“If you want to make more money, what business should you start?” This may be the first question many young people ask after entering the world of online entrepreneurship, but marketing strategist Jay Yang—who has worked on content crafted by Alex Hormozi, Leila Hormozi, and Noah Kagan—believes this question is wrong from the start.
Jay Yang recently published a long-form article titled “How to become a top 1% earner in the digital age,” sharing how he went from consecutively failing with an Instagram niche account, a YouTube channel, an email newsletter, and even a clothing brand—until he relied on copywriting, ghostwriting, AI, and personal branding to raise his income to what he calls the “top 1% worldwide.”
He turned this experience into a fairly simple framework for getting rich in the digital age: first build a skill the market is willing to pay for, then learn to sell, and finally use software and content to decouple your time from your income.
In that, the role AI plays isn’t directly making money for people—it’s becoming a new kind of leverage. When ChatGPT can multiply a person’s output, the question that truly determines the income ceiling shifts from “how many hours you can work in a day” to “how many people your skills can serve through leverage.”
Entrepreneurship is just the vehicle—the skill inside it is what’s truly valuable.
Jay Yang recalls that since he was young, he wanted to become one of the so-called “great people.” He read biographies of Kobe Bryant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Napoleon, and others, imagining he could one day achieve similar accomplishments.
But at first, he had no idea how to make it happen.
So, like many teenagers, he began searching “how to make money online,” then tried almost every popular online money-making method at the time.
He ran Instagram theme accounts, launched several YouTube channels, managed a weekly newsletter, and even started his own clothing brand. At one point, he believed he might be building the next Gymshark.
Everything failed. Years later, looking back, Jay Yang believes the problem was that, at the time, there was no core ability that the market was willing to pay for.
That’s why he proposed his first viewpoint: Business is a vehicle—companies are just the vehicle.
If someone hasn’t built a skill that the market is willing to pay for, then whether it’s founding a company, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, or an e-commerce brand, it’s just a “car with nothing in it.”
How much money you make depends on “how many people you help × how much you help each of them.”
Jay Yang further breaks income down into “creating value.”
Value is determined by two variables: Scale × Magnitude
Scale represents how many people you can help; Magnitude represents how big a problem you can solve for each person.
And the value people are willing to pay for can roughly be summarized into three outcomes: saving time, increasing income, and reducing risk.
If you can save more time for more people, create more income, or reduce greater risks, then in theory you can earn higher compensation.
This also forms his understanding of the difference between “working a job” and “entrepreneurship.”
Employees solve problems for the company; the company pays a fixed salary and takes on the risks of acquiring clients and running the business. Entrepreneurs might solve similar problems, but they can set prices themselves and capture more value—the trade-off is that they must find and persuade clients themselves.
Separate “time” from “income”
But even if you master a high-value skill, Jay Yang thinks there’s still a clear ceiling if your income increases strictly in proportion to hours worked—because there are only 24 hours in a day.
As long as the income formula is still: working hours × price per hour = income, then even if you raise your hourly rate, your income will ultimately still be limited by your personal time.
So he believes the truly important second phase is to decouple your time from your money—gradually making income less tied to your personal working hours.
Jay Yang: Only four kinds of assets can be built
The method is to build “assets.” His definition of assets is: something that can keep creating value even when you stop working.
According to Jay Yang’s classification, a person can build four main types of assets.
The first is capital (Money), which keeps your money—and even other people’s capital—invested, compounding over time.
The second is People—using the time and expertise of team members to accomplish an amount of work that a single person could not complete independently.
The third is Software, letting programs and machines automatically run work 24/7 and be copied at scale.
The fourth is Content. An article, a video, or a book needs to be created only once, yet it can continue to reach new people months or even years after publication.
Jay Yang calls Money and People the traditional “permissioned assets.”
If you don’t have capital, it’s not easy to obtain capital. If you don’t have income, it’s also hard to directly hire a large number of people.
But Software and Content are different.
He calls the two together permissionless assets (assets that don’t require permission).
In theory, a normal person today only needs a computer to start coding, using AI, running communities, writing articles, or making videos. No need to obtain a lot of capital first, and no need for approval from any institution.
This is also why Jay Yang believes the digital age changes the path to accumulating wealth.
Step one: Don’t do everything—start by doing one skill to the very top
Jay Yang breaks down the path into the high-income group into four steps.
Step one is not entrepreneurship—it’s choosing a skill and doing it extremely well. His reasoning comes from the globalization competition brought by the internet. In the past, a professional might only need to compete with people in the same city, but the internet lets the best people worldwide directly serve clients around the globe.
So income distribution becomes more and more likely to follow a Power Law.
The top 1% earns far higher returns than the next 10%—and the top 10% is still well ahead of everyone else.
The skill Jay Yang chose for himself is Copywriting.
He defines copywriting as “doing, as effectively as possible, the act of transferring an idea from one person’s brain to another person’s brain.” In essence, it’s about completing the sales process through words.
That skill later became the foundation for all his other leverage.
Step two: Learn to sell, or you’ll always need someone else to sell for you
Step two is Learn to sell.
Jay Yang believes that if someone can’t sell their own skills, they’ll always need a company, a boss, or other intermediaries to obtain clients for them.
In fact, office workers are also “selling” every day—they’re just selling their employer’s products.
Therefore, as he moved from being employed to independent work or entrepreneurship, one important turning point was changing from selling value on behalf of a company to being able to directly sell his own value.
This is also why he thinks Copywriting has special leverage: it’s both a professional skill you can charge clients directly for, and it’s also a “selling capability.”
Step three: The truly important Meta Skill is “learning how to learn.”
Step three is Learn to learn.
In Jay Yang’s view, if someone can’t learn a new skill on their own, their income ceiling is limited by whether “other people are willing to teach you.”
Different people learn in different best ways. Some people do well with reading, some with listening, and some need hands-on practice. And for him, the most effective method was observation.
So he deliberately found ways to get close to successful people and observe how they make decisions.
Ghostwriting becomes a special kind of tool here.
Because ghostwriting for entrepreneurs and high-income individuals essentially means: “the client pays you to gain access to them.” The ghostwriter can directly ask about their thought process, then organize that content into an article.
So this work not only brings income, but also becomes his learning pipeline.
Step four: Build “permissionless leverage” with AI and content
The real fourth step that started to separate Jay Yang’s income from selling his own labor was building permissionless assets.
First is Software—especially generative AI.
After ChatGPT was released, he started using AI to create drafts, edit content, and speed up delivery.
As Jay Yang puts it, after introducing AI, he could handle about three times as many clients using roughly half the time.
Suppose a freelancer could originally serve only 5 clients. Even if demand keeps rising, they’re still constrained by time. But once AI dramatically lowers the marginal hours required per client, the same person can serve far more clients.
So AI didn’t directly create his professional abilities—it amplified the output of skills that already existed.
The second lever is Content.
Once Jay Yang built his audience, customer acquisition began to flip.
In the past, he proactively searched for clients. With a personal brand, clients began to come to him on their own—and even further brought other opportunities like investments.
This is why content stops being merely marketing and becomes an asset that can continuously generate distribution for the individual.
This article is reprinted with authorization from: (Chain News)
Original title: (At age 20, income places them in the world’s top 1%! In the AI era, the key to getting rich isn’t entrepreneurship—it’s skill × permissionless assets)
Original author: Neo
“At age 20, top 1% globally by annual income: In the AI era, the key to getting rich isn’t entrepreneurship—it’s skill × permissionless assets” was first published on “Crypto City.”