I'm 42 Here's How I'm Preparing for a "Jobless Future"

So, I'm 42. I have two kids. And I am preparing for a jobless future. A world where there are fewer and fewer and fewer jobs that can actually give you a good life. Where they do not grind you on pay or hours, fire you on a whim, where AI can just take your job overnight. It is very clear that right now the world is dividing into two groups. those who have leverage and those who are leverage for others. And I want to share with you the five changes that I'm making so that I can have leverage in my life. So what I'm going to describe here has not required me to take any big risks or run some big business. And it has eliminated my worries over AI and shifting economies and it's gotten me off the treadmill of time for money. And this whole thing started a few weeks ago when I was chatting with my friend and he had recently got fired from Tesla and he said something to me that I can't stop replaying in my head. So my buddy has been out of the job for a few months and he's a super talented guy. He's very sharp. He did everything right. And he told me something that I keep hearing now again and again and again which is this. I am terrified I won't find another job and I'm also terrified that I will. So the thought of getting another job and the pressure and the timelines and everything, he just hated this idea. And to me, that says everything about where we are right now. And we can see all of this around us, right? AI is accelerating in the middle of the labor markets disappearing and wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living and they haven't in almost two decades. And the truth is this, the economy is changing faster than most people's careers are adapting. And I've spent the last several years making very intentional changes in how I work. So I want to walk you through these five shifts that I've made in my own career and they are shifts that I think any professional can use to stay ahead of what's coming. And they are practical. They are rooted in what's happening right now. And they have completely changed the way that I work and earn. And I think they can do the same for you. All right. So the first shift I'm making is to zoom out. So when I was about 25, I learned one of the most important of my lessons of my life from a man named Mosha. He was my business partner at the time's godfather. This guy was almost a billionaire from real estate, except to meet him, you would never know it. He had a a regular car in this small office in Westlake. It was just him and an assistant in this office. And I asked him a question that I thought was very bright and was going to get me this very um complicated answer, which was, "What's the difference between a good investment and a bad investment? And I thought he was going to, you know, have this complicated formula or some big answer. And this was literally a guy who could tell you the price of copper wire by the foot in the buildings that he owned. He could tell you, you know, rental rates in hundreds of markets around the country, but without skipping a beat. He didn't even blink. His answer was 10 years. That's all he said. And it took a long time for the profoundity of that to really settle in. But after working with all of the founders that I've worked with over the years and now more than 1400 people in the freelance formula, what I know for certain is this. Most people avoid the micro discomfort of change today and they end up living in macro problems for decades. So the first thing that I told my friend when we were chatting and that I'm doing myself is simple. It's zoom out. It's sitting back and asking yourself 10 years from today, from right now, what will you wish you had started in a jobless future? The people who are able to zoom out, who see how the world is evolving are going to be the ones who thrive amidst all the rapid change that we're seeing. The second shift that I'm making is diversifying income. The way that I see the world is this. A job, no matter how good that job is, is concentration risk. You would never put 100% of your investments into one stock. But people will put 100% of their income, which is the single most important wealth building and freedom building instrument that you have in your life in one company. That is not stability. That is fragility. So here's how I handled this in my own life. I did not go broad. I didn't change lanes and instead I doubled down on the things that I was already good at. So I started my career as a copywriter and then what I did is productize and layer. I went from copywriter to messaging strategy. I added on a positioning sprint. I built the freelance formula based on requests from my clients. And I've added on YouTube. And each one has fed the next, creating this portfolio of income and flywheel. And what I believe is the biggest shift for any mid-career professional is this. Take the skills you already have, package them into some kind of a consulting offer that detaches your time from money. Literally this one single change going from copywriter to messaging strategist took me from 75 bucks an hour doing a bunch of work to charging 75 grand per engagement. The skills did not change. All that changed is the story about how I talked about myself. My leverage changed. If your entire income depends on one person saying yes, which is your boss, you're exposed, right? We're all part of the family until we're not. Now, I knew for myself when I was making this transition, I did not want a full-time job. I wanted leverage, which was something that broke my dependence on a single employer. And I think before we go further, I need to define this word leverage because I think it's the single most important idea in the modern workplace. Leverage is the ability to produce outcomes that are much larger than the effort that you put in. It's work that scales, that compounds, that isn't tied to hours. This is why two people with the same skills can have completely different income and completely different freedom in their lives. Right? You know people who are no smarter than you, making 10x more simply because the way that they package and sell their skills is more effective than the way you do. In a world