Hey Reader,

Have you ever spent a whole day on something almost nobody saw?

It's painful when the whole reason you worked hard was because you wanted to reach people.

If you teach a workshop in person, you reach the 20 people in that room. But if you record that same workshop once, you can keep teaching for years on autopilot.

This is the concept of leverage, and it's something I talk about in my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth (you can pre-order it now).

A lot of people will look back at their calendar and evaluate all of their meetings and tasks in terms of how much of the work was within their zone of genius. Or maybe based on what brought you joy.

There's even an exercise I shared awhile back where you score your work on opportunity, skill, and effort and multiply the three numbers.

And while these are all useful, my favorite way to think about things I'm doing is in terms of how much leverage they have—which you could determine by scoring everything you do in a given week on a scale of 1 to 5 (where 5 is high leverage).

For instance, unless someone is helping you unlock something significant, one-on-one meetings are typically low-leverage activities. Whereas recording a podcast is higher leverage.

At least… recording a podcast could be high leverage.

But it's not necessarily guaranteed. It just has the potential to be high leverage.

And this gets to what I've been thinking about lately: there's another dimension beyond whether a task is considered low or high leverage. It also matters whether we're talking about potential or realized leverage.

If you record a podcast and only 5 people listen, did you actually have more impact than the teacher in a room of 20?

Here's a matrix to help you visualize it:

I learned this difference the hard way in the early days of scaling Kit. I was so obsessed with doing things that scale (high potential leverage but low realized leverage), that growth stalled. I never got any momentum, so the flywheel never turned. I'd put these activities in the lower right quadrant of the graph.

What finally changed things was doing direct sales. One-on-one calls. Which seems counterintuitive because those don't scale.

But the realized leverage we got from doing those one-on-one calls was substantial even if their potential leverage score was low. I'd put these activities in the upper left quadrant.

Which corner you should be living in depends on where you are.

With over a hundred team members at Kit, my week has to make room for work that won't pay off this quarter. A week spent entirely on sales calls would waste the position we're in.

Early on, the opposite was true.

Recently, I was listening to an older episode of Noah Kagan's podcast where he interviewed Laura Roeder.

I've known Laura for over a decade, and followed her journey building a social media scheduling tool she staffed with full-time employees and eventually sold for multiple seven figures. It was a successful company, but she told Noah there were endless meetings, and it got to the point where she resented it. Because she couldn't do anything herself without first talking to someone else.

But in this interview, she described her new company, a coaching software business called Paperbell, that's making over a million dollars per year with no full-time employees.

She made an intentional choice to only hire freelancers and build a business that had no meetings beyond a weekly update for the team. So instead of working 8 hours a day where 2 are high leverage, she just does the 2 or 3 hours of highest leverage work and stops there to go be with her kids.

Laura can spend her days that way because the work she's doing is not just high in potential leverage but realized leverage.

So here's your homework:

Look at the biggest time investments you made over the last quarter and give them two scores:

1. Potential leverage - What that work could return (1–5)
2. Realized leverage - What came back from it so far (1–5)

A high potential score next to a low realized score is where you might be deluding yourself. It's okay to give something time to show results, but if it's no longer early, it might be time to drop those activities.

Anything low on both, once it's had enough time to gain traction, isn't paying off either.

But if you notice work that scored low on potential and yielded a lot of results, that's momentum—and it's the easiest work to talk yourself out of because it doesn't scale. Don't.

Score your last month before you plan the next one and you'll know exactly which hours to protect.

​

PODCAST

$1M CEO: How to ACTUALLY Sell Online Courses in 2026

My episode with Layla Pomper last week on pivoting from courses to services really took off. It's one of our top 10 most-viewed episodes.

But today Sam Vander Wielen is back to talk about how she made $500,000 from a course launch in under 4 days. About $198,000 of that came in roughly five minutes on the webinar.

So are courses dead?

Sam says no, and she walks through how she runs hers. We cover:

• The webinar launch system behind a $500,000 launch
• How she drives show up rates before the webinar starts
• What she does inside the webinar to turn viewers into buyers
• The email list strategy she runs between launches to keep it all working

​Watch or listen to episode »​

EVENT

Vote for my SXSW panel: How to Turn Creator Income Into Lasting Wealth

I put in a session for SXSW 2027 with Tori Dunlap, and voting is now open. There are two sides to creator wealth, and we want to talk about both of them:

1. How to structure a creator business so it keeps generating revenue
2. How to convert unpredictable creator income into lasting financial security

Community voting closes August 23. You'll have to sign up for a free account to cast your vote, but I'd really appreciate if you did!

Click the "Vote ♥️" button on the page.

​​Vote for my session »​​

X POST

Courage over intelligence

AI is commoditizing intelligence. But it can't replace courage.

This short post by Sahil Bloom is worth reading.

Stop waiting for permission.

​View post »​

—Nathan

P.S.

Where do you need courage that you may be mistaking for intelligence?