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 explain how individuals can still move forward inside them.

That’s where leverage enters the picture.

For a long time, especially in developed countries, there was a relatively stable script — particularly if you were a local. You went to university, earned enough to live, bought an apartment or a house, found a partner, built a family, and progressed through a career that rewarded consistency more than reinvention. If you wanted more comfort or upside, you might switch companies or try entrepreneurship. In rarer cases, some pursued intrapreneurship within large organizations. Both paths usually came after several years of experience, often in one’s mid-40s in the most successful cases.

This path was never universal or fair. But the incentives were aligned enough that an average, disciplined person could still move forward without exceptional strategy. It didn’t require constant reinvention.

That alignment has been breaking for decades—and today, it is at a riskier level than ever.

The cracks that broke the old path

1. Wages decoupled from productivity

Work continued to generate more value, but compensation stopped tracking it. The reward for effort flattened, while risk quietly shifted from institutions to individuals.

This shift didn’t just reduce fairness — it removed one of the most reliable forms of leverage people used to rely on.

Real productivity and wage developments in the EU28 and in selected member states. Source: Real compensation/worker, real productivity per worker (AMECO, 2018)

Productivity Soars, Wages Stagnate. Source: Statista.

2. Housing became a financial asset

Homes stopped being primarily places to live and became investment vehicles. This disrupted the natural sequence of

work → savings → ownership → stability

As housing and long-term assets became inaccessible, mass production, globalization, and credit made consumer goods and experiences cheaper than ever.

This created a substitution effect: people stopped building assets and started accumulating things, experiences, and identities instead. Consumption replaced ownership as a coping mechanism.

3. Careers turned into tournaments, not ladders

Global competition, credential inflation, and early automation transformed careers into asymmetric races. You could still build one — but only if you won repeatedly, early, and visibly. Recovery from mistakes became harder and more costly.

In tournament systems, leverage concentrates early — and disappears quickly for those who fall behind.

This dynamic resembles the “Matthew Effect,” where early advantages (or disadvantages) compound over time, widening gaps in opportunity and outcomes.

4. Shared social and professional contexts eroded

Partnership, friendship, and professional growth gradually detached from stable institutions and synchronized timelines. As shared environments weakened, people lost access to continuous feedback, coordination, and long-term alignment. Social platforms amplified choice, but reduced commitment and coherence. Communities eroded rapidly and proved hard to restore.

In their absence, we began to crave quicker chemistry with minimal risk and contact. Even something as simple as grabbing a coffee started to feel “risky,” as time itself became something we were reluctant to invest. I found myself wondering when a casual invitation last carried no second thoughts about intent. This shift likely contributed to the growing loneliness crisis—widely discussed, yet poorly addressed.

Settling down—professionally and/or personally—became a high-stakes decision rather than a natural progression.

5. The collapse of long careers (very likely)

Artificial intelligence may break a final assumption: that a career is something you build once, then progress and defend for decades. As AI reshapes knowledge work (and, with robotics, work beyond it), many roles may have shorter lifespans, require continuous reskilling, or disappear unevenly across regions.

Only once you accept that the old script no longer works reliably, the question changes.

It is no longer “How do I follow the path correctly?”

It becomes “What allows me to move when the path disappears?”

I learned this earlier than I would have liked—not by choice, but through my experience as an immigrant in challenging environments, where I had no safety net or support.

TL;DR (especially if you’re under 30)

Here is the short version:

• Careers are becoming shorter and less forgiving
• Waiting to “react later” is riskier than it used to be
• Leverage isn’t about AI hype — it’s about options
• Build one small skill or project outside your main path
• Do it early, while mistakes are still affordable

The first escalation: the “failed” hackathon

In my early twenties, at the beginning of my career in tech, I convinced two of the smartest classmates I knew to join me in a hackathon focused on technology to support women facing violence in El Salvador. We built what we thought was a strong solution — a mobile-friendly reporting map. Technically, it worked.

On the final day, a member of the jury looked at us and said, “Only one of you will present. Who will it be?”

My teammates stepped back. I froze. I had never defended a project alone. I mishandled the moment and failed in public. After that, my colleagues lost trust in me and avoided future collaborations.

That experience taught me something uncomfortable: my technical skills alone were not leverage.

I didn’t give up, but I did change direction. I started deliberately placing myself in environments where I was weak—communication, public speaking, exposure. I pitched at every hackathon I could, spending almost every weekend in the trenches: leading a new team while coding for three days and pitching on the last. I gathered feedback, improved my stage presence, and learned how people actually respond.

Eventually, people began to say there were two Federicos—the day-to-day one and the one on stage. I didn’t seek attention through these experiences, but I understood something important: relying on a single strength had already proven fragile in a world that was gradually stopping rewarding specialization alone.

Without a doubt, that “failed” hackathon marked the moment I stopped betting my future on a single skill and started thinking seriously about leverage.

The second escalation: Poland

If the hackathon taught me that technical skills alone were fragile, Poland taught me something deeper: what happens when you have no default leverage at all.

