Leveraging Your Time

You talk about time and financial leverage, which I found super fascinating. Now I'm completely obsessed with this concept. So can you tell us more about that? So, because I came up in finance, we think of leverage. Like you buy a house, you put 10% down. Now the house goes up by 10% and you've made 100% on your money because you only put 10,000 into $100,000 house. So then it goes up by 10% to 110,000 year, 10 goes to 20,000. So that's the leverage that we think about. And we think about that in the stock market, maybe you have a margin account and you have 50%, you put a 30% leverage in there or something like that. So you can make a lot more. The same as the house example, but with a stock, if something happens, people freak out, analysts downgrade it, then the stock goes down 50% and you lose all your money because you only had 30% in. Or you'll lose 90% of your money when the stock goes down 50% because, because you had that leverage. So in my mind, financial leverage and, and you also can have it in derivatives options, things like that. You have embedded leverage even if you haven't borrowed to do it. So there's all this kind of financial leverage, which means if it goes the direction that you're betting and if you understand the vehicle, so if you understand the options, you understand the derivative, you understand how it should trade if you're betting. So first of all, you need to know what your bet is, and then you have to understand the vehicle. And if it's going to trade the way you think it will, when your bet is correct, then you can make a ton of money, but you can also lose it all. So financial leverage is, is very, to me, is risky when I think about personal leverage. It is the decisions you make about how you use your time. Where can you get an assistant now? Students at Stanford may not be able to afford assistant right now. How can you use ChatGPT prompts to do the work of an assistant? How can you use Google? How can you use Python to automate a whole bunch of your tasks? So every time I do something twice, I ask myself, could I spend 10 minutes and automate this and never do it again? And the thing that really struck me, where this changed in my mind, I used to think about the 8020 rule. 20% of my effort results in 80% of the benefits, either profits or earnings. And then I read this book by Gary Keller called the One Thing. And he asked, what is the one thing you could do today, right now, that would make everything else on your list unnecessary or easier, and that is personal leverage.