Melanie brings a rich mix of experience to that question. After 20 years in corporate transformation, she started her own business. Now, through My New Ways Decision Points, she helps experienced leaders and experts turn what they know into digital businesses built around their expertise and methods.

I came to the conversation from a different path: I’ve built businesses since I was 14, but learned the hard way that loving the work doesn’t mean you’ll love every way of running it. I’ve burned out twice by spending too much time on operations when my strengths lie in designing products, sharing ideas, and solving strategic problems.

We found common ground in the idea that the answer isn’t always to work harder. It may be to redesign the way the work is packaged and delivered.

Your expertise can travel beyond one-to-one work

Selling your time can be a good way to begin. Consulting, coaching, and personal services help you learn directly from the people you serve. But the model has limits: earning more can mean working more, and time away can mean income stops.

Digital products and programs can help create another way for your expertise to reach people. That doesn’t mean every service should become a course, or that one-to-one work has no value. It means asking which parts of what you know could help people without requiring you to deliver the same thing personally every time.

Melanie shared the example of a postpartum care worker who supports families with newborns. Her hands-on work matters to her, but it also takes time, travel, and energy. She began turning parts of her knowledge—such as preparing for the first weeks at home—into resources families could use alongside her personal care.

That kind of shift asks for more than a new offer. It asks people to see themselves in a new way: as both a care provider and a business owner, or as both an expert and someone who can create something scalable from that expertise.

Start with the business model—and with yourself

It’s tempting to begin with a platform, a website, or a content schedule. But before choosing channels, it helps to ask what kind of business you actually want to run.

Do you want to be on camera? Do you want a lot of client contact? How much time do you want to spend on delivery, operations, and promotion? What do you want your working life to feel like?

Those answers can guide the model. If you don’t want to make videos, you don’t have to force yourself into a video-first strategy. If you value direct contact, you can keep one-to-one work as part of the business while building other ways for people to benefit from what you know.

The sequence we discussed was simple: get clear on the business model, decide what you want to be known for, find your voice, then make a small offer and test whether people want it. Validate before investing heavily. An idea becomes more useful when it meets real people and real needs.

More tools don’t automatically create more clarity

AI has made it faster to draft, build, and explore. It can help experts turn their knowledge into clearer offers and create things that once took months. But speed brings its own pressure: endless tools, models, advice, and new possibilities to keep up with.

Lucas newsletter name is Beyond Noise. That phrase captures a central challenge for independent professionals now: the problem is often not a lack of information. It’s deciding which information matters.

AI can help organize and filter what we already know. It can surface patterns in notes, projects, and decisions. But it can’t decide what matters to us, what trade-offs we’re willing to make, or what kind of work we want to build our lives around.

For that, we still need human judgment—and sometimes a pen, paper, and enough quiet to think.

Small decisions can open a big door

In the conversation, I talked about “asymmetric decisions”: small, relatively low-risk actions that could lead to a much larger result. When we have too many options, we can get stuck waiting for certainty. But the next helpful move is often modest: make one call, talk to one potential customer, test one version of an offer.

The goal isn’t to make the perfect decision. It’s to make a useful move, notice what happens, and learn from the result.

That’s also why a first product doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s an experiment. If it doesn’t work, the response is information you can use to adjust. If it does, you have something to build on. Either way, you learn more than you would by keeping the idea in your head.

You are allowed to redesign the work

Many of us learned to follow a fairly predictable path: get an education, find a job, build experience, and progress along an established route. That path is changing. New tools are altering how work gets done, and the old ways of earning may not fit everyone anymore.

Your years of experience still matter. The combination of your skills, history, judgment, and way of working is part of your intellectual property. The opportunity is to decide how to use it—and to build a structure that suits both the people you help and the life you want.

You don’t need to follow every trend or reinvent your entire career overnight. Start by asking: What do I want more of? What do I want less of? What’s one small way to test a different model?

That’s where a sustainable business can begin.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Meet Melanie: Her background and why she started writing on Substack

• 01:41 — Turning expertise into a digital business: Building offers around what you already know

• 03:26 — When your business starts to feel like a cage: Burnout, business operations, and changing the setup

• 06:41 — Why time-for-money models become hard to sustain

• 09:35 — A care worker’s path to digital offers: Extending hands-on expertise beyond one-to-one work

• 12:34 — Identity and asymmetric decisions: Why knowing what to do doesn’t always make it easy to act

• 14:40 — Start with the business model: Design around the life and work you want

• 16:28 — Choose what you want to be known for, then test a small offer

• 18:03 — Finding the pattern in your experience: What Lucas learned by reviewing his past projects

• 24:00 — Getting unstuck when you have too many ideas (approximate)

• 31:00 — Making your expertise visible and useful (approximate)

• 46:30 — Where human value sits as AI automates more work

• 47:15 — Using decision filters without handing decisions over to AI

• 52:16 — Why pen, paper, and human judgment still matter

• 57:01 — New business models, AI agents, and protecting what makes your expertise unique

• 59:15 — Finding work that fits your natural strengths

• 1:02:04 — Start messy: treat your first offer as an experiment

• 1:05:21 — Final thoughts: choose the work and business model you want

This article accompanies my live conversation with Melanie of My New Ways Decision Points. Watch the video above for the full discussion on business models, expertise, decision-making, AI, and building a way of working that fits you.

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Lucas

She built a community on Skool. There were courses, ebooks, and landing pages for hotels. A new idea popped up every few weeks.

But she wasn’t lazy or lost. With fifteen years in hostels and hotels, she welcomed thousands of guests. She’s smart, funny, and creative.

Yet, she felt stuck.

Smart people don’t usually lack ideas; they struggle with decisions. The more talent you have, the more ways you find to avoid them.

Last Wednesday, Alicia brought 80 folders to the first Decision Room. That’s my live session for paid subscribers. One hour later, she realized the answer was something she already had. She agreed to share her experience. This shows my approach works with real people in real situations.

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Every hostel has a board behind reception with a key on each hook. A good receptionist grabs the right one without looking. Alicia managed that board for fifteen years. Now, she faces eighty hooks and has no clue which door to open.

A Board with Eighty Hooks

Here’s where she stood.

She shut down her last hostel. Then, she tried selling supplements. Finally, she went all-in on a crowded Amazon market. That venture failed too. When I asked what she does now, she laughed: “Now I do so many things. That’s why we’re here.”

Then, a few minutes in, she said the sentence that explained everything:

“I always did business for three years, left it, made another one, three years, and left it. I easily become bored.”

She needed the next big thing to work, and quickly. Instead of narrowing her focus, this pressure widened it. Each new idea seemed like a way out, so each got a folder. The board kept filling up.

I’m not saying she was lazy. Quite the opposite—she was always working. The issue was never effort or knowledge. You don’t need another marketing book to sell to someone who already trusts you. She knew every step but couldn’t see the next one because her board was too cluttered.

The Patterns, in Plain Words

In my book, I outline six Shadow Patterns. Smart people use these to dodge tough decisions while seeming responsible. During one hour with Alicia, four of them came up—not as labels, but as sentences.

Building instead of moving. When I asked what decision she’d make in 48 hours, her first answer was: “Like I should work on my Skool community.” Then she realized: “One of my other 50,000 folders.” A new platform felt like progress but added another hook.

Keeping every door open. I asked if she needed all those folders active. “I keep them for the future.” That’s a half-decision. The folder stays open, the mind keeps checking, and every morning starts with zero clarity. It’s like a computer running eighty programs—everything is slow.

Negotiating against herself. “I need a certificate first. A better landing page. One more tool.” She didn’t argue. She said, “Guilty.”

Pressure dressed as importance. Busy every day, everything urgent, but nothing that moves the money.

None of this is rare. When someone claims their situation is unique, it usually isn’t. Different businesses, different stories, the same six patterns.

The Moment It Turned

The breakthrough wasn’t a plan. It was a sentence she said casually when I asked her about hotels in Puerto Escondido.

“That’s actually what’s working here now: when I go directly to the hotels and talk to them.”

Stop there. After eighty folders, what worked was already working. Hotel owners don’t trust ads. They want Alicia to walk in, sit down, and show them. She’s good with people, and they know, like, and trust her. Some are even her neighbors.

The key was on the hook the whole time.

That’s what an asymmetric decision looks like. Not a heroic leap, but a small move with big results. The asymmetric decision changes everything, which is why we often avoid it.

You could see her relief. She didn’t need to finish the community or create another ebook or course. Everything she needed was within walking distance. Before we moved on, she said: “I’m going to go through my project folders, see what I can get rid of, and close a loop.”

A Key Anyone Can Copy, and One Nobody Can

After the session, I kept asking: what does Alicia have that others don’t?

Her first product was landing pages for hotels with direct booking. Useful, but it’s a commodity. Any agency can build a website. Anyone with a phone can take photos. AI can do half of it in an afternoon. That’s a key anyone can copy, and each copy makes it cheaper.

Now, look at what can’t be copied.

Fifteen years in hospitality, thousands of guests. She knows what a guest needs before they do. No AI can replace that.

The most important part: her. She loves being around people, on the beach, over mezcal. She’s funny and creative. Her social media content about Mexico has gone viral. This mix of humor, warmth, and creativity is unique in her business. It was waiting on a hook while she made keys that anyone could copy.

This is what many smart people miss. Creativity isn’t always an advantage. In the right place, it creates asymmetry: a small move with outsized results. In the wrong place, it creates the opposite. Eighty folders, endless talent, and standing still.

Beyond Noise exists for this exact reason. Step back from the chaos. Look at the situation differently. Make the one choice that changes everything.

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Not Less of Her: A Different Configuration

Here’s what matters most, where most advice goes wrong.

Alicia once said that if money weren’t an issue, she’d be a YouTuber. Creating is her passion. The common advice would be “stop creating, start selling.” It would fail in three months. It goes against her nature, so she’d leave, like she has with everything else.

So, we didn’t remove anything; we changed the order.

Content creation, video editing, and community-building are slow processes. Doing this under pressure to make quick money is exhausting. Done second, after establishing a stable business, it becomes enjoyable again. Her clients become her stories to film. The community grows from real people, not an empty platform.

Same skills. Same person. Different setup.

I’ve seen this repeatedly in my life and with others. You rarely need to change your job. Your expertise often comes from what you love and years of experience. You don’t need to discard it. Sometimes, you need to change the format.

I learned this the hard way. I burned out twice while running my agency—not because I hated the work, but because of its structure. I wanted to create and work with clients, but ended up as an office administrator. Same work, wrong setup, and it nearly finished me.

What the Room Took Home

Something else happened that I didn’t plan. While we looked at Alicia’s board, others began to see their own.

A member noticed he had been putting off a simple offer for months. So, he chose to message someone he already knows instead of drafting another plan. Every experiment needs a clear definition of success. Also, decide how long you will allow it to run before evaluating results. Otherwise, you never know if you’re on track or busy.

That’s why the Decision Room is a room, not a call. You see one person’s choice analyzed step by step. As this happens, you realize your own hands are doing the same.

Your 48 Hours

If any of this resonates, here’s a simple version of what Alicia did.

1. Count your hooks. List every project, idea, and half-finished task still “open.” All of them. The number itself holds information.

2. Find the key closest to your hand. Circle the project that could bring in money in the next 30 days from people who already trust you. Not the most exciting one, but the closest.

3. Close the board for 90 days. Move everything else into a folder named “Later.” Don’t sort it. Ten minutes is all it takes. Sorting eighty folders is another project.

4. Decide when you’ll check. Write one sentence: what success looks like in 90 days and the date you’ll decide to continue, change, or stop. A planned exit removes the need to escape now.

5. Within 48 hours, have one conversation. One person, one simple offer, one price. In person if possible.

If you have Asymmetric Decisions, reread the Shadow Patterns chapter tonight. Alicia is in there, and so are you.

Thank you, Alicia, for going first. It takes courage to dissect your decision in front of others. We’ll check back in the next Decision Room, and I’ll share how it went.

The Decision Room meets twice a month. Bring a decision or listen.

