The 4 C's of Leverage!

It’s Nov 2nd, 2023.

I finally get to meet one of my biggest idols: Sahil Bloom (story on how this happened here).

In our 20ish minute conversation, I remember telling Sahil about feeling the pressure to keep up with my early successes at 15.

His response stuck with me: Instead of feeling overwhelmed by it, why don’t you change your mindset towards it and think about how you can leverage your previous successes towards whatever you’re working on.  

After listening to him, I slowly realised over the next couple of weeks, that I was running away from my previous self and trying to be someone that I am not - at the time, trying to start a tech startup.

Instead, I needed to look within myself and Leverage my previous experiences to achieve my end goal: helping 1 billion people around the world.

But what does leverage even mean and how can I apply it in my current life?

This led me down this rabbit hole and that’s when I discovered the 4 C’s of Leverage - a framework that has truly changed how I approach things now.

I first came across it on the Almanack of Naval Ravikant (which I recommend you read) and then on this tweet from Alex Hormozi.

They talk about in the business context, but I think it can apply to each one of us.

Here is what leverage means and how you can apply the 4 C’s in your own life…

When I think of leverage, my head immediately goes to the root word: a lever.

A lever is a tool that is used to move a heavier object by applying some force on one end.

Historically, the ancient Egyptians used levers to lift stones weighing over 100 tons to build the pyramids.

What the lever allows you to do is get a disproportionately more output than the effort you put in - like the Egyptians lifting 100 tons of stone.

So what are the levers in our life and how can you use them?

*The 4 C’s Enter the Chat*

First C: Collaboration (other people’s time)

When you’re working on something, you initially trade your time for the outcomes (money, impact, grades, etc).

But we all have only have 24 hours/ day, which means we have a bottleneck in terms of how much we can do.

That’s when other people come in.

At my nonprofit - it took us 3 years to help 500 people.

And then because of the pandemic, we were forced to collaborate with organisations across Kenya to distribute our products.

These partnerships took our impact from 500 to 8000 in one year.

Whether it’s a school project, your business or at work - one lever you can use is by collaborating with or hiring other people.

Second C: Capital (other people’s money)

Whatever you’re working on - more money allows you to move way faster. And you can’t or don’t always have a lot of your own money,

That is why people raise money for the businesses to scale, for example.

When I start my nonprofit, I’d reach out to lots of people to donate to us.

I would get a lot of rejections because no one wanted to give their money to a random 15 year old.

So we started selling shawarmas at our school events every couple weeks and we’d make $200-300/ per event.

But that could only take us so far? There were only so many events and so many shawarmas we could sell.

That’s when we started pitching to companies to sponsor our products in exchange for putting their logos on them.

We eventually got our first sponsor: $12,500 and then our second: $30,000 and so on…

This money is what allowed us to scale quickly and go from 500-25,000 people in a couple years.

More money - More leverage - More output.

For the first two, Naval mentions that they both require permission.

For Collaboration, somebody has to decide to work with you. For Capital, somebody has to give you their money.

Both of them are dependent on others.

The next two C’s are permission-less and are so relevant now more than ever.

Third C: Content (other people’s attention)

We live in a time more connected than ever before.

And with online platforms, you can reach millions of people at almost no cost.

I mean just look at me - I am a random 22-year old writing to over 100k+ people from my dorm room in Vancouver at almost no cost.

And more attention means more distribution I have - which will eventually allow me to make more $$ with whatever I end up doing with this.

Let me give you another example:

In 2020, I joined Sophia Kianni as an Outreach Director at her newly formed org at the time Climate Cardinals.

Our first step: recruit volunteers

TikTok was popping off at the time and Sophia asked some of her friends to make some videos to promote the application.

Those posts went viral and guess how many apps we got? Not 100, not 1000 but over 6000+ apps (I feel like it was more but I don’t remember the number).

We then used that as leverage to set up partnerships with orgs like National Geographic, Translators without Borders, UNEP, etc which eventually led Sophia to become the youngest advisor to the UN-Secretary General.

That’s leverage.

Fourth C: Code (use a machine’s time)

Code allows you to scale in a way that hasn’t been done before.

You can create a software and it can run without you even when you’re asleep.

The best part is that it virtually has no marginal cost of use/ production.

The Elon’s, Mark’s, Steve’s and Jeff’s of the world have all built their empire leveraging code.

And now with AI it’s easier than ever before to leverage code and automate your life.

Think about how you plan to use Code as leverage for whatever you’re working on.

One last thing, I will add - you don’t have to have or use all of the 4 C’s.

This is just a framework and just like any other framework - think about how you can use it to apply to your life for whatever you’re working on.

Right now with Leaders of Today, I am not using external Capital for example but I am definetely Collaborating with others, putting out Content and building Code in the back end.

Eventually, this will give me more Capital to even further scale my work.

I would love to hear from you. What are you currently working on? How would you say you’re applying the above framework in your own life?

Send me a note at [email protected] - I reply to every email!