A man joined a good company.
Hotel stays, fine dinners, business cards with embossed logos.
Everything looked right.
By 40, he had done everything the system needed:
Worked hard. Showed up. Played safe.
Then one day, he was let go.
No warning. No severance that lasted.
No second act.
Just silence.
No leverage. No brand. No network. No artifacts.
Years of loyal service, vanished like mist in the morning.
That’s the risk no one talks about.
Because not all labour is the same.
There are two kinds:
Unleveraged labour and leveraged labour.
Unleveraged Labour:
This is labour that’s perishable.
You do it.
You get paid.
You stop doing it.
It stops paying.
Like a job. Like hourly wages. Like freelance gigs with no audience, no residuals, no ownership.
Its a ladder you try to climb
But the ladder may vanish
The higher up you are in the ladder
The harder the fall.
It’s linear.
One unit of work, one unit of pay.
It’s also risky.
Because when it ends, you’re left with nothing but memories.
Leveraged Labour:
This is a different game.
Work once, and create something that can get paid more than once.
Write a book — royalties.
Build software — users keep paying.
Create a video — it keeps getting views.
This kind of labour has four properties:
Non-perishable
It lasts beyond the moment you did it.
It doesn’t melt away like the ppts you made last week
Convex
Low downside if it fails, huge upside if it works.
Artifacts
It leaves something useful behind:
A brand
A network
A reputation
A portfolio
Scalable
You do it once.
And still it can be manifested more than once.
It is decoupled from time and effort
So every time you work, you choose:
Should i create a perishable?
Or do I want leverage?
Leveraged labor builds a future.
Don’t just chase comfort or safety.
Chase trajectory.
Ask yourself:
Will this compound?
Will it still matter next year?
Will it matter in five?
If yes, it’s leverage.
If no, it will decay.
Your real wealth isn’t what you earn
It’s what keeps working after you stop