🔻 Base — Skilled Labor Trading time for money. The Industrial Revolution model. Most people are stuck here.
🔺 Level 1 — Intellectual Property (IP) + Media Rather than learning more stuff, you reflect and create. Document what you’ve done, turn it into a story, record a video, make a guide. IP is anything written, on video, or audio. Steven Covey is the example — a church leader and small business consultant who reflected on what he’d seen, wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, sold 20 million copies, and built a $400M consulting company — based on IP, not his labor.
🔺 Level 2 — Data + Software Build a database. Capture email addresses, customer information, survey results, scorecards. Then turn your IP into an engine that automatically delivers a result. Software — including AI applications — lives in this bucket.
🔺 Top — Financial Assets Package everything into a business that can be sold. The shares become a financial asset. This is where significant wealth is created.
You can’t jump straight from skilled labor to software and AI. You have to go through IP → media → data → software.