That is the single most common DM I receive on Substack and X.

Usually, I refer those people to studies or books. But that’s a big investment, and the best sources aren’t often available for free either. That is without even mentioning the rigor required to understand half of them in the first place.

It’s just a lot of work.

That’s why in today’s article, I will spare you half of that work and teach you the core principles of game theory—the ones you can apply immediately. From there, you can decide whether you want to dig deeper, but that’s your call.

Today, you’ll learn strategy. We will begin with the fundamentals: what a game is and how to read it.

Contents Include:

1. What a Game Actually Is

2. The Vital Rule of Strategy

3. Scenario: A Prison and a Bill

4. Equilibrium & Solving the Game

5. Iteration (“Shadow of the future”)

6. Summary (Save This)

1. What a Game Actually Is

It’s not a metaphor at all. Whenever we speak of a game, we technically refer to a situation with three aspects:

• More than one person is making a choice (n > 1, where n represents the number of players).

• Outcomes depend on the combination of the players’ choices, so it’s not just about you. Every single player shapes how the game is played.

• Everyone tries to act as rationally as possible to maximize their payoff

  • This means that everyone cares about the outcome. We usually don’t expect a player to say “fuck it” and proceed to go away unless that itself has a strategic value.

  • In contexts such as behavioral game theory, we can look at the motivations of others beyond rational incentives, e.g., emotional needs and subjective desires of all sorts instead of just capital or tangible rewards

This means that you are inside a dozen different games per day, and it doesn’t really matter if you recognize that.

Ever thought about who should text first? Yeah, that’s a game too.

This is the first skill: to recognize that you are inside these games yourself. This grants you a surprising sense of agency once you internalize it.

You are a player, so you may as well act like one. Without this mindset, you cannot practice game theory.

2. The Vital Rule of Strategy

When making normal decisions, such as choosing the time for your alarm clock, you typically pick the best option: the one that gives you enough time to get ready and go to work. It’s entirely your call, and no one can truly affect this decision.

Hence, when making decisions, there is always a best option.

The same cannot be said about games.

There is no best option—only a best response. The best response depends entirely on what moves the other players commit to. Likewise, their best move is also impacted by what you do.

This “strategic interdependence” is the mathematical backbone of game theory. You perpetually respond to the game.

3. Scenario: A Prison and a Bill

Before we actually split a bill and take a look at game theory in everyday life, I should briefly go over the Prisoner’s Dilemma, possibly the most famous game in all of game theory.

Honestly, if you’re even mildly interested in game theory, then you’ve heard it repeated a million times already.

Nonetheless, I will briefly outline the essence of the game so that we can then move on to a more practical scenario.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is wildly overrated. It’s not wrong, but it's been repeated to the point of becoming wallpaper. Knowing about it is now somehow associated with “understanding game theory.”

The setup of this game is simple: two partners in crime are arrested and separated from each other. They are interrogated in two different rooms, so they cannot communicate with each other at all.

Both prisoners can choose between two strategies: staying silent or betraying the other. This leads to three outcomes:

• The pair stays silent → 1 year in prison each

• Both betray each other → 2 years in prison each

• One betrays, the other remains silent → the betrayer walks free, the silent one gets 3 years

Don’t question the logic of this game. These are the rules, and there’s no avoiding them or “calling your lawyer.”

Under the given circumstances, the best response would be to betray. Staying silent bears the highest potential risk. By contrast, electing to defect either allows you to walk free or imprisons you for 2 years.

In every conceivable scenario, defection is a better strategy.

Now what’s the issue with it?

First off, it has led people to think that game theory is always about betrayal, which is simply false. Game theory studies the structure of a game, and this structure happens to be rather unforgiving.

Second, it’s nonsensically abstract. I had to explicitly tell you to adhere to the rules of the game so that you don’t break it. It’s therefore not a very practical game and won’t give you a real-world application.

Something of Substance: Splitting the Bill

Now let’s go over a very common horror scenario at the restaurant. You and seven other people enjoy a nice evening until someone utters a sentence that could start a war:

“So… shall we split it evenly?”

