Why I Left My Good Job to Go Fractal
A Pirate's Manifesto.
“Why join the Navy when you can be a pirate?”
Steve Jobs
Six months ago, I decided to walk away from a more than excellent job at IIH Nordic.
A month ago I walked out.
Good salary, respected company, a four day workweek, clear career, co-founded it - everything that conventional wisdom tells us to value. My colleagues thought I'd lost my mind. My partner was concerned for my sanity.
Even I questioned the decision in those quiet 3 AM moments we all know too well.
Well, sometimes the biggest risk is not taking one at all.
The navy mindset: comfort in structure
Corporate life is seductive in its predictability.
At IIH Nordic, I knew exactly what was expected of me. I had a title, was part of a team, a manager, and a neat little box on the org chart.
The Navy offers structure, hierarchy, and the comfort of knowing your place in the grand machine.
For years, this felt like winning. I was doing my part, hitting my KPIs, and collecting the accolades that come with being a "high performer." But somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't really building anything new, I was just maintaining a vision.
The Navy teaches you to follow orders, execute strategies, and optimize within existing frameworks. These are valuable skills, but they come with invisible handcuffs.
You become excellent at playing by rules you didn't write, solving problems you didn't choose, using tools someone else selected.
The pirate's call: freedom to create
Going fractal - operating as an independent, multifaceted professional across multiple domains - is the modern equivalent of raising the black flag.
It means rejecting the false security of employment in favor of something far more valuable.
Autonomy over your own destiny.
Pirates don't ask permission. They identify opportunities, assemble crews, and chart their own course. They're comfortable with uncertainty because they understand something the Navy doesn't.
In a rapidly changing world, adaptability beats predictability every time.
Why "fractal" changes everything
The term "fractal" captures something crucial about the modern economy.
Like mathematical fractals, successful professionals today need to be self-similar at every scale, bringing the same core capabilities whether they're working on a small project or a massive transformation.
Going fractal means:
Portfolio thinking over position thinking.
Instead of optimizing for a single role, you optimize for a diverse set of capabilities that can be combined in infinite ways.
Network effects over hierarchy.
Your value comes not from your position in a pyramid, but from your ability to connect ideas, people, and opportunities across domains.
Value creation over value capture.
Rather than extracting a salary from existing systems, you focus on creating new value in the marketplace.
Learning velocity over expertise depth.
You become someone who can rapidly acquire new capabilities rather than someone who knows one thing extremely well.
The economics of independence
Let's be brutally honest about the math.
In the short term, leaving IIH Nordic meant giving up a guaranteed paycheck, benefits, and the psychological comfort of employment. But the economics of independence follow a different logic.
As an employee, your compensation is capped by someone else's budget and risk tolerance. As a fractal professional, your compensation is limited only by the value you can create and capture.
More importantly, you own the upside of your own success.
The corporate world is optimized for predictable, incremental value creation.
But we live in an exponential age where the biggest opportunities come from connecting disparate domains, identifying emerging patterns, and moving faster than institutions can.
Lessons from a month of piracy
The transition hasn't been smooth yet. Independence is messy, uncertain, and occasionally terrifying. But it's also been the most intellectually stimulating and personally rewarding period of my career.
I've learned that most of what we call "job security" is actually just institutionalized risk.
When your income depends on a single employer, you're not diversified, you're concentrated. Going fractal forces you to build real resilience through multiple revenue streams, diverse capabilities, and a broad network.
I've also discovered that the skills that made me successful in corporate environments, strategic thinking, execution capability, and relationship building are even more valuable in the open market.
The difference is that now I more than ever get to choose how to deploy them.
The future belongs to pirates
We're living through the beginning of the collapse of the industrial employment model. The half-life of skills is shrinking, organizational structures are flattening, and the most interesting work happens at the intersections between traditional domains.
In this environment, the Navy mindset becomes a liability.
Companies need people who can think like owners, not employees.
They need professionals who can navigate ambiguity, build from scratch, and take responsibility for outcomes rather than just activities.
Going fractal isn't just a career choice, it's a bet on the future of work itself.
For those still in the Navy
If you're reading this from your corporate cubicle (or home office), wondering if you should leap, here's my advice.
Don’t.
Wait
Think.
And maybe start building your pirate ship while you're still in the navy.
Develop capabilities that go beyond your current role. Build relationships outside your industry. Create value in domains that interest you, even if they don't directly relate to your job.
Most importantly, start thinking like an owner rather than an operator.
The question isn't whether the future of work will be more fractal, it's whether you'll be ready for it.
The Navy will always be there for those who prefer the comfort of orders and the predictability of hierarchy. But for those ready to chart their own course, the open seas have never been more promising.
Why become a pirate when you can join the Navy?
Because some of us were born to sail under our own flag.
