Leverage
The superpower you keep forgetting to use
Erin challenged me to pick one word for 2026. After much deliberation, I said leverage.
Not in the financial sense—borrowing money to amplify returns. In the broader sense: finding the specific areas where I’m uniquely advantaged to succeed and pressing there.
Most people have leverage they’re not using. Fewer people realize that combining leverage points multiplies rather than adds. Almost nobody reassesses their leverage as their life changes.
Your leverage profile at 30 isn’t your leverage profile at 45. Are you still pressing on old advantages while ignoring the ones you’ve built since?
Leverage, Actually
Leverage is an asymmetric advantage that lets you accomplish more with proportionally less effort.
This isn’t just “having an edge.” An advantage is: I can run faster than you. Leverage is: I’ve built a system where my one hour of work produces what would take you ten.
The word matters and how you frame it matters. Archimedes didn’t say “give me a long enough advantage and I shall move the earth.” He said lever.
Leverage compounds. That’s what makes it leverage.
Eight Domains of Leverage
(According to me)
1. Access to Capital (Meta-Leverage)
The ability to deploy money toward a goal. This is meta-leverage because capital can purchase most other leverage types—time, expertise, distribution, tools.
But capital without the other forms of leverage is often wasted. Well-funded startups burn cash precisely because founders lack the leverage to deploy it well. Capital is an amplifier. It amplifies both competence and incompetence.
2. Compounding Enthusiasm
When you’re innately drawn to something—when you’d do it late into the night and forget to eat—you acquire skills faster, sustain effort longer, and outpace people who are just meeting requirements.
The leverage isn’t the enthusiasm itself. It’s what enthusiasm enables over time: faster skill acquisition, deeper expertise, willingness to push through periods that break others.
Someone who loves the work doesn’t just work more. They compound faster.
3. Experience/Knowledge
Time leverage. You already paid tuition in mistakes and learning. Every problem you’ve seen before is one you solve faster now.
I see this one get massively undervalued. People genuinely don’t know what they know until they watch someone else struggle with something they find obvious. A decade of domain-specific pattern recognition is worth more than most credentials.
4. Risk Tolerance
Opportunity set leverage. Higher risk tolerance means access to plays others won’t make. More at-bats. More shots at asymmetric outcomes.
This correlates with youth but the actual variable is obligations, not age. A 55-year-old with a paid-off house has more risk tolerance than a 28-year-old with student loans and a new mortgage. The person who can afford to fail gets to try things the person who needs every swing to pay rent cannot.
5. Network/Relationships
Access to people. Not schmoozy “who you know” stuff—practically: the person who can get the decision-maker on the phone closes deals the cold-caller can’t.
Relationships are stored credibility you can deploy. Every favor you’ve built up, every person who’ll take your call, every introduction you can make—that’s leverage sitting in a bank.
6. Platform/Distribution
If you already have an audience, customer base, or following, that’s leverage. You’re not starting from zero.
The person with distribution can test ideas, launch products, and get feedback at speeds unavailable to someone building from scratch.
7. Time
Raw hours available to deploy. The person with no day job, no kids, no elderly parents has more time to allocate.
This is finite and non-renewable. It’s worth naming because it’s the one leverage type that depletes whether you use it or not.
8. Reputation/Track Record
The founder who already had an exit gets different treatment than the first-timer. Doors open. Benefit of the doubt extends.
Reputation is leverage you’ve already earned that keeps paying dividends without additional effort.
Do This Self-Assessment Right Now
When was the last time you actually inventoried your leverage? Ever?
Most people operate on vibes and assumptions about what they’re good at. Not an honest assessment of where their asymmetric advantages actually lie.
Set aside a little “you time” and answer these honestly.
Access to Capital
How much can you personally deploy toward a goal without borrowing?
How much could you raise from your network if you had a compelling opportunity?
Do you have relationships with people who allocate capital professionally?
Rate this domain out of 10 with 10 being the highest.
Compounding Enthusiasm
What would you do for free? What have you done for free?
Where do you lose track of time?
What topics do you voluntarily read about, watch videos on, or discuss at parties?
Where has your enthusiasm already built skills others don’t have?
Rate this domain out of 10 with 10 being the highest.
Experience/Knowledge
What problems have you solved enough times that the answer is now obvious to you?
What mistakes have you made that you’ll never make again?
What do people regularly ask your advice on?
What do you know that you forget isn’t common knowledge?
Rate this domain out of 10 with 10 being the highest.
Risk Tolerance
If this bet fails completely, what happens to your life?
What’s your actual downside—financial, reputational, emotional?
How many swings can you afford to take before you need a hit?
What obligations constrain your risk-taking? (Kids, mortgage, aging parents, debt)
Rate this domain out of 10 with 10 being the highest.
Network/Relationships
Who would take your call tomorrow?
Who would vouch for you to someone they respect?
Who owes you a favor? Who do you owe?
Where are you one introduction away from an opportunity?
