What did you do today? This week? Over the last five years?
What impact did it have?
Did it all compound equally?
Some of what you do produces a result, and then it’s done. One hour in, one deliverable out. Other work ripples outward. It changes how the next project runs, or how other people operate, or what becomes possible six months from now. The hours feel similar. The returns are not.
That asymmetry is rarely made explicit. This piece is an attempt to make it visible by tracing a pattern that has held across centuries, through printing presses, franchise systems, satellite navigation, and more. Some things have stayed exactly the same.
Whether you’re early in your career, leading a team, or building an institution, the question is the same: given the effort you’re already putting in, where does each unit of it create the most impact?
The four components shaping outputs
The four forces that shape what your effort produces: Leverage, Insight, Entropy, Energy cost
Impact is shaped by four forces: the leverage your work carries, the depth of insight behind it, the drag (entropy) it faces, and the energy it costs you. They work together as a system.
Understanding each one changes how you see your own week.
Leverage is the structural scalability of your work: how far it extends beyond your personal hours. Some activities produce linear returns: one hour in, one unit out. Others produce multiplicative returns: one hour in, ten or fifty units out. The difference is the type of work, not the amount of it.
Leverage is a force multiplier for judgment. It amplifies the wrong things as readily as the right ones. And judgment without leverage is bounded. You can be right about everything and still be limited by your own hours. The interplay between the two is where outsized impact lives, especially when both leverage and judgment are built intentionally.
Insight is the quality and appropriateness of what you bring. Beyond skill it includes how well you know the territory you’re operating in, how you reason through complex problems, and what patterns you see that others miss. The most critical form of Insight is phase judgment: knowing which type of work matters most right now, even when it’s not the obvious or prestigious choice.
Part of Insight is specific knowledge: the kind of understanding you can only build through direct immersion. It can’t be fully taught in a classroom or captured in a playbook. It comes from doing the work yourself, long enough and deeply enough that you develop pattern-matching and judgment that is genuinely yours. Formal training gives you the map. Direct immersion is what teaches you the territory. The gap between the two is where specific knowledge lives.
Entropy is activity that drains energy without producing value, learning, or momentum. Laborious doesn’t mean entropy. A founder going door-to-door to recruit first users is doing laborious work, but it’s an investment. The learning and momentum compound. What counts as drag depends on who you are and where you are. A meeting that’s entropy for a senior IC might be genuine investment for a new manager still building organizational understanding. The question isn’t just whether an activity produces value, but whether it produces more value than what your time could create elsewhere.
Complexity can work the same way. Work can be technically demanding, intellectually sophisticated, and still not compound. A system built brilliantly but pointed at the wrong problem. A deep analysis applied where a simpler one would have reached the same conclusion. A sophisticated process in a domain where the bottleneck was never process. How hard the work is and what the work produces are different questions.
Some of the most stubborn entropy comes from misaligned incentives: systems that reward activity over impact, or where processes accumulate faster than anyone retires them. This kind of entropy is a design problem.
Energy Cost is what the work demands from you: hours, attention, physical and emotional capacity. Not all hours are equal. An hour at peak cognitive energy is worth three hours of depleted grinding.
The five levels of leverage
The altitude of your work influences how far it reaches: Task, Project, Process, Strategy, Systems
If Leverage is the structural multiplier, what determines it? The altitude at which you operate.
Task level is direct production. Writing the report. Building the financial model. Writing the code. One hour, one deliverable. Your impact is bounded by your available hours.
Project level is owning outcomes: not just writing the report but managing the entire workstream end-to-end. Coordinating timelines, handling stakeholders, delivering the whole. The multiplier is modest because you’re orchestrating tasks, not redesigning them.
Process level is making things repeatable. Building the template so the next report takes half the time. Creating the playbook. Training others. One hour of process improvement can save hundreds of hours downstream. This is where leverage begins to compound. Process-level work is often the most accessible starting point through initiative. You don’t need a new role to build a better system.
