How Personal Leverage helps you Accomplish the Superhuman
Can you do things that seem superhuman?
Can you lift 800 lbs?
Can you throw a person 20 feet in the air?
You can with a 20-foot lever. A lever used in physics and engineering to increase a force — to lift more weight or move a greater distance.
This idea applies outside physics. Levers can multiply mental effort just like they multiply physical effort.
How do people accomplish superhuman mental feats?
How do they respond to thousands of emails a week?
How do some earn millions of dollars per year?
How do they build relationships with thousands of people all over the world?
They use Leverage. Personal Leverage increases the impact of your time, effort, and judgment.
What does it mean to leverage something?
Leverage is a mental model — an idea to guide decision-making. A mental model is a simple idea that represents a big, complicated, and important idea. This simple idea is easier to remember and act on as we go about our work.
There are many mental models: Inversion, Compounding, 80/20 principle, Principal-Agent Problem… many many models. But this post is just about leverage — personal leverage.
Here is my definition of Leverage:
Levers are force multipliers
Leverage is the art of accomplishing more
Technically, this is about changing the effort/impact ratio. (Achieving the same result with less time, or achieving significantly more with the time you have.)
There are other definitions of Leverage, these are NOT what I am talking about:
Financial Leverage - borrowing money (debt) to increase ROI on invested capital.
Negotiation Leverage - to get the upper hand on someone, to have control over them.
Leverage makes the seemingly impossible (like lifting 800 lbs) possible.
Here is a normal person doing a normal amount of work:
And here is a person who has built leverage, doing a superhuman amount of work:
I think of Building leverage as doing the work that gets more work done. Spending time, effort, and money (such as hiring an executive assistant) to get leverage growing will enable you to accomplish much more over time.
Those who focus on building, growing, and re-investing Leverage are playing a different game. Over time your skills and your hourly rate have natural caps on growth. Leverage can continue to increase and accelerate.
Leverage is tricky to get into your head as a mental model, but once it’s there, it’ll be there forever – and it will change your life. You will learn the art of accomplishing more. You will do more, with less effort. Most mind-boggling of all… the leverage effect will continue to increase, and each year you will accomplish more than you did the year before.
Leverage is not about working harder or longer. Leverage is about learning to play a different game — to do the work that gets more work done.
I am enthralled with the idea of Leverage and continue to explore, explain and apply it. I’m building an evergreen course on leverage to help you do the same. Join the email list below to get more posts, case studies, and learn more about the course, Building a Mountain of Levers.