Lucas

Read more

That was the starting point of my first Substack Live, with Cory Blumenfeld, founder of BlueMoso and author of Taking My Time Back. We live half an hour apart (me in Tulum, Cory in Playa del Carmen) and met on Substack. Here is what we covered.

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Delegation has a hidden cost

I’m good at finding good people. I’m bad at managing them. Every time I outsourced work to take my time back, I ended up with more work, not less.

AI changed part of that equation, because much of what virtual assistants used to do can now be done by AI. But automation comes with its own maintenance bill: fixing bugs, tracking tokens, checking that services still run. You don’t remove the work. You change its shape.

Cory’s answer, from running a business that places virtual talent: the question is not “AI or humans,” it’s which parts of a business need which. Empathy, judgment and taste need a human. Repetitive work and pattern analysis belong to AI.

Amplified, not replaced

I shared a small example. A friend of mine had written a book and refused to use AI because he wanted “a human book.” A human editor spent two weeks on it. We then removed the typos and small errors with AI in about half an hour. The sentences were still his. He changed his mind on the spot.

The lesson is not that AI should write your book. It is that context and expectations decide the result. If you know what you want and give AI the right context, you get something completely different from what you get by prompting it like a search engine. The people who will struggle are those who treat AI as an authority (”ChatGPT told me so”) instead of a tool that needs their opinion.

Cory added an example he’d heard: when AI took over a large part of IKEA’s customer-chat work, the company retrained those people as interior design advisors, because they knew the catalog better than anyone. Instead of cutting costs, they opened a new revenue stream. AI replaces functions. Humans rediscover their role.

Time is the wrong unit

This was the part I care about most. Most virtual-assistant work is measured by time. With AI, effort stops being a measure. I don’t care if you use AI or not. I care about the result.

Cory’s company moved from hourly billing to a monthly subscription, and his reasoning is practical:

• Hourly billing pushes everyone toward the cheapest rate and the shortest task list.

• A fixed monthly fee gives the assistant stability, and stable people do better work.

• Focusing on outcomes rather than tasks means the tasks can change as the situation changes.

He was also clear that there is no universal answer: an in-house counsel is paid a salary, a law firm hourly or on retainer. It depends on the business model.

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Narrow beats broad

My own consulting used to be very general. Over time I removed things until I found the one problem I solve better than almost anyone: decision architecture, and what I call asymmetric decisions.

Time-based pricing only makes sense when you cannot define the result. When you can scope an outcome precisely, you can charge for the outcome, serve clients anywhere in the world, and scale without selling hours. It is not easy to cut everything you offer until only the one thing that is yours remains. But that is where pricing power comes from.

Cory’s view was consistent with this: in services, a true competitive advantage is rare, so thought leadership, conviction, and honest positioning are what set your price. He is building BlueMoso as a product, not a marketplace: matching on personality and work style, plus a management layer that makes both the client and the assistant succeed. Customers don’t compare it to a freelancer on Fiverr, because they are not buying the same thing.

Where humans stay in the loop

Two points from the second half of the conversation:

1. AI is good at data that already exists. Cory’s team is building personas of good and bad client-assistant matches. If you ask AI to build them without the real data, it hallucinates: it invents personas and gives them names. A human has to collect the actual stories first. Humans feed the systems, or the systems train on outdated data.

2. AI output needs judgment. Everything you ask AI for comes back “done.” Someone still has to choose, edit and decide. There are even emerging marketplaces where AI agents hire people, and others paying experienced professionals well to review AI output.

Cory’s check for deciding what stays human: if it needs empathy, judgment or taste, it’s a human job. AI is overly polished. People are imperfect, and that randomness is exactly what makes them valuable.

Why we did this live

Polished text is everywhere now. A live conversation can’t be prepared or polished, and that’s why it works. Cory believes we’re heading into AI fatigue, and people will crave real human conversation more than ever. I agree. Our Substacks are the proof that we’re not AI.

Chapters

• 00:00 Intro: strategy, decision architecture, asymmetric decisions

• 03:00 Meet Cory and Taking My Time Back

• 05:50 AI doesn’t save time, it multiplies you

• 08:00 Cory’s story: from tech founder to virtual talent

• 12:40 AI hype cycle and the human in the loop

• 13:45 The IKEA retraining example

• 15:35 How people misuse AI (and the book-editing story)

• 21:35 Outcomes vs time billing

• 30:50 Narrow specialization and pricing

• 35:00 Product vs service vs marketplace

• 41:30 AI and human virtual assistants, the “last mile”

• 44:40 Why AI hallucinates without your data

• 47:00 Empathy, judgment, taste: what stays human

• 48:40 Why live beats polished

Follow Cory

• Substack: Taking My Time Back

• Business: BlueMoso, tapping into the right virtual talent globally

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If this was useful, share it with one founder who is still trying to delegate their way to more time. And tell me in the comments: what is one task you’ve handed to AI that you’d now take back?

Lucas

It can’t tell if your last move was brilliant or if it will lead to defeat in eleven moves. It only counts seconds. That’s its whole job. Two buttons, two columns of time, no judgment.

In a tournament, that’s fine. The clock isn’t there to evaluate moves. It just makes sure the game ends.

The issue arises when people take the clock home and use it to price their work.

Not a Pep Talk

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a “know your worth” post. I won’t tell you that you’re amazing and should raise your prices.

Many people raise their prices but don’t change anything else. They often lose clients and don’t learn from it. The price wasn’t the issue. The tool was.

Here’s a tough test:

If getting better at your work means you earn less per unit, you aren’t underpaid. The design misprices you. The system is doing exactly what it was meant to do.

Read that again, because most who bill by the hour fail this test.

The Man in Front of Me

Jakub Lizak is a chess master. He became the Polish junior national champion at fourteen. His peak FIDE rating was 2250 at seventeen. He holds the International CM title. Since 2015, he has coached students on three continents, plays in tournaments, teaches online, and occasionally spends evenings at a local club.

He calls himself the Chess Doctor and also does improv and acting. This last part is more important than it seems, and I’ll return to it.

His students improve from ratings like 850 to 1500, and from 582 to 1200. One student, at fourteen, is chasing norms.

Until recently, he sold his expertise like most coaches: by the hour. He set his price by comparing it to what others charge.

He is my friend and client. When we examined his business, I didn’t find a marketing issue. I found a man holding a chess clock, using it to measuresomething unseen.

Every Year You Get Better, You Get Cheaper

Here’s what the clock does to a master.

When a student sends a game, an average coach spends forty minutes analyzing it. Jakub looks at the game and sees, in under a minute, that the problem isn’t a blunder on move 23. The real issue is that this player has been choosing openings that lead to confusing positions. He’s done thisfor two years, and every loss after move 20 stems from a decision made before move 5.

That insight took a minute. It also took twenty years.

If priced by the clock, that minute is worth less than the forty minutes of the coach who found nothing. The faster you are, the less you earn. Improvement makes your hourly output more valuable to clients but less valuable to you.

This isn’t a pricing mistake. It’s an inverted incentive at the core of thebusiness, quietly punishing the very thing that creates value.

It gets worse. The clock also dictates what you sell. When you bill time, you can only sell time. You have a fixed number of hours, limiting your entire professional life to simple math. People think they have an income problem. They actually have a units problem.

Easy Means Compressed, Not Cheap

This is where many experts misunderstand their own value.

When something takes little time, you call it easy. Then, you price it as if it’s worth nothing. In your life, easy and cheap often mean the same thing. Ten minutes of work seems cheap to sell.

But easy here doesn’t mean cheap. Easy means compressed.

Twenty years of study, thousands of games, and hundreds of students all condensed into one minute of looking at a board. That minute isn’t the work; it’s the format of the work. You’re not selling the sixty seconds. You’re selling everything that led to that moment.

The clock can’t see this. It has two buttons and no perspective. It prices the delivery format and ignores the compression.

This is why what’s easiest for you is often the most valuable thing you own. You haven’t charged for it because it never felt like work.

That’s also why the answer to “I should charge more” rarely looks like justa bigger number for the same hour.

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Why You Cannot See This in Yourself

Ask a master what they do best, and they’ll mention the board.

Jakub’s first reply was that he teaches chess: openings, endgames, analysis. True, but that’s just the surface. Many can teach openings. Engines do it for free and never tire.

What Jakub can’t see is what he does naturally.

In his career story, one line stands out. He learned to find openings that make opponents uncomfortable. Not the best. Just uncomfortable. He built a career on putting players in tough spots, but he brushes it off as obvious.

This isn’t just a chess skill. It reflects his worldview. He applies it to eleven-year-olds, adults stuck at 1200, his own tournament prep, and even a grandmaster he beat online.

Then there’s more he doesn’t notice. He knows what a student believes about their game before they say a word. He identifies which bad habit to fix first and which four to leave alone to protect their confidence. He helps a nervous fourteen-year-old calm down at move 30. He created a comedic persona because he thinks the chess world is too serious. This autumn, he’ll appear in a film as a chess mentor. None of this is strictly chess. It’s why parents choose him over stronger players who only know the board.

Stronger players exist. So do good coaches. But none match Jakub’s unique blend, and he priced it at the local market rate.

What We Changed, and What We Did Not

I don’t fix marketing. I examine a business, uncover hidden value, and rebuild around it. Sometimes that involves price. Usually, it doesn’t.

His skills remain untouched. The chess itself doesn’t change. I won’t tell a master how to play.

What changes is the structure his skills fit into.

We removed the clock. He stops selling hours and starts offering a named outcome with clear steps: an entry diagnosis, a defined path, a small number of students receiving the real deal, and a way for others to access the same material without taking up his time. His time is no longer the product. His judgment becomes the product, delivered in a way that doesn’t break when he sleeps.

The structure belongs to him, specific to his business, so I won’t share it publicly. But here’s the key part, often overlooked, that truly drives results.

You don’t get paid for effort. You get paid for the gap between where someone is and where they end up, along with the certainty they will get there. The clock measures neither.

I always ask one question about any structure. An hourly rate fails this question every time. Does this expand your freedom or create dependency? Time-based pricing answers this negatively. Every hour sold is one less hour owned. The better you get, the fewer hours clients need, which means less selling. This isn’t a pricing problem; it’s structural, built into the instrument, not the price.

The transformation has just begun. We have the diagnosis and a new structure. Execution is next, and the numbers aren’t in yet. I’m sharing this now because this moment is worth noting. Not a neat case study, but the moment a man with twenty years of excellence realizes he’s been using the wrong instrument.

What to Do in the Next 48 Hours

Four steps. The last one is the only one that truly matters.

1. Find your one minute. Write down what you do that takes almost no time but changes results for others. Not your job title. The specific action. If you can’t find it, ask your last three clients what they would have missed without you. Their answers will differ from yours, and theirs are the right ones.

2. Count what it actually cost. Years, not minutes. Write that number down. That’s what you’re selling. The minute is just the delivery method.

3. Name the outcome, not the activity. Complete this sentence without verbs: “They come in at X and leave at Y.” If you can’t identify X and Y, you lack a product. You have an occupation, and occupations get billed by the hour forever.

4. Quote the next one differently. Not with a higher hourly rate. Use a different unit. One price, one outcome, no clock. Send that quote within 48 hours to a real person, in writing.

Step four might feel costly. It isn’t. The worst outcome is one person saying no, and you’ll learn more from that than from six months of thinking.

Most people will complete steps one through three and stop. Those steps are homework. Step four is the decision.

The Room Where This Happens

Everything above is diagnosis. The architecture that changed what Jakub sells can’t be learned from reading. You must see it built in a real business, amid debates.

That’s the Decision Room. Twice a month, paid subscribers and I take one real decision from a participant’s project and dissect it. Repricing expertise. Ending a seemingly profitable service. Choosing which client to fire. These moves don’t show up on dashboards but change everything downstream.

The next session is 30 September.

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Your Turn

What is your one minute?

The thing that takes you almost no time, that you have never charged properly for, because it never felt like work.

Put it in the comments. I will tell you what I see in it. Same goes for the other ones people bring me: a price that stopped making sense, a service line that looks profitable and is not, a client who costs more than he pays.

