I think what you should be looking at is this, in 4 weeks time did my SP grow above 35 SP. If it didn't then you are in a loss but if it did far more than that then you are in profit. I Lease SP a lot and it has helped me grow my account, grow followers that exchange upvotes with me and other added benefits that come with it. I think with a lot of people their experience with leasing wasn't profitable so they won't see any good in it. let me share some of my strategies:

• I try to post daily.
• I belong to a lot of communities for which I receive upvotes from for my post - @upvotebuilders (I run this by the way), SBI, Qurator, jjm and other Dapps.
• I comment a lot and upvote the post for which I comment on that in return give me upvotes too.
• I use a lot of Dapps and alternative Steem platforms (Actifit, Partiko, Busy, Steemcoinpan, AAA), I earn extras in points, tokens and extra upvotes, I can also exchange those tokens/points for upvotes or sell the token at Steem-Engine for more Steem.
• I autoupvote a lot of post by regular members that have good returns for my upvote and it pays well via curation.
• I use the services of Dustsweepers so that I don't loose any curation because of dust value
• I power down part of my SP in a way that what I earn for the week is more than the value of the power down SP received. This ensures that I always have ther resources to extend my leased SP and that my account keeps growing week in week out.
• I try to make my VP stay above 80% always, that way I my upvotes are always in the optimum range 80% to 100%.

Those some of the things I do and more am trying to remember to help me stay leasing and growing my SP.

I also do some delegation as the also bring in their own rewards. Cheers.