Detecting a High-Leverage Human
The subtle markers, language patterns, and energy signals that reveal a 1% operator in record time
The true meta-skill in talent acquisition isn't finding candidates - it's identifying the rare individuals who transform organizations through their presence alone.
After years studying human potential and bringing 200+ professionals into a rapidly scaling tech unicorn, I've identified the subtle markers that separate multiplicative talent from the merely competent.
The Ultimate Intelligence Test
Naval Ravikant says that the only test for intelligence is whether you get in life what you want. This comes with two implications. First, are you intelligent enough to get what you want and to materialize all your desires? Second, are you intelligent enough to actually, truly understand what it is that you want?
This second dimension translates directly into how people are signalling intelligence because all the most intelligent people are extremely purpose-driven. They've crystallized what they want in life and why. They can clearly articulate it. They might not have a crystal clear vision for the next 10 years - especially during turbulent career transitions - but they will possess robust frameworks and mental models for discerning the opportunity in front of them.
While they're exploring opportunities, they're extremely attuned to their core values and understand exactly what they're looking for in their next career move.
The moment you open your mouth, your resume becomes irrelevant.
Something a lot of candidates don't understand - something I explain to my coachees at a very early stage of a career coaching relationship - is that the moment you open your mouth, your resume becomes irrelevant.
Your resume is your marketing collateral created for one sole purpose: getting your foot in the door. But once you're in the interview, the game is all about what your mind is capable of. What your mind is capable of is shown through the quality of your communication, and the quality of your communication is a function of the quality of your thinking.
There are several attributes of communication that we're looking at:
Precision of communication: Can you explain something complex in a way that another human understands rapidly? (Explain a complex idea through minimum words applied; words are used in the right way to convey the right meaning)
Sophistication: What's the complexity of the idea and richness of your vocabulary?
Clarity: Clear communication is clear thinking. If you use too many words to communicate an idea, you're not a clear thinker. Some people start talking and they don't even remember where they started, they go into the woods. Tangential communication signals tangential thinking.
The Interviewer Becomes The Interviewed
One of the best signals to recognize top operators is that you don't interview them - they interview you.
The top 1% don't have a scarcity of games to choose from. They're not looking for jobs. They are looking for strategic career moves.
They can create any kind of job, any day, any place - everyone wants them for their top talent. Even if there's no day job present in this current phase of their life, they'll have something to occupy themselves with (side-hustle, family business, passion project etc.) Their true intelligence will manifest in their ability to monetize their thoughts and skills regardless of being employed.
As a recruiter, I show up at their doorstep offering them a new kind of game. I'm showing them that if they play well the game that I am offering, they will reap specific benefits: growth, upskilling, developing their character, and of course, material wealth perks that certainly matter too.
My job isn't to sell the game. My job is to understand what exactly they want to do with their character, how do they want to develop it through the larger game of life, and coach them through this transformation process.
Even this kind of thinking - thinking of yourself in terms of a character of a computer game - is the metacognitive skill I'm looking for. I want to see the ability to disassociate from their thinking processes and identity, and analyze both deeply.
Life Is A Single-Player Game
When looking for patterns of achievement, I view life as a single-player game. (this is another mental model from Naval, but he, of course, derived it just from simple observation of life - the school of existentialism, solipsism, etc.)
So, in life, you start at point A with a preset character. If you're lucky, you're born with good pre-requisites: a high-functioning brain, a functioning body, and a good family with a solid upbringing.
Until about 18, your life is largely a product of your external conditioning. By 35, your life is a product of how you've worked with this conditioning and what choices you've made.
At mid-life, for most people, whatever they do with themselves in the first half is what they'll do in the second. It's an extremely complicated project to uncondition yourself and reimagine/rebuild yourself into something new.
I look at how the person plays their single-player character and how quickly they progress through levels. That is their self-concept? How have they developed their character? What life were they able to will into existence? I look at the complexity of the games they choose - this signals the sophistication of their mind. Even if their path is spiky rather than traditional, high-leverage humans attain mastery quickly, kill the boss at the current level, and move on to the next one.
How High-Leverage Humans Show Up at Different Levels
High-level operators show up differently at different organizational levels:
As Individual Contributors: They always act as owners. They scale the business as if they were owners themselves, taking full responsibility for outcomes. They elevate the culture of the whole team or the business unit. They understand the whole business of the system. That system thinking allows them to 5x, or 10x their function.
As Managers: They are strategic. They understand their job is to build teams that win championships. They know human capital is their highest leverage point. Their recruiting capabilities become critical because they bring in people who act with extreme ownership. They excel in the coaching skills - the ability to bring out the best in high-potential talent.
