# Chapter 102

“Your choices create leverage. Your habits unleash leverage.“ James Clear

You chose well, and that great choice creates potential leverage. You chose poorly and gain no leverage. The meaning I am using for leverage here is power authority influence and advantage. Leverage powers my entire work life.

In the most basic sense, I am leveraging the technology of the internet and the tablet that I am writing this on, to communicate with countless people throughout the world irregardless of how far from me at this moment they may find themselves. The limitations of distance, who can hear my voice when I speak, who can look over my shoulder as I write, all those limitations are destroyed by the leverage of this technology.

In a higher sense, I leverage my uniqueness. I am a rich person living in a poor country. There is leverage with that (and care must be taken in how that is utilized). I am a foreigner in a strange land, that too can be leveraged, both to my advantage and to my disadvantage (as anyone who has lived as an ex pat can tell you). But I am also a multi-cultural multi-lingual highly educated and widely experienced person and that is a great leverage.

In the best sense, I leverage the people and networks of people that I have gotten to know around the world. To make the story of a lifetime a bit shorter, this means that I get to work in all kinds of change-the-world venues. In areas that my normal age, experience, education, skin color, gender, etc would not allow me to work in. That is what leverage is. Now make it a habit!