Most of you have read Asymmetric Decisions. The question above, whether a structure expands your freedom or creates dependency, is the Decision Filter pointed at a business instead of a choice. Step four is Level 5: Movement. If you bought the book and never opened the two files that came with it, the Filter is one of them. It is still in your download folder.

Lucas

I built a free tool for this community.

When you are inside a business, everything looks equally urgent. The one thing holding the rest is the one you stopped noticing. You cannot fix what you cannot see from the inside.

To solve this, I built a tool to diagnose your business. In three to five minutes, it runs your current situation through my frameworks, finds your exact bottleneck, and gives you the one asymmetric move to make within 48 hours to change your trajectory.

It is a gift for my subscribers and readers. There is no account to create and no credit card required.

Run your business through it here: https://lucashubert.me/bottleneck

Let me know if it works for you.

Have a good weekend, Lucas

I watched AIR recently on Prime Video.

I expected a good business movie about Nike, Michael Jordan, and the creation of Air Jordan. Somewhere halfway through, I realized I was watching something much closer to the philosophy behind my book Asymmetric Decisions.

Not because the movie is about taking risks.

It is about recognizing that not all decisions have the same weight.

And then having enough conviction to protect the one that matters from all the noise around it.

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Some of you have probably seen AIR. If not, it was released in 2023, directed by Ben Affleck, with Matt Damon playing Nike basketball executive Sonny Vaccaro, Ben Affleck as Phil Knight, and Viola Davis as Michael Jordan’s mother, Deloris. It is currently available through Prime Video, with purchase options through platforms such as Apple TV and Amazon Video depending on the country (Prime Video).

There are spoilers ahead, because I want to do something more interesting than review the movie.

I want to take the central decision in AIR and run it through the same two frameworks I use in Asymmetric Decisions: The Decision Filter and Shadow Patterns.

The result is surprisingly clean.

The game Nike was losing

The film takes us back to 1984.

Nike is already a successful company, so calling it a tiny startup would be misleading. But in basketball, it is the underdog. Converse and Adidas dominate the category. Nike is associated much more strongly with running.

In the movie, Sonny Vaccaro has a basketball endorsement budget of $250,000. The reasonable plan is to spread that money across several players from the 1984 NBA draft.

Diversify.

Reduce risk.

Don’t bet the division on one person.

Sonny sees the same information and reaches the opposite conclusion.

Instead of signing three or four decent prospects, he wants Nike to put its entire basketball budget behind one player.

Michael Jordan.

The problem is that Jordan does not want Nike.

He prefers Adidas. Converse is already deeply established in basketball. Nike is not the obvious choice, and Jordan is expensive enough to consume virtually the entire budget shown in the film.

From a conventional risk-management perspective, Sonny’s proposal looks reckless.

From an asymmetric perspective, it starts to look very different.

The mistake is assuming every dollar should be diversified

The central idea behind Asymmetric Decisions is simple:

Not all decisions are equal.

One small decision can unlock a year of movement. Another decision can consume months and change almost nothing. The skill is not making more decisions. It is identifying which decision actually carries the outcome.

That is exactly what Sonny does in the movie.

Everyone else is trying to optimize the basketball budget.

Sonny is questioning the premise.

The organization is asking:

How should we distribute $250,000 across the available players?

Sonny is effectively asking:

What if there is one player whose potential value is so much greater that distributing the budget is actually the riskier decision?

That is a completely different problem.

And this distinction matters.

An asymmetric decision is not simply a big bet. A big bet can be stupid.

It is a decision where the relationship between downside and possible upside is unusually uneven.

Nike could lose its basketball endorsement budget.

That hurts.

But if Sonny is right, Nike does not merely get a successful endorsement.

It gets Michael Jordan.

It gets a signature product.

It gets cultural relevance.

It gets a position in basketball it did not previously have.

And eventually, it gets one of the most valuable athlete-brand relationships ever created.

Nike’s original deal with Jordan was for five years. ESPN reports that Nike had protections allowing it to exit if certain sales targets were not reached. Instead, Air Jordan generated around $70 million in sales in its first two months. (ESPN.com)

The downside was real.

The upside belonged to another universe.

That is asymmetry.

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Smaller players cannot always afford to play the safer game

This is one of the parts of AIR I find most interesting.

Nike Basketball has fewer resources than its dominant competitors in the category.

The obvious response to having fewer resources is caution.

I think that is often backwards.

When a larger competitor can outspend you, out-hire you, out-distribute you and survive more mediocre decisions, playing the same game conservatively can be the most dangerous strategy available.

You cannot beat someone with ten times your resources by becoming a slightly more efficient version of them.

Sometimes you need concentration.

You need to identify the decision where being right changes the game itself.

Sonny is not trying to win the existing sneaker endorsement game a little more efficiently.

He is trying to change what an athlete endorsement means.

That distinction is important for founders too.

Many founders with limited capital spread themselves across ten products, six acquisition channels, four partnerships and three markets because diversification feels responsible.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it is fear wearing a spreadsheet.

The better question is:

Which one of these decisions has a payoff curve radically different from the rest?

Conviction before consensus

Most of AIR is not actually about finding Michael Jordan.

Sonny finds the answer relatively early.

The rest of the movie is about surviving what happens after you see something before everyone around you sees it.

He has to convince his colleagues.

He has to convince Phil Knight.

He has to deal with Jordan’s agent.

He goes directly to Jordan’s family.

The team has to create the shoe and the pitch.

Jordan still prefers another company.

At almost every stage, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why the idea should die.

This is where the movie becomes particularly relevant to high-stakes decision-making.

The hard part is often not discovering the signal.

The hard part is preventing everything around the signal from talking you out of it.

In the movie, Sonny becomes the carrier of that signal until the rest of the organization can see it.

Eventually other people join him.

That distinction matters because this is not a story about a heroic individual being smarter than everyone else.

A decision of this size still requires a team.

But consensus comes after recognition.

Someone has to see the decision before the organization can organize around it.

This connects directly to another principle in my book: a decision is not the end of movement. It is the beginning of movement. Once the real decision is made, the right tasks become obvious.

Before Jordan, Nike has a portfolio problem.

After Jordan, suddenly there is a shoe to design, a presentation to build, terms to negotiate, a story to tell, internal approvals to secure.

One decision generates hundreds of tasks.

Hundreds of tasks would never have generated that decision.

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Running Nike’s decision through The Decision Filter

The Decision Filter I built for Asymmetric Decisions has five levels: Recognition, Distillation, Structural Check, Selection and Movement.

So, as a thought experiment, I ran the central decision in AIR through it.

Recognition

The first step is to stop hiding decisions inside projects.

The question is not:

What should Nike’s basketball strategy be?

That is too vague.

It is not:

Which rookies should Nike approach?

Still too broad.

The actual decision is:

Should Nike concentrate its basketball resources on signing Michael Jordan?

Now we have something we can decide.

Recognition matters because vague decisions create infinite work. Precise decisions create selection.

Distillation

Now remove fear, social pressure, inherited assumptions and identity stakes. That is what the second level of my Filter is designed to do.

What remains?

Jordan is an exceptional player.

Nike is weak in basketball.

Jordan prefers Adidas.

Nike cannot compete by simply offering him the same thing everyone else offers.

The available budget is constrained.

A signature relationship with Jordan has potentially enormous strategic value.

Now look at some of the other statements surrounding the decision:

We don’t put the whole budget behind one player.

He doesn’t want Nike.

Phil won’t approve it.

This isn’t how we normally do things.

Those statements may contain useful information.

But they are not the same thing as evidence that Jordan is the wrong bet.

That is one of the hardest distinctions in high-stakes decisions:

Difficulty is not evidence against the decision.

Sometimes difficulty tells you something is structurally wrong.

Sometimes it simply tells you the decision has consequences.

The job is to know the difference.

The Structural Check gives a more interesting answer

This is where blindly celebrating Sonny would actually contradict my own framework.

The Decision Filter does not say:

You feel strongly about it, so do it.

Conviction is not proof.

At Level 3, I score four structural questions from 1 to 5: whether the structure is clean, whether the other side carries its own weight, the ongoing energy cost, and whether the decision expands freedom or creates dependency. Scores from 16 to 20 indicate strong structure, 12 to 15 mean mixed signals and require modification or more information, and below 12 defaults to no.

If I score the Jordan decision at the moment Sonny first proposes it, I would probably give it something like this:

Structure: 4/5. The strategic idea is clean, but the actual deal has not been constructed yet.

Does the other side carry its weight: 5/5. The entire thesis exists because Jordan brings extraordinary value himself.

Maintenance cost: 3/5. Building an entire product and brand around one athlete is not a low-maintenance commitment.

Freedom versus dependency: 2/5. Nike would deliberately create significant dependence on one athlete.

Total: 14/20.

That is not a clean YES.

According to the Filter, it is mixed signals.

Pause.

Modify.

Get more information.

And that is exactly what makes the story more interesting.

The right answer is not:

NO, too risky.

Nor is it:

YES, trust your gut.

The answer becomes:

YES, with changed conditions.

That is one of the four explicit selections available in The Decision Filter.

Nike does not just hand Jordan money.

It designs a product around him.

The relationship becomes bigger than a normal endorsement.

The economics are negotiated.

The actual historical contract also included performance protections for Nike. (ESPN.com)

The opportunity stays the same.

The structure gets better.

That is a fundamentally different way of thinking about risk.

Do not automatically reject the opportunity because the current structure is bad.

Sometimes the opportunity is right and the conditions are wrong.

Change the conditions.

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Then Deloris Jordan changes the deal again

One of the strongest characters in the movie is not Sonny.

It is Deloris Jordan.

She understands something Nike itself is still learning.

If Michael creates disproportionate value, he should participate in that value.

The movie dramatizes her pushing for Michael to receive a share tied to the success of Air Jordan.

That moment is another asymmetric decision.

Nike can protect precedent.

Or Nike can recognize that Jordan is not a normal endorsement.

If the upside is non-normal, perhaps the deal structure should not be normal either.

The historical story is more complicated than the film suggests. There has been disagreement for years over how much credit Vaccaro deserves, who drove different parts of the negotiation, and who originated specific ideas. Jordan himself has emphasized George Raveling’s role, while his former agent David Falk has said he negotiated the deal primarily with Phil Knight and Nike executive Rob Strasser. (ESPN.com)

That matters.

AIR is a dramatization, not a documentary.

But for this article I am less interested in assigning historical credit than in the decision architecture the movie reveals.

And that architecture is remarkably useful.

Now run the movie through Shadow Patterns

The second diagnostic in Asymmetric Decisions is Shadow Patterns.

The idea is that many people do not lack intelligence, information or options.

They have recurring structures that protect them from making a decision they already know is uncomfortable.

My six starting patterns are Architecture as Avoidance, Half-Open Loops, Negotiating Against Self, Over-Responsibility, Confusing Pressure with Importance and Dragging Unclean Deals. They are not meant as universal personality types. They are starting points for discovering the protective patterns operating behind a decision.

AIR contains almost all of them.

The strongest one is Architecture as Avoidance.

Nike already has a process.

Scouting.

Rankings.

Budget allocation.

A portfolio of prospects.

Meetings.

All perfectly legitimate.

But those systems can also become a sophisticated way of avoiding the simpler, more frightening question:

What if we already know who we want?

That is Architecture as Avoidance.

You can build a beautiful system around a decision you are unwilling to make.

Then there is Confusing Pressure with Importance.

Nike has deadlines. Budgets. Internal politics. Other athletes. Agents. Competitive pressure.

All of it feels urgent.

Sonny separates urgency from leverage.

The Jordan decision matters more than the dozens of things producing more immediate pressure.

That distinction alone changes the direction of the division.

I also see Negotiating Against Self throughout the organization.

Jordan is special, but...

Jordan could transform the division, but...

We should pursue him, but...

The budget...

Adidas...

Phil...

At some point, another round of debate stops being analysis and becomes a mechanism for avoiding commitment.

This is one reason repeated internal negotiation is so expensive.

You are not getting new information.

You are reopening the same decision because you do not like its consequences.

Interestingly, Sonny mostly avoids Half-Open Loops.

