Leverage Explained
How Aligning Your Strengths With The Right Opportunities Maximizes Your Impact
In a competitive world, our success hinges on many factors. Some we can control, many we can’t. However, identifying the right targets to focus on can shift the odds in our favor. Points of leverage are places where our efforts and skills can produce the greatest results. They’re the targets we have the highest chance of hitting. If we can discover where we have a disproportionate advantage, we can play to our strengths and set ourselves apart from the competition.
Discovering how to leverage your strengths can be a process in itself. However, when you start thinking about your actions more strategically you can make better decisions. This can translate to finding the right fields, choosing the right roles, and progressing further and faster in your career. I’m really interested in exploring how to work strategically. I would like to highlight what I’ve uncovered so far about leverage.
Takeaways
Leverage multiplies your efforts, allowing you to achieve the best possible results.
Uncover your unique advantage and the conditions you need to thrive.
Focus on addressing the problems you’re best positioned to solve.
Enhance your capabilities by continuously developing them.
Find a balance between your goals and the effort required.
Why Leverage Matters
Leverage multiplies your efforts, allowing you to achieve the best possible results.
Just like how a lever minimizes the force required to lift heavy objects, finding the right points of leverage can transform small inputs into big outputs. Companies use leverage through economies of scale, brand loyalty, patented technologies, etc. to solidify their position in the markets where they are most likely to succeed. They are constantly thinking about how to take advantage of leverage to create sustained success. As professionals, we frequently encounter challenges that require us to act tactically as a team or as an organization. Why shouldn’t we apply this same mindset to our own lives?
Each day we have to decide how to use our time and energy. However, most of our activities are dictated by our jobs. We have various tasks to complete, some of which we’re better at than others. However, if we want to optimize the results of our efforts, shouldn’t we prioritize the tasks where our unique strengths yield the most valuable outcomes? While it’s important to work on our weaknesses, we also need to invest our efforts in the right things. It’s often more beneficial to develop the areas that support and enhance the things we already do well.
Understanding leverage allows us to strategically manage our resources. When we know our strengths, we can capitalize on them by pursuing opportunities that fuel our personal and professional success. It lets us concentrate on fewer, higher-impact goals and create more efficient and effective workflows designed to support them. When you understand exactly when, where, and how to use your skills, you can maximize your impact.
Identifying Your Strengths
Uncover your unique advantage and the conditions you need to thrive.
Finding leverage is not just about doing what you’re good at. It’s about finding the things you excel at that are valuable to other people. Uncover where your strengths overlap with high-impact opportunities. You need to discover the conditions and the environment where you thrive. Ask yourself: What is easy for me but is hard for others? And where can I add the most value? The intersection of these two questions is your competitive edge.
Finding what you’re great at is not always easy. You have to spend time exploring and trying different things. I still haven’t found that one thing I do incredibly well. While I have become a decent generalist, I still want to find my niche because I know that’s where I’ll have the most leverage. While the path may not be straightforward, seeking out where your strengths align with something the market needs sets the foundation for a successful career.
For example, if you excel at empathizing with people, focus on developing a deep understanding of people and their problems. Understanding their behavior, needs, and motivations. Use your knowledge, experience, and intuition to form a rich perspective on their world that leads to truly transformative solutions for them.
Apply Your Unique Strengths
Focus on addressing the problems you’re best positioned to solve.
Applying leverage effectively is about directing your time, energy, and resources to work that will have the most significant impact. Figure out the problems you are uniquely suited to solve. ****Identify a critical area you can directly and immediately influence. You have to continuously assess if outputs lead to meaningful outcomes, and actively course-correct based on the actual results.
An amazing solution for a highly specific problem is usually better than mediocre solutions for multiple problems. It may take some trial and error to identify your niche, but each attempt informs the next. As you experiment, you get a better grasp of your capabilities and how to apply them. When you focus on what you do best, you produce higher-quality work, which creates a self-reinforcing cycle that positions you for long-term success.
For example, if you’re an analytical person, you may excel at identifying patterns and distilling insights. You can take advantage of this by focusing on critical areas where the team (or the organization) is struggling to make decisions. Working on problems where you have a clear advantage allows you to create greater value and highlight your unique skill set.
Develop Your Strengths
Enhance your capabilities by continuously developing them.
To maximize leverage, it’s not enough to simply identify and use your strengths—you need to continuously develop them. Your skills, knowledge, experience, and intuition are valuable assets. The areas you excel in produce even greater returns when you invest in their growth. Sharpen your strengths by actively nurturing and enhancing them.
Developing your strengths means deepening your expertise in the things you do best. Fine-tune processes that support productive activities. Seek regular feedback to optimize your efforts. Explore new areas that complement your strengths. The right improvement can have a ripple effect, allowing you to tackle larger, more complex challenges, and increase the value you can create.
For example., if you’re skilled at product marketing, you can prioritize mastering new tools, expanding your industry knowledge, or diving into consumer psychology. Spend time exploring how each product function contributes to the experience you want to create. This gives you more context allowing you to find new ways to apply your strengths and yield better results.
Work At A Sustainable Pace
Find a balance between your goals and the effort required.
Effectively leveraging your strengths can be transformative to your professional growth. However, the things you’re good at are not always good for you. If your strengths lie in things that you find inherently boring, unfulfilling, or even stressful, your work will inevitably leave you drained and exhausted. You need balance, and you need to define what it means to you to assess whether the effort you put in is truly worth it.
It can be hard to tell sometimes. People working in demanding, high-pressure roles are often well compensated. If they thrive in these roles, they are rewarded for their performance. However, the work may be taking a toll on them in other ways (such as their health, well-being, and peace of mind. etc.). You probably know people like this or you are someone like this. While it’s natural to want to be good at what you do, it’s important to remember that you are more than what you do.
If your identity is rooted in your job, professional progress becomes the only indicator of personal success. Work can be a source of meaning, but it shouldn’t be the only one. You have to separate professional fulfillment from personal fulfillment - the work that makes you happy vs everything else that makes you happy - to find a purpose beyond "what" you do. It would be great if we could all do what we’re good at and find fulfilling. However, it takes time, effort, and luck to find that kind of work. In the meantime, find what you’re reasonably good at and work at a sustainable pace.
Conclusion
We are all skilled in different ways. However, the challenge is aligning our talents with the right opportunities. Discovering how to leverage your strengths effectively is a process. The path may be different for each person. However, you have to start by thinking strategically about how and where you use your time, energy, and resources. You have to constantly evaluate your efforts to optimize for the best possible results while continuing to expand and refine your strengths. It ensures that what you do meaningfully contributes to what you want to accomplish.
Thanks For Reading
If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing and sharing this newsletter with a friend.
I hope you have a great week!