For most of human history, the only leverage available to most people was labour — their own body and time. More work produced more output, linearly. The relationship between effort and result was direct and proportional. This is the world most people still operate as if they are living in. They are not.
Three forms of leverage are now available to anyone: code, media and capital. Each of them allows one person's effort to reach thousands or millions of people with no proportional increase in cost. A piece of software runs for a million users with the same effort it took to write once. A piece of content reaches a million people with no additional work after publishing. Capital deployed into a business works while the deployer sleeps.
The people building the most interesting and valuable things today are not working harder than previous generations. They are deploying leverage differently. A twenty-two-year-old who builds a product that ten thousand people pay for monthly is not working ten thousand times harder than a twenty-two-year-old who trades their time for a salary. They have applied leverage.
The question to ask about any activity is: does this scale? If the result is proportional to the effort — if ten times the work produces ten times the result — it is labour. If the result can scale beyond the effort — if work done once can produce value many times over — it is leverage. Optimise for the second category.
The profound insight is that the most important decision most people make is not what to work on — it is what form of leverage to apply to it. Hard work applied to a leveraged structure produces extraordinary results. Hard work applied without leverage produces exhaustion and linear progress. Choose leverage first. Then apply the work.