High leverage work

Most people think about work in terms of hours. You show up, you put in the time, you get paid. But once you step outside the traditional employment model, you start to see work through a completely different lens: leverage. The core idea is simple. When you work for someone else, your income is capped. Your salary is determined by your qualifications, your title, your position on a career ladder that someone else designed. You might get a raise every year, maybe a promotion every few years, but there's always a ceiling. The company captures the difference between the value you create and what they pay you. That's the deal. When you work for yourself, the equation flips. You get to keep most of what you earn. There are expenses, of course, maybe employees, tools, infrastructure, but the fundamental relationship between effort and reward is different. You're no longer renting out your time at a fixed rate. You're building something where the upside belongs to you.

The rat race isn't about laziness

People talk about the "rat race" like it's a character flaw, something you fall into because you're not ambitious enough. But it's actually a structural problem. In traditional employment, the system is designed to keep you running. Every raise gets absorbed by lifestyle inflation. Every promotion comes with new expectations that fill your calendar. You earn more but you never feel like you're getting ahead. The real issue is that employment trades your time for a predictable but bounded outcome. There's comfort in that, and for some people it's the right choice. But if you want to build wealth or create outsized impact, you need a different model. You need leverage.

What leverage actually means

Naval Ravikant frames it well. He talks about four types of leverage: labor (other people working for you), capital (money working for you), code (software you build once that runs forever), and media (content that reaches people while you sleep). The first two are the older forms, requiring permission. The last two, code and media, are the new forms of leverage. They're permissionless and have zero marginal cost of replication. For someone building a business today, this is the playbook. You don't just trade hours for dollars. You build systems, products, and content that compound over time. A piece of software you ship today can serve customers for years. A blog post or video you create today can bring in leads indefinitely. The leverage I've been fortunate to build comes from years of working at a startup where we did everything from scratch. Infrastructure, development, business operations, client management. That breadth of experience across the entire stack, both technical and commercial, is what Naval would call "specific knowledge." It's the kind of knowledge that can't easily be taught in a classroom because it comes from doing the actual work in messy, real-world conditions. That foundation is what I'm anchoring on now. We run a consultancy doing software development work as an agency, and we build products that help teams ship their own agents. The agency work provides cash flow and client relationships. The products provide scalable leverage. It's the combination of both that creates a durable business.

The compounding advantage of doing it all

One of the underappreciated benefits of running a small operation is that you develop competence across every part of the value chain. You understand sales because you've closed deals yourself. You understand delivery because you've shipped the code. You understand support because you've fielded the complaints. This cross-functional knowledge creates a compounding advantage. Every new skill you pick up makes the others more effective. Understanding business helps you build better products. Understanding engineering helps you scope projects more accurately. Understanding marketing helps you position your work so it actually reaches people. In a traditional job, you're usually specialized. You go deep in one area and rely on other teams to handle the rest. That's efficient for the company, but it limits your personal leverage. When you're on your own, being a generalist isn't a weakness. It's a superpower.

Personal branding, with some caveats

Everyone seems to be talking about personal branding right now, especially in the context of AI. And I do think it matters. Having an online presence, showcasing your work, making yourself discoverable, these things genuinely help when you're building something of your own. But I also think the conversation has gotten overblown. A year ago, barely anyone in tech circles was talking about personal branding as a strategy. Now it's everywhere, like every other trend that catches fire on social media. The fundamentals haven't changed. If you do good work and share it consistently, people will find you. You don't need a content strategy with a 30-day calendar and a brand archetype quiz. What actually matters is distinctiveness. In an era where AI can generate generic content at scale, the thing that stands out is your specific perspective, your real experience, your actual opinions. Forbes contributor William Arruda puts it well: visibility used to be the goal, but now the focus needs to shift to being distinctive. Being seen isn't enough when everyone is producing content. Being recognizably you is what cuts through. The most effective personal branding isn't really "branding" at all. It's just consistently doing interesting work and being open about it. Write about what you're building. Share the lessons, including the failures. Have opinions and defend them. That's the kind of presence that compounds, because it's rooted in substance rather than performance.

High leverage work is a choice

The shift from employment to self-employment isn't just a career change. It's a change in how you think about work itself. Instead of asking "how can I get a better salary," you start asking "how can I create more value with less input." Instead of climbing a ladder someone else built, you start building your own. It's not easy. The hardest parts are the ones nobody talks about: finding clients when you're starting from zero, managing cash flow when revenue is unpredictable, making decisions without a team to fall back on. But the leverage is real. When you own what you build, every improvement compounds in your favor. The opportunity right now is especially interesting because AI is reshaping what a small team can accomplish. Tools that would have required entire departments a few years ago can now be operated by one or two people. The minimum viable team for a serious business is shrinking, which means the leverage available to individuals is growing. If you have the experience, the skills, and the willingness to take on uncertainty, high leverage work isn't just an option. It might be the most rational choice you can make.

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