Once he reaches his conclusion, he moves it into reality.

He talks to people.

He travels.

He creates confrontation.

He forces the organization to respond.

A decision that exists only in your head is not a closed decision. The Movement level of my Filter requires an externally observable action, ideally within 48 hours.

There is also a risk of Over-Responsibility.

Sonny pushes outside the normal boundaries of his role and carries an enormous amount of the initiative personally.

But I would not diagnose it as his dominant pattern.

There is an important difference between taking ownership of one consciously selected decision and becoming the permanent stabilizer of everyone else’s chaos.

One is leadership.

The other eventually becomes self-destruction.

Finally, Dragging Unclean Deals appears in reverse.

When the existing deal structure is not sufficient, the Jordans do not simply accept it because Nike wants the relationship.

The conditions change.

The opportunity survives because the structure is renegotiated.

That is cleaner than dragging a deal everyone privately knows is wrong.

My verdict

If I compress the whole movie into the two frameworks, this is what I get:

Filter Result Recognition

Bet on Jordan, not on a portfolio of average options

Distillation

Strong signal survives once convention and fear are removed

Initial Structural Check

Approximately 14/20, mixed signals

SelectionYES with changed conditions

Movement

Immediate, observable action across the organization

Dominant Shadow Pattern

Architecture as Avoidance

Secondary Shadow

Confusing Pressure with Importance

Third Shadow

Negotiating Against Self

Core asymmetry

Basketball budget at risk versus company-changing upside

Final verdict

Proceed, but redesign the structure around the asymmetric opportunity

That last sentence matters.

The lesson from AIR is not:

Bet everything.

It is not:

Ignore everyone.

It is definitely not:

Believe hard enough and reality will agree with you.

A concentrated bad decision is still a bad decision.

The better lesson is this:

When one option has a radically different payoff curve, stop treating it like every other option.

Then filter it.

Remove the noise.

Test the structure.

Change the conditions if necessary.

Select.

Move.

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What Asymmetric Decisions is really about

This is why AIR stayed with me after the credits.

My book Asymmetric Decisions is not a productivity book.

It is not about getting more done.

It is about judgment and selection when there are too many possible things to do.

The central premise is that one right decision can be worth more than a thousand right tasks. One decision can generate a thousand tasks. A thousand tasks rarely generate the decision that should have come first.

That problem has become more important in the AI age.

Execution is getting cheaper.

Information is everywhere.

You can generate strategies, campaigns, products, code, research and options faster than at any point in history.

That sounds like freedom.

Without selection, it becomes noise.

The scarce resource is no longer the ability to produce another option.

It is the judgment to know which option deserves your resources.

Nike’s story happened decades before generative AI.

But the principle is even more relevant now.

The company did not need another list.

It did not need another hundred tasks.

It did not need to optimize everything equally.

It needed to recognize that one decision was different.

Everyone else saw concentration risk.

Sonny saw asymmetry.

And after the decision was finally made, the organization could move.

That is the Architect’s Position.

Not doing more.

Seeing what actually matters, selecting it, and allowing everything else to reorganize around the decision.

One decision. A thousand tasks.

Nike chose the decision.

Have you seen AIR? And more importantly: what is the one decision in your business that might deserve more of your resources than everything else combined?

Lucas

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Elon Musk thinks traditional work is dead.

“There will come a point where no job is needed,” he recently claimed, suggesting AI will eventually do all the heavy lifting.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, pushing unemployment to 20% within five years.

Then there’s Jensen Huang at Nvidia, who brings it back to reality: “You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.”

Three pioneers. Three different predictions. But they agree on one brutal truth: The architecture of work and business is changing. Fast.

Personally, I don’t buy the “end of work” narrative. Work isn’t going to disappear. But the old way of building companies and monetizing skills absolutely will. And that distinction changes everything.

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The Collapse of Execution Costs

For most of modern business history, execution was the bottleneck.

If a founder wanted to scale, they needed headcount. If you wanted marketing, software, or operations, you hired a team. You added humans to the machine. Revenue growth was directly tied to payroll growth.

AI breaks that equation.

The cost of capability is collapsing. We are moving past chatbots answering questions—we are entering the era of agents executing multi-step business workflows. But when execution becomes cheap, the Operator loses leverage. The Architect gains it.

If you give twenty AI agents bad instructions, you don’t get twenty times the output. You get twenty times the chaos. The scarce resource is no longer doing the work. It’s knowing what should be done, in what sequence, for whom, and why.

The Era of the Micro-Company

This is the most critical shift for founders and small business owners today.

Companies are going to get smaller in humans, but not in revenue. Look at Lovable—in early 2026, they reached $400 million in ARR with just 146 employees. That ratio used to be impossible.

Large corporations historically won because they hoarded capital, talent, and distribution. Those moats are drying up. If you run a small business today, you have access to infrastructure that previously required hundreds of employees.

This means small doesn’t automatically mean under-resourced anymore. Small means zero political friction. Fewer meetings. Ruthless speed. We are moving toward an economy of highly capable micro-companies: A few humans, a swarm of specialized AI agents, and a network of niche partners.

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Why Your Expertise is Your Deepest Moat

This shift isn’t just for tech founders. It is the biggest opportunity in decades for seasoned experts, coaches, and corporate veterans looking to pivot.

For 20 years, you may have accumulated industry secrets, pattern recognition, and deep domain knowledge. In the past, monetizing that independently was a nightmare. You needed to build an agency, hire staff, and manage operations.

Today, that infrastructure is available on demand. You don’t have to be just another consultant billing by the hour. You can turn your specialized knowledge into a productized service, a decision framework, or a highly profitable micro-business. Your expertise is liquid again—you just need the right business model.

What Dies vs. What Survives

Generic execution is dead. Average analysis is dead. Coordinating people just for the sake of coordination is dead.

But as AI commoditizes execution, the human elements become premium:

• Judgment and taste

• Deep, un-Googleable domain knowledge

• Trust and reputation

• Proprietary relationships

• Spotting asymmetric opportunities

AI can give ten founders the exact same data. It cannot guarantee they make the same decision. That gap in judgment is where your profit margin lives.

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Don’t Defend. Redesign.

The biggest divide in the next decade won’t be between people who use AI and those who don’t. It will be between people willing to redesign their businesses (and themselves) and those praying for the old system to come back.

Don’t defend your old structure. Find your new leverage.

Look at your company, or the knowledge sitting inside your head. Can you turn that expertise into something scalable? Can agents remove 70% of the execution? Can you build a business entirely around the piece where your judgment actually matters?

So, what is your asymmetry?

I’m genuinely curious about how you are navigating this transition. Tell me what you’re building in the comments.

And if you are:

• A founder or SMB owner trying to scale your business, redesign your model, and increase margins without adding corporate bloat...

• An expert, coach, or consultant looking to productize your knowledge and reach a global scale...

• A seasoned professional ready to pivot out of the corporate world but unsure what kind of business to build around your skills...

...send me a message. Helping people and businesses extract their true value and build highly leveraged models around it is exactly what I do.

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Lucas Hubert

Nobody who books time with me has an intelligence problem.

They arrive with the situation already diagnosed, usually better than I would have diagnosed it. They know the numbers. They know which of the three options is correct and roughly why. Several of them are the most capable person in their industry within a fifty mile radius, and they know that too.

And they haven’t moved in nine months.

There is no intellectual gap in the room. No missing information, no skill to acquire, no course that would help. The analysis finished a long time ago. Something else is holding it, and it isn’t smarter than they are.

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Here’s the part that makes this worth writing about now.

Something reset in the last two years and most people haven’t updated the story they tell about themselves to match it. A person working alone and a company with four hundred employees now reach for the same models. Same access, same tools, same speed. The gap that used to separate them was mostly capital, and capital bought execution, and execution just got cheap.

Which means a whole category of legitimate excuses quietly expired. Not enough resources. No team. Can’t afford the tooling. No time to build the thing. Those were real constraints in 2019. Most of them are now stories people tell because the story is older than the situation.

When the tools stop being the constraint, you find out what the constraint actually was.

So here’s what I see, and at this level I see it without exception.

Intelligent people substitute intelligence for architecture.

Something in the system is missing. A process, a role, a rule, a boundary, a decision nobody ever made. A less capable person hits that gap and stops. The stop is information. It’s visible, it’s uncomfortable, and it forces a redesign.

You don’t stop. You see the gap, you solve it in four seconds, you cover it, you move on. No incident. Nothing to report. Nothing to fix.

Do that five times and it’s competence. Do it five hundred times over four years and you have built something whose central load-bearing component is a human being who can’t be copied, documented, or rested.

The system isn’t broken. It never breaks. That’s the problem. Nothing that breaks stays unfixed.

What follows are the five ways I watch this happen. They aren’t five separate problems. They’re one process at five stages, and most people can find themselves somewhere in the middle of it.

One. It’s faster if I just do it.

You can do it in twenty minutes. Explaining it takes three hours, and the first three attempts come back wrong anyway. So you do it yourself. That decision is correct. Objectively, locally, measurably correct, every single time you evaluate it on its own.

You’ve made it maybe two hundred times. You were right two hundred times.

And two hundred locally correct decisions produce a globally broken structure. You optimized every step and the sum is a business that can’t run without you. Nobody made a mistake. There’s no bad call to point at. That’s exactly what makes it invisible for years.

The three hours were never the cost of teaching. They were the price of an asset. You kept declining to buy it because it was quoted in hours instead of dollars, and hours always feel like they’re free.

Two. You become the missing piece.

Every gap in the system got filled by you personally. Not by design, by reflex. You’re now the connective tissue between every part that doesn’t quite connect, and you’ve been doing it so long you’ve stopped registering it as work.

The test is simple and unpleasant. Go through your business and ask what happens to each part if you’re unreachable for two weeks. Don’t answer optimistically. Most people find that nothing breaks and nothing moves, which is worse, because a break would at least be a signal.

The cost isn’t the workload. The cost is that patching consumes exactly the attention you’d need to design the thing that makes patching unnecessary. It’s self-sealing. That’s why smart people stay in it for a decade.

Stop asking what needs to be done. Start asking what keeps needing to be done by you specifically. Every item on that list is a design defect wearing a workload costume.

Three. It only exists in your head.

There is real architecture in this business. Often excellent architecture. It lives entirely inside one skull, because writing it down always felt slower than just running it, which was true.

The tell: onboarding anyone into any part of the work takes longer than doing the work. So you never onboard anyone. So it never changes.

This is the one that gets misdiagnosed most often. People decide they have a trust issue. They read about letting go. They work on themselves. And it doesn’t move, because delegation was never blocked by trust. It’s blocked by the absence of anything transferable. You’ve been treating a documentation problem as a psychological one, which is why the psychological work never fixed it.

An undocumented system isn’t a system. It’s a habit with good results. The difference doesn’t matter until the day you want it to exist outside of you, and then it’s the only thing that matters.

Four. You delegate the task and keep the outcome.

Eventually you do hand something over. You give away the execution and keep the responsibility. The other person does the work, you still carry it. You’ve added a coordination cost and removed no weight.

You know this one because you delegated it and you’re still thinking about it at 3am. If the outcome still lives in your nervous system, nothing was transferred.

Then it comes back at eighty percent. And you experience the missing twenty as failure rather than as a price, so you take it back. Just this once. Three times. And the whole thing recentralizes tighter than before, and now you have evidence that delegation doesn’t work for you, which closes the exit properly.

This is the most expensive misreading in the whole sequence. You’re not transferring work. You’re transferring the right to be wrong. If the other person isn’t permitted to produce a worse outcome than yours, you haven’t delegated, you’ve deferred. The eighty percent result isn’t a defect. It’s the market price of leverage, and it’s cheap.

I find this one genuinely hard, so I’m not writing it from a distance.

Five. Nothing runs without your judgment.

Every process you built silently assumes your judgment as an input. Not your labor, your judgment. Someone else can perform the identical actions and produce a different result, because the part that mattered was never in the actions.

You can see it in one number: your revenue ceiling and your calendar are the same number, and have been for three years.

