Last week, Avishai Abrahami — CEO of Wix — sent a letter to his entire company.
It was warm. It was honest. He talked about saying goodbye to friends, people he’d worked alongside for years, people he trusted and respected.
Then he laid off 1,000 of them.
Twenty percent of the company. Gone.
And he wasn’t wrong to do it. The math was no longer working. Currency pressures, AI restructuring, and a stock down 50% since January. He had shareholders to answer to, users to serve, and a business to run. If the business doesn’t make money, it dies.
The letter was emotionally intelligent and strategically cold at the same time. Both things were true. That’s not a contradiction.
That’s just how companies work.
Let this be a reminder to you if you’ve forgotten that lesson, or if you’ve been pretending otherwise.
You Are a Resource
It’s right there in the name: Human Resources.
Not Human Beings. Not Human Potential. Not Human Purpose.
Resources.
And resources are things to be acquired, deployed, optimized, and when the math changes — reallocated.
This isn’t a cynical view of business. It’s how the world is structured. Companies exist to serve customers and generate returns. You are an input in that equation. A valuable one, hopefully. One they’d prefer to keep, ideally.
But nothing more than a means to an end.
That’s why you’re there. It’s why they pay you.
The mistake isn’t that companies operate this way. The mistake is that you forgot.
You gave the Job your best hours. Your sharpest thinking and your peak energy. When someone asks you who you are, you answer with your job title. You answered emails at 10pm, took calls on vacation, carried the stress home and served it to the people you love most.
And in exchange, the company gave you a salary and kept its options open.
That’s not betrayal. That’s the contract you signed.
This doesn’t mean you should become cynical, detached, or mediocre at work. Keep on doing excellent work. Just stop confusing borrowed terrain with sovereign ground.
The Rented Land Trap
Every generation thinks the disruption is uniquely catastrophic.
AI is reshaping the knowledge economy. That’s real. But the pattern is familiar: technology shifts, industries restructure, and the architecture of employment changes.
The people who survive the collapse are always the ones who were building a body of work that belonged to them—not their employer.
Which brings us back to a core distinction: your Job vs your Work.
- Your Job: What someone pays you to do. It lives inside someone else’s org chart. It ends when the business case for it ends, and you don’t get a vote.
- Your Work: The change you’re trying to make in the world. The contribution only you can make, in the way only you can make it. It answers only to something deep inside you.
The 1,000 people who got that letter from Wix last week didn’t just lose a paycheck. For many, they lost their work too. Why? Because they built it on rented land. They handed their talents, their architecture, and their identity over to a corporate container, hoping it would keep them safe.
It didn’t. And over the long-term, it never does.
What would survive the letter?
Let this story serve as a diagnostic.
You are a resource being deployed. AI is coming for parts of your job. How are you responding?
What are you building right now that is uniquely yours?
Not something for your employer. Not something serving your title.
But a distinct asset—an expertise, a perspective, a reputation, or a body of work—that would survive intact if a strategically cold letter landed in your inbox tomorrow morning?
If the answer is “not much,” wake up.
You don’t need to quit your job tomorrow and follow some half-baked dream. That’s a rookie mistake. But you need to treat your Work like it matters.
Because when the math changes, the Job ends.
But your Work is yours forever.
Ready to Stop Building on Rented Land?
If this hit a nerve, it’s time to stop building your identity on rented land.
You don’t need to blow up your career. But you need to identify the part of your work that belongs to you: your skills, your point of view, your body of work, your reputation, your operating system.
That’s the work I help people do.
If you want help mapping out what’s uniquely yours, reply to this email. That’s exactly what the Strategy Call is for.