There’s a particular frustration that doesn’t show up in dashboards.
You’re executing well. Building real things. Moving. And something still isn’t resolving the way it should. The effort is real. The gap between effort and outcome keeps widening.
That gap is almost never an execution problem.
When I started writing the Rented series, I was exploring one idea: the difference between owning something and renting it.
The pattern kept showing up — leaders and companies building on foundations they didn’t own, competing inside categories someone else defined, executing brilliantly inside races they could never win.
The more I followed that thread, the further it went.
Positioning isn’t just a marketing problem. It’s the surface layer of something deeper — a question about where you operate and who sets the terms.
At its highest altitude, positioning is category ownership.
The leaders who've solved positioning aren't better at articulating what they do. They've stopped competing for position and started defining the space itself.
That’s where the thread led.
This publication is being renamed.
Prime Positioning is becoming The Breakaway.
Same Substack. No migration required. You’re already here.
The Rented series stays. Those concepts are the foundation — understanding what it means to own versus rent is prerequisite thinking for everything that follows.
The thesis behind The Breakaway:
Technology commoditizes the peloton. It amplifies the breakaway.
When AI accelerates execution for everyone, executing harder inside the existing race produces diminishing returns.
The advantage shifts to leaders who’ve stopped competing for position inside someone else’s category and started owning their own. Every new technology wave benefits them. It compresses everyone still in the peloton.
Joe Rogan didn’t go looking for a platform deal. Spotify came to him. YouTube came back to him. That’s not luck — that’s what category ownership produces. Platform optionality. The platforms needed him more than he needed any of them.
And it applies across every industry and every stage.
The Breakaway isn’t about better positioning tactics.
It’s about what game you’re actually playing, and whether it’s one you can win. That question gets more specific from here, not broader.
The writing stays peer-to-peer. I’m not teaching you to make the break. I’m writing from inside it, about what the view looks like from here.
If you’ve been reading the Rented series and something kept resonating — a sense that the problem runs deeper than positioning tactics, that there’s a frame you’ve been trying to articulate but haven’t found language for yet — that’s what The Breakaway is about.
You’ve found the room.
— Michael
The Breakaway · thebreakaway.com