How to Move the Earth 🌎

Using leverage to improve your outcomes

I had a flat tire the other day. A man came to my home, pulled out some magic machine and, with a few cranks, lifted my 4,500 pound vehicle.

Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

-Archimedes

We live in a hack culture. Everyone wants shortcuts. Instead of hacks, we should search for leveraged activities - those activities where the outputs far exceed the inputs (time, money, effort).

In a given day, we have an infinite amount of work activities that we can pursue. The key to effectiveness is to shift our energy toward activities that will have the greatest impact. In other words, we should move to the points of highest leverage.

Let’s look at some high leverage activities:

Media. Videos, articles, books, documentation are all high leverage. You write or record them once and they can be consumed an infinite amount of times. This is why I favour writing and video in my work at Gubagoo. Rather than verbalize information to a small group, I would record a video or write a doc and publish it to Slack, Confluence, e-mail etc. Similarly, a single blog post can drive hundreds or even thousands of leads.

Writing Code. You write software once and there is near-zero marginal cost in consumption. Also, it lives on forever.

1-on-1s, meetings and presentations. You present to your team or coach a direct report for one hour and it influences her work and the work of others for tens or hundreds of hours.

Watch out for negative leverage though!

Micromanaging to the point of doing someone else’s job takes your time and marginalizes their time.

Broken processes take effort to implement and have the effect of slowing everyone’s output.

Ineffective meetings drain energy, waste time and put everyone in a worse position to do great work.

Take inventory of your week and ask yourself if you are truly seeking and capitalizing on high leverage opportunities!

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