What is “expert’s privilege” anyway? I made it up. Or did it come to me?

In March of 2025, I hired Fen Druadìn, a book midwife.

Not a ghostwriter. Not a book coach. But a book midwife - someone to help deliver my first book from my head into reality.

The first thing we did was a structured but open-ended North Star session to try and draw a circle around what book I was feeling called to write.

In preparation, I wrote down a lot of loosely related ideas as they came to me, all in this realm of owning your expertise:

• cities work because everyone owns their slice
• what if we looked at our expertise the same way
• life-work integration
• reclaimed time
• raise the tide of creativity by staying in our genius zones
• find another gauge of success than money
• find another carrot/stick than money
• establish a path to a ‘deployment cushion’
• ‘running start’ to going solo

And then my mind spit out an elegant umbrella concept:

“In our current system, you can earn the ability to do your own thing.”

Then right next to that, like a Eureka! moment, I wrote:

“expert’s privilege”

It’s a play off the term ‘jester’s privilege,’ which refers to the lenience given the Jester in the royal court to mock the King all he wanted without punishment.

In our context as corporate folks, I conceived ‘expert's privilege’ to mean that once you’ve acquired a certain level of unique domain expertise, you earn the ability to step out of the corporate grid and interact with it on your terms.

And 16 months later, the full argument is here.

It’s intentionally written as an introspective weekend read, with over 30 original frameworks and illustrations to help you internalize the idea that you - yes, you - are, in fact, an expert.

And you've earned the right to deploy as you please.

Mark your calendars - the official book launch is set for next week - Tuesday, July 14th.

🥳 If you're interested in joining me for a private, pre-launch Zoom next Monday afternoon (US Pacific) click here, and I'll send you the details.

💡

-Wes