FINDING A POSITION OF LEVERAGE

After reading Naval Ravikant’s “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant”, I came across his idea of building expertise and a brand in an undervalued niche, so that when it comes into view, you can emerge as leveraged as possible. For example, in “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, he provides the anecdoe of Bill Gate’s rise to power:

“Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, had a unique opportunity during his formative years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He attended Lakeside School in Seattle, which was one of the very few schools in the United States that had a computer terminal at that time. The terminal was connected to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle.
What made this situation extraordinary was that Gates and his schoolmates had virtually unlimited access to this terminal. The Mothers’ Club at Lakeside raised funds to purchase computer time on this mainframe, and Gates and his friends were able to use it freely. This was during a period when access to computers was extremely limited and costly for most people.”

Essentially, Gates was able to build up his skills in an extraordinary position in which few people had access or even saw the utility in computers. When the internet took off, he was uniquely positioned, being one of the few people on the planet with over 10,000 hours logged. This concept came to me a week after reading “The Talent Code”, in which Daniel Coyle also assesses that world class skill comes from 10,000 hours of dedicated practice.

I’ve chosen my niche to be Blockchain technology. In order to track my progress, I’m using an app called Clockify, which I stumbled across by accident when trying to find an app to track my study time for the CPA exam, but deleted after thinking there was no timer function (there was). Not only will this track how much time I’ve spent mastering the technology, but it also helps serve as motivation that I am making progress. I’ve also used Zapier (finally found useful utility for it) to connect it to my Google Calendar, so I can also track how I spend my time in otherwise white spaces on my calendar. My github profile is linked below, but I’ll also be playing around with the Clockify API and Zapier to see if I can code it to automatically create time logs that update my progress in hours here.

• GitHub

4/7/2025 – I’ve unfortunately had to set aside the blockchain niche for now, in favor of finishing the CPA exams. However, it looks like if I’m able to finish all of the CPA exams over a two month timespan, I’ll have a couple months capacity to take on more niche knowledge. In finding a position of ‘permission-less leverage’, as Naval Ravikant calls it, I feel that this includes Artificial Intelligence. I’m considering pursing a masters in AI from WGU in this short period of spare time. Right now I’m working on the logistics and planning behind the scenes. I’m sure I have the financing figured out, with the degree having no cost to me, but am just working on the timeline to figure out if I’m able to squeeze it in.

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