Solvent No001

The Success Trap

What got you here will keep you here.

You’re playing the game.

You make quality work.

Maybe you’ve even built a successful career around it.

Things are going well.

At different times along the path, we focus on different things based on the game and level we’re playing at.

The producer is in the game of making better work.

The touring artist is in the game of getting more bookings, higher fees and building their reputation in the scene.

The freelancer is in the game of getting better clients, bigger projects and higher rates.

All of these strategies are correct for the current level of the game they are playing.

But what do you do when you’re winning the game, and progress slows? And what are the hidden assumptions behind the strategy you’re working within?

For the producer, they often assume that the career will materialize around increasingly better work.

For the touring artist, it’s that their career will stabilize through better opportunities within the game they are playing.

For the freelancer, it’s that their next level is getting more money for the same type of work.

While these assumptions are true, they overlook a fundamental flaw in their respective strategies.

Your next level is achieved by changing your strategy for the game as you establish success at each level.

The trap begins when you keep playing the same game in the same way, even after you’ve already won.

Games are infinite, levels are not

The game is infinite, but levels within the game are finite.

And each level requires a new strategy backed by a new identity and operating system.

When you win a level, the best move is to start playing at the next level, which comes with new rules, goals, strategies and outcomes.

Each level in a game has different problems to solve, and those problems are solved by strategies that are foreign to the levels that precede them.

Each level unlocks new capabilities, new objectives and new rules for advancement.

And each level builds upon the last.

Winning at one level unlocks the necessary conditions for entering and playing within the next.

The previous level does not simply disappear - it becomes the foundation for what comes next.

Quality craft becomes the foundation for a successful career.

A successful career becomes the foundation for professional leverage.

And leverage becomes the foundation for building a legacy.

Level 1: Craft

Everyone starts at the same place.

To build a career, you must first be good at something.

You need to create quality work, build expertise, and have the ability to create something that others value.

During this phase, your mission is to get good enough at the craft that you can reliably make consistently good work.

Once you can do that, you have effectively succeeded at level 1.

Now you’re ready for level 2.

And to be clear, not everyone wants to or should go any further.

Some people do things for the joy of it. It’s a hobby.

Nothing wrong with that.

The problem is the assumption that good work will magically build a career.

It won’t.

If you want to build a career around your work, you must start playing the game at a higher level.

You don’t stop putting attention and effort into the craft, you simply change your strategy and priorities.

Level 2: Career

At this level, the game is about building a sustainable career around quality work.

When we set out on the career path, the goal is to establish a baseline across those points.

Winning at the career game means that you’re making enough money to do the work full time and continue growing within it.

The artist gets bigger and better gigs and tours.

The freelancer gets bigger and better projects.

The event producer creates bigger and better experiences.

When you play the game the right way, you eventually “make it” by your own definition of what “making it” was when you set out on the path.

What inevitably happens is that the successful careerist continues optimizing for the same career-level win conditions even after they have arrived at the destination they once only dreamed about.

Level 3: Leverage

This is where things get fun.

At level 3, you start to disconnect your effort from out outcomes and impact.

You are no longer just getting by, you are creating significant revenue from assets rather than direct effort.

Your works starts working for you, without depending on constant grind.

You escape the burnout cycle, and you no longer run the risk of starting back at $0 every month.

Your career success becomes the raw ingredients for generating compounding value.

The basic strategy at level 3 is:

This is all built on top of what you achieved at level 2.

You must have quality work.

You must have expertise and experience.

You must have value to compound.

Level 3 is marked by greater personal autonomy, ownership, freedom, income and ownership of your time.

You may still do all the level 2 activities, but here it’s by choice.

And the value of those activities compound from the value you create here.

Level 4: Legacy

The focus here becomes entire about impact and longterm wealth.

The leverage you build in level 3 provides the raw ingredients necessary to build a lasting legacy.

Level 4 priorities:

You are successful, thriving, and living at your highest potential.

The game becomes more about the impact you make and the legacy you leave behind.

It’s less about what you do, and more about what it does for the world.

At this level you work to become fully self-actualized.

You can eventually exit the game entirely while what you built continues to work without you.

Success reinforces the current level

When you achieve success at the game you’re playing, it teaches you to repeat what produced the win.

The existing strategy continues producing reliable results, so it continues to feel like the winning strategy. And to a certain extent, it is.

Progress can continue for years, while becoming increasingly incremental.

Early on, small moves can produce big wins.

But the more you win, the harder it is to achieve further wins.

The better you get as winning the current level, the harder it can be to continue advancing within that level.

The audience growth slows down.

The fees hit a competitive ceiling.

The network remains strong without reaching a wider audience.

And further progress requires a greater degree of effort and hustle.

You may have a great lifestyle having achieved your previous goals, but the constraints on your progress slowly begin to reveal themselves.

What worked continues working, but it eventually produces diminishing returns.

Without a fundamental change in strategy and game, the cycle continues.

What got you here will keep you here.

Incremental Success vs. Breakthrough Success

Incremental success increases your score within the current level you are playing at.

The game gets harder, but you keep making progress, so you keep pushing harder.

It’s working, so why change it?

And as the old saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The problem is that putting more effort and better execution into the winning game often produces gains that slow down over time.

Occasionally you may achieve a 2x or 3x gain, while the baseline slowly produces 10-50% gains through immense hustle and grind.

