A Little Too Much Leverage

Are we at peak leverage? Every thinkfluencer has been drilling into folks heads for the last 10 years that selling time is the devil, you need to have assets. Well, now everyone has a few too many assets.

Crypto, retail stock trading, NFTs, etc. Everyone has the general idea right, but the execution is 140 character version of that idea. We’re boiling down our skill into the ability to trend chase—is Dogecoin about to blow up? Let me hop in on that.

If you find the process of holding assets like this stressful, that should be some kind of signal. You’re probably stressing because you don’t want to be the last sucker holding the bag. You’re timing the market, not contributing to it.

Your goal should be to have your work be something that can be transformed into an asset. Relying on a Bitcoin farm to provide your proof of work for you is outsourcing the most important aspect of your output.

A simplistic way of framing the problem is this: the thing that’s valuable about any machine is its ability to transform free energy into something more useful. A tree that transforms the sun’s light into its growth is more valuable than desert sand that transforms the sun’s light into heat.

When you think you’re gaining leverage by buying some new asset that might blow up, you’re really just providing fuel for someone else’s engine. You’re not transforming your time, energy, and resources into something more useful—you’re relying on someone else to do it.

Yes, if you’re like, Bill Gates, you have resources on a scale where you’re mostly just directing streams of resources all day long. But the difference there is Bill is actually deciding what happens.

You’re not Bill Gates. He’s deciding what happens, and you’re simply placing a vote on those decisions. But voting is not a full time job, or really a profession. Voting is a great hobby, the responsible thing to do, and generally something everyone should participate in.

But don’t mistake this sort of leverage for building your own engine of contribution.