The 14-Year-Old Who Wakes Up at 4:30am

And what he knows that we forgot.

It’s 4:30 in the morning in Brisbane, and a 14-year-old kid is getting ready for work.

No one’s making him. He doesn’t need to pad his resume. He’s going because he has customers depending on him, products to develop, and ideas he wants to test before school starts.

He’s been running businesses since he was 11. Copywriting, marketing, sales—he taught himself all of it. Set up affiliate deals with suppliers. Co-designed an electric motorcycle with a manufacturer. Learned to weld and solder so he could build things himself. When he needed to negotiate with adults three times his age, he figured it out.

He used to ride a pedal bike to customers’ homes at 5am to walk their dogs. Now he makes enough money to buy all his own gear and equipment. He’s joined a network of teenagers doing similar work nationally. They operate under one brand but they’re all independent. They collaborate when it makes sense. They do their own thing when it doesn’t.

His mom says he’s never doubted his ability. He’s never questioned whether he’ll succeed. When other kids his age are worried about getting into the right high school, he’s worried about whether he’s charging enough for his work.

One thing makes all this possible: he’s never had a job. He sees the adults around him working for themselves, so that’s what he considers normal. “I’m constantly reminded of what the future of work looks like by watching him,” his mom wrote. “This is the future of work for high-frequency people.”

This kid isn’t doing something impossible. He’s doing something we all used to know how to do—before we were trained to forget it.

You weren’t designed for employment. You were designed for this.

I’ve been working with the wrong people

For years, I’ve been coaching executives and designing organizations for founders. Writing about “A World Without Bosses.” Talking about decentralized adaptive organizations, distributed intelligence, leaderless structures.

That work lights me up. The leaders I work with are sharp. They see the trends. They understand the old models are breaking down.

But they don’t feel the urgency.

The people who feel the urgency—they’re the ones I haven’t been talking to.

2.6 million workers. Three years or more in their jobs. All out of work in a two-year period. When they were surveyed a year later, less than 2/3 had found new work. That leaves nearly a million dedicated workers either unemployed or out of the labor force entirely.

They’re software developers and product managers watching their fields contract. The finance professionals and legal workers who’ll be next—likely starting in Q1 2026, based on AI procurement patterns and historical precedent from previous technology transitions. The creative workers and middle management who’ll follow by late summer.

Q1 2026 might seem far away. But there are only about a dozen useful business weeks left in this year. We’re already halfway through one of them.

These are the people who need what I’ve been building. Not next year. Now.

Kids know something we forgot

Watch a kid for five minutes.

They sell Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. They organize car washes to raise money for band trips. They babysit, dog-sit, mow lawns. When they want something, they figure out how to create enough value that someone will pay them for it.

Nobody teaches them this. It’s innate.

Entrepreneurship and interdependence—these aren’t skills you learn in business school. They’re capabilities you were born with. Then we send kids to school, and over 12 to 16 years, we systematically train it out of them.

We teach them to follow instructions, memorize answers, compete for grades. We teach them that security means finding someone to employ you. That success means climbing someone else’s ladder. We teach them to make themselves small enough to fit into a job description.

Look at the word “employee.” The employer employs. The employee is employed. One acts. The other receives the action. The power dynamic is built into the grammar itself.

For 50 years, this model has been training people to need taking care of. It’s the dependence contract—exchange your agency for a paycheck, your autonomy for benefits, your full self for a role someone else defined.

But people are rediscovering what that Brisbane kid never forgot.

From 2020 to 2024, the number of US freelancers grew from 59 million to over 76 million—nearly 30% growth in four years. COVID-19 forced an unintentional experiment. When full-time employment tanked, millions discovered they could create value directly. They could figure it out. They didn’t need someone to hire them.

If your LinkedIn badge says “Open to Work”, here’s something to think about:

Nearly 70% of employers hired freelancers after conducting layoffs in 2023-2024. And almost every company was hiring freelancers in 2025.

