For years, my coaching model has been three words: clarity, leverage, resilience. Almost no one ever asks me about the other two.

For years, my coaching model has been three words: clarity, leverage, resilience. Almost no one ever asks about clarity or resilience. Everyone wants to talk about leverage. So back in January, I took the month off to study the one question my clients kept pulling me toward: what does leverage actually mean?

I had been circling it in client work for years, and I wasn't satisfied with any of the existing answers – the finance version, the Silicon Valley version, the productivity-hack version. I sent a note to this list asking what you meant when you used the word, and a lot (!) of you wrote back. Thank you Niklas, Helen, Gregor, Christian, Robin, Jessica, Tim, another Tim, Oliver, and more. Some of those replies are still sitting in a document I keep open. They shaped what I'm about to share more than you probably realize.

Then life got in the way. I finished my first book, some of my clients were going through wild times, I needed to take a hard look at my own organization, and my family needed me. The work kept going in the background, but slower than I'd planned.

What I kept coming back to was a much older image than any of the frameworks I'd been reading.

Think of the oldest image we have for leverage: Archimedes with his lever, claiming he could move the world if you gave him a place to stand.

Almost everyone remembers the lever. Almost no one remembers the second half of the sentence: 

Give me a place to stand.

When a CEO asks me about leverage, they're almost always asking about the lever itself: should I raise capital, hire, automate, get on more podcasts... For sure, these are real questions. But a lever on its own doesn't do anything. It needs a place to stand – solid ground underneath the person pulling it – and it needs the right conditions around it to actually move what it's trying to move. Without those, the lever is just a stick.

There's a name for this: the leverage stack. Three layers, and they have to be worked in order. 

The lever you already know about – capital, systems, people, reach. These are the four types most existing conversations about leverage focus on, adapted from Naval Ravikant and others. I will go into these types in a later episode. But first, the two layers most conversations skip.

The enabling foundation underneath the lever – the place to stand. This describes all the conditions that have to be met before a lever can do useful work. There are two sides to check: 

The target system has to be stable enough to take the pressure and legible enough that you can see where to push. A lever on a system you don't understand is a guess. A lever on a system that snaps under load is a disaster. Don't raise a growth round on a team that's barely holding together.

You, on the other side of the lever, have to be clear about what you're actually trying to do, honest about your own capacity to operate the lever, and rested enough to handle what it will demand of you. A lever in the hands of someone who isn't ready breaks the person before it moves the system. That same fundraise won't do you any good if you're trying to save your marriage.

This is the layer almost everyone skips, because it feels like preparation rather than progress. It is also the one most leaders stumble over eventually.

The enhancing conditions around the lever — "multipliers." These compound on top of whatever lever you're pulling. They don't replace it; they make every pull either easier (or harder). A few examples:

Multipliers are “meta” in that they apply across all four lever types. The same reputation that makes capital cheaper also makes hiring faster and distribution easier.

Foundation, lever, multipliers – these are the three layers of the leverage stack. A place to stand, a way to push, and the conditions you're operating in.

Pick the biggest lever you're currently pulling on – maybe an important hire or a strategic initiative. Before you pull harder, answer four questions, fast, on the back of something:

If you can't answer one cleanly, that's where the work is. Not on the lever. Underneath and above it.

Yours,