Success is a solvable equation
It’s just four words with three multiplication signs in between.
There’s this sticky note on the wall next to my desk that I haven’t been able to throw away for almost a month now.
It’s just four words with three multiplication signs in between. I wrote it down one afternoon when I was trying to figure out (for the hundredth time), why some people I know are quietly compounding into something serious, while others (often more talented, more disciplined, more “ready”) are still in the exact same spot they were three years ago. I kept circling the same answer from different angles, and eventually it crystallized into this:
Success = Ambition × Identity × Leverage × Creation
That’s it. That’s the whole equation you need to get right to succeed.
And before you come at me, I know how it sounds. Reductive. A bit too clean. The kind of thing you’d expect from a guy on Twitter trying to sound profound. But the more I’ve sat with it, the more it just keeps holding up.
The reason I think it’s important (and the reason I want to spend the next 3,000 words on it) is that it’s multiplication and not addition. That single mathematical choice changes the whole structure of the equation. With addition, you can be weak in one area and make up for it elsewhere. With multiplication, if any single variable is zero, the entire output is zero. You can be running three of these four at a 10 and still be sitting where you’ve been for years because the fourth one is hovering near zero, quietly strangling everything else.
This is not going to be a motivational piece. I’m not going to tell you that you’ve got this. (I tend to be a bit harsh in my writing and frankly, I’ve sat at zero on at least one of these variables for most of my twenties, so I’m not in a position to talk down you either way.)
What this is, is a breakdown. Of the four variables, why each one matters, where I personally got each one wrong, and how to figure out which one is currently the zero in your own equation, so you can lock in on all 4 and finally solve the equation.
This is going to be comprehensive.
Take notes if you want. Or don’t. Whatever floats your boat.
Let’s begin.
Ambition is the engine, and almost everyone is running on a smaller one than they admit
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
When I was 12 years old, I told my mom I was going to be rich some day.
I don’t remember the exact moment. I remember the kitchen we were in. I remember it was probably embarrassing the way 12-year-old declarations are embarrassing. But what I remember most of all is what she said back. She didn’t laugh at me, she didn’t say “we’ll see,” she didn’t soften it for me.
She said, “I know you will.”
That sentence ran in my head for sixteen years. Most of it I didn’t even notice. It was just the floor under everything else. When I was in Denmark doing badly in school, when I was 18 in Spain doing telemarketing, when I was 22 in a corporate sales job I hated, when I was 25 watching my agency collapse from €50K/mo back down, it was always there:
“I know you will”.
I’m telling you this because we need to be honest about where ambition actually comes from. It’s not something you develop from reading books, attending goal-setting workshops or journaling your heart out three times a day. It comes from somewhere much earlier, and most people have been quietly downgrading their version of it for years to avoid the discomfort of wanting something that scares the people around them.
The unfortunate reality is that the ambition you have right now (the real number, not the polite version you say at dinner) is probably about 20% of the size of the thing you actually want.
Most people simply fail because they aimed at a slightly-better version of their current life, hit it, and then wondered why they still feel restless.
To take it a layer deeper, what you actually want is downstream of how you were raised, what you saw, who told you what was possible. My mom telling me “you will” at 12 gave me a forcefield around a number that I never would have allowed myself to want otherwise. Most people don’t get that. Most people got told, gently, to be realistic. And so they were.
If your ambition is small, the rest of this article doesn’t matter. The equation collapses. You can have perfect identity, perfect leverage, perfect creation output, and you will simply build a slightly-better version of an average life.
Worth thinking about before we go further.
Identity is the ceiling, and you keep hitting it without realizing it’s there
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
– Carl Jung
For about three years, I was running a six-figure Notion business and still thought of myself as the kid from Denmark who got into trouble too young, smoked too much weed through his teens, blew €9K on a failed dropshipping store at 20, and was lucky to be making any money at all online.
The numbers said one thing, but the internal story said another.
Guess which one won.
I’d hit €10K/mo and feel like a fraud. I’d hit €30K/mo and find creative ways to spend it down so I felt normal again. I’d watch peers with worse products and weaker positioning blow past me, and I’d quietly explain it to myself with “they have a different background.” Which is just identity dressed up as analysis.
This is the variable nobody talks about because you can’t tweet a 7-step thread about it. Identity isn’t a tactic or a system, it’s the operating system underneath those systems. And the unfortunate reality is that you can be running every correct strategy in the world on top of an identity that’s still calibrated to your old ceiling... and the ceiling will win. It always wins.
Here’s how this actually plays out, mechanically:
You set a goal that sits one or two levels above your current identity
You execute well enough to start approaching it
Your nervous system registers the gap between who you are and who would have this thing
You unconsciously sabotage to close the gap back to baseline
You explain it to yourself as bad luck, bad timing, or the market
This is why identity is the ceiling. The gravitational pull that snaps you back every time you drift above it.
I had to consciously kill the version of myself that thought of business as a thing you almost lose. I had to stop describing myself as “the Notion guy” once that label started capping me. (That’s actually the entire reason I’m doing this brand pivot publicly right now. The old identity was generating the old ceiling, and the new vision needed a new operating system to support it.)
