You either have leverage or someone else has leverage against you.
I’m not a fan of “kill or be killed” type of advice, but I do believe that if you don’t arm yourself, you’ll be at risk. Or at least won’t get the best return out of your efforts.
The harsh truth is that companies drive you toward commodification and standardization.
And the antidote to commodification is career leverage.
Defining Career Leverage
Having career leverage is when your work is valuable, hard to replace, high impact relative to the input, and high upside. It’s when certain opportunities yield greater return than others.
It’s like having a catapult to launch you forward, while everyone else is marching steadily forward (or for some, pulled backward).
Those returns can come in many forms. It’s not just about money, but can be about increasing your impact, autonomy, flexibility, development, or status/level.
And when you don’t have career leverage, it usually means someone or something has leverage over you. And your work and returns are severely limited.
But the big mistake is that most seemingly good careers are actually low leverage. I’ll get to that later.
Please note: I do not mean that having high leverage equals “good,” as in morally. There are many important, high value careers that are unfortunately low leverage in our system today. But I am here to talk about what you can do about it.
No Leverage
▸ Examples: retail jobs, service work, ride-sharing gigs, warehouse jobs
In No Leverage careers, there is no track. We call these “dead end” jobs for that reason.