In school I used to annoy my teachers.
“Vlad, you could be #1 if you tried harder.”
I got good grades... stable ones I'd say.
I just didn’t see the point of burning extra hours for a tiny upgrade in percentage.
That mindset followed me into corporate.
Because corporate loves the “busy hero.”
The person who replies fastest. Takes every call. Says yes to everything. Stays late. Looks committed.
And yeah… you can climb like that.
But there’s a cost nobody puts on the performance review:
Your time. Your attention. Your relationships. Your energy.
I’m a strategist by nature. I think in systems.
I like doing more with less.
And over time I realized there are two types of people trying to build a better life:
Hustlers and Surfers.
Hustlers do what they were trained to do:
Be busy. Put the time in. Do it all. Take every meeting. Reply to everyone. Sacrifice family time and call it “ambition.”
They work hard.
But most of that hard work goes into motion, not progress.
Surfers work hard too, but their definition of “hard” is different.
Surfers:
choose the right wave instead of paddling at every ripple test ideas in public instead of overthinking in private build assets instead of stacking tasks create systems that keep working even when they log off They still put in effort.
They just put it in the place where effort compounds.
And that’s the part most corporate creatives miss:
If you keep using “employee energy” to build your own thing… you’ll stay stuck.
Because employee energy is built for compliance and busyness.
Builder energy is built for leverage: clear offer → clear message → repeatable system → proof.
Hard work is necessary.
But you get to choose where that hard work goes.
You can hustle inside someone else’s system…
or you can surf your way into ownership.