Growth Mindset and Leverage - Two Powerful Ways of Thinking That Create Wealth
🧠 Introduction - What Successful People Have in Common
After reading over 50 books on entrepreneurship, I've realized something. Most business books are either completely useless or life-changing. There's rarely a middle ground.
Among them, there are books that had the biggest impact on my business and revenue growth. Today, I'd like to introduce two books about mindset: Carol Dweck's "Mindset" and Naval Ravikant's "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant."
📚 "Mindset" - Carol Dweck
Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset
This book might seem too simple to be useful just from the title. But it's one of the most important books I've read for building a business.
Carol Dweck is a psychologist who spent decades researching how people approach challenges and learning. What she discovered is that people basically operate from one of two mindsets.
🔒 Fixed Mindset
- Believing your abilities are set in stone
- "I'm just not a numbers person," "It's too late for me," "I can't do that"
🌱 Growth Mindset
- Believing anything can be learned and developed with time and effort
The Magic of the Small Word "Yet"
The difference between these two mindsets really comes down to one tiny word: "yet."
Instead of saying "I'm not good at marketing," say "I'm not good at marketing yet." This one word changes everything.
After reading this book, I realized that everyone who's good at something was once terrible at it. The only difference is they stuck with it long enough to get better.
So instead of thinking "I can't do this," I started thinking "I can't do this yet." This small shift made me much more willing to try things, fail, learn, and try again.
💡 Key Insight
If you get discouraged easily or feel like you're not naturally talented at business, this book will completely rewire how you think about learning. The truth is you can learn almost anything. You just haven't learned it yet.
📖 "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" - Eric Jorgenson
Leverage: The Real Way to Create Wealth
This book is a bit different because Naval didn't actually write it. Eric Jorgenson compiled Naval's tweets, podcasts, and interviews into one place.
Naval Ravikant has some of the clearest thinking on wealth creation I've ever encountered. And the core concept from this book that completely changed how I think about money is leverage.
The Trap of Trading Time for Money
Most of us are taught that to make more money, we need to work harder or put in more hours. Want to double your income? Work twice as much. But there's an obvious problem: there are only 24 hours in a day, and you'll eventually hit a ceiling.
Naval says in this book that the real path to wealth isn't about trading more time for money—it's about using leverage to multiply your efforts.
Three Types of Leverage
1️⃣ Labor Leverage
- Hiring people to multiply your time
2️⃣ Capital Leverage
- Using money to make money
3️⃣ Code and Media Leverage 🔥
- What Naval calls "Permissionless Leverage"
- You don't need anyone's permission to create them
- Can reach millions without additional work
💡 My Realization
Reading this on a flight, it really clicked for me. In banking, to make more money, I had to work harder or get promoted. But with YouTube, I could create one video that reaches hundreds of thousands of people, and I could keep earning ad revenue from that one video. I'm investing the same amount of time, but the output is multiplied.
This is probably the biggest mindset shift anyone can make when building wealth. Stop thinking about how many hours you can work and start thinking about how you can use leverage to multiply your efforts.
🎯 Conclusion - The Synergy of Two Mindsets
Growth mindset and leverage thinking complement each other perfectly:
| Growth Mindset | Leverage Thinking |
|---|---|
| "I can't do it yet, but I can learn" | "Greater results from single effort" |
| Abilities are developable | Time can be multiplied |
| Failure is part of learning | Scale with code and media |
If you're stuck in the "time = money" mindset, these two books will open your eyes to a completely different way of thinking about wealth creation that many people haven't been exposed to.
The key takeaway:
- Believe you can learn anything (you just can't do it yet)
- Instead of trading time for money, find leverage
- Code and media are the most powerful leverage—requiring no one's permission
📚 Recommended Books: "Mindset" by Carol Dweck, "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" by Eric Jorgenson