At this point you’re not running a business. You’re running an unusually well paid job with no exit and no buyer. Every growth conversation arrives at the same wall, and somewhere along the way you started describing that wall as your personality. High standards. Hands on. I care too much. All of it true, none of it structural.

The useful question isn’t who could do this work. It’s what would have to be true for someone else to make this decision correctly without me. That’s an architecture question, it has a real answer, and almost nobody has sat down to write it.

Now the part everyone gets wrong about how this ends.

Everyone in this pattern eventually burns out, and everyone in this pattern misreads what happened. The story is a stamina failure. Too much work, not enough recovery, a discipline problem. So the response is more discipline. Better sleep, tighter boundaries, a new system, a real morning routine.

That reading is wrong, and the wrong reading is why it comes back.

Burnout here isn’t a stamina failure. It’s a delayed invoice. You spent years covering structural gaps with personal capacity, which is a loan against your own nervous system, and loans get called. More discipline doesn’t retire the debt. It extends the credit line.

The way out isn’t working less and it isn’t caring less. Both of those are the same pattern at lower volume, and you’ll rebuild the whole thing inside eighteen months.

The way out is a change in what you consider your job. Not solving the problem. Designing the thing that means the problem doesn’t arrive at you.

Which requires separating two things that intelligent people have fused so completely they can’t see the seam: knowing the answer, and being obligated to execute it. Capability is not duty. You’re allowed to know exactly how something should be done and decline to be the one who does it. That sentence sounds obvious and almost nobody lives in it.

And most of what you’ve been controlling was never controllable. The full plan, the modeled chain, the contingency for the contingency. That wasn’t risk management. That was managing the discomfort of not knowing, and you’ve been paying for that comfort with your life. Some things you set up and then you walk away and let them happen without you. Not because you’ve made peace with it. Because the alternative is being the missing component forever.

The architect isn’t the person who can solve anything. It’s the person who decided what deserves to reach them.

So, two questions, and I’m actually collecting answers on these. Which of the five is yours, and how long has it been yours? And what’s the one thing in your business that keeps needing to be done by you specifically? Reply or leave a comment.

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Lucas

Some of you have read Asymmetric Decisions. This essay is one pattern out of it.

The book is about the decisions that actually move something, and how to tell them apart from the ninety percent that don’t. Tasks became cheap. Direction didn’t. Most of what people call being stuck is a filtering problem wearing a workload costume, and the book is the argument for why, plus what to do instead.

It comes with two instruments, and they’re the part people write to me about.

Shadow Patterns is a diagnostic. You run it against your own last ninety days and it surfaces the avoidance patterns you’re personally running, not a generic list of six. Most people find one they didn’t know was there.

The Decision Filter puts a single decision through five levels until it either clears or dies. It’s built to run against your accumulated context, your past calls and how they turned out, not in the abstract.

If you’re new here, that’s the place to start: lucashubert.me/

And if you’re sitting on one specific decision that hasn’t moved in months, write to me.

Deciding is not the result of long thinking.

A decision is not what you get at the end of intense thinking and planning everything step by step.

Deciding is not arguing with every doubt that shows up.

A decision is 100% certainty without knowing all the details. It is delegation, and trust in the process that carries it.

It is like dropping a letter in a mailbox and leaving it there. Not checking on it. Not pulling it back out to read it one more time.

You do not need to know how

When you drop a letter in the box, you do not know what bike the postman rides. You do not know his route, his shift, which van the bag goes into, or what the sorting office looks like at three in the morning.

You do not need to. You need the letter to arrive.

That is the part people invert. They believe a decision requires knowing the whole path, so they stand at the mailbox trying to model the entire postal system before they let go of the envelope. Some of them try to build the post office themselves, and then audit it, just to be certain it works.

That is not diligence. That is a letter not being sent.

A decision is a result you have named. Everything between here and that result is a problem, and problems get solved when you arrive at them. You cannot solve them in advance from the pavement in front of the mailbox.

The architecture is the mailbox

You write the letter. You drop it in. You forget about it.

What happens next is not your job. The box is built to hold it. The postman comes. The letter travels. It reaches someone. Something comes back, or nothing does, and either way the loop closes.

That is decision architecture. The construction that carries a decision after you release it, and filters what happens at each stage without you standing over it.

Your only job is writing letters worth sending.

A well written letter needs no translation. It is a clear command with a clear answer available. If the person receiving it has to guess what you meant, you did not send a decision. You sent a question wearing a decision’s clothes.

And if it does not arrive, you write another one. That is the entire disaster you were protecting yourself from.

How is the easy part

How is comfortable. How has no consequences. You can spend a month on how and nothing in your life is on the line, because how does not ask you to decide anything. It only asks you to be busy.

Why is the expensive one. Why comes with responsibility, and responsibility comes with consequences that arrive in your name.

So people escape into how. Into tasks, into tools, into the new project, into a full calendar. It looks like work. Often it is good work. It is still an escape, and the thing being escaped is a decision sitting unmade in the background.

Busy is the most respectable way to avoid deciding. Nobody questions it. You do not question it yourself.

What not deciding actually looks like

You rarely refuse outright. Usually you half decide.

You leave it open. You will get to it. You need more information first. You want to see how the next two weeks go.

That is the letter that gets written and stays on the desk. No stamp. Not today. Later.

It is always easier to start something than to end something. A new project costs you energy. Ending one costs you a conversation, a position, and your name on the outcome. So the new thing gets started and the old thing stays open.

And an open loop feels like a door left open. Optionality. Nothing lost, nothing foreclosed.

It is not optionality. A door you never walk through is not a choice you are preserving. It is a decision you are not making, and it charges you rent for the privilege.

One letter on a desk is nothing.

Twenty letters stop being twenty letters. They fuse. They become one mass of unfinished business and you cannot see the individual decisions inside it anymore. You only feel the weight.

That is when you get stuck without knowing why. Nothing dramatic happened. You just have too many open loops running in the background, all consuming the same nervous system you need for the next move.

That is why people are stuck. Not workload. Unsent letters.

Getting out

Two ways.

Clear the whole thing. Throw the stack out and start with an empty desk. Most of what is on there died months ago and you have been carrying a corpse.

Or filter it. Take the stack one letter at a time and answer one question about each: does this get sent, or does this get thrown away.

Both work. What does not work is keeping the stack.

And notice what is true here. Deciding not to do something is a decision. Throwing the letter away closes the loop as cleanly as sending it. The RAM is released either way.

What surprises people is the last part. You expect clearing the desk to be brutal. Mostly it is not. Most of those letters lost their weight a long time ago and were being carried out of habit.

What is left afterwards is quiet, and an empty desk, and considerably more room than you thought you had. Room for things you actually want on it.

That is what deciding buys. Not a better outcome on any single letter. Peace, and space.

The two tools

Asymmetric Decisions is three products in one. The book, and two standalone files that do the actual work.

Shadow Patterns is the diagnostic. It catalogs the six mechanisms that keep letters sitting on the desk: architecture as avoidance, half open loops, negotiating against yourself, over responsibility, confusing pressure with importance, dragging unclean deals. It comes with a prompt. Paste it into whatever AI you already talk to, give it your context, and it will name which pattern is holding your specific letter. Not blockers in general. Yours.

The Decision Filter is the instrument. Five levels, each one closing a layer:

1. Recognition. Name the decision in one sentence. If you cannot say it in fifteen words as a yes or no, you are still holding a cloud, and you cannot filter a cloud.

2. Distillation. Strip out fear, social pressure, sunk cost, borrowed assumptions. This is where I feel like this is not right gets separated from this is structurally unsound. They look identical until you do this.

3. Structural Check. Four questions, scored. Is the structure clean. Does the other side carry their own weight. What does maintaining this cost me. Does it expand my freedom or create dependency. The number tells you before your feelings do.

4. Selection. Four possible answers. Yes. No. Yes with changed conditions. Not now until a named trigger. Maybe is not on the list. Maybe is avoidance in formal dress.

5. Movement. One physical action within 48 hours. Send, sign, decline, delegate, delete.

One tool tells you why the letter is still on the desk. The other filters out the false assumptions and ends with one decisive move.

The book is here: book.lucashubert.me

If you already bought it, both files came with it, separate from the main text. If you read the book and stopped there, you have the philosophy and not the instruments. They are still in your download folder. Open them.

And if you want this construction built around your actual context instead of in general, that is the work I do. Not coaching. Architecture.

Lucas

For most of my career, the actual work was the smallest part of the work.

Maybe twenty percent. The other eighty went to everything around it: discovery calls, meetings, writing offers, explaining the offers, negotiating the offers, convincing people I could do the thing, then doing the thing, then producing reports to prove the thing had been done, then presenting the reports so the reports would be believed.

I used to call it overhead. It’s not overhead. It’s a tax. The proving tax.

And it wasn’t just me. Salesforce has been measuring this for years: salespeople spend about 30% of their time actually selling. The rest disappears into admin, internal meetings, reporting, and preparing to sell. An entire profession where the job is the minority of the job.

I’ve watched companies staff whole departments for that second job. Millions in revenue, armies of people, and a margin that would embarrass a lemonade stand. That’s not a business model. That’s a proving machine with a small business attached.

The old marketing had two legal moves. Either you built a market, which is expensive and slow and mostly reserved for people with money to burn. Or you bent yourself into the shape of what clients already wanted, and competed on price with everyone else who bent the same way.

Both moves rest on the same assumption: the client doesn’t know you exist, doesn’t understand what you do, and must be chased and persuaded.

So we industrialized the chase.

Open my inbox. Cold emails, every day. Some from real companies with real products. And almost every one proves, in the first sentence, that they have no idea who I am, where I am, what I’m building, or what I need. They automated the chasing and skipped the understanding.

Everyone did. Which is why cold email reply rates collapsed from around 8.5% in 2019 to under 4% today. The chase is dying of its own volume. And AI made it worse before it made anything better: about half of what gets published online now is machine-written. The same porridge, industrial quantities, “personalized” with my first name.

The punchline, courtesy of McKinsey: 71% of customers now expect personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t get them. Companies that get this right pull 10 to 15% more revenue from it. So the bar for feeling understood keeps going up, while the average message gets dumber. That gap is the opportunity.

Here’s what I think people are missing while they use AI to chase harder.

The point of this technology is not louder chasing. It’s matching.

Flip the old assumption. Don’t bend yourself into the shape of a client. Be entirely, almost uncomfortably, yourself. Do only the thing you’re actually best at, and document it in public, in your own words. Yes, this filters people out. That’s not a side effect. That’s the mechanism. Your weirdness is the filter. The wrong people bounce. The right ones stop scrolling.

And the machines are now very, very good at finding the people on the other side of your filter.

I’ll give you my numbers, so this doesn’t sound like theory.

I sell a $67 book to complete strangers. Cold Meta traffic. Around three hundred copies a month. No cold emails, no DMs, no “quick call to explore synergies”, no content calendar, no dancing for an algorithm. I wrote the book once. The ad doesn’t persuade anyone. It filters. And Meta’s AI does the one thing it is world-class at: finding more of the people who stop.

The book does my proving now. I did it once, in writing, instead of doing it live in every sales conversation for the rest of my life. That’s the asymmetry: effort once, matching forever. The deliverable became the marketing.

Now the honest part, because this is where most “AI changed everything” essays start lying to you.

Two caveats.

First: paid attention is not a free lunch. Customer acquisition costs are up roughly 60% over the last five years, and they are not going down. If your offer is generic, AI targeting will simply help you lose money with better aim. Matching amplifies a sharp signal. It cannot create one. The filter has to exist before the machine can find the people who pass it.

Second: this works at the entry, not at the top. Nobody has ever bought serious advisory from me because an ad told them to. Not once. The people who pay for high-trust work come in the long way: book, reply, conversation, trust. The ad opens a $67 door. Everything above that door still runs on the oldest technology there is. If you sell expensive things, matching gets you into the right rooms. It doesn’t close them.

But here’s what entry-level matching does that no amount of chasing ever did: it fills the room with the right people.

