The Two Biggest Levers
There are more twenty something millionaires making self made fortunes than ever before. The internet has unleashed this gold rush stemmed from creating 2 massive points of leverage.
The first is software. The prototypical silicon valley entrepreneur who codes up an application to disrupt billion dollar industries.
The second is media. Web 2.0 has created the influencer; people that create content through videos, photos, blogs/newsletters, podcasts, etc.
Why makes these two areas high leverage?
Inputs are disproportionate to outputs
As soon as you ship a piece of software or a blog post it becomes an asset. This asset works for you while you sleep. This is unlike most professions such as a pharmacist, that trade their time for money.
In both these areas, the inputs are disproportionate to outputs. You can code up a piece of software, or make a video on YouTube, and thousands, even millions, of people can use or see it at the click of a button. As soon as you ship this out to the world, it can then start to work fro you while you sleep. Software and media are where assets are made.
Low cost of entry
Both software and media have a low cost of entry. My laptop is just as powerful as a world class engineer at Google. My smartphone is capable of taking breath-taking photos. Nearly everyone has a computer and smartphone, and just these two devices are more than enough to get started.
Scalability
You can code up a piece of software, or make a video on YouTube, and thousands, even millions, of people can use it or see it at the click of a button. Maintaining code infrastructure is much easier than it was before thanks to services like AWS. And luckily there’s very little infrastructure that a media influencer needs to deal with.