Leverage: The 9th Wonder of the World (and how you can harness more of it today)

Have you ever tried to use a wrench to loosen a bolt, and it just wouldn’t budge? When you add a wrench extender, all of a sudden it’s easy. Why is that?

Leverage.

The more leverage you have, the less effort you need to get the same (or better) results. I know you didn’t come here for a simple physics lesson, but this idea translates to human accomplishment.

Think of leverage as the skills, resources, and assets you have to accomplish things. The more of these you have, the longer your wrench and the less effort you need to put in to get big results.

You can classify these into three different kinds of leverage.

• Low leverage: Time, energy, skills, knowledge, etc.

• Medium leverage: Media, code, IP, etc.

• High leverage: Wealth, press connections, political power, etc.

As you can see, someone who only has a lot of time and energy will need to use a lot of that to equal, say, being wealthy and well connected.

Knowing Your Leverage

To get the most out of this idea, you need to know what you have right now that can get you to the next level.

Maybe the most important step in unleashing the power of this concept is by finding and understanding what your leverage is. You need to analyze all that you have.

See, you probably have skills you don’t even realize are skills. Everything you know how to do, there are people out there who don’t. Any tools or assets you have, there are people out there who don’t have them.

Using Your Leverage

So you know your leverage, now it’s time to use it.

The trick is to match the right leverage to the obstacle at hand. If you want to accomplish a creative project, no amount of money in the world can replace you actually putting the time into it. But if your creative project is a film, no amount of time will make up for the fact that you don’t have money to buy or rent equipment.

That means you have to prioritize your projects to the leverage you do have. Then, you can easily achieve goals. As you do that, you gain access to new kinds of leverage, which brings us to our next point.

Building on Leverage

We can use our low leverage to build medium leverage. And from there, eventually, we can get to a high leverage position.

The trick is to strategize around what leverage you currently have, and what kind you’d like in the future. Many people reading this will have something to get started. Maybe you know how to cook and have a lot of drive to create a restaurant.

You can use that drive and cooking skills to create IP — like creating a menu and a restaurant concept. If you get things together well enough, you can use that to gain access to funding. Once you have funding and a location, now you have a lot of medium leverage, all built out of low leverage.

And if you use your restaurant the right way, you can gain access to high leverage. By expanding your operations and using the money to invest widely, all of a sudden you are a pillar in your community. 

What started as a passion turned into an empire. That’s the power leverage.