Make millions by impacting millions through scale or magnitude

The fastest paths to wealth obey simple math: either serve many a little or serve a few a lot. Economists would call this scale and price discrimination, but you can think of it as width or depth. The Law of Effection says money follows impact, and impact can be wide or deep. Wide is a pen sold to 20 million people with small profit per pen. Deep is one complex surgery, one enterprise rollout, one development that houses 400 families.

Consider two founders in the same city. Mira builds a subscription note‑taking tool for students at $6 per month. Her focus is wide. She invests in search traffic, campus partners, and a clean onboarding that retains users. Eli launches a cybersecurity consultancy serving medical clinics at $40,000 per engagement. His focus is deep. He invests in authority content, compliance case studies, and a referral network of CPAs and attorneys.

Both can make a million, but the design, the channel, and the daily work differ. Mira’s micro‑anecdote is an email from a sophomore: “Your app saved me during midterms.” Eli’s is a clinic director saying, “You helped us pass our audit.” The details and sensory feel are distinct too. Mira’s phone buzzes at 7 a.m. with usage alerts. Eli’s coffee goes cold during a tense boardroom Q&A.

When you choose a lane, strategy gets easier. Behavioral science helps here: constraints liberate creativity because the brain stops juggling competing goals. You narrow attention to levers that matter—reach for scale, perceived risk reduction for magnitude. From a systems view, you then tune the loop: acquisition, activation, retention, and monetization, measuring unit profit and the number of units. Wealth follows that loop when it grows in either count or depth without adding equal hours from you.

Decide whether your offer will reach wide or go deep, then describe the one unit of value a customer receives. Put a first‑pass number on units and profit so the path is concrete, and select a matching channel strategy—distribution for scale, trust for magnitude. Set up a small dashboard to watch acquisition, conversion, retention, and unit profit weekly, and change one lever at a time until the math moves. Start with the lane decision today and write the numbers down.