As Executives: They understand they need true people leaders who can build system-evolving teams. True directors direct the business - they steer the ship in the market through their judgment skills. They teach you things you didn't know and solve problems you didn't know existed. You don't tell them what to do; they tell you what to do and how to grow your business.
Metacognition: The Ultimate Superpower
The metacognitive skills I'm looking for include the ability to disassociate from thinking processes and identity and analyze both. Humans capable of this can work on their mental models and install any software into the hardware of their brain. They can proactively and quickly shift their identity and evolve their belief system.
This translates into rapid learning. When people say someone is a "quick learner" or "adaptable," that’s what they mean - they're describing this ability to shift and calibrate identity within new contexts, rapidly.
A high degree of self-awareness enables high-leverage humans to disassociate from their ego and absorb feedback effectively. They challenge directly, but they come from a place of high emotional and intellectual empathy. They build fast feedback loops for themselves and handle criticism without emotional engagement. That's how they want to be treated, and that's how they treat others.
The Curveball Test: Revealing Mental Terrain Navigation
To test metacognitive abilities in real-time, I throw so-called curveballs - questions my candidates likely have never experienced before that push their mind into novel, uncomfortable, deep self-reflection territory:
"What's the difference between great and exceptional in your field?" This reveals how they define greatness and what delta they perceive between levels of performance.
"If you were in my seat, what technical questions would you ask to assess someone in your role?" The quality of their questioning reveals the quality of their knowledge and thought process. This question quickly reveals their depth, as you can assess that based on what the person is looking for.
"What are your core values and drivers? What's the source of your drive? What is pushing you forward in your career?" I want to understand their purpose, vision, and how sophisticated they are in articulating both.
"What are the hardest problems you've solved?" At the end of the day, both life and career come down to one skill: problem-solving ability. I want to know what problems they gravitated to and how they have used their minds to solve those problems.
"What was the most intense environment you've worked in? What does You operating at peak intensity look like?"I'm curious about the systems they've deployed to control chaos while still performing at a high level.
"If someone shadowed you for a month, what conclusions would they draw about how you function professionally and personally?" This question is rarely asked, and it reveals their degree of self-awareness. I want to know how they observe themselves, what they know about themselves, but most importantly, how they respond.
A low-level thinker will be confused and stuck. A high-level thinker will navigate new mental terrain with speed and depth.
Distinguishing True High-Leverage from Skilled Pretenders
Competent people speak from past experience. If you ask how they'd approach a problem, they pull data from actual experience and construct a narrative. Even when building theories, these are informed by practical experience and real-life lessons.
People who are pretending give purely hypothetical answers without personal experience to draw from.
Another strong signal is divergent thinking.
Low-level thinkers build simple logic chains: A to B, B to C, C to D. High-leverage humans assess problems from multiple angles, which prevents them from being too judgmental, critical, or reactive. Their logic structure is a multi-thread construct that they weave real-time in front of you. The most sophisticated minds are fascinating to observe.
They take time to assess multiple perspectives and understand that the answer is often "it depends." They value their knowledge and experience, but never forget that there could be something they don't know. They move effectively through the ladder of inference without operating from limited assumptions.
This form of intelligence manifests as wisdom - the ability to calculate many steps ahead.
The Energy Equation: Vibrational Alignment
Recruitment game is 25% science and 75% art.
The art piece is energetically aligning similar humans. They don't have to be the same - they could be energetically complementary - but what's most important is that they vibrate at the same frequency: similar purpose, values, communication styles, psychological makeup (psyche architecture).
This frequency alignment comes from:
Shared purpose and values – Not just having similar definitions of values, but actually embodying and living them - philosophical values manifested in real behaviour. Lived core values define organizational success.
Growth demonstration – It's one thing to claim a growth mindset; it's another to show tangible evidence. "Tell me something you've taught yourself in the past six months," or "Tell me something you had to unlearn."
Similar sense of humour – Interestingly, humour is a function of intelligence. Work is already hard enough. You want someone who faces challenges with stoicism and equanimity, stays calm under pressure, and can still crack jokes. This implies the ability not to take yourself and life seriously.
Shared definitions of excellence – Finding the right balance between individual contribution and collective purpose, wanting to elevate others around you. Being coachable - absorbing the new data when there is a human who is better / smarter than you, willing to elevate you.
While psychology has tried to quantify this with frameworks like MBTI, DISC, Enneagram, and Hogan Assessments, your most powerful tool is intuition - your real instincts and seeing how someone will blend with their team, manager, or ecosystem. Seeing what the alignment is on chemistry.
The Work Athlete Pattern
Top-performing, high-functioning humans constantly optimize for performance.
