Last Updated on September 19, 2025 by Chin Yi Xuan
Everyone has the same 24 hours each day.
And assuming 2 people who start with equal education and financial background, how they accumulate ‘leverage factors’ will be the biggest differentiating factor in their careers.
Leverage is how you turn a small effort into a relatively bigger outcome.
The outcome isn’t just about money, but can be about your autonomy, flexibility, development, or status at work.
I think about leverage a lot in my career. Let me share some key ideas with you today:
Input x Leverage Factors = Magnified Outcome
Table of Contents
Factor #1: Time-Based Work
My first job was as a part-timer in those escape game rooms after Form 6. I made RM5/hour.
During public holidays, I get paid RM10/hour – but that’s about it. I could serve 5 customers, or 20 customers… but my pay ceiling would not budge.
Time is the first leverage factor that we’ll all start with at the beginning of our careers – and it is also the weakest one of all.
You are paid by the hour, no matter how much value you create. You are replaceable because almost anyone can be trained to do your work.
The job isn’t about you – it’s about the hours (input) you clock in.
Early on, I aspired to reduce reliance on time as my only career leverage.
This led me to the next few factors:
Factor #2: Skills
Things started to change for me when I picked up knowledge and experience in financial planning & investing.
When I conduct workshops, I wasn’t charging for hours – I was charging for value. If I manage to help my audience achieve what they want, I could price my work based on results, not time.
Then I stacked writing into the mix. Then marketing. Skill-stacking helped multiply my value, and propelled my income and flexibility at work.
Here are 3 ideas to maximize the value of your skills:
- Challenge yourself to be compensated for the outcome (performance) instead of your input (time). This could mean selling your own products, commission-based work, or taking up a profit-split income model with your employer.
- Stack your skills. Combine your core strength with complementary ones. Yoga + video editing. Investing + copywriting. Coding + storytelling. Every layer magnifies the value of your work.
- Pick the right market. Not all market pays the same for your skills. Choose the market where the rewards for displaying your skills are higher. (eg. Working with US or SG companies/clients)
Factor #3: Your own product or services
During the pandemic years, people were stuck at home with money they could not spend – and they wanted to invest it.
Coincidentally, a blogpost I wrote on an investing platform was discovered by people who’d like to invest in stocks. The result? My readers started to sign up using my referral link, which opened up my career to numerous opportunities down the line.
It was the first time I experienced leverage. I created the content once. And instead of spending time telling people 1-by-1, the internet helped me reach thousands of people overnight. My income was no longer tied to my hours.
Money aside, this incident taught me to start looking at career decisions through the lens of leverage.
Factor #4: Capital
The most straightforward way to use capital (money) as leverage is to invest it.
An example is the stock market, where you buy a piece of ownership in other people’s businesses, and get rewarded as the businesses thrive.
That’s how I’ve been building my low-maintenance dividend income via my Freedom Fund. It allows me to get paid while I sleep.
Growth aside, capital can also protect you by giving you choices. To quit a toxic workplace. To say ‘No’ to uninspiring projects. To take a leap of faith in life.
In addition, capital can also help to magnify outcome. Like running ads to scale your products. Or hire help to deal with accounting and taxes.
Used well, capital can be a powerful lever in your career & life.
Factor #5: Audience
You don’t have to go viral – you need to build trust.
An audience is the most powerful form of leverage. Because when people trust you, they listen. When they listen, they buy. And often, they’ll buy again.
You do not need millions of followers – you need the right people who resonate with your values, and believe that you can help them.
In his famous essay ‘1000 True Fans’, Kevin Kelly said:
If you have 1,000 people who truly believe in your work and are willing to support you, you can make a living as a creator.
Still unsure about how to build leverage in your career?
Here are what you can do:
- Follow leverage: If your boss/mentor has leverage, it is likely to flow down to you. As they thrive, you will thrive with them.
- Go smaller: Join a smaller company or startup. The smaller it is, the more important you can be – which translates to high leverage opportunities.
- Go together: Join forces with people who have skills that complement yours. That is where you can stake each other’s skills and multiply your value as a collective group.
The challenge in building leverage in a career isn’t the ‘Hows’, but the need for you to make a drastic shift in mindset. To step out of the comfort zone of exchanging time for money. To develop your leverage despite the uncertainties. To stay patient before the compounding effect takes place.
Each leverage factor will unlock new perspectives, bringing in more freedom and choice.
Hope this week’s newsletter got you thinking. All the best!
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p.s. Feel free to share your thoughts with me too! I read all replies!