That’s the real economics of this. A client who understands you and your work: the collaboration is clean, the work is the work, the proving tax drops toward zero. A client who pays but doesn’t fit costs more than he pays. You just don’t see it on the invoice. You see it in scope creep, in explaining, in defending, in reporting. In the eighty percent.

Not everyone is my client. That’s not arrogance. That’s the foundation of scale.

Because scaling was never about more clients. It’s about better fit. More clients with bad fit scales your proving tax. Better fit scales the twenty percent that was the point all along.

If you’re building something right now, here’s what I’d do with all of this. Three moves.

Skip the content treadmill. Somewhere along the way, “start a business” became “spend six months filming reels for five platforms.” Most people treat it as the entry fee. Check the math first: organic reach on Facebook fell from about 16% of your followers in 2012 to 1-2% today. Instagram shows your posts to maybe 3-4% of the people who explicitly asked to see them. That’s the deal on the table: months of free labor in exchange for reaching almost nobody. Paid distribution flips it. You pay money instead of months, you reach exactly the people your filter selects, and if you have an entry offer, the reach can fund itself. That’s not a hack. That’s refusing to work for the platform for free.

Cold outreach isn’t dead. Dumb cold outreach is dead. The generic blast to a bought list is over; the reply rates above already buried it. What works now is embarrassingly simple: write when there’s an actual reason. AI can watch the signals all day: a company announces funding, an expansion, a new market, a hire that reveals a plan. You contact the decision-maker while the need is live, and you name the reason you’re writing. Signal-triggered outreach gets reply rates of 8 to 15%, against 2 to 5% for the static-list spray. Same channel. The difference is that one of them is a message and the other is noise.

Retire persuasion. Cold calls convert at about 2%, and two thirds of people won’t even answer an unknown number anymore. That’s not a script problem. Your client is bombarded daily, so the defense is automatic. Every persuasion technique you ever learned now triggers the exact immune system it was designed to bypass. Matching does the opposite: you arrive as the answer, not the interruption. Nothing to overcome, no objections to handle, no closing framework required.

That’s the ideal I’m pointing at. You, matched with the clients who need exactly what you do, exactly now, when nobody else is better positioned to do it. No chasing, no convincing, no proving tax. The technology for this exists today. Most people are just using it to chase faster.

The mass era is running out. Mass cold email is dead in the data. Mass content is drowning in its own slop. Mass influence is aging badly. What replaces it is smaller and quieter: people who are unmistakably themselves, found by exactly the people who need them, with machines doing the finding.

You don’t find a niche. You become one. The technology finally caught up with that sentence.

So, two real questions, because I’m collecting data on this. What’s your ratio: how much of your week is the actual work, and how much is proving you can do it? And what’s the one thing in your business you keep doing only because everyone says you have to? Reply or leave a comment. I read everything.

Most of you have read Asymmetric Decisions. This essay is that book applied to marketing: one sharp position instead of a thousand persuasions. If you’re new here and haven’t read it yet, that’s the place to start.

Lucas

If you read the book, you already have the move. This is where it meets AI. Most people learn the hammer and forget to ask if they even need the nail.

There is an ocean of content about how to do things with AI. How to use this tool, how to wire that automation, how to prompt your way to a finished thing. Most of it answers the wrong question.

People start with “how.” How do I use it. Which tool. Which model. Almost nobody starts with “why.” Why am I using this at all. What for. What am I actually trying to move.

So they do what the hype and the FOMO tell them to do. They pile up tools. They subscribe to twelve things. A few months later it is expensive, half of it makes no sense, and they quit and decide AI was overhyped. It was not. The tool was never the problem. The approach was. They spent their energy learning to swing the hammer instead of asking whether the nail needed to go in at all.

Asking “why” before “how” is the asymmetry. It is the highest-leverage move you can make, and it costs you nothing but the discipline to stop and ask it. That is the whole argument of Asymmetric Decisions. This piece is where that argument meets AI.

The part nobody wants to hear

AI changes every week. New models, new tools, new updates. You cannot keep up, and you are exhausting yourself trying.

So stop. The tools and the models will keep changing. The architecture will not. The architecture stays the same for the next twenty years. Only the engine swaps out.

Here is the simple, almost boring truth underneath all of it:

Your leverage is your unique knowledge, your IP, your way of thinking, multiplied by AI.

The data is yours. That is the part that stays rare. Everyone has the same models. Almost nobody has documented their own judgment.

Someone always says, “but AI already knows everything.” Sure. It can answer almost anything. Two problems. You still have to know what to ask. And it cannot filter the way you filter. You are the filter. That is the whole point. Your perspective, your taste, your read on a situation, that is the thing the model does not have and cannot fake.

I did not build an AGI. I built signal.

People ask which AI I use, expecting a secret. I can use almost any of them, because the edge is not the model. The edge is what I feed it.

I do not feed my system information. I feed it essence.

Every day, what passes through my work gets filtered. Notes, conversations, decisions, the lot. Raw input comes in, and what comes out the other side is only what actually mattered. A day that filled ten pages gets distilled to three sentences. I do not keep the noise. I do not store the fact that I was stressed or thinking in circles. I keep the essence. The professional name for this is context distillation, or semantic compression, and it is not a productivity hack. It is the difference between a model that helps and a model that wastes your time.

Here is why, with the receipts.

More context is not better context. Researchers call the failure mode “context rot”: the more you stuff into the window, the worse the model performs, even when you are nowhere near the limit. Chroma tested eighteen frontier models in 2025, including Claude Opus 4 and Gemini 2.5, and every single one degraded as the input grew (Chroma / Redis). A separate Stanford study, “Lost in the Middle,” found accuracy drops by more than thirty percent when the relevant fact is buried in the middle of a long context, replicated across six model families (Liu et al.).

So when people brag about pasting their entire drive into a giant context window, they are quietly making the model dumber. Distillation does the opposite. In retrieval systems, compressing a thousand-token passage down to roughly two hundred tokens of pure signal is standard practice, and it cuts cost while raising accuracy (RECON, arXiv). The token savings are the small prize. The real prize is precision. Essence is a signal-to-noise play, not a cost play.

The other half is the prompt. The discipline of loading exactly the right context for the next step now has a name, endorsed by Andrej Karpathy in 2025: context engineering, “the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step” (Karpathy). My filters live in that prompt. That is not folklore. It is the dominant frame in production AI right now.

What I actually built, and what it is called

People assume it is one clever app. It is not. It is a layered memory system, what engineers call polyglot persistence. Three layers, each doing what it is good at: plain markdown as the source of truth, a vectorized layer on top for semantic retrieval, and a normal SQL database underneath for the things vectors are bad at, the exact dates and amounts and tasks. I will show you exactly how they connect, with the schema and the flow, in the build below.

One warning before you go and download an app. People hear markdown and immediately think Obsidian, and then think installing Obsidian makes them a context hero. It does not. It is the hammer again. The magic is not Obsidian. The magic is plain text. My notes are markdown files, pure text, no formatting, no lock-in. They open in anything, on any machine, twenty years from now, online or off. Obsidian is just a clean window onto those files. The format is the asset. The app is the glass you look through.

And the asset lives with you, not in someone else’s app. This is the line most people miss. Your system is not a Notion workspace or whatever CRM is in fashion this year. Those tools can be fine for personal use, a place to dump and tidy. But the moment you think strategically, architecturally, the question changes: where does your IP actually live? If it sits inside someone else’s product, it is shaped to their schema, their roadmap, their idea of the average user, and you are renting access to your own knowledge. Your data belongs on your disk, in your own base, on your own server, in a format you control. Not outside. Not bent to fit a tool built for someone who is not you. That is the difference between owning an asset and borrowing a workspace. The asset stays home.

This is not a second brain. It is an architecture of judgment.

Here is where it stops being a notes app and starts being leverage. My system does four things a folder of notes never will.

It checks coherence. When I ask it what I should do, it tells me whether the move is consistent with decisions I have already made, with my architecture, with my business model. That is the Decision Filter from the book, running in software.

It argues with me. A brain built on your own data will happily agree with you forever. That failure mode has a name too: sycophancy, the well-documented tendency of models to tell you what you want to hear. So I built critic agents whose only job is to break the echo chamber. Most people build a machine that confirms them. I built one that contradicts me on purpose.

It catches my patterns. Because the decisions are recorded, the system sees the loop. The same pattern I run in business shows up later in private life, in a different costume, and without the record I would never have noticed. That is the Shadow Pattern Filter from the book. Seeing the pattern is what lets you choose to break it.

And it never decides for me. The AI processes and synthesizes. The decision is always mine. In the trade this is called human in the loop, and in my system the loop is the whole point, not a safety bolt-on.

How this is different from what everyone else is doing

Most “AI second brain” setups are collectors. They hoard raw notes and hope semantic search saves them later. That is collection. Mine is distillation. I throw away ninety percent on purpose and keep the essence.

Most people use AI as a better search box. I use it as a coherence engine and an adversary. Search retrieves. Judgment decides, and checks itself.

The components are all standard: RAG, second brain, polyglot persistence, human in the loop, context engineering. None of it is exotic. What is rare is wiring all of it together over your own IP, with your own filters. The parts are off the shelf. The inputs are you. That is why it cannot be copied.

What you do with it next is the easy part

Here is the part that flips most people’s priorities. Once the base exists, the output is almost trivial. On top of your own documented IP you can build whatever you want: a custom GPT that reasons in your frame, an app, a website, agents that answer in your voice, internal tools for your company, a product for your clients. An entire market already runs on exactly this, assistants and services wrapped around proprietary knowledge.

But notice the order. The apps, the agents, the tools, the custom GPTs, all of it is downstream. It is output. It is the fun, visible, easy part, and it is secondary. The asset is the IP underneath. Build the base and you can spin up a hundred different outputs from it, in any direction the market turns. Skip the base and every output is just a clever wrapper around nothing.

That is the real reason this is worth building. Not a faster chatbot. A foundation you own, that survives every model change, and that you can point at any opportunity that comes.

Before you go, two honest questions

Do you have your own IP documented anywhere? Or is it all still in your head and scattered across old chats, half-remembered, impossible to query?

And have you actually thought about how to turn what you know into something only you have? Not more notes. An asset. A filter. A version of your own judgment you can hand to a model and trust.

If the answer is no, that is not a failure. It is the opening. It is exactly where I stood before I built any of this.

Leave a comment

Tell me in the comments: what is the one decision you keep remaking, in business and then somewhere private? That is your pattern. Naming it is the first asymmetric move.

The move comes before the build. If you have not read it yet, Asymmetric Decisions is where the move starts, and it is the foundation for everything below. Read that first, because the rest assumes it.

Get The Book

Everything above is the why. Below is the how.

I have spent this whole piece making the case and naming the parts. I have not shown you the build. That is deliberate.

Below the line is the actual system. The distillation protocol I run every day, the exact four tests a note has to pass before it is allowed to exist, the note schema, the folder architecture, how the three layers connect, the master-prompt skeleton with the filters wired in, how the critic agents are set up, the daily workflow, and worked examples you can copy and adapt to your own work tonight.

This is not a newsletter. A newsletter rents you attention once a week. This builds you an asset you keep. The price is set on purpose, as a filter. Annual is the move: it is how you commit to actually building this rather than dabbling. There is also a founding tier for the few who want me directly inside their build. You will see the packages the moment you click upgrade.

The price is also a filter, and I mean that as the compliment it is. The people on the other side of this wall are focused on the same problem you are: building a real Moat out of their own expertise. Not tourists collecting another subscription. The cost keeps the room small, serious, and worth your time when you ask a question in it.

Here is exactly what a paid subscription gets you:

• The full architecture, documented and copyable. The four-test distillation protocol, the note schema, the folder structure, the master-prompt skeleton, the agent setup. Take it and build your own.

• Every premium piece goes past the principle into the build, with worked examples you can implement the same day, not just described but shown.

• The Decision Room. Bring a decision you are stuck on, or a part of your build that will not click, and I answer directly. This is the closest access to me short of one on one work.

• A vote on what comes next. Paid members shape the topics, the tools I build, and the direction this whole thing takes.

• A small room of people solving the same problem. Everyone here has read the book and chosen to build a Moat. That is who you are in the room with.

