Building Ferryman has involved plenty of trial and error, especially moving from the chaos of Telegram threads and spreadsheets for tracking my work to a proper system. Switching to Linear was the turning point, providing the most streamlined way to prioritize features while maintaining a high shipping velocity. If you want to clean up your own workflow, use the link below to get 6 months of Linear Business for free.

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One year ago today, I walked away from my Software Engineering role at Google. At the time, it felt like the riskiest move of my life. Now, looking back from the other side of 365 days of self-employment, I realize the real risk wasn’t leaving, ironically, it was staying.

Here are the three most important things I’ve learned during my first year of self-employment.

1. Changing Nothing is Risky

We are wired to obsess over the risks of changing course. We weigh the uncertainty of a new venture, the loss of a steady paycheck, and the possibility of failure. But we rarely apply that same scrutiny to the risk of doing nothing different. We discount the danger of continuing what we’re already doing.

Leaving my job helped me realize that had I stayed, the only thing that would be different today is that I’d be one year older and have one less year to pursue what I’m actually interested in. Staying at my job would’ve just been me trading my finite time for a false sense of security. The risk of reaching the end of my career and realizing I never actually tried what I wanted to is far greater than the risk of failing at the thing I wanted to pursue.

2. Leverage is Everything

My most profound realization of the last year is how poorly most people understand leverage. In 9-5 jobs, we are often incentivized to equate impact with hours spent working. But after leaving, I’ve realized that this is not the ideal way to work. Results, above all else, are what truly matter. Instead, you should focus on identifying and attacking the highest leverage item at all times. Which also led me to the realization that writing code wasn’t actually my highest-leverage activity.

Leverage is the art of identifying where a small amount of input leads to a massive output. Identifying your leverage is everything. I learned that I could identify opportunities that take only a few days of focused work but generate the same result or revenue as a full month of working at my 9-5 job. Once you stop trading your time for a salary, you’re can focus on identifying and occupying positions of leverage.

3. 50/50 Rarely Works

It is incredibly difficult to achieve something big when you have one foot in and one foot out. For a long time, I tried to balance the safe path of having a job with the “risky” one of pursuing something on my own. But I realized that having a backup plan was actually nerfing my abilities.

When you always have a Plan B, you unconsciously give yourself a reason not to go all-in because in the back of your mind you realize that you don’t truly need to succeed. It creates a safety net that can drastically affect how you operate. Because of this, at some point, you have to make a decision and commit to it fully. There can’t be a “break glass in case of emergency.” If you’re going to do something meaningful, the first step is committing to swinging big and swinging big requires burning the boats.

Thankfully, the first 365 days of self-employment were great. I’m hoping this next 365 days is even better. I’m excited to see what I learn in my 2nd year of self-employment and hopefully it only gets easier.

Where you can find me online:

• X

• LinkedIn

• Twitch

• YouTube

Drop a like ❤️ and comment below if you made it to the end of the article.

Most AI tools trap your ideas in a sidebar, but the Miro’s AI embeds intelligence directly into your canvas to bridge the gap between ideation and execution. I’ve been using Flows to scale Ferryman, instantly transforming high-level feature concepts into visualized technical roadmaps and actionable dependencies.

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Most people blindly subscribe to a linear relationship between input and output. They believe that if they work 40 hours a week, they will achieve 40 units of progress, but this is an incredibly dangerous mindset. We’re socially conditioned to value hard work over high-leverage work, leading many to believe that as long as they’re busy, they’re succeeding.

But in reality, leverage is the force multiplier that will reward you. It’s the art of identifying the 5% of activities that generate 80% of the results, moving you away from being a busy person toward being an effective one.

1. “Busy” is Bad

The first step in wielding leverage is unlearning the social conditioning that equates sheer volume of activity and movement with value. We often fall into the trap of doing what everyone else does: working set hours, attending recurring meetings, and clearing a list of tickets to be productive. This blind subscription to the standard 40-hour workweek is often just a socially acceptable form of procrastination.

It feels safe because it is what’s expected, but working 40 hours a week on low-impact tasks is actually a failure of strategy. Stop judging your day by how many items you checked off a list and start judging it by how much closer you moved to your primary goal in life. Realize that if you aren’t carefully evaluating where your effort goes, you’re likely wasting the most limited resource you have.

2. Identify What Moves the Needle

Identifying high leverage requires a mental shift from mindlessly crossing off todos to critically considering at all moments what you could be working on. Whether you’re an employee or a founder, you have to ask yourself: which of these tasks is maintenance, and which is a multiplier? For a Software Engineer, this might mean choosing to ignore the low-value, minor tickets, in favor of investigating a deep, structural shift in architecture that could stabilize your production servers.

When you’re on your own, the stakes are even higher because your time is your only true capital. You should likely find yourself having to ruthlessly prioritize only the activities that you, and only you, are capable of completing. The ones that could directly result in growth of your business like landing new clients or securing additional revenue for the company. Ultimately, high leverage is the hypothetical search for actions that will continue to pay dividends, rather than just solving today’s minor inconveniences.

