Why Leverage Is 1000x More Important Than Hard Work

In this video, we are going to talk about why leverage is much greater than hard work. My name is Eric Siu. Before we start, hit the subscribe and hit the like button if you want to grow both faster personally and professionally. All right, so let's talk about this. What does this mean exactly? Growing up, my parents always taught me that you have to work very hard. Okay? If you work very hard, you go to a good school, right? You go to a good college, you get a good job, and you're gonna get pension. You're gonna get all these benefits. You work for the government, you do all these things. You will be taken care of. And that's fine because your parents love you. They want you to be safe more than anything else. They don't want you taking risks. They want you to be safe because you are their baby. You will forever be their baby and they don't want to see anything bad happen to you. And so that's fine. They come from a good place. But I think in a lot of scenarios, you know, your parents don't understand kind of the world that we live in today. They don't understand the internet world that we live in today. They don't understand what true leverage can actually be. Um, in many cases, the one thing I'll say is this, you have to work hard up to a certain extent. And I'm not saying, you know, I don't work hard anymore. I certainly think I do work, continue to work hard, but I'm saying you want to work as hard as you can to gain leverage. Okay. So what do I mean by that? Let's use Gary Vee as an example. So Gary Vee, um, you know, pre-COVID, I believe his agency was on its way to doing $200 million a year in revenue, which is great, but he built his audience You know, he was doing Wine Library with his dad's business back in the day. So he innovated, he helped take his dad's company from $3 to $60 million a year, started doing Wine Library. And, um, you know, Wine Library was where he built his audience or started to get a good sense of how to build an audience and, uh, was teaching people about wine. And he, he got a sense of how important content is. Then he wrote the book Crush It. Um, and then he wrote a series of other books, but you know, he's always been kind of forward-facing. Uh, teaching people, creating content. He has, uh, DRock who follows him around. He has Team Gary as well. And he's just cranking out content over and over and over, right? And he's built up, you know, audiences on all these different social platforms with millions and millions of followers. That is leverage because he took years and years to build, build that up. You know, initially he was working so hard for his dad's company, built that up, and then decided he's gonna go off and, and do his own thing. While he's building this agency, he's also continuing to build his audience. And now he has leverage where, you know, he can go on Instagram, uh, and then basically send a, uh, do a story and then, you know, survey a bunch of people or ask a bunch of people to meet up, uh, at one time. That is leverage and, um, that's powerful, right? So he's built a great company doing that. Now, a second example would be, um, when I think about, there's a guy on Twitter, he's, he's kind of a rising star in my mind. His name's Dave Perell and he's got, I think maybe 85,000, 90,000 Twitter followers or so, but he grew it all organically. His whole shtick is about writing. You have to learn how to write. You have to— writing clarifies your thoughts. And he just kind of says the same messaging over and over and over, but he repackages it. And that's how he built his following. He has a lot of famous investors and entrepreneurs that are following him. And he came out with a course. His course, I believe he sells for $2,000 or so. I had a friend last week that bought the course. And I was like, whoa, $2,000. That's a lot. He's like, yeah, he's very hands-on with it. And I just want to learn how to become a better writer. This guy's in his mid-20s right now. And he's— I'm sure he's gonna build a great, you know, 7-figure business. And that's fine. That's a great business. He wants to make the business even bigger, great. But I think even for right now, it's a great one-person business. You can get it to 7 figures. That's already a great outcome. Another guy that comes to mind would be Anthony Pompliano. His podcast gets about 2.5 million downloads a month. And when you think about that, I'm just gonna do the math over here. 2.5 million downloads a month, if he's charging maybe you know, $30, uh, CPM, which is cost per 1,000 impressions, he would be making $75,000 a month on advertising. And that's $900,000 right there. Um, he could be making more in terms of CPM, but he also has a newsletter that he writes for as well. And, um, that's, that's leverage because he has maybe, um, you know, about 50,000 subscribers or so. Um, that probably kicks him a good, you know, 5 to 6 figures a month in income as well. So you have this, um, he's built leverage because he has this audience. Dave Perell has built leverage as well. Same thing with Gary Vee. Andrew Wilkinson, who I had on the Leveling Up podcast, he's done well for himself because he had a company called MetaLab, which just cranks out profit, and he didn't know what to do with the profit. So he just takes the money that he has and he buys other businesses that have audiences, that have great revenues, great cash flows, and he just continues to do that. But that's also leverage too. When you work hard, you don't want to continue to work hard and say, hey, I'm gonna, you know, stop at, you know, working at a fast food joint and that's it. Or I'm gonna stop and I'm gonna just, you know, continue to work for someone and be maybe at a junior level or mid-senior level, and that's the rest of my career, right? You want to continue to push because you're watching this right now. You want to get better and better. You might as well shoot for the stars. You only have one life. You might as well go for it all if you have the capacity. If you're lucky enough to be able to continue to take shots, you know, why not do that? Leverage to me is you have a— you have an audience that maybe you're getting paid in advertising dollars, or you're getting paid on course sales, product sales, you're getting paid on software sales. Um, while you sleep. That is true leverage. For example, me doing the, the, this, this video, or me doing the Marketing School Podcast, we get— we have a pretty decently sized audience there. And, um, the work I put in to make each new episode, it's the same, but now I have an audience. And so I get a lot more viewers each time, or a lot more downloads, um, when I'm doing a podcast or I'm doing a video, right? YouTube's a lot smaller for me, but on the podcast side of things, it just, it cranks. It continues to compound. It continues to grow. More and more people tell each other about it. And it just gets stronger and stronger. So you want to be able to build leverage. You got to think about what are the leverage points for you where you're not the one doing— you're not the only one pushing the boulder up the hill. In fact, you have multiple boulders going up the hills, or you have multiple people helping you push the boulder up. That's true leverage, and that's a lot greater than hard work. You want to make— money could be leverage. You want to make your money work for you. You want to let the money compound. Um, you know, media attention is leverage as well. So You want to be able to get there. You want to be able to get to that point. I think you can do it. You let me know in the comments if you agree with me or if you disagree with me when it comes to leverage. Also, don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe as well if you want to grow faster. And yeah, that's it for today and we will see you tomorrow.