With multiple projects live at different stages, decision-making began to blur. The problem was not a lack of ideas, but slow role creep: projects quietly trying to do more than they were meant to.
Left unchecked, this creates diffusion of effort, expectation debt, and time spent defending decisions emotionally instead of structurally.
I needed a way to reduce optionality, not increase it.
If I wanted to guarantee long-term stagnation, I would let every project pursue multiple vague goals at once — learning, identity, ethics, expression — without any hard constraint on what actually compounds.
Inversion makes the failure mode obvious: projects that do not accumulate real leverage slowly turn into unpaid work defended by narratives.
I am locking a single global operating rule:
Each project must accumulate a form of leverage that can plausibly convert into freedom (money without daily labor). Anything that does not strengthen that leverage is rejected by default.
Leverage is not posture, ethics, learning, or identity. Leverage is something that can compound and later cash out.
After inversion, only four leverage types survive scrutiny:
Examples include postcards, generated visuals, audio or video outputs, puzzles, and minimal interactive toys.
One-off virality alone is not leverage. Traffic counts only when it accumulates or returns.
A concentrated group of people who come for a specific reason and recognize the project as “for them”.
This is not broad traffic, not general trust, and not authority. It is sharp positioning with vitality inside a narrow space.
Trust is leverage only when explicitly protected.
Each project is allowed one primary leverage. Secondary effects may exist, but are not optimized for.
ViralToys builds viral toys knowing most will fail, and turns the visible record of those attempts — including their deaths — into a shareable artifact itself.
Individual toys are disposable inputs. The kill feed and lifecycle system are part of the artifact.
Virality is not guaranteed. Neither toys nor the kill feed are rescued to force outcomes.
Some principles apply across all projects but are not leverage themselves:
These are governance constraints. They protect leverage; they are not leverage.
Any action must name which leverage it strengthens, and for which project.
If the leverage cannot be named clearly, the action is rejected.
If a project stops accumulating its assigned leverage, it enters decay mode:
Decay is not failure. It is capital preservation.
You are not building products. You are accumulating leverage under uncertainty.
Projects are vehicles. Leverage is the asset.