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Think of written language: a way to leverage what people have learned in the past so that we don't have to relearn everything from scratch with each new generation. Or consider standardization of processes, which gives companies leverage over people by making them easier to replace. Levers are everywhere, once you start looking for them.

Leverage unleashes the potential of what we can do. When we all had sticks, the variation in productivity wasn't much. Small changes in individual performance didn't have significant absolute impacts. It wasn't until we developed tools that allowed us to leverage small changes in individual performance that we started to see a lot of variation in productivity.