TL;DR:
- The people who navigate volatility aren’t better at predicting — they’re better at structuring
- Optionality beats conviction: capped downside, uncapped upside
- Going independent was an options trade — swapping one employer for a portfolio of possibilities
- The employee version of me was fragile; the independent version was antifragile
- In uncertain times, the question isn’t “what will happen?” — it’s “how am I positioned for whatever happens?”
The world is fucking mental right now.
Venezuela. Greenland. The Taiwan threat from China. Russia and Ukraine grinding on. Currency debasement accelerating. And underneath all of it, the AI revolution ramping up and causing shifts in society that nobody fully understands yet.
It’s unnerving. It’s also exciting. And the gap between those two feelings — between paralysis and possibility — is where most people get stuck.
The ones who don’t get stuck aren’t the ones with better predictions. They’re the ones with better structure.
I spent the best part of my twenties doing corporate jobs. Well, kind of corporate.
The first — Kronos, now UKG — was proper corporate. Five thousand employees globally. Big systems, big hierarchy, big inertia. The second was Trustpilot. Technically a startup, but growing fast — fifty people when I started, five hundred when I left. Finally, Jabmo, an ABM (Account-Based Marketing) software company in Paris, made me rethink everything.
Each job followed the same pattern. I’d commit fully. Put my energy, identity, and trajectory into the company’s hands. I believed the implicit deal: perform well, and you’ll be taken care of. Stay loyal, and loyalty will be returned.
The deal was a lie. Not maliciously — just structurally. When circumstances changed, when companies pivoted or failed or simply decided I was no longer essential, I was left high and dry. Despite performance. Despite loyalty. Non-competes meant I couldn’t move freely. Long notice periods — standard in Europe — meant I was trapped for months even after the relationship was dead. Lower pay, because salaried employees are a discount on the open market. Employers felt they owned me. And in a sense, they did.
I had put my entire life on one track. When that track ended, I had nothing else.
The year I turned twenty-nine, I went independent.
The change was immediate and clarifying. I could still work with the same companies — but now I was the business, not the employee. I set my rate. I chose my projects. I started building my own brand instead of someone else’s. And something unexpected happened: I was paid more and respected more. The same skills, the same person, but structured differently. Independence led rapidly to leadership roles, to equity, to ownership — both operational and financial.
I hadn’t become more talented overnight. I had become better structured. And the difference in outcomes was enormous.
What I didn’t have at the time was a framework for understanding why. I just knew that being employed had felt like a trap, and being independent felt like freedom. It took a few more years — and a book — for the logic underneath to click.
In 2020, while the world was locked down and uncertainty was at a level most of us had never experienced, I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile. The timing was perfect. The world was fragile and everyone could feel it. Taleb’s argument was that the opposite of fragile isn’t robust — it’s antifragile. Systems that get stronger from disorder. Organisms that need stress to grow. People who benefit from volatility rather than being destroyed by it.
The concept that hit hardest was optionality. Taleb argued that the most powerful position in an uncertain world isn’t the one with the best forecast — it’s the one with the most options. Capped downside, uncapped upside. Small bets with asymmetric payoffs. The right, but not the obligation, to act when conditions change.
I realised I’d already lived this. Going independent at twenty-nine wasn’t just a career move. It was an options trade. I’d swapped a concentrated position — one employer, one salary, one track — for a portfolio of possibilities. Each client was a position. Each project was a bet. If one failed, the others held. And new ones were always available.
The employee version of me was fragile. One shock and I was done. The independent version was antifragile. Shocks created opportunities.
This is the principle: the people who navigate volatility well aren’t the ones who predict it. They’re the ones who structure around it.
In markets, this is intuitive. A trader who goes all-in on one thesis is making a fragile bet. A trader who buys options — paying a small, defined cost for asymmetric exposure — is making an antifragile one. Same conviction, radically different risk profile. The difference between holding a conviction and structuring around a conviction is the entire game.