Rate this domain out of 10 with 10 being the highest.
Platform/Distribution
If you made something tomorrow, how many people would see it?
Do you have an audience, customer base, or following you could activate?
What credibility do you carry from previous work that opens doors?
Rate this domain out of 10 with 10 being the highest.
Time
How many discretionary hours do you actually have per week?
What obligations are non-negotiable? What’s flexible?
Where is your time going that isn’t serving your goals?
Rate this domain out of 10 with 10 being the highest.
Reputation/Track Record
What have you done that speaks for itself?
Where do you get benefit of the doubt that others wouldn’t?
What doors are open to you that are closed to someone with identical skills but no track record?
Rate this domain out of 10 with 10 being the highest.
Now Use It
The first problem: most people have leverage they never deploy.
You know you have a network but don’t make the ask. You have experience but don’t position Yourself as an expert. You have capital access but never pitch anything worth funding. You have enthusiasm but spread it across twelve things instead of concentrating it.
Leverage identified is not leverage used.
Some reasons people don’t deploy:
Social discomfort. Asking your network for help feels transactional. Using your reputation feels like bragging. So people just... don’t.
Misallocation. Still pressing on leverage points from a previous life stage. The 45-year-old grinding 80-hour weeks when their actual advantage is the Rolodex and pattern recognition.
Diffusion. Spreading leverage thin across too many goals. Enthusiasm for ten projects means mastery of none.
Not recognizing it. Genuinely not seeing what they have. The expert who thinks everyone knows what they know. The connected person who doesn’t realize most people can’t get that meeting.
The fix is simple but uncomfortable: pick the goal, identify which leverage points actually apply, and press.
Compound Your Leverage
I almost called this section “leverage stacking.” But that’s not quite right.
Stacking is addition. You put one thing on top of another. 3 + 5 = 8.
What actually happens when you deploy multiple leverage points together is multiplication. Network × Capital Access. Experience × Reputation × Enthusiasm. The output isn’t additive—it’s exponential.
This matters because it changes the math on where you focus.
If you have three leverage points rated at 3, 5, and 7:
Added: 3 + 5 + 7 = 15
Multiplied: 3 × 5 × 7 = 105
The difference between deploying them separately versus together isn’t marginal. It’s an order of magnitude.
And it gets more dramatic with each additional leverage point you bring to bear. Four leverage points multiplied doesn’t give you 33% more than three. It gives you multiples more.
This is probably the most important takeaway: identifying your leverage matters. Using your leverage matters. But compounding your leverage—deploying multiple points together on the same goal—is where the real asymmetry lives.
High-Value Multipliers
Experience × Network. You know what works and you know who to call. Timelines collapse.
Compounding Enthusiasm × Time. Obsession multiplied by hours equals mastery.
Reputation × Capital Access. The same dollar goes further when your name is attached. Better terms, better talent, better partners.
Risk Tolerance × Platform. You can make bets others won’t, and you have distribution to capitalize when they hit.
Network × Enthusiasm. You’re energized by people and you know a lot of them. The network compounds because you actually enjoy compounding it.
Experience × Reputation. You’ve done the thing and people know it. Skip the “prove yourself” phase entirely.
Your Multiplication Problem
Look at your strongest 2-3 domains from the self-assessment. Now ask:
What goal could I attack with all of these simultaneously?
Where am I currently deploying just one when I could be multiplying?
What’s the product (not sum) of my top three leverage points?
A Note on Building Leverage
You can build leverage you don’t have. If your network is weak, you can build it. If your experience is thin, you can acquire it. If your reputation doesn’t exist yet, you can earn it.
But that’s a different article. This one is about using what you already have—because most people don’t. They’re sitting on leverage points they’ve never deployed, or deploying them one at a time when they could be multiplying.
Build later. Multiply now.
Common Mistakes
Pressing on old leverage. You’re still working like you’re 28 when your actual leverage has shifted to experience and network. Update the playbook.
Building instead of using. Spending years acquiring leverage you don’t have instead of deploying what you do.
Adding instead of multiplying. Using one leverage type at a time. Asking your network for intros without bringing your experience. Having capital without reputation, so the money doesn’t attract the right people. Deploy together or leave value on the table.
Leverage envy. Wishing you had someone else’s profile. The 50-year-old wanting the 25-year-old’s risk tolerance. Play your hand, not theirs.
The Net Of It All
Your leverage profile has changed since the last time you thought about it. Probably dramatically.
The risk tolerance you had before kids, before the mortgage, before the aging parents—that’s different now. But so is your experience. Your network. Your reputation. Your access to capital and the people who control it.
Most people never do this inventory. They operate on decade-old assumptions about their strengths. They press on leverage they no longer have while ignoring leverage they’ve built.
Do the assessment. Identify where you’re actually strong now. Find where those strengths multiply each other.
Then press. Hard. Specifically. Together.
That’s leverage, baby.
This was a great read George, thanks. At a timely moment for me as I look at jumping back in!