16d • Journal Entries
Stop Trading Hours for Dollars and Start Asking What Your Decisions Are Worth When Scaled
Ten Decisions, Twenty-Two Million Dollars
Why the gap between what you know and what you earn has nothing to do with effort and everything to do with leverage.
I was opening my mail this morning and couldn’t believe what I found. I actually won the lottery. I had overpaid my company tax bill for 2025, and sitting in my pile was a refund check from the New Jersey government. That’s the first time I’ve ever received a check from them. It’s usually me with my hand over my face, gasping at whatever crazy amount of underpayment they’ve figured out I owe. The famous shortfalls I seem to get every year because they always want more and more. But not today. Today was a win.
After that piece of mail was another one, a summary from my IRA sent by Brown Advisory. I don’t usually look at these things, but I opened it for a cursory review. It’s a standard mutual fund, a mid-level conservative mix of stock portfolios. Nothing unusual. I started scanning through the normal statistics of a pretty standard review, and then I saw some numbers that stopped me cold.
Total assets: $6 billion. Number of holdings: 34 stocks. And the line below that, the one I was staring at: $22 million in fees.
Let me get this straight. You have 34 stocks and you charge $22 million to manage them. No wonder the financial industry makes so much money. A handful of decisions a year, maybe the turnover of 10 stocks, and that’s $22 million. Ten decisions. Twenty-two million dollars. That works out to about $38 per $10,000 invested. Pretty good yield-to-value equation if you’re on the receiving end.
It really got me thinking about value. The leverage or non-leverage we have and what we could do about it. The mechanic turns a wrench. The teacher plans her lessons. The bartender shines up his glasses. Anyone working has a value, but it’s the leverage on that value that determines the output. That’s what my example above with the financial advisory group illustrates so clearly.
It made me think about what I’m good at and how my own value-to-leverage equation could produce better wealth. Most people are still just working today because their value-to-leverage equations aren’t adequate for wealth. They’re very low, in fact. It’s hard to scale leverage when your hands are deep in a Toyota Tundra changing a spark plug.
But for the rest of us, the knowledge workers, how can we make our value-to-leverage quotient larger? I thought about what I could do, what I could write about, what I could produce in videos to keep expanding on my leverage with my experience.
One, case studies. Real-world accounts of people who’ve come into my world and how we’ve helped grow their businesses. The stuff that actually works.
Two, process and structure. Business operations, systems, all the things we implement and how it works. Sort of like the digital plumbing for businesses.
Three, advertising best practices. Giving away the secrets, the things that get us success running campaigns for our clients. Real solutions, not theory.
Four, business growth lessons. From everything I’ve built. I built a multimillion-dollar business and I’m building a new one today, all by hand, all from scratch, starting from zero. There’s a lot of lessons in that.
Five, coaching and mentoring. Many of my clients need accountability for their activities. They need help focusing on the items that move their business forward instead of the day-to-day head-in-the-sand model, which is pretty much most businesses.
But then I really started to think about what’s the best leverage of all things to consider, and it’s a dead bull’s-eye on the revolution we are experiencing right now through AI. There’s no question about it.
My biggest leverage might be my real-time experience with learning the leverage of the leverage. AI as a multiplication process of learning and implementing solutions that are scaling faster than we can even possibly think. There’s no doubt in my mind that those who use these tools to accelerate their value-to-leverage equation can secure a much better wealth quotient.
But that $38 per $10,000 that Brown Advisory charges makes me think. If I only had to make 10 decisions a year? Wow. That’s a pretty good yield-to-value equation.
The Lesson
Your hands don’t make you wealthy. Your decisions do. A fund manager doesn’t get paid $22 million because he works harder than a mechanic. He gets paid because the leverage sitting underneath his decisions is enormous. The same knowledge, the same handful of choices, applied across $6 billion instead of one car in one bay.
That’s the entire game. And right now, for the first time in history, AI is handing that kind of leverage to people who have never had access to it before. The question isn’t whether you’re smart enough or experienced enough. The question is whether you’re willing to stop trading hours for dollars and start asking yourself what your decisions are actually worth when you multiply them across the right platform. Because the value was always there. The leverage is what was missing.
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Stop Trading Hours for Dollars and Start Asking What Your Decisions Are Worth When Scaled
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