Working hard is probably not the best strategy
Working hard can be good, but if you feel it’s the solution to every problem or ambition that you have, that probably is not true. We should first understand why. It’s not just about working hard, it’s about the nature of the thing that you are working hard at.
Some things are linear. If you work hard at cutting a tree with an axe, and you chop it twice as fast, you will get twice the amount of wood. You will double your output. Your output is linear to the amount of input that you give.
But let’s say you are managing a large team of people. If you are managing things well, you can scale your management techniques from a hundred people to a thousand people. You hire managers below you and ensure your whole crew runs tight under your supervision. You can change your output from a hundred people to a thousand people, but your input stays the same. You’re just managing it more efficiently by introducing a layer of other management folks who are adhering to your management principles. Your input stayed the same, but the output went from a hundred to a thousand people. Assuming every person brings in a certain amount of output on average, when you scale from a hundred to a thousand people, you also scale your output 10x. Just by introducing layers of people to manage other people, you leverage the management chain in the middle and effectively increase your output 10x.
Tech is another example that comes to mind because it’s not linear. Let’s say I’m writing a document for a person who needs a document to be written. For every document I write, let’s say I get paid ten bucks. If I work hard and work three times as hard, I get paid three times more.
But let’s say I build a software or a tool that helps people write their document just by speaking into it, or maybe in the future, just by thinking about it and the tool knows what to write. If I make the process of writing documents easier and enable people to do it by themselves, they remove the blocker where they had to reach out to people to write documents for them. The tooling is so easy that people can do it themselves, and they will be willing to pay for it because their overall effort decreases and their time to market increases. They can do it faster.
There will be so many people willing to pay for the tool. Let’s say 10,000 people agreed to pay for it. And let’s say the cost of each of those sales is equal to ten or even a hundred of the documents that you used to write. You essentially made 10 million times what you would make by writing one document. No matter how hard you would have worked, you would have only reached that goal really slowly and linearly. But once you shift your model to how you can drive more value rather than working hard yourself, creating a product for people gives you 10 million times that one document worth of output.
That output is also not immediate. It will take time to build the tooling, to reach out to people, to build the distribution, and to adhere to financial and tax regulations. But overall it gives you more leverage because you can reach so many people who are willing to buy your product than if you just work hard.
When you have nothing—when you have no leverage, when you have no capital, when you have no connections—working hard is how you get your foot in the door. You need additional tools in your arsenal to play a different game. When you don’t have any other tool, you just play an entry-level game. But as you reach the next levels of this game of life, you have more tools in your arsenal. You have capital, you have connections, you have people, you have AI agents. You have more leverage.
If you don’t use these tools, your growth in life is going to be linear. But if you use those tools and level up based on that, it’s just going to be exponential, or whatever mathematical curve you choose, because that is dependent on the game that you play. As I wrote before, life is a game.