The divine lever

Find what pulls you; why is it so hard to focus on demand?

I’ve been obsessed with this idea for months and need to get it out of my head. WARNING: This is the most abstract thing I’ve written. Back to practical matters next week.

Link to the podcast episode of us wrestling with this topic:

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Operating Philosophies Matter, A Lot

I got goosebumps reading Joel Mokyr’s book A Culture of Growth. Mokyr won this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the ideological causes of technological progress. He documents how the Industrial Revolution became possible because of a new ideology, one that had the audacity to think, “we can make things better.” This idea was non-obvious and actually controversial at the time! The default ideology at that time was that Aristotle and the ancients had figured everything out; there was nothing new under the sun.

I’ve previously written about the idea of an operating philosophy: Our calendar reveals our philosophy about how the world works. Mokyr’s work made me realize just how important operating philosophies are: A small group of people acting on a new operating philosophy was upstream of the mind-boggling technological progress we’ve experienced over the last 250 years.

The entrepreneur’s operating philosophy

So then… what does the modern entrepreneur’s calendar tell you? What is our operating philosophy?

My take is that our operating philosophy is primarily self-centered: We are focused on our goals, what we want to build, how we want the world to work. This operating philosophy isn’t limited to a few psychopathic hype-lords… you see it even in “social impact” founders. We are all primarily focused on serving ourselves, not serving customers / demand.

Our operating philosophy should obviously be primarily focused on serving customers, helping them accomplish important things in increasingly wonderful ways. This is not just kumbaya bullsh*t. In every moment, we can either (1) put demand first or (2) put ourselves first. Basically everything I’ve written in this newsletter demonstrates the effectiveness of putting demand first:

• Sales: Is it about convincing them to buy, or serving their demand? (Physics of Sales)

• Outbound: Is it about what you want, or what they want? (Pipeline mega-post)

• Ideal Client Profile: Do you choose, or do they choose you? (ICP)

• Product: Is it about what you envision, or what fits their demand? (Product)

Think of all the waste caused by the self-centered operating philosophy - all the LARPing, grifting, and time wasted building products nobody wants. At a micro scale, it’s all waste too: When I give into the self-centered operating philosophy prioritize suboptimal things (based on what I want, not what serves demand), then I execute my suboptimal priority in a suboptimal way (based on what suits my interests, not what serves demand).

This adds up, over time, to a massive divergence between what we could accomplish, and what we do accomplish. And, back to Mokyr, the world improves at a slower rate as a result of this.

But here’s the hard part: It turns out that even if we want to put demand first, it’s a really hard thing to do!

Why is it so difficult to prioritize demand? In my experience, I WANT to put demand first, but I’m struggling against a self-centered gravitational force that’s acting upon me in almost every moment, pulling me towards acting self-centered by default. And this is true of every entrepreneur I know, too.

I don’t know where this selfishness comes from. Maybe selfishness is just core to human nature, or maybe there’s something rotten in the water of today’s culture. Who knows. We just need a solution.

How do we fix this?

How do we focus on demand by default, rather than ourselves by default? How do we change our operating philosophy?

Here’s what I’ve found: All of my best work follows ONE pattern - it is downstream of moments when I’m focused on something that is purely good… more specifically, something that purely serves demand with zero self-centeredness attached.

The operative word here is “pure” - any amount of self-centeredness poisons the well. First, it’s ineffective: People can tell when you’re being even slightly selfish. Second, and more importantly, if you are not entirely focused on something that purely serves demand, “selfish gravity” seems to pull you to pure selfishness. Only purity seems to fight the gravity of self-centeredness.

You can think of self-centeredness as a kind of rot that compounds over time, like a decay function: y = (1-x)^t

where y = quality, x = % self-centeredness, and t = time.

Any x > 0 leads to y = 0 over time. Only x = 0 avoids this fate.

This decay function led me to the concept of the divine lever, which I believe is the critical missing thing in modern business.

Understanding the divine lever

You’ve heard of causal levers - things that cause other things to happen. For example, there are growth levers - activities you perform that cause your business to grow. Business is about figuring out and applying force against the levers that cause the physics of your business to work, so you can grow and be profitable. Examples of levers: “Attack our current bottleneck in customer onboarding.” Or: “Write provocative content about marketing.”

A divine lever is something that is purely, objectively good… that happens to be a causal lever that makes your business work.¹ By definition, a divine lever must deeply serve demand. Unlike a goal or OKR, or any other kind of causal lever, a divine lever cannot be gamed or made selfish.

