Why I believe Leverage is More Important than Ever 🕯️
Banner owned by Federico Navarrete Leverage, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is “the influence or power used to achieve a desired result.” Today the word is everywhere — and often empty. It’s sold as a shortcut, a trick, a way to “win faster.” For most of my life, I didn’t chase leverage. I didn’t even know it had a proper word until the late 2010s. I learned it under constant pressure, across four countries and two continents. And once you learn it that way, it’s hard to ignore. The last few years have been unusually volatile and difficult to predict. Trade tensions returned, conflicts multiplied, layoffs spread across sectors once considered stable, and artificial intelligence accelerated faster than most organizations could absorb. A few months ago, I published Why I Always Think in Systems and Incentives: My Two Cents . This text is a continuation of that line of thinking. Understanding systems and incentives explains why environments behave the way they do — but it doesn’t fully ex...