Strategy level is setting direction. Deciding what matters and what doesn’t. Making trade-offs. Allocating resources. One good strategic decision can outweigh a year of excellent execution. Strategy at this level means setting a direction that others build on. That usually requires some degree of organizational authority or earned trust. But the judgment behind it can be developed long before the authority arrives.
Systemic level is shaping ecosystems. Governance, thought leadership, policy, institution-building. Work that changes how entire industries or organizations function. The rarest and highest-leverage. A single act at this level can redirect thousands of hours of others’ work.
The exact multiplier at each level depends on what the work touches. What holds consistently is the relative ordering. Process compounds more than Project. Strategy compounds more than Process. And Systemic work, when it lands, can reshape everything beneath it.
But the level describes the leverage structure, not the value of the output. Task-level doesn’t mean unimportant. It means personally dependent: the impact requires you, in that moment, doing that specific work. When Insight is high enough, even low leverage produces extraordinary results. A diagnosis that changes a treatment path or an audit finding that catches a structural risk before it cascades is Task-level by structure, but the judgment behind it is irreplaceable.
Some Task-level work can be systematized, moved to Process level through templates and playbooks. Some can’t, because the value is the specific knowledge: the researcher writing novel code, the consultant modeling a unique deal structure, the operator who has internalized decades of pattern-matching in a domain. Knowing which of your tasks can be templated and which can’t is itself a form of Insight.
And some people’s highest-impact path is staying at Task level with exceptional Insight, not migrating up the levels. The framework is a lens for understanding where your impact comes from, not a ladder to climb.
What your work creates
Impact has a depth dimension and a breadth dimension
The five levels describe the structure of how you work. But structure alone doesn’t determine impact. From an output perspective the impact your work creates reflects two things: how much better it is than what already exists, and how many people it reaches.
You can create impact by going deep: concentrated value that changes a trajectory. A surgeon whose judgment in one operation saves a life that wouldn’t have been saved otherwise. A teacher whose investment in a single student compounds across that student’s entire career.
Or by going wide: smaller improvements across many people. A platform builder whose tool reaches millions. A policy maker whose decision affects an entire population.
Wide and deep are often a temporal sequence, not a choice. Many of the most impactful ventures started deliberately narrow: unusual depth for a small group, which created the compound growth that eventually became wide reach. Wangari Maathai planted seven seedlings on a single day. Within decades, the movement she built from that act had planted over fifty-one million trees across a continent. The early depth was the foundation that made the later breadth possible.
Different people create impact in different ways: some through what they produce, others through the people they develop, others through which bets they make, others through the systems they shape. These modes shift with context and career phase, but most people have a natural center of gravity. What shifts more often is the level, because of the demands of different phases.
Finding the right gear
The pull toward familiar work, and what to consider before jumping gears
Task and Project work is where value gets delivered, where promises are kept, where the actual thing gets built. The feedback loop is tight and satisfying: you produce something, someone uses it, the project moves forward.
The risk is that Task-level work can become the default allocation even when the phase calls for something different. Process, Strategy, and Systemic work compound more over time, but the feedback is delayed. The impact touches many people, often in ways that are hard to trace back to the original decision or design.
When you shift even a portion of your week toward higher-leverage work, building a process, clarifying a strategy, shaping how others operate, the compounding effects can multiply what those same hours produce. Not because the effort changes, but because the structure around it does.
But the opposite trap is equally real. You can’t design a good system until you’ve lived inside the problem the system will solve. The founder who insists on doing manual user onboarding when everyone tells them it “won’t scale” isn’t failing to optimize. They’re building the specific knowledge that will make optimization possible. It doesn’t need to scale yet. It needs to teach them what to build.
The trap isn’t being at the wrong level. It’s being at the wrong level for your phase.
Like a manual transmission, leverage levels usually work in sequence: each gear builds the understanding needed for the next. Sometimes you can skip one. The question is whether the momentum is already there, and that depends on which phase you’re in. The road has a shape, and the right gear changes with it.
