A friend of mine, let’s call him Vikram, once told me something that took me years to understand fully.
He said, “Bhai, rich people don’t work for money. They make their money work for them”.
At that time, I thought he was repeating the same line from the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. Most fake gurus on the internet say the same freaking thing.
But it took me years of losing money in the stock market and struggling with my weight to understand that this one sentence explains almost everything.
That’s called leverage.
Wait! Not the margin leverage we take in trading.
What leverage actually means
Forget the textbook definition for a second.
In simplest terms, leverage is the gap between how much work you put in and how much you get out of it.
High leverage means you put in little work and get a lot out of it. Low leverage means you put in a lot of work and get very little out of it.
A job is a low-leverage play.
You trade hours for money, and if you stop showing up, the money stops too. No matter how senior you get, there’s a ceiling because you are the manpower and the leverage for the company, not the other way around.
Moreover, you can only work for certain hours in a day. Your manpower is limited.
Now let’s talk about the stock market. What’s the real leverage in it? You guessed it right.
Capital.
Capital, when put to work in the market, is a completely different kind of leverage. There’s almost no manpower involved, apart from analyzing trades and executing them.
Money doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t need sleep, it doesn’t take sick leave, and it doesn’t need you to sit at your desk all day to keep multiplying.
Once you have real capital compounding in your trading account, it keeps working for you even at 3 AM while you’re asleep. That’s something no job on earth can offer.
Now, before you start calling me anti-job, I’m not telling you to quit your job tomorrow and start trading full-time.
In fact, it’s almost the opposite. Let me explain why.
The most dangerous sentence in trading
“I’ll leave my job and start trading full time”.
I’ve heard some version of this sentence from at least a dozen people over the years, usually after they’ve had two or three good months in the market.
And almost every single time, it ends badly. Not because trading is a scam, but because of one thing people conveniently forget.
Trading is about probability, not certainty.
SEBI, India’s market regulator, conducted a detailed study on individual F&O traders using transaction data from every broker in the market. The numbers are hard to argue with.
In FY24–25, 91% of individual equity derivatives traders lost money, with the average loss at about ₹1.1 lakh. This was almost the same as the previous year, when nearly 9 in 10 traders also ended up with losses.
Read that again. Not 9 out of 10 bad traders, but 9 out of 10 traders ended up in the red.
Most of them started with hope, a YouTube channel, maybe a Telegram group giving calls, and ended up paying for an expensive lesson with their hard-earned money.
This is exactly why a job isn’t the enemy. It’s actually your biggest asset in this business.
A stable income and multiple income streams give you something the market will never give you on its own: certainty.
The certainty that one bad month in the market won’t stop you from paying your rent or your bills.
When trading isn’t your only source of bread and butter, you trade like someone who has nothing to prove. You’re not constantly stressed about making money only to make ends meet.
But when it’s your only source of bread and butter, you trade like someone desperate to make money. Unfortunately, desperate decisions and consistent profits don’t go together.
So the real leverage isn’t quitting your job for trading. It’s using your job’s stability to protect your capital while it slowly learns to work for you in the background, without needing your full attention.
The advantage I never had
I can say this with more conviction than most, because I never took the job route. My bread and butter came from fitness and nutrition coaching, without a fixed monthly salary.
Trading on top of it was much harder for me because I didn’t have the cushion a stable salary gives.
There is a hidden downside of trading without a steady income.
Every rupee you trade often has to cover next month’s expenses. Every loss hits differently, with more fear, more pressure, and more desperation baked into every decision. That pressure alone makes trading harder before you’ve even opened a chart.
Whereas that same monthly salary that feels like a ceiling in one context becomes a shield in another. It lets you build and protect your trading capital without depending on it to cover next month’s expenses.
So if you have a job right now, you’re already at an advantage most people don’t even realise they have. The guaranteed cash flow a job gives can be redirected and used as leverage in trading.
You don’t need to quit your job for trading. You only need to leverage it.
Tuition first, leverage later
I’ve talked about this before, many times.
Initial losses are tuition fees paid to the market. That part doesn’t change.
Everyone who starts trading will lose some money at first. It’s part of the process.
No course can teach you how you’ll feel, how your heart races, and how you handle the pressure when a trade goes against you. You’ll only learn this through experience.
Leverage only becomes useful once you’re past that stage.
Using real capital as leverage while you’re still learning is like handing a learner driver the keys to a truck instead of a small car.
The fundamentals don’t change. The lessons don’t change. Only the size of the damage does.
Once the basics fall into place, like risk management, position sizing, and a system you trust, only then does capital become the real leverage.
It grows and protects itself with far less of your time and energy than any job ever could. That’s the power of leverage. Doing less while getting significantly better results.
The same principle, sitting on your plate
The Day I Realized Fitness and Trading Are the Same
The same leverage principle applies to fat loss as well. Almost nobody thinks about it this way.
Most people trying to lose fat believe the answer is more effort. More hours in the gym, more starving, and more punishing themselves for a bad week.
That’s low-leverage thinking. A lot of effort for very little reliable output, because the effort is aimed at the wrong target.
The real leverage in fat loss isn’t the gym or your workouts. It’s tracking what you eat.
Research consistently shows that people tend to underreport how many calories they eat. Most people trying to lose fat underestimate how much they eat and overestimate how much they burn.
The gap between what they believe and what’s actually true is where their progress quietly dies.
Weighing food and tracking removes that guesswork. It replaces assumptions with actual numbers.
That one habit, done consistently, is more valuable than any new workout split, supplement, or fat-loss strategy.
Tracking your food is the real leverage in fat loss. It makes a calorie deficit predictable and easier to achieve.
NEAT: The quiet leverage to lose fat nobody talks about
There’s a second leverage point that gets almost no attention: NEAT(Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis).
In simple terms, NEAT is all the movement you do outside your workouts.
Walking while talking on the phone, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, standing instead of sitting, and even fidgeting.
All these little movements burn calories, even if you’re not exercising.
Someone who naturally moves more throughout the day can burn hundreds of extra calories without ever stepping on a treadmill. That’s leverage.
Research consistently shows that NEAT can account for a large part of your daily calorie burn, often contributing more than your workouts.
This is leverage in its purest form.
You’re not adding another punishing hour at the gym. You’re simply moving a little more throughout the day you were already going to live anyway.
Small input and bigger output. Just like capital working quietly in the background while you sleep.
Fundamentals first, optimization later
Capital becomes a leverage once you’ve learned to manage risk and survived the tuition phase. Tracking and NEAT work the same way. They amplify results only when the fundamentals are already in place.
Stay in a calorie deficit. Strength train. Move more throughout the day. Do that consistently, and you’ll stop restarting every Monday.
No calorie deficit = no fat loss.
No risk management = no sustainable profits in trading.
A trader who deploys more capital before learning risk management blows up faster. A dieter who focuses on a “perfect” plan before building the basics is more likely to quit.
If you’re looking for the secret, this is it.
Stick to the boring basics first. Then let leverage do the heavy lifting. That’s smart work, not just hard work.
One of the highest forms of leverage is borrowing someone else’s experience instead of paying for every lesson yourself.
Here’s a FREE guide to kick-start your fat loss and start today.
Leverage it.