where companies are replacing roles faster than people can adapt, leverage is the only thing that's going to give you options. It's going to give you bargaining power and it's going to make you less dependent on anyone's source of income. What I believe is this. In the new economy, you either have leverage or you are someone else's leverage. And I encourage you to take a beat and really think about that. Where do you sit in this ecosystem right now? Because if you do not own a system for yourself, then you are by definition leverage in someone else's system. And unless you find a way to I'm going to talk more about this in a minute, but if you cannot find a way like I did to separate my time from money, right? Like to go from whatever the version is in your niche, copywriter to messaging strategist to learn how to leverage your skills better. You will always be underpaid and overworked. So I started by consulting. I productized my expertise. That's where I had had a moat. And my position is that that's where your mode is too. What I have found is that people don't realize that everything is a market. Every single business, right? Whether it's real estate, e-commerce, starting a physical product, brand, wherever you are, the place that you're currently in, that's where you have the biggest moat, right? Because you don't know what you don't know about everything else. But you do know your field, your domain, your skill set. So take the things that you're already doing and stop using it as somebody else's leverage and instead use it as your own. This shift alone changed my life. So the third shift I'm making is building intellectual property. So in a world where AI is going to overrun us with average work, right? The only differentiator becomes our thinking. AI is going to take all the average information from the internet and it's going to give us it can give us the Google search faster. It can do templates. It can do okay quality stuff. But what it can't do is replicate a 20-year point of view on supply chain messaging and positioning design. Your point of view, your taste, your process, accumulated expertise, the unique cocktail that is you. In a world where everything is a commodity, your IP is going to be the single thing that can separate you. Owning a brand is the single most important investment of the modern age. Take a minute and zoom out and look at society. It's entirely driven by story. Hermes sells Birkin bags for $25,000 when a 5-cent grocery bag would do the same exact thing for you. This is what I built my entire career on is understanding that all software is intrinsically the same, right? It's an Excel sheet. Like the era of SAS was basically an Excel sheet with a UX put on top. The difference is the story that's told. And you already know, by the way, that story is what drives everything. You can look around it. It fuels the car decisions that you make. It fuels where you live. It fuels the clothes you drive. Everything, right? But we forget this about our careers. When I was a copywriter, I 10x my income just by changing the story I told about it. Instead of doing the thing, I built a workshop around messaging strategy and I literally did a fraction of the work for 10x the money. And you can do the same thing with your with your skills. The people that you admire who are earning more are not smarter than you. They're just better leveraged. That's it. So your IP can be any result that you create that you can formalize into a method. We talk about this in the freelance formula, the difference between process expertise and subject matter expertise. Most people think they need to know more about a subject, but what you actually need is a process to get to a result. It can be supply chain, curing diabetes, picking out the right socks. Marie Condo, just consider this for a second. She has literally built a global empire teaching people how to clean up their freaking house. And you're telling me the, you know, million-doll SAS contract you landed or the 20% operational efficiency you drove or the accounting expertise or whatever does not have huge value. It's a limiting belief. you are just not leveraging yourself properly. So if you are a mid-career professional, somebody with some expertise, I would encourage you to ask yourself this. What do people already come to you for that you could turn into a system? This is what I did and it literally changed the trajectory of how I earn and I bet you're a lot closer than you think. Shift number four, use AI as leverage. So here is the truth about AI. It is here. It is not going away. And it's going to benefit owners of systems and punish employees of systems. If you own a system, consult any kind of business. It's going to give you a huge economic asymmetric advantage. If you work for someone else's system, it is going to exponentially increase the demands on your time as they keep asking you to do more and more with less and less faster and faster and faster. And many of you out there are already feeling this happen. AI is not going to replace experts. What it is going to do is replace people who don't own a process. If you own a process, AI multiplies it. When your employer owns that process, AI replaces you inside it or it simply increases the demands that your employer puts on you. So, let me give you an example of this from my own work. Since I own IP, I can take chatbt and I can now do the same engagements that used to either require assistance or used to require a lot of time on my part and I can deliver that value in a fraction of a time. The process is mine, the trust is mine, the expertise is mine. AI just amplifies that. If I worked in a company and I was a, you know, a product marketer, right? They would just be asking me to create more and more and more and more stuff, I'd be asked to do a thousand things with AI. I implore you, do not be on the wrong side of this. The simple question you can ask, even if you want to keep your job, right, is where can AI multiply my advantage and not just make me faster at someone else's workflow? Every profession has an answer to this. literally whether you're a naval ship architect any like you can find a way to own a process that is going to give you leverage over your