Renting Out Your Time and Working for Yourself

Originally published in the Zhihu column Scaling Thoughts, 2025-02-08

Since I happened to answer a question on this topic, I thought I'd revise and organize my thoughts into an article. I feel there are some commonalities between leverage and scaling. I originally wanted to call it "Leveraging Thoughts," but in the end I decided to stick with this name.

Most of the content is copied directly from that answer. I'll just briefly share my own experiences and thoughts. Since I'm still "on the road" and don't have any stories of success to share, you can just take this lightly. Looking back a few years from now, I might find all of this a bit naive. This post also serves as a book review of sorts for a business book (The Almanack of Naval Ravikant), so just read it for fun~

"Once you've tasted freedom, it will make you unemployable."

The Past: Side Hustles Selling Time

Back in college, I started doing some simple side hustles. At first, it was selling credit cards (going door-to-door in dorms), editing papers to lower plagiarism scores, and later tutoring for after-class assignments. Eventually, thanks to the trust of some friends and seniors, I was referred some freelance outsourcing work.

To be honest, I have some regrets about most of those experiences. In essence, I was still renting out my time, trading it for money rather than wealth (I'll talk about my thoughts on wealth later). Moreover, your time has the highest leverage during your student years (undergrad), and I really should have spent more of it studying. However, looking back and reflecting on it now, I realize it was precisely those experiences that sparked my later reflections. Cause and effect, as they say. Furthermore, by a stroke of luck, I ended up joining a research group that wasn't overly focused on academic publishing, had a fantastic atmosphere, and ultimately allowed me to land an internship at Google as I had hoped. In hindsight, that was a perfect path for me. I believe the one form of equal wealth everyone possesses is time. I earned money from some of my side hustles, and I used some of that money to buy back time (including, but not limited to, taking faster transportation and investing more heavily in productivity tools; so I think smart spending is also a skill. This isn't advocating lifestyle inflation, and those with similar experiences will naturally understand). Because of this, for a long time I believed in this rule: "If the money I earn from selling my time can buy me back even more time, it's a worthwhile trade."

Reflection: Pricing My Time Wrong

It seems I've been digressing up to this point, so please bear with me as I lay this out slowly.

The reasons I later came to feel this wasn't actually a worthwhile trade are:

• I ignored the opportunity cost of time.
• I ignored the effect of leverage.
• I failed to price my own time accurately.

I know many seniors and mentors, and I think one of the few abilities I have is trying my best to "make friends" with people who are currently more successful and experienced than I am (not necessarily in terms of age). Many people believe that making friends essentially requires an equivalence of value, whether in terms of current value or future value. So this is a study in itself. If I were to reflect on why I've had opportunities to make friends like these, my answer would probably be: self-motivation (future value), the reliability to get things done (trust), and dabbling in various fields while gathering information broadly (future value).

Getting back to the point, I had some conversations with them and asked the kinds of questions many of you might also ask. I felt all their answers were "right," but they are things you have to experience for yourself. One point in particular made a lot of sense to me later on: a manager's time is simply too valuable. For him, starting something like "indie development" from scratch is worse than just resting, because it wastes energy and isn't worth much compared to his hourly rate.

I'm not talking about "indie development" in the narrow sense here. I believe indie development is essentially about creating your own "wealth" and working for yourself. My understanding of wealth is inseparable from the influence of many business books: it is something that provides stable cash flow and generates "sleep" income (passive income). Examples include fixed assets that generate capital income, your software, your blog, your videos, and so on.

Moreover, leverage exists in everything. Let me quote directly from the book here:

Some of this is cliché, yet it still holds value. The reason ideas like this sometimes become overly commercialized and despised is essentially that people exaggerate the scope of where they apply. Looking back, the side hustles I did back then were somewhat shortsighted. I was still selling my time and doing things without leverage (which determines future value). I overlooked the fact that my present time is actually just as valuable as my future time. I should have spent the period when I was poorest (because I had no salary, haha) doing things that would have an impact and hold value for the future. You are never going to get rich renting out your time.

To quote another line: "Set an aspirational personal hourly rate and stick to it. If outsourcing a task or not doing something will cost you less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don't do it. If you want to make real money, you first have to believe you are worth a lot."

This is why I feel my previous side hustles weren't worthwhile.

The Solution: Doing Things with Leverage?

Now that we've identified the problem, how do we solve it? Haha, if you're hoping to find the secret to success here, this article won't give you the answer. Paths to success cannot be replicated; being yourself is much more important. So I'm writing down my thoughts and my mental journey simply hoping to offer some readers a bit of inspiration.

Early on, I had the idea to work for self, which is why I always hoped to join a foreign company to give myself some breathing room, whether for physical health or for pursuing side projects. Working at domestic companies, in most cases, requires renting out all of your time. So when choosing between working on LLMs and joining a foreign company, I chose the foreign company. Foreign companies are certainly going through turbulence right now, but nothing in life is perfect; you just do your best.

With that groundwork laid, I started thinking about what angles I could use to apply leverage:

1) Labor leverage feels too inefficient to me. I tried being a minor project lead in some open-source communities and realized I'd rather just write the code myself. I suppose I don't have a talent for being a manager. At the same time, in the AI era, I have at least four hardworking workers: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek. The efficiency of myself plus them might be higher than me managing a small team.

2) Since personal efficiency can be scaled up entirely through LLMs in the AI era, I believe full stack && indie development will give rise to new paradigms.

3) Technology has been democratized by the development of LLMs. Unless you are a top pioneer leading the pack, it's hard to say you can make a living purely off technical skills anymore.

4) Marketing and traffic are the most important things in this era. Whether you are building software or not, indie development is sometimes a "fan economy."

5) Therefore, personal influence is crucial. I need to build personal influence, specifically trusted personal influence.

6) Capital leverage is very useful. Friends who have traded know that percentage-based efficiency is insane.

7) However, I'm not sure if I'm very good at it. I have studied basic microeconomics, monetary economics, and related data, and I believe LLMs will multiply our learning efficiency. Still, when it comes to investing (capital leverage), I am a complete novice. Past experience tells me, though, that one of the perks of being a programmer is being able to achieve initial capital accumulation relatively quickly and then start utilizing capital leverage. I plan to make good friends with people around me who are skilled in this area. I am also making some risk-controlled investments myself; I think the financial market educates a person no less than school does. Meanwhile, the foundational knowledge I learned previously keeps me from fearing complex topics in the LLM era (I believe foundational knowledge is even more important in the LLM era: foundational knowledge + LLM ≈ a mini domain expert).

8) That leaves me with the third form of leverage. Right now, the optimal medium is definitely video (the mainstream), though I'm not sure if I'm good at it. I'm quite passionate about writing blogs. A blog is also the third form of leverage, and it helps build a personal brand at the same time.

9) In summary, I've abandoned labor leverage, and I will continue learning about capital leverage without using it lightly. As for products with zero marginal cost of replication, one path is full-stack development in the AI era, and the other is more traditional blogging (though I've recently been thinking about an LLM-powered Blog Workflow, and I might publish those thoughts later). In the future, I might dabble in video-related content (even though I personally feel reading text is a faster way to take in information).

Let's keep pushing forward together.