The Leverage Paradox
One of the great paradoxes of life is that the younger you are, the more leverage you have in your life - yet it takes life experience to be able to do anything with that leverage.
I am in a phase that requires me to consume an insane amount of content. I am not an expert yet in the categories which interest me so I am consuming content to digest and share my takeaways and my experiences in the hope of helping someone like you or a younger version of myself.
I wish I could go back to my younger self and tell him to do this so I don’t have to.
Granted, he did, just not in the quantities needed to truly learn from other peoples’ experiences and he was afraid to take actions on those learnings.
Okay, adult me is also a bit afraid of taking action but has significantly less fear of judgement with a lot more fear of losing money and putting his family in a bad financial situation.
This content consumption pattern is also meant to help me form my own opinions surrounding what other people have learned through their lives.
For the time being, I am trying to find content that I resonate with to reflect on and see if I have applied that before or - if it deeply resonates with me - content to act on.
I wish I could convince my younger self this because if he would have been able to consume this content and act on it, I would be years ahead of where I am now.
For perspective, I am almost 28 years old making low six figures - very low but I am grateful - working as lower level management for a very large institution.
It took three years of effort to move myself to this goal and a lot of that time I spent focusing more on my current suffering than I focused on intentional action to set me up for success.
Now I find myself working to build the skill of doing hard things to set myself, my family, and you up for success.
I am fortunate to have realized that I need to buckle down and focus on my goals this early in life. For some, it doesn’t happen until their 30s. Others their 40s. Less their 50s. Some don’t ever get there at all resulting in a life full of regrets with dreams left on the table.
I refuse to go there; and if I can help it, want you to avoid this problem too.
The problem with realizing this later in life is that you have limited time left in this world and accomplishing your dreams takes time. The earlier you are able to take actions towards achieving your dreams, the more likely you are to be able to make them a reality.
But when you are young, you aren’t able to see opportunities as clearly as those that have tenure. Those that have experienced decades of change. You have more free time than anybody but if you aren’t able to be intentional and pursue a clear goal, you aren’t able to capitalize on it.
The worst part for everybody involved is that there is no system that teaches this.
Unless you are fortunate to find a mentor that has found this out for themselves or happens to be privileged to be raised by a family that lives intentionally - you don’t just learn this.
When I was in high school, I got a small scholarship to play Division II college football. I couldn’t see the opportunity as clearly as my parents and, if memory serves, my mom told me she loved me but I would have to be stupid not to take it. My dad agreed.
When divorced parents agree, you know there is something they know that you don’t.
After a couple of seasons, I began to loathe football and was going to quit. I knew I needed some sort of plan and found a 3+2 program that I could get both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the same time, accelerated for a slight increase in tuition over what I was going to pay for just a Bachelor’s.
In all of my divine wisdom, I thought this was great. I would get a 6 figure job, or at least high 5 figure straight out of college. I was going to do great.
$456. That is what I made in my first job out of college over a 5 month span after 6 months of being intentional in searching out career opportunities.
I took a different job for $54k.
It took me almost 5 years from that starting point to get where I am now.
Now?
I see all of the opportunities I sacrificed along the way to climb this mountain.
My exposure to the world and my experience has shown me pathways I could have gone down that would have been more lucrative for less effort - and some bad situations that I managed to avoid.
And it exemplifies the paradox.
If I would have had more experience, I would have seen how successful people had gotten doing YouTube or podcasting or coding or I would have been able to better identify potential gaps in the workforce where I could have leveraged the timing of education.
But I didn’t. I learned many lessons and grew as a person but lost time and leverage along the way.
The more time you lose, the less you have.
This is not to say that there aren’t ways to rebuild this leverage but time is a lever that is continually shortening and the longer you wait to intentionally utilize it, the less leverage you have.
Your life experience is the amount of force that you are able to apply to the lever. The more you are able to acquire at a younger age, the more force you can apply to a lever that has more leverage.
This significantly increases the probability of you hitting your goals.
But how do you gain life experience as a young person?
While you naturally gain life experience as you age, that doesn’t necessarily mean that an older person is wiser in all areas of life.
When one has been unintentional with their life, their lessons have come through unintentional exposure and therefore may not be realized or may not be acted upon.
You are here out of intention. When one lives intentionally, they can amass the life experience of an older person in a smaller amount of time.
To gain more experience, capitalize on the experiences of others. Alex Hormozi talks about how he paid to attend masterminds for gym owners before he opened a gym so he could shave off ten years of lessons.
While you might not be trying to open a gym and don’t have as pointed of a direction in that sense, I encourage you to consume content.
Find a direction that you want to go down and explore it. Pair this exploration with action.
If you think that coding a software as a service application might be the avenue for you to achieve your goals, start trying to create your first application. You don’t know the fundamentals of coding? Congratulations. You just found your starting point.
You now know html? Start writing code. Don’t know how to make the page look nicer? Google how to make the page look nicer. Oh, what’s that? CSS makes pages prettier. Learn CSS.
And so on.
In this journey, you may realize that isn’t the right thing for you. Start by asking yourself what about it isn’t resonating. If it’s just hard, hire a coach. Go on YouTube. Read a book. We live in a time where there is an infinite supply of information. You can find enough information to move yourself in the right direction.
Anything worth doing is going to be hard. If you never want to accomplish anything, play easy indefinitely and watch other people turn your ideas into something special and regret the lack of action you took.
If it truly doesn’t resonate or set you up for your goal, find another north star and pivot.
Each path you dive down helps inform you of what is or isn’t worth your time and energy. You begin amassing experience in the perpetual state of trying and failing and trying and failing and pivoting and trying and failing.
If you learn from each trial and failure and pivot, as long as you are aiming in some constant direction, you will make progress. You will not feel it in the moment but you are building more and more experience that will help you realize the dream that you are aspiring to reach.
You are gaining experience to apply more force to the ever shrinking lever that is your remaining time.
Get after it. Regardless of where you are at in your life, you have a combination of this force and leverage and if you work hard enough, you just might surprise yourself with the mountains that you are able to move.
