Finding Our Leverage Points

The other day Nicholas Kristof (author of A Path That Appears — according to Adam Grant, one of the most influential books of the decade) came to Penn to speak about leverage points in the developing world. I thought it was a simple and intuitive concept that was also particularly powerful. Leverage points are the aspects of our world where a small change has a disproportionately large effect. In the business world, these are the high return on investment (ROI) opportunities where an investment yields a proportionally higher return.

This concept gets even more interesting when we think about leverage points in our own day-to-day lives. I’ve seen its power in both my professional and personal life.

With Prayas Analytics, I have seen leverage points multiply our productivity when it comes to sales. Our sales process a year ago required a ton of manual work for every sales lead who we emailed. After we found the contact and their email information, we would handcraft each email by copy and pasting, adding custom links, and personalizing to the recipient’s name and company. It would take me hours to send even 20 emails. Then we discovered our leverage point, Tout. Tout allowed us to mass upload personalized contact details via a CSV/Excel file and automatically send emails in batches (the quality and content of the emails remained the same). Now, without the manual process, I could send closer to 100 emails within a few hours rather than the 20 before.

On the personal side, I have applied a leverage point to dramatically reduce my Facebook usage through a simple user experience change. I moved the Facebook app off of my iPhone home screen to the second screen inside a folder called “Social.” This change has significantly reduced my Facebook usage (close to 50% less I’d guess) and increased my time to focus on other more important activities. It’s another example of finding a leverage point that, without any cost at all, can realize significant personal gains.

Leverage points are powerful but the real difficulty comes when we think about how to find them in our own lives. I think it starts with creating a culture where we are comfortable with continuous intentional change. By making our lives a continuous experiment, we are able to test potential changes to our lifestyle and essentially “optimize” our happiness. When I wrote the first draft of this blog post, I thought I’d suggest a fairly simple technique of finding our own leverage points: you’d reflect on all of the small activities that you do on a day-to-day basis and write them down. After you had done that, you could think about potential changes you could implement to improve your happiness. You’d start with the only one change that is likely to have the biggest impact and measure its effect. Then you’d go back and do it all over again.

I realized though that there was a major issue with the technique suggested above — it just wasn’t practical. Most people were not going to take the time every night to reflect on their routines and think of changes to implement. In the past, there has been no way to document our life’s data, at least not without lots of effort. This is where I think technology comes in. Through wearables (examples: the Fitbit or the Apple Watch), we will be able to seamlessly document the data of our lives. This will finally make finding leverage points on a regular basis practical.

Here’s a hypothetical example to help you visualize this effect: say that you’re the owner of a pair of (the now retired) Google Glass. Google Glass has the ability to see what you see through an always-on camera that sits near the corner of your eyeglass frame. With the continuing rise of ComputerVIsion, technology will soon be able to analyze continuous video in near real-time. What that means is that Google Glass will eventually be able to monitor when you are spending too much time watching Netflix or when you’re spending too much time sitting in your chair at the office. This becomes even more powerful when you consider integrations across many of your personal devices (read: Internet of Things). With these integrations, I believe that technology will be able to quantify (almost) everything about our lives (read: the quantified self).

This dataset of our day-to-day activities can then automatically be cross referenced against hundreds of years of research about our happiness to find and suggest specific leverage point triggers that we should implement to be happier. It will make it practical for us to live our lives as an experiment, continuously implementing small changes and testing their effects on our happiness. And perhaps most powerfully, it will help crowdsource a whole new level of empirical research, providing extensive data about millions of people that scientists, psychologists, researchers, and more can discover new solutions to some of our world’s most pressing problems.

There’s a caveat though. As powerful as technology can and will be, it still comes down to one bottleneck: us. We know for a fact that we should exercise, yet most of us don’t. We know that we shouldn’t skip class, but often times we do. We know that flossing our teeth is important, but most of forget. Technology can guide and enable us to do many things that previously weren’t possible to but it’s still on us to act. For instance, we shouldn’t wait for the Apple Watch to be released before deciding to exercise more. We should still act now and embrace technology to help us along our path.