Brief aside: The word “divine” might imply that you need to be religious in order to apply it, but really you just need to believe that there is such thing as pure, objective good. I did not go looking to make a religious statement, there just isn’t another word that fits this concept. Anyway, back on track:

“Solve climate change” is not a divine lever, because it is not a single business’s causal lever - if you focus on generally solving climate change, your business will not be successful. But “electrify the automotive industry (to solve climate change)” is closer to a divine lever. Another example is “scale compute to make AI more powerful”; this is a causal lever but it is not divine, whereas something like “build an increasingly useful assistant by scaling compute” is closer to a divine lever.

In summary: A divine lever is a purely good, non-selfish thing you apply all your force against, and by applying your force against it, you wind up with a successful business.

Here’s my v1 graphic of the concept:

Divine levers reveal the physics of startups

Let me share my experience so that so you might find your divine lever, because I think I have found mine. My divine lever, I think, is to build and share a comprehensive, practical theory of the physics of startups.

This is a lever. It seems to cause my business to financially work.

It is also divine. It is an objective good, a way to deeply serve entrepreneurs’ demand. It would be an objectively good thing even if it didn’t cause my business to work.

This divine lever is great because I can just focus on it, and it causes everything about my business to work. But that’s not all it does. I’ve been slowly realizing there are three non-obvious, but very important implications that stem from the word divine.

First, applying effort towards something that is purely good gives you energy, where applying effort towards something that is self-centered expends your energy. A simple example: After writing about the physics of startups for like 5 years, I thought by now I would be (1) out of topics and/or (2) tired of writing every week. Surprise! I have more hunger to write and more topics to write about than I’ve ever had, and it makes no sense - it’s the opposite of “draining a battery.” I can talk for hours on this topic, I can run through walls building my startup as a means of figuring this out. I am writing this at 10pm on a Monday night simply because I can’t not do it.

The energy you get from your divine lever is what counters the “self-centered gravity” I talked about earlier in this post. The divine lever pulls you! You don’t want to spend time on anything other than your divine lever; you get obsessed to a level that can’t be replicated, or even understood, by someone who doesn’t understand divine levers. You become a force against complacency and entropy. As a result, you become next-to-impossible to compete against, because your expertise and knowledge compound faster and faster.²

Second, focusing on your divine lever gives your business a weird shape that is hard, if not impossible, to copy. The divine lever causes you to make a set of decisions that make zero sense to traditional business thinkers who want to follow a checklist and optimize every penny of their businesses.

I, for example, have open-sourced basically every inch of what you might consider my “intellectual property.” And I haven’t moved my “website” out of a Google doc yet. Plus, when people come through PMF Camp, one ticket buys access for their whole team, forever. These things make no MBA sense, but in a way, that makes the business feel better. What matters is I’m focused on my divine lever, and as a result, my business takes a shape that fits demand… a global optimum that is locally suboptimal in a bunch of wonderful ways.

This gives us another way to think about divine levers: They are THE global optimization function for a business. We have been in the local optimization game, with disastrous consequences. More on that in a bit.

Third, you intuitively understand the physics of startups. All this demand stuff becomes obvious, and you do the right things by default.

Who’s found their divine lever?

Enough about me: I think the great businesses we admire all had a founder/leader who found their divine lever. And I think the greats across history are those who found their divine lever.

I created a short list of people who seem to operate as if they found their divine levers. You’ll notice they all seem to share an almost indescribable obsession with something… and also, many are known to be quite difficult to deal with. Perhaps they are just frustrated that nobody understands their divine lever.

Business:

• The simplest example: Jiro from the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi has a divine lever - an obsession with the perfect sushi.

• A divine lever can be found anywhere: James Dyson found it in vacuum cleaners.

• Like him or hate him, Elon is great at putting massive force behind divine levers: “Get to Mars” and “Make electric cars a thing.” And try convincing me Steve Jobs wasn’t focused on a divine lever!

• Watching the Martha Stewart documentary, you sense an unstoppable inner pull towards demonstrating that anyone can reach perfection.

• Aaron Levie from Box couldn’t stop obsessing over AI’s impact on business software if his life depended on it.

• Tiny businesses can have divine levers: Orthodox Masonry focuses on designing and building homes that will last hundreds of years. They build wonderful things with a small group of craftspeople. Yes, they would almost certainly have higher margin if they used cheap labor or materials, but then they would have lost focus on their divine lever.

Business thinkers:

• Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, obviously. I quoted Antifragile in my wedding vows; who writes a probability book that way?!

• Taiichi Ohno, who revolutionized manufacturing thinking while at Toyota: When you read his work and sense that he spent a lifetime obsessed with the manufacturing floor and process improvement.

• Christopher Alexander (the origin of the concept of “unfolding”) spent his life focused on how to make buildings make you feel alive. Who gets a PhD in architecture, writes a 4-volume theory on The Nature of Order, while also making homes by hand?

