Leverage outside the 9 to 5

The permissionless age unlocks opportunities beyond a day job.

The most subversive thing you can do in a job today is build an audience online.

It isn’t illegal, but it is visible. And visibility makes you harder to control.

I started posting on LinkedIn in 2021 when I worked at Business Insider. Most people use the platform for “humbled to announce” platitudes about new jobs or promotions. Polite theatrics meant to offend no one and impress everyone.

But I took a different approach. I treated it like a reporting desk.

I shared observations from interviews, anecdotes from stories I wrote, blogs and photos from places like the New York Stock Exchange and the streets of Manhattan.

I quickly learned this made me a better journalist. More reach, more sources, sharper instincts, stronger relationships with readers. My stories went further.

Yet by 2023, when I crossed 10,000 followers, I learned too that building an audience comes across as suspicious to an employer.

Near the end of that year, one executive-level editor pulled me into a meeting and warned me to stop what I was doing on LinkedIn.

“You have enough followers,” this person told me.

The concern wasn’t the quality of my work. It was that too many people were reading it under my name, rather than that of the company.

Distribution, in their eyes, was zero-sum. If it didn’t flow through Business Insider, it didn’t count. If it built me up more than them, it was a liability.

The meeting lasted almost an hour. Not once did the editor mention the added reach, new readers, or professional upside. The problem was the independence, not performance.

That’s the part legacy institutions can’t seem to stomach.

The most ambitious people all realize that you no longer need to rely on your employer for leverage, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence.

And employers are correct to push back on this because it opens the door for top talent to leave.

In many cases, managers are less like coaches and more like bottlenecks. If you can write, code, or build, doing great work becomes a question of bandwidth rather than permission.

Indeed, career development today is something you own, not something you request from an org chart.

An audience, as I’ve learned building Opening Bell Daily, provides both armor and a moat. It makes you harder to fire and easier to find.

On LinkedIn alone, I now write to nearly 35,000 followers each day.

Yet companies still operate under outdated assumptions. They reward invisibility and discourage standing out. Control, in the eye of the legacy employer, is confused with productivity.

So when someone inside the building starts to get noticed outside of it, alarms go off. Not because the work is bad but because it’s independent and impossible to manage. It’s a game that exists outside of internal metrics.

The paradox of the modern career now is that the more valuable become, the more uneasy your employer gets.

That becomes more true if that value shows up on other people’s social feeds.

The people who figure this out won’t need permission to win.

They’ll just need WiFi.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily