The year was the late 1980s. I was a Director of Research for a leading Park Avenue consulting firm. My husband was a business manager for high-level music executives and entertainers. We were both doing exactly what we had trained to do. Both making excellent money.
Both completely trapped.
Sixty to eighty hours a week. Manhattan. The pace was relentless — and we told ourselves it was the cost of success.
On weekends, we would escape to a small farm we had bought in New Jersey just to decompress. To see the trees and feel the grass under our feet. To breathe. Ride our horses. Then Monday morning would come — or even Sunday afternoon depending on how pressed we felt — and we would drive back in through the Lincoln Tunnel to start all over again.
I remember standing in that corral looking at our horses one Sunday morning before packing up thinking: There has to be another way.
Not another job. Not a career change. I loved my work. I was good at it. The problem was not the work itself. The problem was that my freedom had an expiration date every single week.
If I did not show up. If I did not produce. If I did not manage those mounting client projects and lead that team — the income stopped.
My lifestyle was completely dependent on my output, and my husband with demanding clients and 13 employees to manage with families to feed and NYC overhead expenses. So no amount of money felt like enough, because enough would only come when I stopped working and could breathe.
I did not have the language for it then, but we had a leverage problem.
And here is what I did not know at the time: we were not alone. There were thousands of professionals like me, and solopreneurs like my husband — successful, respected, building impressive careers — who felt exactly the same quiet trap.
They still do.
The difference between then and now? The number of options has exploded. Crypto. E-commerce. Coaching. Affiliate or Social marketing. Real estate. Forex. Digital courses. Dropshipping. The list goes on.
And if you are a busy executive or solopreneur who is already maxed out on time, that explosion of options is not liberating.
It is paralyzing.
How do you choose when you barely have time to evaluate? How do you know which model actually fits your life versus which one sounds good in a sales video? How do you explore something that could genuinely create freedom without adding another full-time job to your already impossible schedule?
That is exactly the question I had to answer for myself over 35 years ago. And it is the same question thousands of high performers are wrestling with right now.
Ann Feinstein is The Leverage Queen — a global business professional and entrepreneur who for 35 years has helped executives and solopreneurs build scalable, system-supported income that grows with them — and eventually beyond them — and even more impactfully now with her Freedom Formula strategy and Freedom Fit Assessment. Connect with Ann to explore a Strategic Partnership.
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Love this!
Thanks so much!❤️
All of this is wonderful.
Thank you Elena! Curious …what was your aha moment?