You could easily come up with examples from sports, music, art, culture, etc. I listen exclusively to metal, and my two favorite movies are Pride and Prejudice (2005 version) & the Penguins of Madagascar, so I’m going spare you my cultural takes.

To summarize: I think you’ve probably marveled at people who found their divine levers, and wondered if they were human. Now, hopefully, you can see that it’s possible for basically anyone to find a divine lever.

But also: You’ve probably noticed how few of these people there are; most of the world operates as if divine levers don’t exist.

Zooming out

When you encounter someone focused on their divine lever, or experience something they created while focused on it, you feel alive. Divine levers are life-giving.

And, the opposite: Much of the hollowness of modern life represents the absence of divine levers.

Divine levers were more common in the past because religion infused everything - work was just a form of prayer, it was divine by default. Today we have mostly driven the concept of the divine out of anywhere but religion, which has many consequences, but the main one I’ll point out is that most things today suck. A few examples:

• The built world: Houses built today are ugly, cheap-feeling, square-foot-maximizing sad buildings. Towns are the same: When you compare modern suburbs to older towns (say, for example, Chagrin Falls, Ohio), old towns somehow manage to be superior in every way. You ask - how is this possible? Did we just forget how to make nice things? The answer is yes, it seems.

• Businesses often grow when private equity / MBAs / “professional management” take over, but they also lose every ounce of soul they once had and rot from within. This is because the “professionals” focus relentlessly on purely economic levers, never divine ones.

• When you look inside most companies today, you see a bunch of people whose sole purpose is to keep their job, who have an operating philosophy that “I deserve this job because I’m me”, and accomplishing little to nothing. Others are simply approaching work as a game to get promoted. Given this, it is surprising that big companies accomplish anything at all; it is no shock that nearly everyone with a job is in a constant, low-grade existential crisis that’s medicated by hours of slack-jawed doom-scrolling.

• This explains why founder-led companies often feel different: Founders often find a divine lever, and as a result operate in a different way to professional CEOs, who may be excellent at mere causal levers but miss the deeper thing.

Most of what we all hate about business (and culture and politics) today is downstream of the last century’s absence of the divine. This is causing ugly spaces, bad businesses, growing anti-business sentiment, slow growth, and fewer meaningful innovations than there should be.³ Simon Sarris once described a “film of careless inertia covering the world” - which is a great way to put the great malaise we all face now thanks to the absence of the idea of a divine lever.

But this is great news! Our bottleneck is just bad philosophy. Even better, as Mokyr found, it only takes a few people changing their operating philosophy to cause a chain reaction that bends the curve of the future.

How to find your divine lever

The important thing to know about divine levers is that they are FOUND, not CREATED. That distinguishes them from mission statements, visions, etc. which are mostly selfish gobbledygook.

So… how do you find your divine lever? In short: Actually know to look for it.

The main reason startups never find demand is because they don’t really look for it, not because it’s particularly hard to find. They just waste their time pushing their product idea, rather than looking for demand. The same dynamic plays out for divine levers.

Divine levers are probably found in the humble act of serving customers, and almost certainly impossible to find in a brainstorming session in a conference room. In my experience, the divine lever reveals itself over time as you get your hands dirty and try to understand demand and the physics of your business. To truly understand these things, you have to put aside the self-centered impulse and see the world from your customers’ eyes.

Now that you know that the divine lever exists, just think of what it might be while you obsess over serving customers and avoiding the selfish decay function: What is in their best interest? What is objectively good, that you can put all your energy behind, that will cause the physics of your business to just work? You will feel it before you can articulate it.

I hope you look for it, and I hope you find it.

Oh - and consider applying the selfish decay function to other parts of your life, especially your relationships. It shows.

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PS:

My next live “product-market fit + sales” program is launching in November (I have been running private versions for funds like Afore, Lightspeed, EIF Catalyst, etc.) Apply soon and learn more HERE.

I am also basically at capacity for 1:1 work, so if you’re interested in getting my support reviewing your sales calls + navigating 0-1 at some point in 2025, please apply soon HERE.

1. The idea of something being purely good or objectively good might sound out of place here, but I believe this is load-bearing. See Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 1 for a detailed discussion of “objective” vs. “subjective” good/beauty and the implications.

2. This also distinguishes a divine lever from the idea of “ikigai” you might have seen. My argument is that by focusing on a divine lever, it solves everything else. I think the Venn diagram about “what the world needs”, “what you get paid for”, “what you love”, and “what you’re good at” misses the whole point.

3. Without the divine lever, it seems like only the most Machiavellian / narcissistic would succeed wildly - the kind of person who gets energy from being ruthlessly self-centered. While there are many examples of these kinds of people at the top rungs of whatever field, there are also many wildly successful, world-changing people who don’t fit that description, and more closely fit the profile the divine lever predicts.