This pattern isn’t new. It’s how civilisations have always dealt with uncertainty — they just didn’t call it optionality.
The merchant class in Renaissance Italy didn’t put their wealth in one venture. They diversified across trade routes, banking, and patronage. If the silk road was disrupted, the banking held. If a patron fell from power, the trade continued. They weren’t hedging because they lacked conviction. They were structuring because they understood that the world is unpredictable and the cost of ruin is infinite.
The post-war corporate employment model was the opposite. It was a deal built for stability: you give us your career, we give you a pension. It worked when the world was stable — when companies lasted decades, industries moved slowly, and the social contract between employer and employee was backed by economic reality.
That world is gone. Companies pivot, restructure, and disappear faster than ever. Entire industries get disrupted in years, not decades. The loyalty contract has become one-sided — companies demand flexibility from employees but offer none in return. The corporate model was functional in its time. It just isn’t this time.
What changed is that volatility became the baseline, not the exception.
Globalisation, technology, and now AI have compressed the cycle time of everything. A career that would have lasted forty years in 1970 might last four years now before the landscape shifts underneath it. A business model that worked in January might be obsolete by June. The rate of change has outpaced the structures most people use to manage their lives.
And yet most people are still structured for stability. One job. One income stream. One identity tied to one employer. One track, with all the risk concentrated in a single point of failure. They’re playing a fragile game in an antifragile world.
The shift that needs to happen — the one I stumbled into at twenty-nine and only understood after reading Taleb — is from prediction to preparation. You can’t know what’s coming. You can structure yourself so that it doesn’t matter as much.
Today, this rhymes harder than ever.
The AI revolution isn’t just another technology shift. It’s a compression event. Skills that took years to develop are being automated in months. Entire job categories are being redefined. The people who will thrive aren’t the ones who predict which jobs survive — they’re the ones who’ve built enough optionality that they can adapt regardless.
Currency debasement tells the same story at a macro level. Governments are printing, deficits are expanding, and the purchasing power of sitting still is eroding. The people holding one currency, one asset class, one strategy are making a concentrated bet on stability in a world that isn’t stable. The ones who are diversified across currencies, assets, and income streams — who’ve bought themselves options — will weather it.
Geopolitics is the same pattern at a larger scale. The nations that will navigate the next decade aren’t the ones with the strongest single alliance. They’re the ones with the most options — multiple trade partners, multiple energy sources, multiple strategic relationships. Optionality scales.
The part that most people miss about optionality is that it’s not just a financial concept. It’s a human one.
When you have options, you have agency. And agency changes everything — how you negotiate, how you create, how you show up in relationships, how you handle setbacks. The person with one job offer takes whatever’s offered. The person with three negotiates from strength. The person with no options is at the mercy of circumstances. The person with many is the author of their response.
This is what I felt the day I went independent. Not just financial freedom — psychological freedom. The knowledge that if any single thing fell apart, I had other things. That my identity wasn’t welded to one company’s opinion of me. That I could say no. That I could walk away. That I could take a risk, because the downside was survivable.
Taleb calls it “fk you money.” I think it’s bigger than money. It’s fk you structure. The architecture of a life that doesn’t depend on any single thing going right.
The world is volatile and it’s going to stay that way. The AI revolution alone guarantees that. Add geopolitics, currency instability, and the general acceleration of everything, and you get a world where the only reliable prediction is that predictions will be wrong.
The question isn’t how to make the volatility stop. It won’t. The question is how you’re structured for it.
Are you concentrated or diversified? Do you have one income stream or several? One skill set or a portfolio? One plan or a set of options? Is your downside survivable? Is your upside open?
I think about the version of me at twenty-five, sitting in a corporate job, fully committed to a single track, assuming the world would hold still long enough for the plan to work. That version of me was fragile. He just didn’t know it yet.
The world told him. It always does.