time. So the fifth shift that I'm making is I'm reclaiming my time. So in a world where AI makes all of the block and tackle stuff automatic, what is left? It's taste and story. Okay, those two things are the ultimate skills. And by that I mean this taste is what does good look like in your space. What does it mean to be a great accountant, to be a great process per like whatever the thing is that you do? And then story is how do you sell the value of that to either people in the market or people in your organization. Those are the two ultimate skills. You can look and see that critical thinking is the moat now. It's not hours worked, right? Janitors, no nothing negative against people who do hard days work, right? but they work incredibly hard in a brutally low-lever way. I am no smarter than most internal marketers, but I will make 10 times the income in 25 hours a week because I leveraged my skills instead of working as leverage for somebody else. In order to do this, you need to stop your cycle of overwork now, right? And this is something that took me a very long time to understand. Your biggest leaps are not going to come from how hard you work. I don't care what social media says. I don't it will not come from how hard you work. What you work on and who you work on it with matters far more than how hard you work. If you are in a system where you can ever only get linear improvements, right? You have a job, you get twice as much responsibility for a 15% increase in pay. You doesn't matter how hard you work, the system limits your growth. So for me, for a very long time, I was stuck because of how hard I worked. because I never gave myself that sounds like a cheesy job interview statement, but it really isn't. Like, you can you can grind yourself into oblivion. So, you're not even thinking clearly anymore, right? I never gave myself time to think. And so, all I ever did was get the incremental results of $75 an hour or the linear job or whatever. Once I took a step back to say, what could a more leveraged way of working be that's when everything started to change. So if you are working internally for a company right now, ask yourself this. Where can you start to create even if it's an hour a week space for the next chapter? You will be amazed what you can accomplish in consistent one hour per week blocks where you move things forward. You know it's cheesy because it's true. Consistency is what matters in these businesses. All right. So if I had to start today, this is the road map that I would follow. One, I would list the skills that I have, right? What are the hard skills, the jobs to be done? I can talk about more about this framework if you want in another video. This is a a framework to identify customer needs, right? B2B buyers, which is what most of you will sell into. Hire based on jobs to be done. So, start ba start with the real skills that you have. The second thing is identify the transformations that you've already created. What are the wins you've made internally for clients, for clients of the agency you work for, the company you work for, whatever. Make that a simple process. Package it into an outcome. Talk with real human beings who have budget and authority to buy what you sell. And then deliver that outcome. Again, you use those projects to build your own frameworks. And then this is the thing that people don't do. Turn left and right with each new project. Meaning for every person who fits your ideal customer profile, who else do you do? they know that you can go make a relationship with right there. You have a diversified business that can 10x your income in a fraction of the time just by doing spending the six months now that people will not to live a life that others later can't. All right? And then you let the leverage compound. This is how you can replace a job in in a very realistic manner. And you don't need to build some massive business like I don't want a huge payroll. I don't want to be a massive entrepreneur. I want leverage in my life. I am 42. I have two kids. And it is absolutely the case that we are entering a jobless future. And for me, this is not something to fear, but something we have to prepare for. The people who win will not be the ones who work the hardest. They will be the ones who understand leverage and identity and compounding. So, if you want help mapping your first offer, I will include a link to a worksheet below. And if you want deeper support, you can check out my self- led the course, the freelance formula, my positioning sprints, where I'll work with you directly. This is the world we're entering and you can absolutely build a business inside it. Uh I'll also link, if nothing else, subscribe and I'll link some other videos here that talk more about the future of work and what to expect. See you in the next video.

The economy is splitting into two groups: Those who have leverage, and those who are leveraged. Which one are you? Discover The Freelance Formula https://www.brendandell.com/freelance-formula-299 Apply for the Positioning Sprint: https://www.brendandell.com/positioning-sprint ________________________________________________________________ I am 42 years old. I have two kids. And I am preparing for a jobless future. We are entering an era where "good jobs" are disappearing—replaced by AI, automation, and efficiency. If your only income comes from a salary, you are in the danger zone. In this video, I break down the 5 Shifts I am making to protect my family and build wealth in this new economy. The 5 Shifts: Zoom Out: Why thinking in "10-year" timelines changes everything. Diversify Income: A job is just "concentration risk." Here is how to hedge. Build Intellectual Property: In a world of AI commodities, your "Point of View" is the only moat left. Use AI as Leverage: Stop competing with robots. Become their manager. Reclaim Time: Why "working harder" is actually a trap. TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - The "Jobless" Future is Here 2:15 - Shift 1: The 10-Year Zoom 4:45 - Shift 2: Diversifying Income (The Portfolio Career) 8:30 - Shift 3: Building IP & Story 12:15 - Shift 4: AI as Leverage (Not Replacement) 16:00 - Shift 5: Reclaiming Time from the Grind 19:30 - My Roadmap for You