The Climb
Fall in Love With the Thin Cut on a Thousand Deals.
The fat cut feels good and stays small. The thin cut feels boring and gets huge.
Greed wants the fat margin on every deal, and greed keeps you small, because a fat margin scares off volume and invites competition. The empire is built by people who fell in love with the unglamorous thin cut - the tiny percentage that's so small nobody bothers to fight it, multiplied across a sea of transactions until it becomes a tide of money.
Train yourself to find the thin cut beautiful. It's the cut that's easy to say yes to, hard to undercut, and impossible to resent - and when it runs across enough deals, it dwarfs anything the greedy operator ever made. Patience with thin margins at scale is one of the quiet secrets of every fortune in the middle.
A thin, unresented cut across huge volume beats a fat cut that caps your growth.
This is one of 48 laws from MIDDLEMAN - The 48 Laws of the Money in the Middle. Read it in full to climb the whole building, floor by floor.