If you are going to become wealthy, you need help. You only have so many productive hours in a single day, which puts a cap on your productivity. What you need is a way to compound your efforts.

You can do this with leverage.

Imagine you're standing on the edge of a bridge over a calm body of water.

With each decision you make about your life or business, you drop a small pebble into the water. This pebble represents your decision. The ripples you see in the water when your rock strikes the surface are the impacts and consequences of your decision.

A pebble isn't very big, so your ripples are small.

Leverage transforms your pebble into a boulder. It greatly amplifies the impact of your decisions and your judgment. And, most importantly, if you choose the right kind of leverage, it's free.

What Is Leverage?

Leverage is just a word for tools that amplify your efforts. These tools are not inherently good or bad. They only boost the impact of the decisions you would make otherwise.

In this way, entrepreneur and angel investor, Naval Ravikant, tells us that "leverage compounds your judgment."

In a world where the consequences of your decisions are magnified, the quality of your choices become more critical.

There Are Four Different Kinds of Leverage.

 Ravikant names four different kinds of leverage:

• Capital

• Labor

• Code

• Media

Capital leverage is just money you have access to.

In the traditional financial sense, leverage is borrowed money (capital). An investment manager could invest this money in productive businesses to try and boost his or her investment returns.

If the manager makes the right decision, they make more money. If they make the wrong decision, they lose more money. Remember, leverage compounds your judgment.

Most of us can't borrow large amounts of money, so this kind of leverage is not very useful to us right now.

Labor leverage is when you have people working for you.

The reason why someone in a Manager or Director position at a large company has more power than the average employee is because they have leverage in the form of labor. When they make a decision, they have a whole team to carry it out. This magnifies the importance of their decision.

Most of us don't have this kind of leverage, either. It usually has to be given to you by someone else in a position of power. This makes it harder to obtain.

Code leverage is when you can command robots to work for you.

Code leverage is the ability to tell robots what to do and have them do it. Code is Ravikant's favorite kind of leverage because it's the most powerful in the modern age.

Plus, it's a permission-less form of leverage. Unlike capital and labor, you don't need anyone to give you.

Here's what Ravikant says about coding in an episode of his podcast called Product and Media are New Leverage:

An army of robots is already here. It's very cheaply available… Essentially you can order this army of robots around. The commands have to be issued in a computer language, in a language that they understand…Coding is such a great superpower because now you can speak the language of the robot armies and you can tell them what to do.

If you can code, you have an army of robots operating for you while you sleep. They are doing your bidding and compounding the impact of your decisions.

I don't know how to code (yet… I would love to learn one day), so this leverage is less useful to me.

Media leverage is when you have code and media working for you.

Media is my favorite kind of leverage. I'm good at content creation, and it's what I get paid to do.

Media leverage is the content you create that scales via software (code) with a zero marginal cost of reproduction. That means you only have to make the piece of content once, but anyone with an internet connection can consume it repeatedly.

Ravikant explains on his podcast why this is so important:

This podcast is a form of leverage. Long ago, I would have had to sit in a lecture hall and lecture each of you personally. I would have maybe reached a few hundred people and that would have been that. Then…30 years ago, I would have to be lucky to get on TV, which is somebody else's leverage… Today, thanks to the Internet, I can buy a cheap microphone, hook it up to a laptop or an iPad, and there you are all listening.

Here’s the podcast episode, called Product and Media Are New Leverage, YouTube:

Media leverage (like code) is permissionless.

You don't need anyone to give you permission to create media. You can make YouTube videos, write blog posts, send e-newsletters, record podcasts, build landing pages all without permission from anyone else.

This makes media leverage highly accessible to the average person.

Plus, media leverage is basically free.

It's incredibly cheap to utilize media leverage through software because there is a zero-marginal cost of reproduction. The robots don't have to work very hard to reproduce your media, so fewer costs are handed down to you, the creator.

Examples of Free Media Leverage 

Here are some of the free forms of media leverage I use daily and others I'll use in the future:

Website (82¢ / day)

My total expenses for Wealest.com are about USD 300/year. That's 82 cents per day to reach thousands of readers a month all around the world. That is incredible value. And you can get even cheaper than that with different platforms.

I own the URL for Wealest through Namecheap and run the site through Squarespace. These two software platforms allow me to scale personalized media to anyone worldwide 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Robots make it possible for my content to get page views, add newsletter sign-ups, and reach new audience members while I sleep.

I repeat – these platforms offer incredible value.

Twitter (Free)

Twitter is a form of media (mass communication). It allows you to scale your personality - your thoughts, ideas, skills, and beliefs - for free to people around the world.

Whether I have one follower or one million followers on Twitter, the cost for me to tweet is the same: the energy to develop and type out my thought. Otherwise, it's free. Then, the Twitter software scales my media to the world without any cost of reproduction.

Mailchimp E-Newsletter Service (Free up to 2,000 Subscribers)

Mailchimp is FREE up to 2,000 subscribers. An e-newsletter allows you to offer value to your audience in a convenient way – sending it right to their email inbox.

And, like all scalable media, you only have to write the newsletter once. Then, you can send it to every single subscriber instantaneously. Let the robots do the work!

I collect email subscribers in two main ways:

1. with sign-up links on my articles (via a pop-up), and,

2. through Twitter by posting my newsletter link in my profile description and in tweets that go viral.

An e-newsletter is the single best way to keep your most engaged fans updated with new content.

And it's effective. Over the last three months, I've had a 25 percent average open rate and a 4.4 percent average click-through rate.

YouTube Videos (Free)

I have a lot of experience with YouTube. Much of what I currently produce ends up on YouTube in the form of commercial and info spots for major automotive brands.

YouTube is a powerful platform because, once again, it allows you to create a video once and then scale it to anyone with an internet connection for free.

I experimented with it for Wealest in the early days but ended up focusing more on written content than video.

Podcast Episodes (Free)

Podcasts are a goldmine for content because of the sheer amount of other scalable digital media you can create from one great conversation.

You can scale the podcast through Apple or Android for free. Then, you can take the transcript of every episode and post it on your site. You can turn quotes into Instagram posts. You can pull content for your Twitter feed. You can post the podcast to YouTube with a simple image and gets views over there - all for the price of a solid mic and an internet connection.

Media leverage compounds over time, so start as soon as possible.

Just like an investment in a great business, your returns on media will compound over time. The sooner you start, the larger you'll grow over the long term.

I started with zero readers 3 years ago. Now I have tens of thousands. I started with zero newsletter subscribers. Now I have thousands.

I'm not unique. All I did was start and didn't stop. If you take advantage of all the free media leverage available to you, I promise that in 10-years, you will not believe what you've built.

Use scalable media as leverage.

Start now.

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Read Naval Ravikant’s article How To Get Rich: Every Episode for more info on leverage.

Also, read his article called: Product and Media are New Leverage for more on info on media leverage.