Building: you’re finding what works. Insight dominates, specifically phase judgment. The right low-leverage work with high Insight beats the wrong high-leverage work every time. Do the unscalable thing. Recruit users manually. Write the first version yourself. The learning is the leverage, even though the structural multiplier is low. This is where specific knowledge is forged.
Growing: you’ve found something that works. Now leverage matters: how do you make it repeatable? Systematize what you’ve learned. Build first processes. Make first hires. The transition from manual to scalable.
Scaling: leverage dominates. Strategy, setting direction and choosing where resources go, becomes the primary driver. Your ground-level Insight from the Building phase is what makes your Strategy informed rather than abstract.
Sustaining: entropy becomes the main challenge. Maintaining leverage while managing the complexity that growth creates. Much of the entropy at scale comes from misaligned incentives that tend to accumulate, for instance, rewarding visibility over value, or short-term results over long-term compounding.
The sequence matters. Each phase builds the understanding needed for the next. The beginning is where Insight is built.
The four modes of impact
The mechanism behind your impact: Execution, Strategy, Selection, Capital
The Five Levels describe the altitude of your work. The Four Modes describe the mechanism: what you’re actually doing to create impact at any level.
Execution is velocity and quality. Building, producing, delivering. Returns scale linearly with your time, and the energy demand is high. Always essential, but it’s the lever with the lowest ceiling.
Strategy is direction and trade-offs. Deciding what to pursue and what to abandon. Returns are delayed but multiplicative when they arrive.
Selection is curation. Choosing who to hire, what to invest in, which bets to make. Returns are high-variance. One great selection outweighs a hundred adequate ones.
Capital is resource allocation at scale. Deploying money, budgets, and capacity. Returns compound over time. Capital well-allocated this year funds next year’s allocation.
Over time, most careers shift gradually from Execution toward Strategy, Selection, or Capital, not abandoning Execution, but changing the ratio. Though for some, deepening Execution with greater Insight is the higher-impact path. The question is which lever your deepest Insight lives in and where your greatest impact comes from.
Leverage through history: what changed, and what didn’t
Seven examples of leverage from clay type to neural networks
one of this is new. The leverage landscape has shifted across centuries, but the underlying architecture has held. The examples are worth tracing, because the pattern is remarkably consistent. The origins of their leverage varied, and none were uncomplicated. The architecture of what they built with it is what holds.
In eleventh-century China, every page was printed from a single wooden block. An artisan carved the full text of that page into the wood, character by character, each one carved as its mirror image so it would read correctly when inked and pressed onto paper. But that block could only ever print that one page. The characters were carved into the wood. They couldn’t be pulled out or rearranged. If you wanted to print a different text, you started over: a new block, carved from scratch. Hundreds of hours of carving, for one page.
Between 1041 and 1048, an artisan named Bi Sheng carved the characters separately. Each one its own piece of clay, baked into hard porcelain. To print one text, he arranged the characters in order and locked them into an iron plate coated with pine resin and wax, heated until it held firm. To print a different text, he reheated the plate, swept the characters free, and rearranged the same pieces. The characters didn’t change. The arrangement did. One set of characters, unlimited pages.
Bi Sheng didn’t eliminate the labor of carving. He redirected it. Instead of carving static pages, he carved a dynamic system. A finite set of modular characters could now produce an infinite number of page combinations. Four centuries later, Johannes Gutenberg would arrive at the same structural insight, adapting it to a smaller alphabet that made commercial scaling faster.
In the 1850s, Florence Nightingale spent years nursing soldiers in field hospitals during the Crimean War, while simultaneously collecting data. She used statistical methods and visualization to prove that poor sanitary conditions, not combat wounds, caused most military deaths. Her clinical work gave her ground-level Insight that no analyst could have had. Her statistical work moved that Insight to Process and Strategy level. Her advocacy changed military hospital policy worldwide.
