Hustling to get leverage is one of the most valuable pursuits anyone can do. Having leverage means that with the same input you can have enormous output. This leads to savings in time or money, two valuable resources.

This post is going to give a short review of Eric Jorgenson’s course, Building a Mountain of Leverage. He created this course after publishing The Almanack of Naval Ravikant given that leverage was the most discussed topic amongst his readers. Here is my review of the Navalmanack which made it onto my top books list of 2021. Before discussing the course, allow me to briefly touch on why you should care about leverage.

Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).

— Naval (@naval) May 31, 2018

🔍Leverage: What is it, why do I want it, and how do I get it?

Leverage comes from capital & people (permission based leverage) along with products: code, media, tools (permissionless). Using any of these forms of leverage means you can do more. With any one, or a combination of, these levers you get outsized returns on your effort.

Let’s get more concrete with an example. Let’s say you are performing the same data manipulation in excel every week and it takes you about 20 minutes. Your 20 minutes of input equals 20 minutes of work. Then you learn about auto-refreshing pivot tables and macros and you build a system. The system may take you an hour to build, but now can run in 5 minutes. By using tool leverage you now accomplish 20 minutes of work in 5.

Perhaps it takes 20 minutes to train someone on a topic. You can record a video, pair it with an SOP, and now it takes 5 minutes to show someone how to locate the training library.

Leverage is what we really want. Building more and longer levers means that we can win back time and money with equivalent effort.

Capital leverage takes time to earn. People leverage requires tremendous leadership, communication, and diplomatic skills paired with competence in a specific domain – this also takes time to earn. Media leverage is provided to everyone with a smartphone (text, video, audio), but an audience must be built to lengthen this lever. Code and tool leverage requires skill and knowledge that is cheaply available on the internet to learn.

🏔Review of Building a Mountain of Leverage.

Over the last 5 years I have taken 1-2 online courses per year from legacy institutions, well known online education platforms, and individual creators. My general opinion is that a course is worth it if it leads to action. I must say that for me Building a Mountain of Levers delivers on the modest ticket price of $297.

The two most valuable assets to the course are the thoughtful structure of the content and the worksheets. Between these two I felt that I grasped the concepts and was able to put them into action (more on the actions I will be taking below). One thing the course did not deliver on, but they are working on for future classes – is having learning groups to discuss the topics. Even without the cohort style learning the class was well worth it for me.

My recommendation: if you are interested in increasing your leverage start with reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. If you are interested in an expansion on the leverage ideas in that book, and are motivated to take action, then get the course.

🛠How I plan to build more and longer levers.

1. Implement Eric’s “leverage worksheet” into my quarterly goal setting. Every 90 days I plan on revisiting my leverage worksheet and writing down what levers I want to implement and grow during each quarter when I set goals.
2. Two of my big focuses for 2022 will be: implementing no-code tools whenever possible (as described below), and continuing to build an audience (people leverage) through media.
   • Record instead of repeat. This can take the form of SOPs at work, blog posts about topics I discuss with friends, video tutorials, use of no code tools like Zapier, etc.
   • Growing the platforms I already have (twitter & kevinconnelly.blog) and creating video content. One of the learnings I had from publishing The Path is that products of the mind spread easier when there is an audience in place.

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