The Secret to Building Wealth with Permissionless Leverage

4 min read

In a 1994 interview with the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, Steve Jobs said something remarkable in regards to life and its possibilities:

“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

 

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

Here’s a snippet from the actual interview:

He goes on to add:

“The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

 

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

I stumbled across this video a few years ago, but it didn’t have much of an effect on me because I had never, as Jobs says, “poked life” in any meaningful way before to see that something could actually “pop out” the other side.

Up to that point in my life, I had simply followed the traditional path of graduating high school, attending college, and getting a job in Corporate America.

It was only once I had become fed up with the 9-5 lifestyle that I decided to research other ways to earn income. This lead me to discover the world of profitable websites. The process was straightforward:

1. Buy a domain name and a hosting plan.

2. Set up a website.

3. Produce content for the website.

4. Monetize the content.

Done correctly, you could earn money by producing content around a topic you’re interested in.

Over the past three years, that’s exactly what I’ve done with a portfolio of sites including:

Four Pillar Freedom: A site dedicated to personal finance and wealth creation,  two topics I’m passionate about.

Statology – A site dedicated to statistics education, a topic that I have extensive knowledge in due to my master’s degree in statistics and four years of experience as a data scientist.

Wander Cincinnati – A site dedicated to sharing the best that the city of Cincinnati has to offer, a topic that I’m also passionate about.

After about three years I was able to earn enough income purely from websites that in the summer of 2019 I quit my day job as a data scientist to pursue online entrepreneurship full-time.

I had, as Jobs said, had the life-changing realization that I could actually mold and change the world around me. I could create websites, publish them online, and take control over my income streams.

Best of all, earning money with websites has two built-in perks that make it possible to build incredible wealth:

1. No Permission Required

It’s possible to earn income from websites without anyone’s permission. I don’t need a specific degree, certification, permission, or even special connections to make sites from scratch and earn money from them.

This realization has changed my life. In a world where individuals and companies obsess over degrees and credentials, the internet is a frontier where you don’t need anyone’s permission to make something from scratch and earn money from it.

I also don’t need anyone’s permission to earn more money at any point. If I want more income, I just need to produce more content on my websites. No meeting with a boss, no pleading my case for why I deserve a raise or promotion, no crossing my fingers in hopes of a good year-end bonus.

I’m in control of my own income streams. I don’t need to convince someone that I should earn a certain amount; the internet automatically rewards me with income based on how much value I provide to other people around the world.

2. Infinite Leverage

The other built-in perk of earning money with websites is infinite leverage. By writing one article about a specific topic, I can reach thousands of people around the world who are searching for that topic online.

This is a fairly new concept in the span of human existence, but it’s life-changing once you comprehend it.

For example, if I was a statistics tutor in 1990 I would have to go door to door around my neighborhood or perhaps post an ad in a newspaper to find potential students to tutor. And once I found students, I could only tutor one at a time.

Today, I can write an article about a certain statistics topic on Statology and tens of thousands of students around the world can find this article on Google and use it to learn about the topic themselves. Best of all, I get paid via ads on the website each time a student reads through the article.

That’s called leverage. I do the work once and get paid over and over again, at scale.

And if I want more income, I simply produce more articles. For example, suppose one article gets 1,000 page views per month and brings in $15 per month in ads. The more articles I have that are doing this, the higher my income:

100 articles = $1,500

200 articles = $3,000

300 articles = $4,500

You can see how one’s monthly income from websites could easily skyrocket after just a few years.

Imagine that you have one website with 200 articles on it generating $3,000 per month in income. If you replicate that process and build a new site around a different topic that also earns $3,000 per month, you’ve increased your monthly income to $6,000. Replicate it with two more sites and you’re at $12,000 per month. That’s $144,000 per year. 

Sure, it might take 5-7 years to reach that point from scratch, but that’s still more money than most people will ever make in a year after working at a company for several decades.

Conclusion

The internet has completely transformed both how you can earn income and how much you can earn, yet 99% of the population doesn’t understand this. 

The old model of earning a high income was: Get a degree in a high-paying field and add value to one company.

The new model of earning a high income is: Learn internet skills (SEO, writing, marketing, programming) and add value to thousands of people around the world.

The new model allows you to build wealth with permissionless leverage. Best of all, there’s no upper limit on the income you can earn using the new model.

Full Disclosure: Nothing on this site should ever be considered to be advice, research or an invitation to buy or sell any securities, please see my Terms & Conditions page for a full disclaimer.