In the decades that followed, Jamsetji Tata founded a steel company that supplied the railways and a hydroelectric power company that powered industrial growth. These were profitable ventures, but they also built what the country lacked. His most consequential allocations were institutional. He endowed what became the Indian Institute of Science. The trust structure he designed went on to seed the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which became the foundation of India’s nuclear and space programs, and the Tata Memorial Hospital. Tata built what India needed, then the government absorbed it. Capital, deployed where business opportunity and systemic need overlapped, became the scaffolding of the modern Indian state.
In the early twentieth century, Madam C.J. Walker began her career mixing hair care formulas in washtubs and selling them door-to-door, personally demonstrating the product on each client’s scalp. Her formulations worked: a carefully calibrated blend of sulfur, beeswax, petrolatum, and coconut oil. But the business was bounded entirely by her physical hours and geographic reach.
Walker’s insight was that the real product was the system, not the formula. In 1908, she founded Lelia College in Pittsburgh to train independent sales agents. She codified her methods into a curriculum that covered not just scalp treatment and application technique, but sales strategy, personal presentation, and financial management. She built a vertically integrated headquarters in Indianapolis, with factory, laboratory, salon, and school under one roof, and distributed through mail-order catalogs, bypassing retail channels that were largely unavailable to her.
Within a decade, Walker had trained and deployed between twenty and forty thousand independent agents, each replicating a business process she had designed from firsthand knowledge of every step. She didn’t stop being a hair culturist. She turned her craft into an architecture that thousands of others could operate.
Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, Gladys West worked as a mathematician at a naval research facility in Virginia, performing exhaustive manual calculations, processing raw satellite telemetry, tracking orbital mechanics, computing astronomical data by hand.
Over decades of immersion in raw numerical data, West made a transition that illustrates the leverage pattern. The Earth is not a perfect sphere. It is an irregular ellipsoid, distorted by mountains, ocean trenches, and gravitational variation. If navigation satellites assumed a uniform sphere, positioning calculations would drift by miles. West designed the algorithms that accounted for these distortions: gravitational fluctuations, tidal forces, rotational effects. She translated that mathematics into software, programming it onto the room-sized computers of the era, generating increasingly precise models of the Earth’s true shape.
Those models became part of the foundational architecture of the Global Positioning System. West took years of direct, painstaking computation and encoded it into a permanent mathematical framework that quietly routes every airplane, every ship, every phone in your pocket.
In the late 1970s, Wangari Maathai, a biological scientist in Kenya, was listening to rural communities describe a cascading problem: deforestation was destroying watersheds, which meant less clean water, collapsing soil, failing harvests, and hours spent foraging for firewood instead of tending crops or earning income.
Maathai’s insight was that planting a tree was an economic unit, not merely conservation. She founded the Green Belt Movement and trained communities, primarily women, in forestry, seed germination, and water harvesting. The key design choice was the incentive structure: each woman was paid a small financial token for every seedling that survived. Short-term economic need and long-term ecological restoration were aligned in a single mechanism.
What began as seven seedlings planted on a single day scaled into a network that has planted over fifty-one million trees. Maathai distributed the leverage directly to the people closest to the problem and designed a self-sustaining system that grew on its own.
In 1998, two PhD students wrote an algorithm. PageRank reshaped how humanity accesses information and created one of the most valuable companies in history. In 2017, a small team published “Attention Is All You Need.” The transformer architecture became the foundation of modern AI. In both cases, the structural leverage was minimal. A few people and their ideas. But the Insight was extraordinary. Low leverage with exceptional Insight can still reshape entire fields.
Today, AI extends this pattern further. Software has already minimized the marginal-cost distribution, with one person’s code reaching billions. AI is extending that to analysis, creation, and decision-support. Process-level work (systematizing, templating) is becoming more accessible.
But certain things haven’t changed. You still have to start with the unscalable thing. Bi Sheng carved clay by hand before he built the modular system. Nightingale nursed patients before she analyzed data. Tata studied cotton trading before he built national institutions. Walker mixed formulas in washtubs before she designed the franchise. West computed by hand for years before she wrote algorithms. Maathai planted seven seedlings before fifty-one million followed. The tools change. The sequence doesn’t.