Think of somebody successful you actually know in real life. Someone you’ve watched up close. Notice how they talk about themselves. They don’t say “I’m trying to be” or “I hope to one day.” They say “I’m a builder,” “I’m a writer,” “I run things.” Present tense. They’re not waiting for permission or proof. They’ve already decided who they are.
That’s identity in a nutshell. And confidence is the side effect of it.
If you’re stuck at a number you keep almost crossing, I’d bet you money right now that the issue is identity and not execution. The execution is downstream. You will not consistently behave like someone you don’t believe yourself to be.
To some people, my approach to this seems harsh. I will literally write down “I am a builder who turns systems into products” and read it before I start work, the way someone else might pray. Because I know that if I don’t, my brain will default back to the kid who was lucky to be making any money at all, and that kid will quietly lower the ceiling on my whole day.
This is the variable that costs the most to upgrade and almost nobody is willing to do the work.
Which leads us into the next one perfectly.
Leverage is what turns effort into compounding, and most people are still trading time for money
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.– Archimedes
Here’s a thing I had to learn the slow way, in public, with money on the line: working hard is not the variable. Working hard while building things that work without you is the variable.
For my entire corporate sales career (five years of my life that I will not get back), I worked hard. I was good at what I did. I hit records. I won awards. And I made the company a lot of money while I continued to stay broke. None of the work I did compounded and none of it was leveraged. The second I stopped picking up the phone to do outbound sales calls, the income stopped as well.
Most people are still in some version of that loop. They’ve just changed the wallpaper. They went from a corporate sales job to a freelance design business. From a corporate marketing job to a consultancy. From an employee to a “creator” who’s still trading hours for tweets and money for clients.
The trap is the same: effort, plus more effort, plus rest, plus more effort.
Leverage is what fixes this.
And there are really only a handful of forms of it that matter:
Code/software (the asset you build once that does the work forever)
Content (the post that keeps generating leads months after you wrote it)
Products (the digital asset someone can buy at 3am while you sleep)
Systems (the documented process that lets you or someone else execute without rethinking from scratch)
People (the team that compounds output beyond your individual bandwidth)
Most one-person businesses are running on two of those at most. Usually content and a product. Which works for a while, until you cap out at the limits of how much content you personally can produce.
I learned this the hard way. The Notion template business I built was leveraged in the product sense (templates sell while I sleep) but not leveraged in the content sense (every tweet, every email, every post was me, manually, sitting at a desk).
The reason I’m building Stanley right now is exactly this. I spent years working with ghostwriting clients at $5,000/month, doing the same thing for each of them by hand. Not really leverage, just exceptionally well-paid manual work. Turning that knowledge into software (software that runs across multiple accounts at once, that doesn’t get tired, that compounds the output of one person into the output of an army), is what true leverage actually looks like.
To take it a layer deeper, the reason most people don’t build leverage is that leverage is slow on the front end. You have to invest the time to build the thing that builds the thing. And most people are too anxious about short-term income to give themselves the runway. So they stay in the trap.
I have a phrase I keep returning to: brute force first, leverage second. You earn the right to build leverage by first doing the manual thing long enough to know exactly what to automate. Then you upgrade. Then you compound. That’s the gear change, and most people never make it.
If you’re working hard and not getting anywhere, I would bet again that the issue isn’t lack of effort, but rather that none of your effort is compounding. The work dies the moment you stop typing.
Fix that, and the equation starts cooking.
Creation is the energy source, and without it the other three are just theory
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”
– Walt Disney
If ambition is the engine and identity is the ceiling and leverage is the multiplier, creation is the actual fuel.
You can want a huge thing. You can see yourself as the right person to build it. You can have leverage systems set up and ready. Yet, if you don’t ship (as in, actually ship, publicly, repeatedly, every day, in a way that creates evidence and feedback and momentum), well, hate to break it to you, but none of the rest matters. The equation goes to zero. The other three variables just sit there waiting for something to multiply against.
I learned this in the most brute-force way possible.
In 2021, I discovered Notion, saw what Easlo was doing, and went all in. I didn’t have a strategy or my positioning ready to go. I just... posted. Templates, tweets, Reddit threads, replies. Volume was entire the strategy because at zero I had no other strategy available to me. By June 2022 I was at €2K/mo. By August I had quit my job. None of that would have happened if I’d been “planning.”
This is the thing I keep telling people who are at zero or near it: volume IS the strategy. There is no clever way around this. The people winning right now are not the ones with the best strategy. They are the ones creating at a rate that looks unreasonable to everyone else.
Here’s why this works mechanically:
Creation produces output
Output produces feedback (likes, sales, replies, silence)
Feedback produces information about what actually works
Information sharpens identity (”I’m someone who can do this”)
Sharpened identity raises ambition (”if I can do this, I can do more”)
Higher ambition justifies investing in leverage
Leverage multiplies output
Loop repeats at a higher altitude
If you skip step one, none of the rest of the cycle ever starts. You can read about it. You can plan it. You can buy courses about it. But the cycle does not begin until you ship.
