There are only 24 hours in a day, and no amount of ambition can change that.
It sounds obvious, but it creates one of the most important constraints we face. If every result you want requires more of your time, eventually you’re going to hit a ceiling.
If you want to make more money, you work more hours. If you want to grow your business, you take on more clients. If you want to create more content, you spend more time creating it.
This approach works, but only up to a point. Eventually, there simply aren’t any more hours to give.
That’s where leverage changes the equation.
At its simplest, leverage means using something to multiply the results of your effort. A machine allows one person to perform work that might otherwise require a team. Capital can be invested with the goal of producing additional capital. Software can perform the same task thousands of times without requiring someone to manually repeat it each time. Social media allows one person to communicate with an audience that could potentially number in the millions.
Now we have another powerful form of leverage: artificial intelligence.
AI is beginning to give individuals access to capabilities that previously required teams of people, specialized knowledge, or significant amounts of time.
This leads to a question I think is worth asking regularly:
“How can I accomplish more without requiring proportionally more of my time?”
That’s the leverage question.
Learning to answer it could completely change the way you work.
Your Knowledge Can Become Leverage
Imagine spending ten hours learning how to solve a difficult problem.
If you use that knowledge once, you’ve received some value from those ten hours. If you turn what you’ve learned into a repeatable process, you’ll be able to solve the same problem much faster the next time it appears.
You could take it even further.
Turn the process into a template and other people can use it. Write an article about it and hundreds of people might learn from it. Create a video and that same knowledge could reach thousands of people without requiring you to personally explain it to each one.
The knowledge hasn’t changed. What changed is your ability to distribute and reuse it.
This is one reason I think certain skills are so valuable. Writing, communication, sales, investing, programming, research, critical thinking, and AI literacy don’t simply help you complete one particular task. They can improve the quality of many other things you do.
A good writer can communicate almost any idea more effectively.
A good researcher can enter unfamiliar subjects and understand them faster.
Someone who knows how to use AI effectively can potentially apply that ability across dozens of different areas.
So when you’re deciding what to learn, don’t only ask whether the skill will be useful today.
Ask:
“Will learning this make other things I do more valuable?”
The best skills often have a multiplying effect.
AI Is a Leverage Machine
A lot of the early excitement around AI focused on individual tricks.
Generate an image. Write an email. Summarize a document. Ask a chatbot a question.
Those things are useful, but I think they’re only scratching the surface.
The more interesting opportunity is figuring out how AI can increase what one person is capable of accomplishing.
Consider someone building a business alone.
Research that once required hours of searching can now be accelerated with AI. A rough idea can be turned into a first draft much faster. One piece of content can be adapted into several formats. Basic software can be built by people who aren’t traditional programmers. Repetitive administrative tasks can increasingly be automated.
None of this means human ability becomes irrelevant.
I think almost the opposite happens.
As execution becomes easier, judgment becomes more valuable.
AI can generate a hundred business ideas, but you still have to recognize which one solves a real problem.
It can give you twenty headlines, but you still need to understand which one will resonate with your audience.
It can help you write software, but someone still needs to decide what is worth building.
It can produce enormous amounts of content, but producing more content isn’t necessarily the same as saying something worth hearing.
As these tools become widely available, simply having access to AI won’t provide much of an advantage. Almost everyone will have access to similar technology.
The advantage will come from knowing what questions to ask, what problems to solve, what to ignore, and how to turn the technology into useful systems.
That’s why I don’t think the goal should be to compete with machines.
The goal is to become exceptionally good at using them.
Build Income That Can Scale Beyond Your Hours
Most of us begin our financial lives by selling our time and skills.
You work for an hour and someone pays you for that hour. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s how most people build their initial income, experience, and skills.
The limitation is that you can’t sell the same hour twice.
Assets work differently.
A piece of software can serve another customer without requiring another hour of development. A video you created months ago can still be watched today. A book or digital product can be sold repeatedly. Money invested in productive assets has the potential to generate returns without requiring you to personally perform additional work for every dollar earned.
Businesses can also use people, technology, capital, and systems to create more value than the founder could ever produce alone.
These are all forms of leverage.
You don’t need to build a billion-dollar company to benefit from this idea.
Imagine simply shifting 10% of your working time away from tasks that disappear as soon as they’re completed and toward building something that can continue creating value.
Maybe that means building a small business, creating evergreen content, learning to automate part of your work, developing intellectual property, or consistently investing a portion of your income.
Over time, perhaps 10% becomes 20%.
The goal isn’t necessarily to create completely passive income. Very few worthwhile things are truly passive.
A more realistic goal is to gradually separate some portion of your future income from the number of hours you personally have available to work.
When that starts happening, money can begin giving you something much more valuable than another possession.
It can give you more control over your time.
Action Steps You Can Take Today
Take a look at how you spent your working time this week.
Some of that work probably created value once. You answered an email, attended a meeting, completed a task, or performed work for someone else. Once the task was finished, the value of that particular effort was mostly exhausted.
Other work may continue producing value after you’ve stopped working on it.
Maybe you created something reusable, documented a process, improved a system, learned a valuable skill, invested money, automated a recurring task, or built an asset.
Both types of work are necessary.
The goal isn’t to eliminate work that requires your time. Instead, try gradually increasing the percentage of your time spent creating things that continue providing value afterward.
Ask yourself:
“What could I create this week that would still be useful a year from now?”
It doesn’t have to be something huge.
You might automate a task you perform every Friday. You might create a template you’ll use dozens of times. You could document something you’ve learned instead of figuring it out again later. You might invest some of the money you earned rather than spending all of it.
Or maybe you create something once that can eventually help hundreds of other people.
The point isn’t to escape the time-for-money equation overnight.
It’s to gradually change the ratio.
Working harder can increase your output, and working smarter can improve your efficiency.
Leverage allows your effort to travel further than you can.
That’s worth building toward.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next Friday.
— Phil Zen Kim
Founder of MMM
P.S. If you know someone who’s constantly working harder but never seems to have more time, forward this issue to them.