Me, Myself, & AI
The New "3-Person" Company
At 8:59 a.m., I’m walking into my home gym with a coffee and a laptop.
My “office” is literally a corner of a 500-square-foot room designed for squats, dumbbells, and sweat.
At 9:00 a.m. I start.
At 3:00 p.m. I’m done.
Monday through Thursday.
Those are the guardrails of what I’m calling my first retirement.
Not the “stop working” kind.
The “I finally own my calendar” kind.
We’re in the golden years - the next 5 to 7 years where my kids still think my wife and I are their heroes and actually want to spend time with us.
So we’re over-indexing on that.
And that’s the point of this post.
Because if you’re still building your career like it’s 1997, I have bad news:
The world isn’t going to change.
It already did.
We live in the best time in history to buy back your time with leverage.
And yet most people are still playing the default game they inherited from parents, teachers, and bosses:
More headcount
More meetings
More complexity
More scale for the sake of scale
The old game rewards obedience. The new game rewards ownership.
The old game rents your life back to you. The new game lets you keep it.
And if you think this is just theory, here’s what the new game looks like in the real world.
Justin Welsh: My office is a bedroom in our house, but I spend most days writing from my kitchen island. (He’s reportedly done $12M+ in revenue with ~80% - 90% margins as a true one-person business.) No employees. No team meetings. No business partner to negotiate with, and no investors to answer to. The only person who influences whether or not I can book a vacation is our petsitter.
My version: My office is a corner in my 500 SQFT home gym, but I can work from anywhere I have a laptop and an internet connection. No employees. No team meetings. No partners to negotiate with, and no investors to answer to. The only thing that influences whether or not I can book a vacation is my kids’ activity and school schedule - and since they’re in private school, even that is more flexible than most.
I call it the new “3-person” company:
Me, Myself, and AI.
