Finding the Right Leverage
When I first started building my startup, I thought leverage meant hiring faster and raising bigger rounds.
More bodies + more capital = more success. But as we grew, things started to get painful. More meetings. Less clarity. Same decisions, just with more people in the room. Our speed slowed and I could feel morale dropping alongside our pace. My co-founder and I would long for the weekend, when we could get a few hours of uninterrupted time to just think… to figure it all out.
I remember one week where I answered the same product question six different times in six different meetings. It felt like I was playing whack-a-mole.
Slack-a-mole.
We weren’t moving slower because people weren’t working hard, we were moving slower because our thinking wasn’t scaling with the organization.
How do you scale clarity? How do you scale judgement?
We couldn’t clone ourselves, so we started writing more, codifying decisions we didn’t want to keep making. Not because it was strategic, at the time we were just trying to save our sanity.
Somewhere in that scramble, something clicked: this was leverage, just not the kind I’d been taught to chase. This was mental leverage.
Mental leverage is when your best thinking gets built into the way your company runs. Not stored in your brain or repeated in Slack but built in systems people actually use.
It means things move even when you’re not there to push them.
I think many operators ignore the importance of mental leverage, I know I did. Not because its hidden, but because it doesn’t look or feel like work.
To be honest, I’m still figuring what mental leverage means for me and for my business.
But if you’re building something, it probably matters to you too.
Mental Leverage: An Operating System
Naval Ravikant (entrepreneur, thought leader, LinkedIn poster) popularized four types of leverage:
Labor: other people’s time
Capital: other people’s money
Code: scalable software
Media: scalable content
This framework is elegant, but it leaves out the leverage that’s hardest to see, and arguably most foundational: mental leverage.
Mental leverage is what makes the other four work. Or fail.
Without it: | With it: |
|---|---|
Labor turns into bureaucracy. | Lean teams ship fast. |
Capital accelerates wasteful burn. | Capital funds derisked bets. |
Technology becomes technical debt. | Architecture scales cleanly. |
Media adds noise, not signal. | Content reaches the right audience. |
Mental leverage is the codification of clarity.
It’s not “thinking time” or some abstract strategy layer.
It means you don’t need to explain the same thing six times in six meetings. It means your team knows what to do when you’re offline
Practically, it looks like:
Shared language
Clear defaults
Decision trees
Documents that don’t need meetings to explain them
Most founders think they need to hire more people to move faster.
In reality, we need to think better and encode that thinking.
You don’t scale by making more decisions. You scale by designing systems that make fewer, better decisions automatically.
Mental leverage is invisible. It doesn’t show up on the org chart or the roadmap.
But over time, it’s the difference between speed and swirl; between scaling and stalling.
Mental Leverage Needs Infrastructure
A quick note before I get tactical: mental leverage doesn’t work if your thinking disappears. You need a central place to store it, not scattered across Slack threads or orphaned in old Google Docs. A real knowledge base. Notion, Confluence, ClickUp, doesn’t matter really. What matters is that people use it and contribute to it.
Mental leverage compounds only when your clearest thinking is durable, visible, and retrievable.
If that’s not in place, start there. If it is, keep reading.
Installing Mental Leverage
Whether you’re a founder, a team lead, or managing 40 P&Ls, mental leverage is how you keep your edge sharp at scale.
Here’s how to think about building mental leverage into your org, today:
1. Write it down once, reference it forever
If you have to answer a question more than twice, it needs to live somewhere.
Write it down and stop repeating yourself. Documenting knowledge is efficient and trains self-sufficiency. It teaches your team to reason without you. This is table stakes.
2. Decide how to decide
Most teams don’t get stuck on what to do, ideas are easy. Teams get stuck on how to decide.
Who owns the call? Does this need a manager’s sign-off? What other teams need to be looped in?
If a decision-making framework isn’t written down, teams default to meetings, opinions, and office politics.
At Apple, every product has a Directly Responsible Individual (a DRI, obviously). One owner with ultimate decision-making authority.
The DRI model streamlines decisions and creates accountability by design.
3. Create language that compresses context
Language is leverage. One shared phrase can collapse a paragraph of business logic and nuance.
At my startup, we do structured reflection and feedback every quarter. We didn’t want it to feel like another HR formality, we wanted it to be about growth and honest reflection. So we called them QGRs: Quarterly Growth & Reflections.
Now everyone calls them that. When someone says “I’m prepping for my QGR” we all know what that means.
Other examples I love:
“1-way vs 2-way doors” (Jeff Bezos, Amazon)
1-way = irreversible, 2-way = reversible. Decide accordingly
“Disagree and commit” (Also a Bezos-ism—damn he’s good!)
Once a decision’s made, everybody aligns behind it, no matter what.
4. Set defaults that prevent drift
Mental leverage isn’t just about systems, it’s about standards.
Defaults prevent slow erosion, protect focus, and reduce fatigue.
Internal docs follow the same structure and format
Meetings start with the same question
Onboardings teach how we think, not just what to do
At Stripe, every docs starts with a simple format: SCQA.
Situation: What’s the current context?
Complication: What’s the tension or risk?
Question: What decision needs to be made?
Answer: What path do you recommend, and why?
5. Create thinking artifacts, not just todo lists
Good orgs create action docs, great orgs create thinking docs.
Mental leverage is about storing why, not just what.
Post-mortems with logic
Include what you knew, what you assumed, and why the tradeoff felt right at the time.
“Why we said no” memos
Write a short note explaining why an idea didn’t make the cut so future teams don’t waste time rehashing it.
“What changed our minds” logs
After a reversal, track: what new data or insight made you undo the original decision, and why. Prevents second-guessing in the future.
Mental leverage scales alignment, judgment, and clarity, all without adding headcount, cost, or meetings.
You won’t see it on your roadmap, but without it, the roadmap won’t make sense to anyone but you.
One last thing…
Every org is built on leverage, the question is whether that leverage compounds or corrodes.
Mental leverage is the difference between fast and frantic, scaling and spinning, building and backtracking. It’s not a neat playbook, it’s a guiding principle.
I’m not fully there yet, but I remember the Slack-a-mole days and I know what I’m building towards.
Up and to the right.