They have abundant life energy, not just for their occupation but for hobbies, side hustles, passion projects, and helping others. Their cup is full and overflowing. They invest a lot of energy and intentional time into filling their cup.
They function as "work athletes" - they work as they train, and they train to work better. This is a universal law: whatever you manifest in life is a function of your energy and intelligence.
They optimize both:
Physical discipline through strength training, exercise, running, or yoga to achieve body mastery and energy management
Intellectual discipline through voracious learning, reading, building systems, writing, and educating others
They understand their learning style and are highly self-aware about what feeds their mind for optimal retention.
Assessing Long-Term Potential vs. Short-Term Performance
When assessing long-term potential versus short-term performance, you're looking at what I call terminal velocity. You examine indicators like core values, which is why understanding purpose becomes critical.
You're discerning their long-term strategy because top performers either go up or go out. They move up or move out if there's no opportunity to continuously grow, learn, and have an impact.
Growth mindset is what you're ultimately looking for - the ability to continuously learn and, more importantly, to unlearn. To never settle, to be hungry for learning, and to be self-directed.
What happens before and after the 9-to-5 job defines a growth mindset. Whatever you do in your 5-to-9 (am or pm) when nobody's watching defines discipline.
What systems do they set in place for short and long-term optimization? This robust mental framework around personal life optimization defines high-leverage operators.
Career Transition Sophistication
There are different patterns in how people articulate career transitions.
We all evolve our consciousness through life's journey. What's interesting is that transitions happen as both intellectual and instinctual decisions. But wherever high-leverage humans go, they make the most of it.
When I coach candidates, I explain that the job description is just the starting point - the actual job is how you shape the role. You take over 100% of your responsibilities, but everything beyond comes down to your creativity, innovation, and proactiveness. Again, what is the career that you can create through the application of your intelligence?
For specific career transitions, top operators demonstrate sophisticated articulation of why choices were made, what they were pursuing, what they were walking away from and toward, and what value they extracted from each chapter.
Red Flags: The Anti-Patterns
Several patterns signal that someone is not a high-leverage operator:
Stagnation: Staying in one role at one company for years without growth. This signals fear of change and inability to transcend that fear - a metacognitive failure. For someone doing the same thing over and over, it is not seven years of experience; it's one year of experience repeated seven times. It can also signal low ambition or inability to navigate organizational politics and complexity.
Aimless Job-Hopping: The opposite problem. Mastery requires depth, which requires commitment. You can't attain deep craft proficiency jumping between short projects. This signals either not knowing what you want or an inability to work through challenges.
Strategic Impatience: Especially at leadership levels (Director, VP, or above), you cannot make a real impact without commitment. After devising a strategy, you need to will it into existence, requiring at least 3-5 years.
Poor Relationship with Failure: see below.
The Relationship with Failure: A Critical Marker
High-leverage operators have an effective relationship with failure. They've crystallized their own definition and built a relationship with it that fuels rapid development and a growth mindset.
They operate from the NLP presupposition: "There is no failure, only feedback." You don't fail; you learn. If you don't learn, you don't progress.
The mental model I help people crystallize is that there are only three forms of failure:
Not starting
Quitting too early
Not learning from the process
Everything else leads to success.
This requires maturity and deep reflection. Humans who attain this level of maturity become extremely effective with failure and, consequently, with change management.
Attracting High-Leverage Talent
My strategies to attract high-leverage humans are built on understanding game theory. These rare individuals play entirely different games - they understand game theory and play infinite games.
One key strategy I deploy is sharing common language. I explain that I play infinite games as a talent agent. My job isn't making a placement; it's helping them progress by gaining clarity on what the next level should look like and developing the leadership capabilities to materialize that quantum transition.
I level the playing field and align both sides so candidates enter conversations with the right perception and preparation. Operating in their best interest is what ultimately wins them over.
The best candidate experience isn't complicated - it's fast, transparent communication. My obligation to the hiring team is the same: provide maximum information, transparency, and full coaching to help them gain clarity on what minds they need to solve their business problems.
Evolution of My Framework
My framework continues to evolve. What I'm sharing represents my current understanding, but I constantly rethink, rewrite, and deploy new mental models while discarding ones that no longer serve.
That's a foundational metacognitive skill: reprogramming your mind to progress through the game to the next levels. This is what you are ultimately looking for if you seek to hire a top operator.
The Decision Velocity
When you find a true high-leverage human who meets these markers, move decisively. They represent the rarest resource in business - and they're never on the market for long.
Most people are walking code. Few are coders of themselves.
Building your business requires coders - rare humans who have transcended their conditioning.