I hate to break it to you, but this is the variable where almost everyone fails the most. And it’s not that they don’t want to create, it’s that they want to create something perfect, and perfection is the disguise that procrastination wears in adulthood.
(There’s a phrase I keep coming back to: the version of you that’s “still preparing” is the same version that will be still preparing in three years. Creation cuts that thread.)
I’m 28 now. I’ve created across three accounts simultaneously this year.
building in public,
writing the strategy, the third account
where I’m running a public 0-to-10K experiment as a case study. None of those would exist if I’d waited until I had “the right plan.” I started each one with a post. Then another. Then another.
The plan emerged from the volume.
If your equation is currently at zero, the most likely culprit is this one. Because creation is the variable that most directly reveals whether you’re actually doing the thing, or whether you’re just thinking about doing the thing while consuming content from people who are doing the thing.
Worth being honest about, on yourself.
Why it’s multiplication and not addition (and what that means for you specifically)
I want to come back to the mathematical choice now, because I genuinely think it’s the most important insight in the whole equation, and I don’t want it to get lost.
If success worked by addition (Ambition + Identity + Leverage + Creation), you could be at zero on one variable and still get somewhere. A 0 plus an 8 plus a 7 plus a 9 still gives you a 24. Not great, but moving.
That’s not how it actually works. The reason high-ambition, low-identity people stall. The reason high-identity, low-leverage people work hard and stay tired. The reason heavy-leverage, low-creation people have beautiful systems running on top of nothing. The reason high-creation, low-ambition people post for years and remain anonymous.
Any zero kills everything else.
This is also why advice is so often useless. Someone tells you “you just need to post more”, but your zero is identity, so more posting just adds volume to your existing ceiling. Someone tells you “you need to think bigger”, but your zero is leverage, so a bigger goal just gives you more hours to burn manually. Someone tells you “you need to build a system”, but your zero is creation, so the system sits empty waiting for you to feed it.
The work, then, isn’t to optimize everything at once. The work is to figure out which variable is currently at zero (or near it) and fix that one. Everything else is a distraction until you do.
Here’s how to actually run this on yourself.
Ambition check: When you say what you want out loud to yourself, does it scare you a little? Or is it a “reasonable” upgrade? If it’s reasonable, your ambition is too small and you’re playing for a raise, not a life. Fix this by writing down what you’d actually want if no one was watching and no one was going to mock you for it. Then say it out loud once a day until it stops feeling embarrassing.
Identity check: When you describe yourself, do you use present tense or future tense? “I’m a builder” versus “I’m trying to become a builder.” Future tense is the giveaway. The gap between the two is the gap between behavior that compounds and behavior that resets. Fix this by deciding on the identity first and letting the behavior follow.
Leverage check: When you stop working, what happens to your income? If the answer is “it stops,” you don’t have leverage. You have a well-paid job you call self-employment. Fix this by identifying the one piece of your work that could become an asset, a product, a system, a piece of software, a piece of content, and building it before you do anything else this quarter.
Creation check: Look at the last 30 days. Count your outputs. Not drafts, not ideas, not plans, but actual shipped things. Posts, products, emails, videos, whatever your medium is. If the number is small, that’s your zero. Fix this by lowering the bar dramatically and increasing the rate. Volume first. Quality emerges from quantity, never the other way around.
One of these is almost always the weakest link. Find it. Spend ninety days on that one variable specifically.
Then re-run the math.
The reason most people will never run this equation honestly
I want to end on something a little more uncomfortable, because I think it’s the actual lesson underneath the whole framework.
The reason most people don’t audit themselves with this equation is that the audit is brutal. Every single variable on this list is something you have full control over and have been quietly avoiding for years. You can blame the market, the algorithm, the economy, your background, your industry, but ambition, identity, leverage, and creation are all yours. Nobody else gets to set those numbers.
When you actually run the equation, you find out which one you’ve been dodging.
For me, for most of my twenties, it was identity. The numbers were rising. The ambition was there (thanks, Mom). The creation was relentless. The leverage was being built. And I was still feeling broke and unseen because the kid from Denmark who almost made it was still the loudest voice in my head.
For my brother (who’s a psychologist by trade), it might be ambition, he’s brilliant and disciplined but operates inside a smaller frame than he’s capable of.
For someone I worked with last year on a mentorship basis, it’s leverage. He creates more than anyone I know and is still trapped in the hours-for-dollars loop.
And for the people I see in the replies most days, it’s creation. They want it, they see themselves doing it, they have plans, but they don’t ship.
Pick yours.
The good news, if you want to call it that, is that fixing any one variable shifts the whole equation. You don’t have to fix all four at once and you don’t have to become a different person overnight.
You just have to find the zero and refuse to leave it at zero.
That’s the work.
The variable that’s quietest in your equation right now is the one strangling everything else, and the move is to spend the next 90 days making it loud.
Ambition. Identity. Leverage. Creation.
You already know which one is yours.
Now stop reading and go fix it.
— Pascal
Things I work on outside this, in case any of them are useful:
Follow me @xgrowthpascal where I’m documenting my journey from 0 to 10,000 followers in 90 days live and in public
Follow me @iampascio where I share my build in public content, experiments and everything else I’m currently building or playing with