Choice Leverage

The Idea

Leverage makes different choices more or less impactful.

In our daily lives, and especially in professional environments, we frequently have to decide where to put our focus and what to spend our energy on.

However, not all choices we face impact our lives to the same degree. Likewise, different things we can spend time with will have different impacts on the future. The more impactful a change in outcome today will be on the future, the more leverage that thing has.

In a business context, an early project decision that will affect dozens of people’s work for months to come has a lot more impact than a choice later down the road where it’s about operational nuances. Early decisions that determine direction have more leverage than late decisions that determine specifics.

Similarly, which people I spend my weekend with might influence my enjoyment of that weekend a lot more than where we will spend our time together. My social circle has higher leverage than the location I’m in.

While all options and choices in front of us often seem essential, in reality, not all of them are equally relevant for the future that will unfold.

Thinking of the leverage of different aspects of a situation or of the problems we are challenged to solve can focus our attention on that which matters most.

Go Beyond

A few further resources you might like if you find above idea interesting:

• 📚  Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

• 📚  Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money

• 📚  Eri Jorgenson’s The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

• 🎙  Podcast: The Knowledge Project

• 🎙  Podcast: Masters of Scale

• 🐥  Twitter: Jack Butcher

• 📝 MindVault: Concern, Influence & Focus

• 📝 MindVault: Higher Order Consequences

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