• A founding tier, for the few who want me hands-on. Direct work with me inside your own build, with the membership included. The deepest access there is short of private advisory.

If you have done the reading and you are ready to build, this is the door.

Read more

You can run a podcast without ever setting foot in a TV studio. You can publish books without a publisher. You can write a blog, record music in your bedroom, and build a business out of the strangest things imaginable. I’m not sure there’s any point in listing the truly weird examples, like the people on OnlyFans selling their own pubic hair, so I won’t.

(Too late. I know.)

It used to be different. You had to fit into a company. Into a corporation. Into templates, rules, dress codes, and job descriptions written by someone who had never done the job.

The day I tried to become normal

A few years ago, after burning out as an entrepreneur, a thought crossed my mind for the first time in my life: maybe I could just work for someone.

It sounded like heaven. Someone takes care of me. Organizes my work. Prepares a desk. I show up, do my job, go home. A desk. A schedule. Bliss.

So I started browsing job offers, honestly asking myself where I’d want to work and what position I’d want to hold. And one giant question mark appeared in my head:

Who the hell am I?

I didn’t even know what to write. I’ve never written a CV in my life. When I tell people about my professional experience, they conclude I’m either mentally ill or making it all up. And then there’s the phrase I kept hearing: “overqualified.”

I sat with that word for a while. Overqualified. What does that even mean? That you’re too good? That you’d work too well?

After a few conversations with recruiters, it clicked. They simply don’t know how to classify me. I don’t fit any position. Any box. Any template.

So I slowly made peace with the diagnosis: I’m completely fucked up. With all the professional success, an entrepreneur since childhood, I am unemployable.

I wouldn’t survive a job in a grocery store. No disrespect to anyone who works in one. I mean it literally: I wouldn’t make it. I’m not sure I’d manage as a waiter either.

Oh, and the punchline: in the time I spent looking for a job, I founded a company and started making money. By accident. While job hunting.

Nobody has ever hired me

At some point I realized something that sounds like a brag but is closer to a confession: nobody has ever employed me. Not once. I’ve never had a salaried job. Honestly, I don’t even know how someone would hire me.

What I did instead: I created my own services, my own offers, my own job title. I built products that solved problems, and when you actually solve someone’s problem, nobody asks for your CV. It would be almost unserious if they did. You hand over the solution. Conversation over.

So I belong to the group of people who have never once been hired based on a CV. Which is convenient, because the whole CV system is now broken beyond repair anyway: people write their CVs with AI, and AI reads them on the other end. If both machines work well, maybe people get better-matched jobs out of it. Or maybe someone can now lie with surgical precision. Whatever. Not my circus.

Because this isn’t about hiring. It’s about the fact that we live in beautiful times. Times when you can earn money on your weirdness. (I promised I wouldn’t bring up the pubic hair example again, and I’m keeping that promise.)

“You’re unpredictable”

For most of my life, I assumed I was normal. Generally indistinguishable from other people.

Then one day I asked a friend why he likes spending time with me. What he actually sees in me. He looked me in the eye, thought for a moment, and said: “You’re unpredictable. I never know what to expect from you. You can’t be fitted into any template or definition. Our hours-long conversations always end somewhere I would never have guessed. Our nights out never end the standard way.”

That surprised me a little. But then I thought about it. Fine, he has a point. My life is, generally speaking, a bit messed up. I like it very much. But it is non-standard, non-linear. I get some people into trouble. Some run away from me. Others love me.

For most of my life I masked this. I tried to be nice, smooth, palatable: a polished version of myself, sanded down to fit the room. But the less I cared and the more authentic I became, something interesting happened: it scared off the wrong people and pulled in the right ones.

Authenticity, it turns out, is a filter.

Marketing in reverse

I worked in marketing for years. The job was always the same: analyze the market, learn the customer’s needs, adapt yourself to the customer.

And here’s what adapting yourself to the market actually produces: insecurity. When you contort to satisfy other people’s demand, you can never stop checking whether you still fit.

It takes balls not to adapt. To just be yourself and walk through the gate of authenticity.

Because the marketing of authenticity works in reverse. You are who you are, out loud, and the market segments itself. You say what you actually think, you do what you actually do, and your environment reshuffles. A lot of people drop off. The ones who stay are the ones who actually fit you.

You stop searching for a niche. You become one. It’s the simplest strategy there is. No market research required. Just be fucking yourself.

Everyone wonders where authenticity comes from. I know how trite the words sound. But it requires rejecting the very standards you spent your whole life trying to fit. It’s discomfort. For a while you might be invisible, because if you fit nothing, there may be a moment when nobody around you will tell you that you’re doing the right thing. It takes courage. And a certain maturity in being yourself.

My environment changed completely within a few years. At first it felt strange and lonely, and I kept pushing the threshold of my own weirdness one step further anyway. Until one day it felt good. I had finally started meeting my people. Small circle, with a good fit.

What’s left when AI does everything else

Substack is living proof that people can be themselves and earn money on their weird passions, on their original way of seeing reality. A perspective AI doesn’t have. Nobody else has it either. Only you.

In a world flooded with AI, that’s what remains: our weirdness. Our individuality, taste, unpowdered, with the wrinkles and the ugly parts. Exactly who we are.

We have so many business models and so much technology that you can invent professions, titles, and services that have never existed. The barrier to entry is embarrassingly low. And the more AI floods everything, the more valuable the one thing it can’t generate becomes.

This is the part of the article where you’re supposed to insert the Japanese Ikigai diagram. Four circles, “what you love,” “what the world needs,” purpose somewhere in the middle.

Fine. Here’s mine:

• How weird are you?

• What do you have that others don’t?

• What do you love doing?

• What do you refuse to do?

Write a comment: what can you do that others can’t?

Because that’s the whole secret: your weirdness, all of it, is your asymmetry. The thing nobody can copy, benchmark, or compete with. It’s what my book Asymmetric Decisions is about. Most of you have already read it. If you’re new here, check it out.

Lucas

Not deleted. Not dramatic. I just stopped treating it like it mattered.

I watched what happened.

Most people who start a business, or think about marketing one, begin the same way. They open accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. They film reels. They buy courses on content creation. They study YouTube. They try everything at once.

And they end up with nothing.

Ninety percent of their time goes to fighting algorithms. Learning what the platform rewards this week. Optimizing hooks. Chasing reach. And no time for the real work they’re supposed to be doing.

Then, after months of that, they discover something uncomfortable: the followers didn’t convert. Because they were never the right people. They were people who responded to what the algorithm promoted, not people who needed what you actually offer.

I published things I was genuinely proud of. Pieces that were, for me, intellectually alive. Things I’d spent real time thinking through.

Nobody saw them. Nobody read them.

That’s not a content problem. That’s a distribution problem. The right message, in the wrong place, to the wrong people. Your family and friends very rarely are your best clients. They are not bad people, but your business is simply not for them. They may love you, but they don’t resonate with your message. And that’s ok.

So I stopped.

I moved my list to Substack. But not the whole list, only the people who had actually replied to my messages. The ones who engaged. The ones where something real had passed between us.

Everyone else stayed behind.

If you’re reading this, you made it through that filter. Wohooo.

That’s not a small thing. It means there’s resonance here. It means this relationship is probably worth more than thousands of random follows from people who liked a photo of someone’s lunch.

I don’t take that lightly.

And I’ll hold up my end: I won’t send you noise. I won’t disguise a sales pitch as a gift. I won’t optimize for your attention at the expense of your time.

Here’s what I learned from all of it:

There’s no shortage of good clients. No shortage of good services.

What’s missing is the right message, reaching the right person, in the right format.

And here’s what’s changed: technology now lets us do that with a precision that wasn’t possible before. AI, personalization, smart distribution, these aren’t just tools for big companies. They’re available to anyone who’s decided clearly what they’re building and who they’re building it for.

You don’t need thousands of followers. You need ten right clients.

You don’t need to be an influencer. You need to be findable by the people who already need what you do.

The difference between those two paths is a decision. Not a strategy. Not a funnel. A decision about what you’re actually trying to build and for whom.

That’s what this newsletter is about.

I’m curious where you are with this.

Which channels are actually bringing you clients, and which ones are just costing you time?

Are you using the leverage that technology offers right now, or does it still feel like more noise to manage?

Reply and tell me. I read every response.

- Lucas Hubert

Most people on this list have read Asymmetric Decisions. If you haven’t yet — or if it’s been sitting unopened — now is a good time. Everything I write here connects back to it.

A friend of mine is paying his Meta agency $25,000 a month. Ads, creatives, landing pages, campaign management. The full stack.

Last week someone in our group chat posted a workflow built by Codex — research engine, strategy briefs, creative generation, distribution, analytics loop. The whole thing. Built in an afternoon.

His response: “I think this entire model is about to change.”

He’s right. But probably not in the way most people think.

Right now, the AI conversation is almost entirely about output. New tools, new workflows, new prompts. Someone generates a landing page in 30 seconds and posts a screen recording. Someone else builds an entire app from a voice note. The demos are impressive.

But there’s a question almost nobody is asking: output of what, and why?

Because generating something is not the same as knowing what should exist.

AI made output cheap. You can generate ten ad variants, ten landing pages, ten positioning angles in minutes. Soon it’ll be hundreds.

But cheap output without direction is just noise at scale.

And the noise is creating something else: FOMO. People feel like they’re behind. Like something important is passing them by. So they burn through tokens generating things they’ll never use — apps they don’t need, content with no audience, automations with no purpose. Activity that looks like progress but produces nothing.

For years, companies paid agencies for the operational layer — campaigns, copy, graphics, media buying. That work was expensive because it required time and people.

I know this because I ran an agency. And I can tell you: trying to charge a client for strategy was almost impossible. Nobody wanted to pay for thinking. They wanted deliverables. Tangible output. Strategy was treated as overhead — something that should come free, bundled with the “real work.”

So I learned to hide it. I embedded my strategy into the outputs themselves, and that became my edge. The client thought they were paying for execution. They were actually paying for decisions — they just didn’t know it.

AI is about to make that dynamic visible.

When output becomes cheap, fast, and abundant, the difference between someone who generates and someone who knows what to generate becomes obvious. The strategic layer can no longer hide inside the operational cost. It has to stand on its own.

Most people right now are in the tools phase. Experimenting with prompts, testing models, building automations. That phase is natural — it happened with every new technology.

But tools are not the game.

One model generates ads. Another analyzes data. Another writes content. Another builds code.

Someone still has to decide: what problem are we actually solving? What data matters? What signals do we follow? What system learns from the results and adjusts?

Without that layer, AI is a very fast machine for producing things nobody needs.

The common fear is that AI will replace people. But what’s actually happening is a reorganization. The value isn’t disappearing — it’s shifting.

The strategists, the architects, the people who always knew what should be built but were bottlenecked by the cost of building it — they now have tools that let them execute at speed. That’s not a loss. That’s leverage.

What is losing value is pure execution without direction. The person who only knew how to produce deliverables but never decided what to produce or why. That role was always dependent on someone upstream making the right calls. Now the upstream person doesn’t need a team of twenty to act on those calls.

This is a restructuring of companies, teams, offers, and business models. Not because tools are powerful — tools have always been powerful. But because for the first time, the tool layer is cheap enough that it stops being the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is now clarity. Direction. Knowing what should exist and why.

And that was always the hard part. We just couldn’t see it behind the cost of everything else.

Lucas Hubert

That world is coming. And it is not a future where AI takes your job. It is a future where AI frees you from the work you know, so you can do the work you are truly meant for. This is not an evolution of positions. It is their complete transformation. The era of HUMAN-FIRST is arriving.

The End of Noise. The Beginning of Signal.

We live in an age of an informational deluge. We work in systems designed for the steam engine, trying to steer them in the quantum age. AI in this transformation is not a competitor. It is an essential filter. Its first and most crucial role is the radical reduction of noise.

It will encompass all executive, administrative, and logistical infrastructure. We will stop drowning in generating hundreds of posts, analyzing thousands of reports, filling out endless forms. AI will clear the battlefield. And on that cleared field, only one thing will remain: human meaning.

