- I am half an employee and half a business owner. I work about 3-4 days a week, and 70% of that time is spent on work I truly want to do. In my private life, I never have to hold back on shopping or activities (though I don't have strong material desires anyway). This is the lifestyle I've built.
- This way of working seems rare, and readers of my note regularly ask me, "Isn't this unreplicable?" or "Please teach us a method that anyone can copy."
- Honestly, it is not replicable. That's because I intentionally spent years building a state of "irreproducibility."
- If my career path were something like "A career hack anyone can achieve in one year!", many similar people would flood the market, diluting its scarcity value.
- Borrowing from Nishiguchi-san's book Practical Customer-Centric Marketing, to get high evaluation for yourself as a product in the market, you must maximize "Uniqueness × Benefit." Benefit is the concrete profit (reason to choose), while Uniqueness is being one-of-a-kind (reason not to choose others).
- Because you are rare, your whims are tolerated, and you receive preferential treatment. Your freedom to work as you please expands. Moreover, the harder you are to imitate and the more people who support you, the more valuable you become. Especially if those supporters are decision-makers or clients.
- ...However, stopping here leads to the cliché conclusion everyone has heard a hundred times: "Scarcity is important." What I want to discuss today is what comes next: How can we create a state of "irreproducibility" with reproducibility?
- Creating irreproducible things reproducibly. It sounds self-contradictory, like a shady info-product pitch, but this is the most critical point. There are no clean, specific how-tos, but I believe there is a mindset that allows you to intentionally build a unique position over time.
First, let's talk bluntly
- If someone says, "You were just lucky," yes, it was luck. All of it.
- I happened to meet good bosses. I happened to work on good projects. My SNS posts happened to go viral. I happened to get a book deal. I happened to meet executives at drinking parties who clicked with me, leading to job offers. They happened to be satisfied, leading to repeat business. Everything was chance. Maybe Tsukishima-san was involved.
- I just hit the jackpot in a gacha game. I won't deny that. But while you can't aim for a jackpot, you can create a "state where jackpots are more likely to appear." To build that state, I focus on three main things.
① Roll the dice relentlessly
- The first is simply increasing volume. Roll the dice, roll them hard. The key is not to try too hard to control the probability of hitting a jackpot. Trying to force a win often backfires.
- For example, when going out for drinks with executives, if you start pitching salesy talk thinking "I need to get a project," they'll think, "Whoa, he's suddenly acting like a salesman," and pull away. The more you aim, the more you miss.
- So, I don't care much about the outcome of each individual die roll. Instead, I significantly increase the number of rolls compared to others. If others roll 10 times, I roll 100 times. Naturally, the number of hits increases.
- To give a trivial example: during consulting firm training, I raised my hand and spoke up constantly. 90% of what I said was nonsense. But maybe once every 10 times, someone thought, "He occasionally says something interesting." That's a .100 batting average.
- But on the day that .100 hit landed, it might catch the eye of a senior executive visiting the training. From there, connections chain together. Purely by luck, I was invited by a brilliant project manager who had never burned a project to join their team.
- Twitter is the same. Now I have over 80,000 followers, but when I started, after two years, I had only about 1,000. Each post got maybe one like, or none.
- However, as long as you don't leave the ring, you haven't lost. By continuing to post and roll the dice, hits began to appear. After several hits, you start to see patterns. I systematized those patterns and continued, leading to a surge in followers and impressions.
- Of course, there are far more misses than hits. During my consulting days, I failed miserably in a new promotion role, breaking my mind and body. I wrote a blog for over 3 years earning only 5,000 yen/month. I interviewed 50 people to hire one, only for them to say "I'm thinking of quitting" two months later.
- Among these corpses of failed dice rolls, I gained apprenticeship under a super-capable boss in consulting. Writing about that experience on Twitter/note went viral. An executive read it by chance and assigned me to an interesting project. That project succeeded luckily. Writing about that success attracted an editor, leading to a book. People reading the book/note hired me. Work expanded until I could easily survive without a job. Yet, I kept my employee status because "being half-employee/half-owner makes me unique." Notes written under the concept "working freely as half-employee/half-owner" happened to grow... and so on. Sixths of sixths chained together perfectly to reach my current state.
- From the outside, it looks like "No way that's replicable. It's just a dice game." But "rolling the dice more than anyone else" is something anyone can replicate. I plan to keep rolling dice to expand my Sagrada Familia-like, unimitable career.
② Capture the 'Structure,' not just the tactic
- The second point is that copying one surface-level tactic is meaningless; you must capture the underlying "structure" that supports it.
- My note membership has about 3,000 members not because I write well or use AI effectively, but because I built a structure.
- That structure is... Read books massively. Test what you learn in work immediately. Accumulate primary information like "failed/succeeded in this project." Verbalize this into ~3,000 characters daily on note. Split one article into 5-10 X posts for traffic. Drive sign-ups to note. This loop keeps turning.
- Comments like "Wow, you read so many books" or "Your verbalization skills are insane" are appreciated, but they are just tiny parts of this structure. Copying only that part won't work unless you also have the reading volume, dual experience as employee/owner, and positioning. Without those, you can't build the same thing.
- Tactics are points. Structure is the line connecting points. Copying lines is hard, making "irreproducibility" easier to create.
- Conversely, understanding structures makes it easier to copy others' behaviors. I used to be terrible at waking up early, but by deconstructing the structure, I now maintain a 5 AM wake-up for 3 months. This is the power of "structuring."
③ Invest long periods of time
- The third is extending the time axis. Things grown over long periods are harder to imitate.
- This applies to corporate strategy too. Amazon invested losses into warehouses and logistics for years, creating a state where "buy online = Amazon" is unimitable. Ultimately, it's about time.
- Compared to Amazon, my note is a drop in the ocean, but the logic is the same. Reading hundreds of books, testing in work, volunteering for risky projects, writing 250+ notes, posting daily on X for 3-4 years—this took time to reach my current follower count.
- You can't copy this instantly because you can't rewind time.
Doing irrational things rationally
- Some might wonder, "Is it okay to reveal your secrets?" Yes. I will continue to reveal everything. Even then, I doubt it will be copied.
- Why? Because the barrier to entry isn't information, but "accumulated action." Can you sustain boring actions for years? That's where the difference lies.
- Kusunoki Ken-san's Competitive Strategy as Story mentions "Critical Core": elements central to strategy that seem irrational individually but connect everything. Competitors see them but don't copy them because they look irrational.
- I value this concept of "seemingly irrational but rationally integrated." Working half-employee/half-owner → "That's halfway done." Reading 300 books/year → "Why bother?" Writing 3,000 chars/day → "Are you unemployed?" Each action alone invites criticism like "half-baked," "overkill," or "wasting time."
- So even if I explain it, no one wants to copy it. And that's fine.
Thus, I hope this serves as a hint for creating a level of irreproducibility so absurd that copying it feels ridiculous.
I run a note membership with 270+ articles summarizing field knowledge for 500 yen/month. For the price of a coin, you can:
• Learn to produce results efficiently at work
• Choose your career path freely (promotion, job change, side hustle, startup)
• Understand how to use Generative AI practically
• Gradually train structural thinking and mental stamina
I write with great care. Please check it out if interested.
Motoyama's Room of Thinking and Trial
