What is Leverage and How Do I Use It?
What Is Leverage
For those who are unaware leverage is when something or someone is in an advantageous position in relativity to someone or something else. We learned the concept of leverage early on as children when we played on one of these (see the above gif).
In the case of the seesaw one side will always possess greater leverage over the other. The person at the bottom holds the fate of the person in the air in their hands. Our personal and professional lives are no different. A more extreme example is America’s 25th president William McKinley being a sock puppet for tycoons such as J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller. The tycoons as mentioned leveraged power to ensure their successes would continue without outside parties interfering.
There Is No Gray Area
Leverage can be used in either a positive or negative way. There is no gray area. Regardless of what the leverage is in question the end game is that one party wishes to shrink the standing of the other party.
Knowledge and Awareness
Leverage comes in the form of both knowledge and awareness. It takes knowledge to be placed into the position and awareness to know you are in such a position.
Unfortunately, I won’t go into an all out dissertation of the many ways to utilize leverage for your benefit. Instead, I figured I could list a couple examples and they should help put things into perspective.
Examples
Financial stability and Likeability both equate to the ability in which one could maneuver more freely when compared to those lacking in the aforementioned areas.
Use the leverage you have wisely as it could help or hurt you in the long run.
Very original idea to write about. Nice post.
Thank you!
This comment has received a 0.07 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @theokritos.
Anyone asking themselves "What is Leverage and How Do I Use It?" Should never use it lol
As crazy as it sounds some people have no idea the leverage or positional authority they hold in some cases. It is quite typical for people to become complacent even with leverage and not have the awareness to realize it may no longer exist. A band with a hit song from twenty years ago decides to do a tour and can't sell 4 tickets to a venue if they tried. As shown above leverage is not absolute so no one really knows the exactness of when it comes or goes.
Agree, it's just too risky and you can lose big time if you don't know what you're doing.