I moved to Poland in 2014 with almost nothing. No EU passport. No safety net. No mentors. A scholarship with an unspoken condition: fail, and you’re gone. I was visibly different—but not different enough to benefit from diversity programs—and often reduced to stereotypes once people realized where I came from. That experience is why I remain reserved when I speak about El Salvador in most groups.

The first year was unsustainable. Constant pressure, little support, and prolonged isolation. I didn’t know how to fix it—I only knew it couldn’t continue that way.

That’s when I walked into a Toastmasters meeting, almost by accident. It was the first place where I felt human again. Mistakes weren’t punished, but examined. Feedback was direct, but respectful. No one cared about my origin or status. The focus was growth, trust, and mutual accountability.

Toastmasters wasn’t a career strategy. It was a social and psychological anchor.

In parallel, my professional leverage was built elsewhere. Inside one of the largest Indian tech companies in the world, I learned a different lesson: specializing too narrowly was dangerous. I didn’t grow by doubling down on a single role. I expanded sideways—into automation, enterprise systems, medium-high level negotiations, internal debates, employee training, and cross-team work. Many of these choices were inefficient and uncomfortable. I was wearing too many hats. But they reduced dependency on any single point of failure.

Toastmasters strengthened communication and leadership.

My professional environment forced diversification.

They were two different leverage systems, built in parallel.

What made them powerful wasn’t visibility or output — it was constant feedback. Real conversations across roles, cultures, and generations. Ideas tested early. Weak assumptions challenged. Signals arriving before crisis.

One of the clearest explanations I heard came years ago, during a cold winter in Estonia, from a former Toastmaster. He put it simply:

“Federico, do you know the difference between a job and Toastmasters? In a job, you can be fired for making a mistake. In Toastmasters, you gain feedback.”

At the time, it sounded almost trivial. In hindsight, it captured something essential: environments where mistakes are survivable — and feedback is unavoidable — allow people to adjust early, before errors become irreversible.

That feedback loop was leverage in itself.

What concerns me today is how quickly these channels are weakening. This didn’t start with COVID-19, but the pandemic accelerated it.

• Shared spaces shrank.
• Conversations narrowed — not just in number, but in diversity, increasingly confined to people of the same age, background, status, and/or assumptions.
• Feedback became optional, filtered, or delayed.

As those feedback loops weaken, leverage becomes harder to build — not because people are less capable, but because they receive signals later (if ever), when adjustment is already costly.

At the time, I didn’t realize how rare that kind of feedback environment would become.

The third escalation: shrinking time, shorter careers

The third escalation is not really about artificial intelligence. It’s about time.

In recent years, I’ve spent time around groups that discuss AI, macroeconomics, and geopolitical risk. What consistently stands out is not panic, but absence. In my experience, the people who attend are usually already concerned — engineers, consultants, business owners, investors, researchers, or professionals who sense that something is off.

Most others rarely ever show up.

Invitations are usually dismissed as boring, irrelevant, unrelated, or exaggerated. Interest typically arises only when the risk becomes personal: when layoffs begin, projects stall, or someone openly admits they could lose their job and is looking to learn something.

Careers are becoming shorter, more fragile, and more sensitive to shocks. Not because people are less capable, but because systems move faster and tolerate less delay. Automation accelerates this trend, but it didn’t create it.

What concerns me is not that people fail to notice the changes. It’s that many still assume they’ll have enough time to react later.

In the past, that assumption was often reasonable. You could specialize deeply, focus on a single path, and adjust when something went wrong. You could reskill in your thirties or forties. Time, experience, family, savings, or institutional stability acted as buffers.

Those buffers are thinner now.

This doesn’t mean education is meaningless or that specialization is a mistake. It means that relying on a single axis of identity — one role, one skill, one employer — has become riskier than most people expect.

Leverage rarely comes from doing more of what you already know — it comes from entering environments where your existing skills don’t protect you.

Think it like this:

• The danger is not learning the “wrong” skill.
• The danger is learning only one, and never testing yourself outside it.

When change accelerates, waiting becomes exposure.

And reacting under pressure is always harder than preparing early.

This isn’t about predicting the future perfectly.

It’s about avoiding being trapped by a single path when conditions change.

Building leverage doesn’t require dramatic moves or radical reinvention.

It requires small, parallel bets made early — while mistakes are still affordable.

That doesn’t mean chasing trends or reinventing yourself radically. It means taking one skill — even a modest one — and pushing it past the point of comfort.

• If you enjoy running, organize an event or coach beginners.
• If you like baking, sell something — even a small batch — instead of only gifting it.
• If you like writing, publish something instead of keeping drafts private.

Especially when that side hustle draws on experiences, contexts, or domains that are hard to reproduce synthetically. As AI spreads, generic skills converge quickly. What compounds more slowly are perspectives shaped by lived paths, cultural depth, and long exposure to specific problems—areas where human judgment, trust, and presence continue to matter.

The goal isn’t success. It’s exposure. Once something is offered to the world — even imperfectly — feedback appears, skills compound, and leverage starts to form.

That is still possible, but the window is no longer as wide as it once was.

That doesn’t mean it’s closed — only that postponing action now carries a higher cost than it used to.

What would you start building TODAY if you knew you wouldn’t have time later?