The day you exercised your leverage

If you identify that one skill that you have, that you can do better than anyone else, you will be valuable, you will be rich.

We are always evolving as a society. That brings us a bunch of new problems to solve. Given the abundance of human population and a finite set of problems we face, most of the value delivered is concentrated among a small set of individuals. The ability to say “I am the best person to solve this problem” is leverage. It is an advantage that will let you deliver maximum value to the society at the lowest possible cost.

All value is captured by the top percentile of individuals. Consider the player of the tournament at the FIFA World Cup 2018 — Luka Modric. His talent is so valuable that he was able to drive his team to a prestegious worldcup final. The cost of doing so is very low, even though he may drive a large paycheck, much larger than many others on the same team. The cost is still to be considered low because training another person to fill in his shoes would mean hunting for a talented kid and training him rigourously for years without the certainity of shaping another Modric. Modric is able to give Croatia what it needs, a solid mid-fielder on the field. Mordric leveraged his skills to be among the top percentile of people who can deliver the job he was asked to do — in due course he was able to capture the maximum value in doing what he did. He not only took home a paycheck, but also love from his fans and respect of the football community, which in turn will drive his value even higher as he continues to play for his nation and club to try and win more championships.

Leverage is being able to command value by doing something better than most.

Getting rich is not a zero sum game. Everyone can get rich — by leveraging their advantages.

Leverage needn’t be a single skill that you are the best in the world at. A combination of skills often become super useful.

Bill Gates was a good programmer. He was not necessarily the best programmer in the world. However, he was also a great negotiator that got him the deal with IBM in the initial days of Microsoft. He was among the top percentile of people who had both the skills — of programming and negotiating. That made him the most valuable person in the world.

Like Bill Gates and Luka Modric, we all have to find a leverage that allows us to work less and earn more, to deliver maximum value to society. The value you earn in cash or kind is proportional exponentially to how well you deliver as compared to the next best person.

Finding leverage is unfortunately not a scientific problem. It is a mix of intuition, hard work and exposure.

You might have some intuition about what you are good at. An easy way to find an answer is to ask yourself what you have been doing all through your childhood without knowing you were excelling? Did you just start winning debate competitions without practice? Were you always able to raise maximum amounts for a charity? That would probably give you an lead as to what your leverage might be.

Once you have a slight intuition you have to build upon it. The only way to do that is to offer your service to people and see if they are deriving value. This is a process that will keep you on your toes. You might have to learn new things to deliver better. You might have to invest in things you hadn’t thought of before — new equipment? online course? software license? But in due course of actually helping out people, you will figure out where you are able to deliver maximum value. That is you leverage.

Leverage is capable of letting you earn high rewards with lower effort. Rewards may be financial, social or spiritual. Once you find your leverage, well, you need to leverage it.

You can now reach out to a huge audience through the internet. If the each person on the internet who comes in contact with your offering contributes a small amount, you will have huge rewards.

How will so many people come in contact with my offering? Once you have figured out you have a certain leverage, you need to create media. Media changes the dimension of communication from one-to-one in the case where you were directly involved in offering some form of service to a one-to-many where once you publish some form of media, the society can derive value without having to interact with you directly.

Media may take various forms — Blogs, videos, Snapchat Stories, podcasts, apps, websites, software or just Tweets.

Once you figure out what is that one thing you can deliver better than anyone else in the world and deliver it using a scalable model like media, you will be rich.

If you haven’t had a chance to read the series of Tweets by Naval Ravikanth, you should read it now.

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