The invisible engine of freedom
Effort fades. Leverage endures.
Most people try to work harder.
Long-game players learn to build levers.
They understand that freedom doesn’t come from working less. It comes from building systems that keep working when they stop.
You can grind twelve hours a day and still crawl. Effort is finite. Energy fades. Life happens.
I’ll let Rocky explain it to you in one of the most famous lines from Rocky Balboa (2006):
“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place, and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward — how much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”
No matter how motivated you are right now or how much energy you put into something, if you’re like 99.99% of people, you won’t sustain it forever.
The variable that multiplies everything is leverage.
Output = Effort × Leverage
Effort is capped by time.
Leverage scales effort beyond you.
Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
That’s the essence of modern freedom. You don’t escape work. You design mechanisms that compound while you rest.
A London Tuesday
London 2013. I’m 21.
I discovered coffee and it tasted like ambition and panic. I was working as a UI/UX designer at an agency, pushing pixels for clients I’d never meet.
One Tuesday, I watched my boss present my work to a client as agency output. My mockups, his slides and bill it at ten times my rate. He didn’t design a thing. He didn’t even rename the file.
That day I understood leverage for the first time.
He wasn’t smarter or faster. He simply owned the system. He had distribution, positioning, and trust. All the invisible multipliers. My effort was his leverage.
I swore I’ll learn how to get more leverage.
Years later, I learned the same lesson in reverse, thanks to my friend Viktor from Iceland, the calmest person in the world.
I was buried in side projects, deadlines, and open tabs. Viktor just looked at me and stoically said, “You don’t need to do anything.”
Thanks to my 10-day Vipassana experience I was able to see clearly what he was saying.
Leverage wasn’t only about scale. It was also about subtraction. Doing less, but at a higher altitude.
That mindset shift changed everything.
Write a blog post on your own site and you’ll get 20 views. Publish the same story on a major outlet and it reaches millions.
When The Observer republished my article 12 Powerful Habits I Have Stolen from Ultra-Successful People, it became one of their top stories of the year.
Exactly the same words, just on a bigger lever.
Leverage turns the same effort into asymmetric outcomes.
The four forms of modern leverage
Code & media. Infinite distribution. Write once, reach forever.
Capital. Money hiring money. Invest in compounding assets, not status toys.
People. Brains that extend your own but only if your systems make clarity scalable.
Reputation & network. Trust that shortens every future deal.
You don’t need all four. One quiet lever that compounds beats ten noisy ones that don’t.
Leverage buys back attention, and attention is the raw material of every long-game.
The long-game player asks a single question daily:
“Does this decision increase my future leverage?”
If the answer is no, it’s noise.
Effort fades. Leverage endures.
Notes
Naval Ravikant on Leverage. “Code and media are permissionless leverage. You can multiply yourself a thousandfold with no one’s approval.” Read: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
Archimedes on Force. “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth.” Every era has new levers. Electricity, TV, internet, AI. The principle never changed.
Andy Grove on Multipliers. “A manager’s output is the output of their organization.” People leverage works only when clarity of direction exists. Read: High Output Management.
James Clear on Systems. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Read: Atomic Habits.
This is Vicious Notes. My study of clarity, power, and compounding for long-game players who want to build and endure.
I wish I could credit everyone that influenced my thinking and I try my best to attribute the source but just want to declare it here and onwards that any accidental brilliance you read here comes from the great minds and people in the arena. As Sir Isaac Newton would say, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.
Freedom scales with leverage.
Audit your work. Turn one effort into many outcomes.
Great reminder as always, Tom! I'll take this to heart.
Even though, sometimes, thinking about all the “leverage” and “opportunity” is frying my brains… sometimes just doing the thing for the thing's sake is all I want.