The growth is real and tangible, but it remains within the rules and limits of the game you are playing.

10x or 100x leaps are often impossible at the current level. They only become possible by entering a new level and changing the way you play the game.

Incremental success is what we can expect when we keep pushing within a level we’re already winning.

Breakthrough success happens when we cross into a new level that has an entirely different set of possibilities and limits.

A breakthrough is not just a bigger win, it is a change in what game you’re playing and the strategy you’re using to play it.

Entering a new level of the game is when breakthrough becomes possible.

Are you ready for a breakthrough?

Readiness is established when you have solved the basic problems of the current level you’re playing within.

At this point, your capabilities and assets exceed the requirements the existing level requires.

Your vision of what you’re capable of outgrows your current reality.

And achieving those goals demands outcomes that the existing strategy simply can’t produce.

The existing level and strategy continues producing results, but the future you want may start to feel increasingly far away.

Things can be going great.

You’ve got the gigs, the income, the lifestyle, the network and the capabilities to make bigger things happen.

But you can find yourself starting to feel the frustration, plateau, boredom, burnout or a vague sense that something is missing. You know you’re capable of much more, but you’re only getting enough to keep you in the game.

This is a clue that you’re ready to play a new game.

The hard part is recognizing what that game even is.

And often, we are ready for the next level before we can even recognize it ourselves.

The producer isn’t getting career traction, so they think the problem is that their work just isn’t good enough, so they double down on the craft.

The touring artist isn’t making enough to build true wealth, so they think the problem is they aren’t charging enough or marketing well enough, so they double down on better marketing and securing bigger gigs.

The freelancer is growing increasingly frustrated with client projects, so the think the solution is to just get better clients and charge more.

What they may be overlooking is the fact that they may be ready to start playing an entirely different game that gives them what they truly want.

And what they want now is often different from what they wanted when they got into the game in the first place.

The mismatch

It’s become clear to me that our reality and capabilities often advance far faster than our identity and strategy.

You reach the threshold of your current level, while still thinking like the person who started out at that level.

Identity says “this is who i am.”

Strategy says “this is what works.”

So the producer thinks, “I am a producer, and creating better work is what moves me forward.”

The touring artist thinks, “I’m a touring artist, and touring more is what moves me forward.”

These are true, but often incomplete especially once you are winning at the game you’re playing.

For the producer who creates quality work, the next level may actually be building a career around that work.

For a touring artist who is constantly on the road, the next level may be turning that status into leverage, assets and independent income.

Each level includes the previous ones.

The touring artist doesn’t stop making music, but the music serves a higher order objective: touring.

And the touring artist that starts playing a different game may never stop touring, but the touring becomes a part of a larger game that unlocks greater leverage, wealth and autonomy.

The problem appears when your priorities and strategy remains organized around a problem you’ve already solved.

You’re trying to achieve the next level with the strategy that helped you win the one you’re playing.

The Success Trap

The trap is not failure.

It is optimizing for a level that you’ve already won.

And that’s why it can be so fucking hard to see.

You don’t even realize you’re trapped until you realize that you’ve outgrown the identity that’s still actively playing the game.

Yesterday’s definition of success becomes today’s ceiling. And today’s ceiling prevents you from reaching tomorrow’s aspirations.

The current level becomes limiting because it still works.

It’s impossible to solve a problem you can’t see.

The Success Trap is when your desired reality has outgrown your current strategy, and your identity has not yet caught up.

You want to become Y, but you’re still playing as X, with the same strategy that helped achieve X.

The scary part is that until you change your identity and your strategy, you’ll be blocked from a true breakthrough, even when everything is going well and the world is reflecting your success back at you.

Your current ceiling is your next level’s floor

When you break through to your next level and start playing a new game, you don’t stop doing what got you there.

You can’t leverage craft, reputation, audience, relationships, expertise, assets of cashflow you never built in the first place.

The game remains constant, but the levels we’re playing at and the strategies we use within them must change.

Each level creates the conditions and requirements for the next.

What was once the goal becomes the prerequisite.

The ceiling of the current level becomes the floor of the next.

What got you here becomes something you stand upon, rather than something that defines your boundaries and limits.

Leverage

“Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” -Archimedes

This publication is for those who are actively playing, winning or ready for the career game.

And for the one’s that are winning, the next move is often not building a bigger career by doing more of the same.

Leverage means using what you’ve already built and established to create outcomes that are disproportionate to the effort you put in.

Instead of pushing 2x harder to get 2x the results, leverage unlocks the possibility of 1-2x effort producing 10x results.

The target shifts from more hustle to more leverage, ownership, assets, systems, autonomy, optionality, distribution and compounding value.

The existing career still matters, but it becomes the foundation for something far greater.

Winning should eventually change your objectives and relationship to the game, rather than merely getting better at what you’ve already achieved.

Are you ready for a breakthrough?

Only you know the answer to what level you’re at and what level you’re ready for.

It starts with self-awareness.

And it progresses with periodic re-evaluation and strategic evolution.

This is how to avoid the success trap, and keep yourself progressing toward your evolving vision and capabilities.

A few questions to consider:

My goal with this essay isn’t to say you’re doing it wrong.

Actually, if you’re the type of person I wrote this for, you’re doing everything right.

And if that’s the case, i believe you may be ready for what comes next.

You transcend your current level by playing the game differently.

How?

That’s what we’re exploring next week.

-Andy

Solvent

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