Leverage is Everything
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Most people blindly subscribe to a linear relationship between input and output. They believe that if they work 40 hours a week, they will achieve 40 units of progress, but this is an incredibly dangerous mindset. We’re socially conditioned to value hard work over high-leverage work, leading many to believe that as long as they’re busy, they’re succeeding.
But in reality, leverage is the force multiplier that will reward you. It’s the art of identifying the 5% of activities that generate 80% of the results, moving you away from being a busy person toward being an effective one.
1. “Busy” is Bad
The first step in wielding leverage is unlearning the social conditioning that equates sheer volume of activity and movement with value. We often fall into the trap of doing what everyone else does: working set hours, attending recurring meetings, and clearing a list of tickets to be productive. This blind subscription to the standard 40-hour workweek is often just a socially acceptable form of procrastination.
It feels safe because it is what’s expected, but working 40 hours a week on low-impact tasks is actually a failure of strategy. Stop judging your day by how many items you checked off a list and start judging it by how much closer you moved to your primary goal in life. Realize that if you aren’t carefully evaluating where your effort goes, you’re likely wasting the most limited resource you have.
2. Identify What Moves the Needle
Identifying high leverage requires a mental shift from mindlessly crossing off todos to critically considering at all moments what you could be working on. Whether you’re an employee or a founder, you have to ask yourself: which of these tasks is maintenance, and which is a multiplier? For a Software Engineer, this might mean choosing to ignore the low-value, minor tickets, in favor of investigating a deep, structural shift in architecture that could stabilize your production servers.
When you’re on your own, the stakes are even higher because your time is your only true capital. You should likely find yourself having to ruthlessly prioritize only the activities that you, and only you, are capable of completing. The ones that could directly result in growth of your business like landing new clients or securing additional revenue for the company. Ultimately, high leverage is the hypothetical search for actions that will continue to pay dividends, rather than just solving today’s minor inconveniences.
3. Attacking the Highest Leverage Tasks
Once you’ve identified where the leverage lives, you have to attack those tasks with a high level of focus. At the beginning, you’ll also likely catch yourself drifting to work that isn’t the highest priority. Sometimes it’ll even be enjoyable to do this since it’s probable that the lower priority work is easier. Don’t be fooled, this is a form of procrastination. It’s not only about doing the right work; it’s about aggressively pruning the wrong work.
You must have the discipline to stop prioritizing noise: low-value tasks that scream for someone’s attention but don’t meaningfully move the needle. For anything that isn’t a high-leverage activity, you must learn to delegate, automate, or simply stop doing it. You must get comfortable letting small, low-impact items stay unfinished so that you can protect the mental energy required for big wins.
So far, I’ve found learning how to correctly identify and wield leverage to be one of the most important factors in continuing to be able to work for myself.
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