3. Attacking the Highest Leverage Tasks

Once you’ve identified where the leverage lives, you have to attack those tasks with a high level of focus. At the beginning, you’ll also likely catch yourself drifting to work that isn’t the highest priority. Sometimes it’ll even be enjoyable to do this since it’s probable that the lower priority work is easier. Don’t be fooled, this is a form of procrastination. It’s not only about doing the right work; it’s about aggressively pruning the wrong work.

You must have the discipline to stop prioritizing noise: low-value tasks that scream for someone’s attention but don’t meaningfully move the needle. For anything that isn’t a high-leverage activity, you must learn to delegate, automate, or simply stop doing it. You must get comfortable letting small, low-impact items stay unfinished so that you can protect the mental energy required for big wins.

So far, I’ve found learning how to correctly identify and wield leverage to be one of the most important factors in continuing to be able to work for myself.

Where you can find me online:

• FAANG interview prep

• Mock coding interviews

• X

• LinkedIn

• Twitch

• YouTube

Drop a like ❤️ and comment below if you made it to the end of the article.

I built Ferryman to solve a simple problem: manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that drains your time. With 10,500+ posts ferried for 380+ users, the system is proven to help you grow on all your socials with zero extra effort. Start scaling your reach automatically. Use code “BREAKSTUFF” for 30 days free of the Creator plan.

Try Ferryman

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I built Ferryman to solve a simple problem: manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that drains your time. With 10,500+ posts ferried for 380+ users, the system is proven to help you grow on all your socials with zero extra effort. Start scaling your reach automatically. Use code “BREAKSTUFF” for 30 days free of the Creator plan.

Try Ferryman

Read more

I built Ferryman to solve a simple problem: manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that drains your time. With 10,500+ posts ferried for 380+ users, the system is proven to help you grow on all your socials with zero extra effort. Start scaling your reach automatically. Use code “BREAKSTUFF” for 30 days free of the Creator plan.

Try Ferryman

Read more

I built Ferryman to solve a simple problem: manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that drains your time. With 9,800+ posts ferried for 350+ users, the system is proven to help you grow on all your socials with zero extra effort. Start scaling your reach automatically. Use code “BREAKSTUFF” for 30 days free of the Creator plan.

Try Ferryman

Read more

I built Ferryman to solve a simple problem: manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that drains your time. With 8,400+ posts ferried for 330+ users, the system is proven to help you grow on all your socials with zero extra effort. Start scaling your reach automatically. Use code “BREAKSTUFF” for 30 days free of the Creator plan.

Try Ferryman

Read more

I built Ferryman to solve a simple problem: manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that drains your time. With 8,400+ posts ferried for 330+ users, the system is proven to help you grow on all your socials with zero extra effort. Start scaling your reach automatically. Use code “BREAKSTUFF” for 30 days free of the Creator plan.

Try Ferryman

Read more

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With AI agents, a lot of the actual engineering work isn’t always visible to the rest of the team. Linear acts as the coordination layer for that high-velocity output, tracking work done by tools like Cursor or Claude at the issue level so you never lose visibility. It’s the first project management tool I’ve experienced that’s genuinely a joy to use.

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I built Ferryman to solve a simple problem: manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that drains your time. With 4,200+ posts ferried for over 200 users, the system is proven to help you grow on all your socials (LinkedIn, X, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon) with zero extra effort. Start scaling your reach automatically. Use code “SWEEKLY” for 30 days f…

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I built Ferryman to solve a simple problem: manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that drains your time. With 2,700+ posts ferried for ~200 users, the system is proven to help you grow on all your socials (LinkedIn, X, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon) with zero extra effort. Start scaling your reach automatically. Use code “SWEEKLY” for 30 days free …

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I built Ferryman to solve a simple problem: manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that drains your time. With 1,500+ posts ferried for 140+ users, the system is proven to help you dominate LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon with zero extra effort. Stop copy-pasting and start scaling your reach automatically. Use code “SWEEKLY” for 30 days free…

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I built Ferryman to solve a simple problem: manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that drains your time. With 1,500+ posts ferried for 140+ users, the system is proven to help you dominate LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon with zero extra effort. Stop copy-pasting and start scaling your reach automatically. Use code “SWEEKLY” for 30 days free…

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I’m excited to share that Ferryman has already cross-posted over 1,000+ posts for 100+ users. Manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that shouldn’t take up your time. Ferryman handles the distribution to LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon automatically, so you can reach every audience without the extra effort. Use code “SWEEKLY” for 30 days fre…

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I’m excited to share that Ferryman has already cross-posted almost 1,000+ posts for ~100 users. Manual cross-posting is low-leverage work that shouldn’t take up your time. Ferryman handles the distribution to LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon automatically, so you can reach every audience without the extra effort. Use code “SWEEKLY” for 30 days f…

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