Let’s get one thing straight before we start: I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yacht. If you’ve got one, fabulous. But I am here to call BS on the story we’ve all been sold—the one where wealth is a direct deposit from God for being the smartest, most hardworking person in the room.
Please. I’ve met geniuses working three jobs and I’ve met C-students who “work” from their beach house in Malibu. The difference isn’t their IQ or their hustle. It’s that they understand one golden rule that the rest of us are too busy, tired, or “virtuous” to see.
But first, let’s dismantle the fairy tales, shall we?
Myth 1: They’re Just Smarter.
Look at the last five billionaires you can think of. Are they all Nobel Prize-winning physicists? Or are they people who understood that a social network for rating college girls’ looks could be rebranded? It’s not about being the smartest; it’s about seeing the *leverage points* that smarter people are overthinking.
Myth 2: They Just Work Harder.
Tell that to the single mom working a day shift as a nurse and a night shift driving for Uber. She is working her bones to dust. Is she on the cover of Forbes? No. Because hard work is the "entry ticket", not the destination. It’s the bare minimum. The wealthy aren’t necessarily working harder; they’ve rigged the game so they’re working differently.
So, what’s the secret sauce? What is this one golden rule they’ve all exploited?
It’s embarrassingly simple.
They don’t trade time for money. They trade ‘systems’ for money.
Let that sink in. While you’re trading the hours of your life for a paycheck, they are building or buying systems that generate money *while they sleep*.
This is the grand canyon between the rich and everyone else. They are obsessed with **scale and leverage.**
Your Leverage:Your two hands, your brain, your 24 hours in a day. (Spoiler: It doesn’t scale).
Their Leverage:
Other People’s Time (OPT):They hire employees. This is leverage 101.
Other People’s Money (OPM):They use investor cash, loans, or pre-orders to fund their ideas. They aren’t risking their own life savings.
Technology & Code: An app that sells digital products, a SaaS platform, a viral TikTok account. One piece of content, one piece of code, can be sold, viewed, or used millions of times at virtually no extra cost.
Capital: Their money makes money through investments, real estate, and the stock market. Their assets go to work so they don’t have to.
They aren’t in the business of ‘doing’ the work. They are in the business of ‘owning’ the machine that does the work.
The 40-hour workweek? That’s a cage for the middle class. The rich don’t have jobs; they have assets and equity. They own a piece of the casino, while the rest of us are hoping for a good run at the slot machine.
So, the next time you find yourself admiring a “self-made” billionaire’s “hustle,” take a closer look. You’ll likely find a person who was brilliant at one thing: building a system that allowed them to benefit exponentially from the collective effort of thousands of people, or the collective attention of millions of users.
They didn’t out-work you.
They out-‘systemized’ you.
And the most sassy, uncomfortable truth of all? That system is available for you to build, too. But it requires you to stop glorifying the grind and start designing the machine.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go build a system. This blog post isn’t going to write itself. (Actually, with a good enough system, maybe one day it will).