The work’s still there. The dependence relationship isn’t.

The same tasks that required a full-time employee with benefits and job security are now being delivered by independent contractors who bring specialized skills without the overhead of institutional dependence.

Look at the satisfaction gap: 84% of freelancers report living their preferred lifestyle, compared to only 54% of traditional employees.

4.7 million independent workers earned over $100,000 in 2024, up from 3 million in 2020. Freelancers average $69,000 per year—$10,000 higher than the median US salary.

Current projections suggest 90.1 million Americans will be freelancing by 2028. That’s more than half the total labor force moving away from traditional employment relationships.

You learn something when you get laid off: you were overqualified for employment all along.

You weren’t designed for employment. You were designed for this.

The Avengers are all freelancers

Last week I was on a Jumpsuit retreat with 16 inspiring humans.

We’re a collective of over 200 vetted independent contractors. No employees. We come together for projects, then disband. We often work with other people and on other projects. It all works anyway.

During one of our sessions, I did the math. Among 16 people, there are 21.5 billion possible permutations (how do you like that, Dr. Strange?). That’s more possible teams than there are people on Earth. More combinations than any company’s org chart could ever map. And every single one of those combinations creates differently.

Right now, I’m collaborating with different individuals and small teams from that network. Every time, it’s a dream team. Every time, I get to choose who I work with.

This is what entrepreneurship plus interdependence looks like in practice. Independent Together.

Not freelancing, where you’re alone with a laptop and a dream. Not employment, where you’re safe but small. Something else entirely.

Think of the Avengers. Everyone has their own thing, their own powers, their own problems to solve. But when something matters, they assemble. They collaborate. Then they go back to their lives. No one’s employed by the Avengers. No one’s the boss. They’re independent together.

That’s the model replacing traditional employment. And it’s not new—it’s the way humans worked for thousands of years before the industrial revolution convinced us we needed to be employed.

In our network, decisions get made by the people closest to the work. When a project comes in, we put together a proposal where everyone has a voice. When the proposal gets accepted, we create statements of work describing what we’ll deliver. We choose people from the network who have the right skills and a track record of using those skills well. We set rates collectively, adjusting for what each project needs.

The accountability isn’t to a boss. It’s to teammates. The quality standards aren’t set by distant authority. The team decides what to put in front of a client.

What replaces corporate structure? Shared values, clear intentions, and a guiding question that helps us choose the work we love. When we need group decisions, we work it out. It produces better outcomes than top-down mandates.

I know this works because I lived the other side.

I spent nearly a decade at a big pharmaceutical company. I derived enormous amounts of my identity, status, and belonging from that job. Really good pay and benefits too. When I left, all of that got stripped away.

The first few months were brutal. I’d wake up at 3am convinced I’d made a catastrophic mistake. My bank account was draining. My former colleagues were polite but distant—I’d left the tribe. I had business cards printed that said “Executive Coach” but I felt like a fraud every time I handed one out.

The breaking point came in month four. I had exactly one client paying me $500 a month. Five hundred dollars. I’d been making six figures. I sat in my home office—which was really just a corner of my bedroom—and thought: “This is it. I have to go crawl back and ask for my old job.”

That afternoon, my phone rang. A referral from my one client. Then another call two days later. Within six weeks, I had enough work to pay my bills. Within six months, I was making what I’d made at the pharmaceutical company. Within a year, I’d doubled it.

One thing changed, and it wasn’t my skills or my network. What changed was the question I was asking.

In the pharmaceutical job, I’d asked: “How do I make myself indispensable?” As a coach, I started asking: “What do people actually need?”

The first question makes you smaller. You’re trying to fit into someone’s existing structure. The second question makes you useful. You’re trying to solve real problems.

I didn’t become a better coach because I got better at coaching. I became a better coach because I stopped trying to be employable and started trying to be valuable.

