I'm The Real Jason Duncan, back with another edition of Beyond the Grind – helping entrepreneurs like you stop being slaves to your businesses. 🚀

Last time I introduced you to the Law of the Prisoner, and I told you about making a million dollars in profit only to discover that my business was essentially worthless because I had built myself into the center of everything.

Now, I want to show you the opposite.

I want to introduce you to the Law of the Architect.

The Real Problem

When I finally understood what was keeping me trapped – that I had built a prison instead of a business – I made the mistake that most entrepreneurs make when they realize something needs to change.

I assumed the solution was working harder on the right things.

I was wrong.

The solution wasn't working harder on anything, and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to figure that out.

The solution was working on fewer things.

Specifically, three things.

Here's what I call the Law of the Architect: The founder has only three roles – and I mean only three, not three plus whatever else feels important at the moment.

Role 1: Set the vision.

Role 2: Communicate the vision.

Role 3: Build the asset.

That's it.

Everything else – and I really do mean everything, including the stuff you're convinced only you can do properly – should be handled by other people on your team.

In my book, I wrote about three entrepreneurs named Edward, Cheryl, and James, and Cheryl's story is the one that haunts me because she came so close to getting it right.

Cheryl was actually decent at delegating, which is more than most entrepreneurs can say.

She happily handed off the low-level tasks and didn't get involved in what she called “minimum wage activities,” which sounds pretty enlightened until you realize what she held onto.

She kept what she considered the “most important” tasks in her business – client acquisition, product development, and customer service – because she genuinely believed those were where a founder's attention belonged.

She was wrong about what mattered most.

Those aren't the most important tasks for a founder, even though they feel like they should be.

Setting the vision, communicating the vision, and building the asset – those are the only tasks that matter for someone who wants to own a business rather than be owned by one.

Everything else is a trap disguised as importance, and the disguise is so good that smart people fall for it every single day.

Why This Matters

Here's something I didn't expect when I first learned this principle, and I wish someone had warned me about it before I spent years figuring it out the hard way: the three roles aren't equally difficult.

For me, setting the vision came naturally.

I've always been a vision caster – it's just how my brain is wired, and I can get excited about a future that doesn't exist yet in a way that some people find either inspiring or exhausting depending on their tolerance for enthusiasm.

Communicating that vision to others?

Also natural, because I'm a communicator by design and always have been – I was the kid who couldn't stop talking in class, which my teachers found less charming than I did.

But building the asset?

That one was hard.

Building the asset requires a completely different kind of thinking than running daily operations, and my brain kept wanting to drift back toward the urgent stuff that felt productive even when it wasn't.

It requires strategic thought – the kind of slow, deliberate thinking you simply cannot do when you're buried in emails, putting out fires, and making decisions that should belong to someone else but don't because you haven't set things up properly.

This is one of the reasons it's so critical to get out of daily operations.

Not just because delegation is good management practice (though it is), but because you literally cannot do the strategic thinking required to build an asset while you're drowning in the tactical work of running a business.

Your brain doesn't work that way.

Nobody's does, no matter how good they are at multitasking or how early they wake up or how many productivity hacks they've tried.

And here's the honest truth about my own journey, the part I don't love admitting: I held onto sales and day-to-day administrative oversight far longer than I should have.

I knew better.

I taught this stuff to other entrepreneurs and charged them money to learn it.

But I kept doing it anyway because I didn't have the right people in the right seats, and that felt like a legitimate reason even though it was really just an excuse wearing a reasonable-sounding costume.

The problem was that I didn't know how to find the right people.

I was hiring based on resumes and gut feelings, which is basically a coin flip dressed up as wisdom – you feel like you're being discerning when really you're just guessing and hoping.

Everything changed when I learned how to use Culture Index, which is a behavioral analytics tool that helps you understand how people are wired before you hire them instead of after they've already disappointed you.

(Culture Index is now a partner of ours in The Exiter Club, and I couldn't be happier with how they're helping our members avoid the hiring mistakes I made for years.)

Once I started hiring people who were actually wired for the roles I needed filled – people whose natural tendencies matched the job instead of fighting against it – something shifted.

The people overseeing daily operations were higher quality.

My trust in them increased, not because I decided to trust more but because they gave me reasons to.

And for the first time, I could actually step back without everything falling apart or without me lying awake at night wondering what was going wrong while I wasn't watching.

That's when I finally had the mental space to focus on building the asset.

Not before.

James, from my book, understood this from the beginning in a way that I didn't, and sometimes I wonder how different my journey would have been if I'd figured it out sooner.

He was a master delegator because he embraced the principle that his business was a tool to provide him the financial resources to live the life he truly wanted – not a monument to his own importance or a way to prove he was the smartest person in the room.

He didn't hold onto tasks out of ego or fear.

He held onto only three things: setting the vision, communicating the vision, and building the asset.

Everything else belonged to his team, and he was fine with that.

Now What?

I want you to do something, and it's going to be uncomfortable but I'm asking you to do it anyway.

Track your time for three days.

At the end of each day, look at how you spent your hours and ask yourself one question: How much of my time was spent on the three roles versus everything else?

Be honest, even if the answer makes you cringe.

Most entrepreneurs discover that less than 10% of their time goes toward setting the vision, communicating the vision, or building the asset.

The other 90% is spent on tasks that should belong to someone else – tasks that feel urgent and important but are really just keeping you busy while your business stays stuck.

If that's you, don't beat yourself up about it.

Just notice it.

Awareness is the key to recovery (I’m sure you’ve heard me say this a million times before, because it is true), and you can't change what you won't acknowledge.

The second step is getting the right people in the right seats so you can actually let go without everything collapsing.

The third step is creating the systems that allow those people to operate without you hovering over them like a nervous parent at a playground.

That's the work we do at the Exiter Club workshop in Nashville – two days to map out your vision, identify your systems, and build the blueprint for a business that doesn't require you to be the hero anymore.

If you're ready to stop being a prisoner and start being an architect, this is where that shift happens.

Learn More and Register Here

Words of Wisdom

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” – Proverb 29:18

This verse has been quoted in leadership books for decades, usually as a way to say that vision is important and leaders should have one.

But that misses the point.

It's not just that vision is important – it's that without vision, everything falls apart.

The people perish.

The business stagnates.

The founder stays trapped in a prison of their own making, solving problems that shouldn't be theirs to solve.

Your first job – your most important job – is to set that vision.

Your second job is to make sure everyone understands it.

Your third job is to build something worth owning.

Everything else is a distraction, no matter how productive it feels.

Until next time...

Go beyond the grind,
The Real Jason Duncan 🚀

P.S. Next, I'm going to help you diagnose which law you're actually living by – the Law of the Prisoner or the Law of the Architect. Most entrepreneurs think they're architects because they've read the books and know the vocabulary. Most are wrong. We'll find out together.