Insight remains the irreducible multiplier. Every era produces people with access to the same tools who create wildly different results. The difference is judgment: about what matters, what to build, who to serve, when to act. Leverage amplifies that judgment. Trust earns the right to apply it. Neither has ever been automated, and both still compound the old way: slowly, through direct experience and genuine relationship.
Entropy: The hidden tax
Not all drag is obvious, some of it looks productive
Leverage, insight, and phase judgment are all things you can build. Entropy is different. It’s the force that works against you whether you see it or not.
It doesn’t just consume hours. It degrades the hours around it. Frequent context-switching and low-value work erode what any given hour actually produces.
But not all entropy is obvious, because some of it looks like real work. It might even be real work. The question is whether it’s your highest-value work. An activity can be genuinely useful and still be entropy for you, if it prevents hours where your Insight is deeper and your leverage is higher. The difference between “is this valuable?” and “is this the most valuable use of this hour, for me?” is where most of the hidden drag lives.
When the bandwidth for higher-leverage work feels unavailable, entropy is usually the reason. Cutting even a few hours of weekly entropy and redirecting them produces outsized returns: the equivalent of many more additional hours at Task level, without working any longer.
The test at the end of a week isn’t how full your calendar was. It’s what moved.
What to do about entropy, whether to automate it, delegate it, hire someone to handle it, or eliminate the need entirely, is itself a decision framework. That’s a question I’ll be exploring separately.
Applying the framework
Not all drag is obvious, some of it looks productive
If you want more impact from the same effort, map your current week across the five levels. Shifting even a few hours toward Process or Strategy compounds what your week produces. But a single week is a sample, not a verdict. The real signal is in the pattern across weeks and months. A heavy Task week during a launch or a Building phase isn’t a problem. Map your seasons, not just your snapshot, and revisit the mapping as your phase shifts. The question is whether your allocation is deliberate or default.
If your energy is depleted out of proportion to your output, look at entropy. How much of your week is consumed by activity that produces limited value, learning, or momentum? And how much of that entropy persists because of misaligned incentives rather than simple inefficiency? Some of what drains you might be genuinely valuable work that belongs in someone else’s hands, or in a different phase of yours. If the work needs doing but you’re not the person whose Insight makes it compound, that’s worth seeing clearly.
If your role has grown but your impact hasn’t kept pace, look at what changed. Sometimes the issue is altitude: you need to shift toward Strategy or Selection, and instead you’re absorbing more volume at the same level. But sometimes the issue is depth: your scope grew without a corresponding deepening of the Insight behind it. More work at the same level with the same judgment isn’t growth. The question is whether your phase calls for a shift upward or for deeper mastery where you are.
If you’re already operating at scale and want to be more deliberate, the framework is a diagnostic for allocation. Where is your Insight deepest? Which lever is your center of gravity? Is your time distribution aligned with where you actually create the most, or is it shaped by habit, organizational expectations, or the pull of immediate feedback?
Seeing clearly works in both directions. Some weeks, you’ll find you’re creating less than it feels like. Other weeks, the quiet process work or the relationship you invested in is compounding in ways that won’t be visible for months.
Phase judgment, knowing which level to operate at given where you are, is where the framework comes together. Low leverage with strong phase judgment produces more impact than high leverage misdirected.
What’s next
This is the structure. There’s more to explore: how different people create impact in different ways, and what to do when you find a gap between where your time goes and where it should. I’ll be writing about both.
Effort is the constant. The architecture around it is the variable. Seeing that clearly, where your time actually goes versus where it creates impact, is where change starts. That pattern has held from Bi Sheng’s workshop to a naval research facility to seven seedlings that became fifty-one million trees. The tools change. The architecture doesn’t.
What will you do tomorrow?
What impact will it have?
How will it compound?