Over 16 years now, the work hasn’t just been developmental for my clients. It’s been developmental for me. I’ve become more self-reliant and more collaborative simultaneously—something I didn’t think was possible in the old model.

The employment model didn’t just change work—it changed you

The employment model didn’t just change how we work. It changed how we see ourselves.

For 50 years, we’ve answered “who are you?” with a job title. Product manager. Attorney. VP of Marketing. We’ve compressed our identity into someone else’s org chart. We’ve let institutions define us.

Entrepreneurship plus interdependence asks different questions: What problems do you care about solving? Who do you want to solve them with? What do you want to be true in the world that isn’t true yet?

These aren’t career questions. They’re human questions. And most of us haven’t asked them in decades.

The dependence contract taught us to trade our full selves for the security of a role. Show up, do what’s expected, keep your head down. Leave your best ideas at home. Avoid risky conversations. Sand down your rough edges. Make yourself fit.

What we got in return was supposed to be security. But that security is evaporating. Layoffs are up 3.5% in the first half of 2025 compared to 2024, and it’s just getting started (I urge you to read The Last Normal year to understand what seeds have already been planted). The organizations we depended on are discovering they can maintain productivity with fewer people, often supplemented by AI and freelance talent.

The contract is broken, and it’s not because anyone’s evil. It’s because the pattern has run its course.

Breaking free from that pattern doesn’t mean learning something new. It means remembering something old.

You weren’t designed for employment. You were designed for this.

3 million kids know what you’re trying to remember

There are three million kids in the US between ages 10 and 14 right now. Some percentage of them are like that kid in Brisbane—learning entrepreneurship and interdependence not because anyone taught them, but because it’s natural. Because they’ve never been trained to believe they need someone to employ them in order to create value.

They’re going to enter a job market that’s fundamentally different from the one that exists today. By the time they’re old enough to legally sign an employment contract, those contracts will be far less common than they are right now.

They won’t see that as a crisis. They’ll see it as normal.

The question is: will we?

The shift is happening whether we’re ready or not. Not because of some grand conspiracy. Because the forces that created the dependence model have reversed. Technology enables direct value creation. Economic necessity is forcing the issue. Millions of people have already proven the model works.

This isn’t a fad, and it won’t go back to “normal”. We’re watching the job market reorganize itself.

The Greatest Generation didn’t start out great—they became great when circumstances demanded it. Humans have always surprised ourselves when necessity required it. We’re wired to survive and to thrive. Those capabilities aren’t carried in personality. They’re in the species.

Okay, so what do I do?

You already have it in you. You know how this works.

Reach out to three people you’ve worked with who you’d actually want to collaborate with again.

Don’t ask for a job. Ask what problems they’re trying to solve. What they’re excited about. Where they’re stuck.

You’re not networking for your next job. You’re building the muscle of thinking in collaborations instead of employment. Of asking “what do people need?” instead of “who will employ me?”

Start building relationships based on what you can create together, not what someone might hire you to do. Build the network that lets you be independent together.

You already know how to do this. You’ve just been told not to.

The entrepreneurial and interdependent capabilities aren’t something to learn—they’re something to remember. You knew this as a kid. You’ve been conditioned to forget it.

It’s time to remember.

It’s 4:30 in the morning in Brisbane. A 14-year-old is starting his day—not because anyone employed him, but because he has work that matters to him and people who depend on him.

By the time he’s old enough to sign an employment contract, those contracts will be artifacts. Museum pieces from an era when people traded agency for security and got neither.

He won’t mourn them. He never knew anything else was possible.

You did, though. Once.

The future isn’t something to fear. It’s something to remember. Entrepreneurship and interdependence. Independent together. The Avengers model. Whatever you want to call it—it’s here now. It’s already working. Millions of people are already doing it.

The future is at our doorstep.

You can spend the next dozen weeks preparing for it—or you can be like that kid in Brisbane and realize you were ready all along.