missed it… I’m writing a series about what happens when the rules of business change faster than businesses can adapt. AI has destabilized the environment and I’m trying to figure out what survives. I’ll drop the previous articles in the comments if you want to catch up. … In my last post, I argued that most of us are still building businesses optimized for stability while AI has pushed us into an increasingly unstable world. Here’s the best business advice any of us ever received, pre-AI: Focus. Niche down. Specialize. Choose “The One Thing”. Ignore distractions. Don’t succumb to “shiny object syndrome”. Go deep. Build the moat. Etc. etc. etc. It’s all the same thesis, just stated differently. And, in a pre-AI world, this was the greatest lesson an entrepreneur could possibly learn. For most of us, it was a lesson we learned the hard way and had to re-learn at regular intervals. The traditional entrepreneurial playbook looks something like this: Pick a market. Find your niche. Develop deep expertise. Build one great company. Hire specialists. Optimize operations. Increase margins. Build defensibility. Scale. Then spend years making that machine increasingly efficient. This is an extraordinarily effective strategy when the environment remains stable long enough for optimization to compound. You spend ten years learning an industry nobody else understands. You develop proprietary processes. You recruit highly specialized talent. You build distribution. You accumulate institutional knowledge. Every year the organism becomes more perfectly adapted to its environment. That sounds wonderful. Until the environment changes. Then something strange happens. The thing that made you great can become the thing that kills you. Your expertise becomes legacy knowledge. Your specialization becomes rigidity. Your optimized processes become expensive baggage.