Society teaches us to seek permission. Get good grades to get into university. Get a degree to get a job. Get promoted to get a raise. Get a mortgage to get a house.

However, wealth doesn’t come from permission, it comes from leverage.

The Three Currencies Most People Confuse

Most people spend their lives confusing wealth, money, and status:

• Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep—businesses, intellectual property, systems that generate value without your presence.
• Money is how we transfer time and wealth—useful as a tool, worthless as a goal.
• Status is your place in the social hierarchy—impressive at dinner parties, irrelevant to your bank account.

Most people chase money and status, while ignoring wealth. They rent out their time for increasingly larger amounts, believing that a bigger salary equals success. They play status games, comparing titles and offices and company perks.

Meanwhile, the builders are creating wealth through leverage.

The Old Leverage vs. The New Leverage

Traditional leverage required permission:

• Capital: Someone had to give you money.
• Labour: Someone had to agree to follow you.

That’s why past generations obsessed over MBAs and corner offices. In their world, leverage was scarce and gatekept. You needed credentials to access capital. You needed titles to command labour.

The internet destroyed those gates.

New leverage requires no permission:

• Code: Software that scales infinitely.
• Media: Content that works while you sleep.

Write once, earn forever. Build once, scale infinitely. No venture capitalist to convince. No employees to manage. Just you, your specific knowledge, and the internet.

The Specific Knowledge Paradox

Here’s what nobody tells you about getting wealthy: If society can train you to do something, society can train someone else to replace you.

True wealth comes from specific knowledge—the intersection of your genuine curiosity, your unique experiences, and what the world needs, but doesn’t yet know how to get.

Specific knowledge:

• Feels like play to you, but looks like work to others.
• Can’t be taught in classrooms, only through apprenticeship.
• Often combines unusual fields in ways nobody else would think to combine.
• Becomes more valuable as the world becomes more complex.

The paradox? The more you chase what’s “hot,” the less valuable you become. The more you follow your genuine obsessions, the more irreplaceable you become.

Why Employment Is a Trap

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time.

This truth hits different when you understand leverage. Every hour you sell to an employer is an hour you’re not building your own leverage. Every innovation you create for a salary becomes someone else’s asset. I’m speaking as a creator at heart.

The employment mindset creates learned helplessness:

• Wait for assignments instead of identifying opportunities.
• Seek approval instead of taking initiative.
• Optimize for looking busy instead of creating value.
• Measure progress by time spent instead of problems solved.

Entrepreneurs think oppositely:

• Create their own assignments.
• Act first, adjust later.
• Optimize for output, not input.
• Measure progress by value created.

The Four Types of Modern Leverage

1. Skill Leverage: Your unique combination of abilities that can’t be commoditized. Not “marketing” or “coding”—everyone claims those. The specific, weird intersection of your interests that creates value others can’t replicate.
2. Code Leverage: An army of robots packed in data centres, waiting for your commands. Every script you write, every automation you build, every system you create—they’re employees who never sleep, never complain, never ask for raises.
3. Media Leverage: Your ideas, insights, and expertise, packaged for consumption at scale. Blog posts ranking in Google for years. Videos gathering views on YouTube while you sleep. Podcasts building relationships you never have to maintain manually.
4. AI Leverage: The newest and most democratizing tool. No longer do you need a team to build at scale. One person with AI can now accomplish what required entire departments. AI is the ultimate permissionless leverage for the rise of solopreneurs.

The Accountability Premium

Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name.

The most successful people have singular, public, risky brands. They put their name on their work. They take the blame when things go wrong. They can’t hide behind corporate PR or committee decisions.

This terrifies most people. They’d rather have a stable job where mistakes are diffused across teams, where successes are claimed by managers, where they can remain safely anonymous.

But markets reward accountability with trust. Trust enables transactions. Transactions build wealth.

Hide behind a corporation, and you’re replaceable. Stand behind your name, and you become irreplaceable. Look no further than Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kanye West.

The Compound Game

All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

The wealthiest people aren’t playing different games—they’re playing longer games. While others optimize for this month’s paycheque, they optimize for this decade’s equity.

Compound games require:

• Picking something you can stick with for decades.
• Choosing partners you can trust indefinitely.
• Building in industries that will exist in 20 years.
• Creating value that accumulates rather than depletes.

Most people job-hop for 10% raises, breaking their compound curve every few years. Builders stay focused on one thing; watching their leverage multiply exponentially.

The Education Myth

There is no skill called ‘business.’

The most expensive MBA won’t teach you how to identify what society wants. No course can train your judgement. No professor can give you specific knowledge.

Real education comes from:

• Microeconomics: Understanding incentives
• Game theory: Predicting behaviour
• Psychology: Knowing what people want
• Mathematics: Thinking clearly
• Computers: Building at scale
• Ethics: Playing long-term games

More importantly: Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.

Builders are too busy building to attend seminars about building.

The Judgement Multiplier

Leverage without judgement is dangerous. Code that solves the wrong problem scales failure. Content that spreads bad ideas compounds harm. AI that automates poor decisions accelerates destruction.

Judgement comes from:

• Experience (making mistakes)
• Reflection (learning from mistakes)
• Principles (not repeating mistakes)

The formula: Judgement × Leverage = Impact

Bad judgement with high leverage creates disasters. Good judgement with high leverage creates fortunes.

The Hourly Rate Razor

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate.

If your time is worth $100/hour in your mind, don’t spend an hour debugging a $20 problem. Don’t do tasks that can be outsourced for $50. Don’t attend meetings that generate less than $100 of value.

This isn’t about arrogance—it’s about allocation. Every hour spent on low-value work is an hour not spent building leverage.

Most people never calculate their true hourly rate. They’ll drive across town to save $10, spending an hour to save what they could earn in ten minutes. They’ll do their own bookkeeping to save $200, losing days they could spend building thousand-dollar systems.

Value your time before the market does, and eventually the market will catch up.

The Uncomfortable Truth

When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize that it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place.

The pursuit of wealth clarifies your values. The discipline required changes who you are. The problems you solve to create wealth become more interesting than the wealth itself.

That’s why lottery winners go broke while builders stay rich. One received wealth without transformation. The other became someone capable of creating wealth repeatedly.

Your Next Move

Right now, someone’s asking for permission to start. They’re waiting for the perfect moment, the ideal conditions, the risk-free path.

Meanwhile, someone else just started building:

• Writing their specific knowledge into existence
• Coding their first automation
• Publishing their unique perspective
• Combining AI with their expertise

One is playing the permission game. One is building leverage.

In five years, one will still be waiting. One will be wealthy—not because they got lucky, but because they started building compound leverage today.

The new economy doesn’t check your credentials. It rewards your creations.

The question isn’t whether you have permission to build wealth.

The question is:

What leverage are you building today that will compound forever?