You're Reading This And I'm Not Online

I first heard the term "leverage" from Naval Ravikant. Ok, it was probably from some college physics course where I learned about levers, loads and fulcrums in the context of the Work formula, but when I first really understood its importance was when I heard Naval talk about it.

In physics, Work is the energy transferred to or from an object via the application of a force along a displacement.

As an example, imagine you're about to hop on a see-saw that's very short in length with a friend that's already in their seat. If the seats are very, very close to where the see-saw's center of balance is (the fulcrum) and you hop on it (force applied) to make your friend go flying, you'll be disappointed.

Work = Force * Distance

Given distance in this case (the levers length) is so small, unless you're a very heavy human, the energy you'd be transferring to your friend would be so small that they'd still remain close to the ground.

On the other hand, imagine this same scenario but with a very long see-saw...

In this case you're sure to send your friend flying! By looking at the formula above you can see that the longer the lever the more energy you're going to transfer to your friend.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world — Archimedes

Naval defines leverage as tools that amplify your efforts (in the example, the see-saw's length — the lever — is this tool). He names four kinds of leverage:

• Labor: a Director at a company making a decision and then having his 10-person team execute on it.

• Capital: a banker borrowing money to enter a position so they have more upside on it (and more downside too). Also known as a leveraged position.

• Product and Media: this essay.

See, you're reading this and I'm not online right now. Who knows what I'm doing in this exact moment. You saw the tweet maybe a few minutes after I published this piece or a couple of hours in, or even days or years have gone by since I wrote these words. Twitter too is using Product leverage as they're getting some revenue by us using a version of their app they shipped long ago.

Even better, sending this tweet out into the world cost me 0 and a retweet of it will also cost me 0. This form of leverage comes at no cost and no marginal cost of replication either.

Work to increase your leverage and you'll soon be flying.