This is not about magic prompts for generating images. It is a deeper revolution. AI will become the gate that separates value from clamor. And on the other side of that gate, you will stand. Not as a “human resource,” but as a mini-agency, self-govern.

Who Are You, Really? Unearth Your Core.

The key competency of the coming years will not be programming AI. It will be the ability to answer the question: who am I when disconnected from my job title and position? What I call the “core” – your unique blend of intuition, experience, passion, and way of thinking that is so deeply embedded it’s almost invisible.

These are skills hard to teach and impossible to copy. Empathy that understands unspoken needs. The courage to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. The ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas. Taste, ethics, wisdom. Your core.

And now, the most important part: AI will become the scaling engine of that core. It will allow you to multiply, amplify, and deliver it not to ten clients, but to ten thousand. You are not applying for a position. You are launching your unique economic entity.

Imagine:

• Not a “social media specialist,” but an “Agency of Emotional Algorithms” – a one-person firm diagnosing and shaping the relationship between a brand and its audience on a continental scale.

• Not a “market analyst,” but a “Council for Impossible Decisions” – a solopreneur specializing in resolving complex strategic dilemmas, supported by AI models scouring all of humanity’s knowledge.

• Not a “teacher,” but an “Epiphany Designer” – a mini-agency creating personalized paths of educational revelation, where AI delivers content, and the human designs the moment of understanding.

Network Architecture: AI as the Nervous System of the New Economy

A solitary mini-agency is just the beginning. The real magic happens when these unique entities start to connect. And here, AI will play its second, crucial role: it will become the nervous system of the new economy.

When a project for the “Agency of Emotional Algorithms” requires ethical depth, you don’t conduct recruitment. You send a query into the network. AI, in a fraction of a second, finds and verifies the “Bureau of Ethical Imagination” – another mini-agency run by a practical philosopher. Need a physical product prototype? AI connects you with the “Workshop of Sustainable Materials”. You form a dynamic, self-organizing team for the duration of the project. Upon completion, the network reconfigured.

This is not the gig economy. This is a project-based economy of unique value, where every human is a node of their irreplicable specialization, and AI is the communication protocol and the execution force.

The Challenge: The Great Identity Reset

This vision is beautiful but demands the most difficult of resets: an identity reset. We must discard not only the education system teaching templates and companies imitating 19th-century management models. We must discard our own internal belief that we are a collection of bullet points on a resume.

This is an inward journey. The questions awaiting us are uncomfortable:

• What were people willing to pay me for, even when I did it almost for free?

• What consumed my time without me feeling its passage?

• What specific, narrow problem can I solve better than most around me?

This is not a time for minor adjustments. It is a time for a blank slate and self-governance. For redesigning the architecture of your own life and value.

The Shadow and The Responsibility

This transformation is not a utopia. It carries serious risks. What about people whose core is deeply buried under layers of adaptation to the system? We need new support systems: education that discovers talents, not tests memory; social security for periods of transformation; a culture that values self-reflection.

AI can unleash potential, but it can also create new, less transparent hierarchies. The vision of a world without unnecessary bureaucracy and power-play politics is not guaranteed. It is a choice.

What Remains? Meaning.

When AI takes over all function, all execution, all administration – what remains? Sense-making remains. Assigning meaning. Making decisions within a framework of values. Responsibility. This is the ultimate human domain. AI processes information but has no sense of meaning. It orders the noise. The human remains with the decision and the direction.

The future of work is not about technology. It is anthropology. It is a return to the question: what are we here for? To earn money to pay off debts in a system we created ourselves? Or to use our unique core – amplified by the most powerful tool in history – to create, connect, solve, and give the world deeper meaning?

Don’t wait for this future to arrive. Start it now. With the question: What will be the name of your mini-agency?

This is not a forecast. It is an invitation.

Lucas Hubert

I tried to work the way productivity books suggest.
Daily habits. Fixed hours. Consistency.
Do a little bit every day. Show up no matter what. Improve constantly. Try hard.

On paper, it made sense. In practice, it slowly exhausted me.

Whenever I tried to force myself into a rigid daily structure, something broke. I could do it for a short while. A few days of intense focus. Sometimes one or two very productive days. And then my nervous system would crash. My mind would become noisy, scattered. My body tired. Clarity disappeared. What followed was a breakdown: confusion, paralysis, and the need to completely withdraw just to recover.

At first, I blamed myself.
I thought I lacked discipline.
That I wasn’t consistent enough.
That others had something I didn’t.

But over time, I started noticing a pattern.

I don’t function linearly. I function cyclically.

My energy doesn’t renew every morning in the same way.
My creativity doesn’t show up on command.
My clarity comes in waves.

There are phases when I naturally want to gather information, read, observe, think.
Then phases when everything suddenly clicks and clarity appears.
Then short, intense phases of execution and creation.
And then phases where I need to slow down, withdraw, rest, integrate.

Each phase has its own intelligence.
Each phase serves a purpose.

The problems always started when I tried to skip one of them.

When I ignored rest, I burned out.
When I forced execution without clarity, I created chaos.
When I judged stillness as laziness, pressure built up in my body until it shut everything down.

Why “Atomic Habits” didn’t work for me

Books like Atomic Habits are not wrong.
They are just incomplete.

They describe a very specific type of human system:
people with relatively stable energy, who regulate themselves through routine and repetition. For them, daily habits are grounding. Consistency calms their nervous system.

Mine works differently.

For me, daily execution is not regulating. It’s overstimulating.
Doing “a little bit every day” fragments my attention.
Rigid schedules disconnect me from my internal signals.

When I try to live by streaks and daily output, my nervous system goes into survival mode. And from that state, no real creativity or meaningful work can emerge.

What I observed instead

When I respect my rhythm, everything changes.

I plan my days lightly, not rigidly.
I start mornings slowly. I write, reflect, talk things through, unload my thoughts.
This sets my nervous system into a regulated state.

From there, clarity emerges naturally.

Some days are for thinking and defining.
Some days are for deep, focused execution.
Some days are for physical movement, solitude, or being in nature.
Some days are simply for rest.

I no longer measure my days as “productive” or “unproductive.”
I ask a different question: What phase am I in right now?

When I honor that answer, I don’t burn out.
I move forward without forcing.
Things actually get done — often faster — because there is no internal resistance.

Different people, different operating systems

What I’ve come to understand is this:
people have different nervous system patterns, different energy dynamics, different ways of functioning.

Some people thrive on daily structure.
Some work best in response to external pressure.
Some are seasonal, creative, cyclical.

Yet society rewards one model: linear consistency.
Daily output. Predictability. Constant visibility.

If you don’t fit that model, it’s easy to internalize the idea that something is wrong with you. That you need fixing. That you should push harder. Find a new app, read more books to learn more and improve.

For many people, that belief is what leads to burnout, breakdowns, and long periods of disconnection from themselves.

There is nothing wrong with you

Not fitting the dominant productivity model doesn’t mean you’re broken.
It means you may be listening to the wrong instructions for your system.

Stability doesn’t always come from discipline.
Sometimes it comes from acceptance.

For me, discovering my rhythm changed everything.
I stopped fighting myself.
I stopped trying to optimize my nature out of existence.

I didn’t become less ambitious.
I became more sustainable.

A question for you

How do you actually function — when no one is watching, when no system is imposed on you?

Do you grow daily, or do you grow in waves?
Does structure regulate you, or exhaust you?
What happens when you stop judging your natural rhythm?

Maybe the most productive thing you can do
is stop trying to become someone else.

Lucas.

This is a lie.

I see leaders drowning in this assumption. They believe that if they just optimize their workflow or acquire enough data, the right path will reveal itself. But this is not strategy; it is operational clutter.

The Great Correction

We are standing on the precipice of the greatest workforce correction in history. The narrative of the last decade—learn a skill, join a team, execute tasks, and be safe—is over.

We are already seeing the signals. Major technology leaders like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon have initiated massive workforce reductions. These are not merely economic adjustments; they are structural shifts. This is a return to truth over optimism. For years, organizations prioritized headcount over coherence. Now, the market is forcing a “conscious killing” of the excess.

The people being removed are not necessarily “unproductive.” They are often highly efficient at things that no longer matter.

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The Failure of Recall

To understand why this is happening, we must look at how we were trained to think.

Our education system was designed for a world that no longer exists. It taught us to recall facts, operate with information, and follow checklists. It rewarded the accumulation of knowledge and the speed of processing. We were taught that more information means more intelligence.

This is a lie.

Operating at the level of information exchange is the lowest level of consciousness. If your value comes from gathering data, read a lot of books every year, processing tasks, or being a “fast” thinker, you are in danger. We cannot be faster than computers. High IQ does not mean wisdom, and the volume of information you possess is no longer a competitive advantage.

For these functions—task execution, information sorting, and pattern recognition—we have AI. And make no mistake: AI will replace everyone who operates solely at this level.

The Intelligence Trap

In the face of this uncertainty, the common reaction is panic. People scramble to acquire “more.” More certifications, more prompt engineering courses, more familiarity with the latest 50 AI apps.

This is a distraction. In fact, it is a form of intellectual masturbation.

It provides a dopamine hit of productivity—a feeling that you are “doing something”—without actually moving the needle. It is operational clutter disguised as progress. If your strategy for survival is to learn more AI tools, you are fighting a losing battle. You are trying to out-process a processor.

Real wisdom is often slow. It is unverified. It navigates the unknown. This “creator mode” is what makes human consciousness unique. It is the ability to design an architecture of choice rather than simply following an action plan.

The End of the Operator

I am not an executor, operator, or growth consultant, and neither should you be. The era of the “operator”—the person who simply moves information from column A to column B—is ending.

To survive this correction, you must shift your identity. You must move from being an executor to being a Strategic Architect.

What makes you unique is not your speed. It is your sovereignty of thought. While the machine processes data, you must operate at the level of assumptions, constraints, and trade-offs. The machine cannot make irreversible decisions. It cannot take responsibility for a strategic bet.

How to Leverage AI (Without Competing)

We must define the relationship clearly: AI is Support, Not Authority.

• Don’t ask AI to create. Ask it to analyze coherence.

• Don’t ask AI to decide. Use it to detect gaps in your logic.

• Don’t let AI drive. Use it to reflect reality so you can see where you are lying to yourself.

Restoring Agency

The future belongs to those who can cut through the noise, not those who generate more of it. It belongs to those who value clarity and strategic truth over the illusion of growth.

Stop gathering tools. Stop seeking motivation. Start defining the constraints that will define your value.

Lucas H.

More posts.
More frameworks.
More opinions competing for attention.
More AI tools and solutions.

And somehow, with all this input, people think less, not more.

Beyond Noise exists as a refusal.

What This Is

This is not a productivity newsletter.
Not motivation.
Not advice on how to win and be the best version of you.

This is a space for clear thinking.

Strategy, in its real form, is not planning.
It’s choosing.
And living with the consequences of that choice.

Most people avoid that part.

Less Is Not Minimalism. It’s Precision.

More options don’t create freedom.
They create paralysis.

More projects don’t create momentum.
They create unfinished loops.

More information doesn’t create clarity.
It delays decisions.

Less, when chosen consciously, is not limitation.
It’s accuracy.

What I Write About

I write about:

• strategic thinking without corporate language

• decision-making when there is no certainty

• creativity born from constraint

• leadership without performance

• why unfinished ideas quietly drain your life

• clarity as a discipline, not a personality trait

No hype.
No borrowed authority.
No “thought leadership”.

Just things that survive contact with reality.

This Is Not for Everyone

If you’re looking for:

• answers

• formulas

• confidence boosts

• someone to tell you what to do

This isn’t for you.

If you’re tired of noise,
of pretending complexity equals depth,
of running without direction —

You might feel at home here.

The Rule

If it doesn’t reduce noise,
it doesn’t belong.

If it doesn’t sharpen a decision,
it’s unnecessary.

If it doesn’t touch reality,
it’s just another story.

Beyond Noise is not about being right.
It’s about being clear.

And clarity, quietly, changes everything.

Lucas.