Let’s say everyone agrees because it’s easier. That’s the moment when the game transforms: the cost of what you ordered suddenly isn’t paid by you anymore. Everyone now co-funds it.

• Now your order will still cost the table full price, but you only pay a share of it.

• Upgrading to an expensive meal will therefore add $20 to the bill, but you only pay $2.50 of it. The other seven will cover the rest of the cost. That’s a subsidy of 8 to 1, and no one has to agree to it explicitly.

• So, everyone upgrades. The bill hits $240; everyone proceeds to pay $30 (the full price), and nobody gets a discount.

It’s a whole dilemma.

Think about your position. Strictly speaking, in terms of value, you would rather pick the cheap one if you had to cover the full price yourself. But the price has changed.

• If everyone now orders modestly while you order up, you pay $2.50 for a huge privilege.

• If everyone else orders up and you don’t, you fund seven other people’s dinners.

Take a close look at what that means. Ordering expensively is strictly better for you regardless of what everyone else does. If you were perfectly rational, you would order up, because it’s the best response.

In game theory, that’s called a dominant strategy: a move that’s your best response to every possible thing that could happen. It does not exist in every scenario, but when it does, it’s strictly the superior move.

The Payoff Matrix: The One Part of Math Worth Learning

Needing to describe a whole game and its payoff sucks.

Now—I promised not to bore you with math, but the payoff matrix is the one piece of notation that’s worth learning.

We use it to visualize games; it basically lists what you end up with, given every combination of your choices and the choices of other players.

Let’s get back to our bill example: this time, we take a table of 4. A cheap meal for $10, an expensive meal for $30, and the same premise as before.

But the expensive one is not worth $30 to you. Let’s say you find $20 to be a more acceptable price for it.

Let’s read it the way a game theorist does, one column at a time:

• If everyone orders cheap (left column):

  • Order cheap → you break even at 0.

  • Order expensive → you’re at +5. Expensive wins.

• If everyone orders expensive (right column):

  • Order cheap → you lose 15.

  • Order expensive → you lose 10. Expensive wins again.

The bottom row beats the top row both times. It’s a dominant strategy, so you don’t need to predict anything here, because it’s always the best response to everything thrown at you.

But what happens when everyone chooses the dominant strategy? Something about the game changes. An equilibrium emerges.

4. Equilibrium

Look at the matrix again and fix your eyes on the bottom-right corner. Everyone ordering expensive is called a “Nash equilibrium.” It’s the state where nobody can improve their payoff by changing their move.

At this point, there’s nothing you can do anymore. Go ahead and test it for yourself: switch to buying the cheap meal while everyone else gets the expensive meal.

You move from -10 to -15. Great. You’re a hero now. A hero that regularly makes very poor financial decisions.

But can we fix it?

The answer to this is… technically yes, but not really.

As stated, you cannot do anything inside the game. Everything you need to do is already settled, and no one can improve unless someone else valiantly sacrifices themselves—which is unlikely.

You can only break an equilibrium by changing (or preventing) the game. In this case, it’s one sentence: “Let’s just individually pay for what we order.”

That’s it. You have vetoed the game without anything changing.

This is a crucial lesson. When a situation produces bad outcomes, look at the rules producing that outcome (splitting the bill) before even looking at the players. Finally, you either choose to play it or to avoid it.

Whenever participating means losing something substantial without a good outlook for returns, then not participating is a winning strategy.

5. Iteration (“Shadow of the future”)

One more thing: how many times are you playing a game? Sometimes, games are not played repeatedly; those are called one-off games. In them, people tend to behave badly because there is absolutely no future in which the players will meet again, so nobody can take revenge.

The opposite of that is an iterated game. Things you do repeatedly in a friend group are an example. Players tend to behave much better in these games. Now, that’s not because they are nicer, but rather because you’ll see each other again; there exists a looming shadow of the future.

So, if you want someone to behave well, you'd better make sure you see each other again. And, of course, always be careful when an iterated game nears its end. Once the finite horizon approaches and the final round is here, it practically turns into a one-off game.

6. Summary (Save This)

You now have four pieces of vital information about game theory, and they cover most of it. To ensure that you can apply them seamlessly, here’s a summary:

1. You can now recognize the game by figuring out whether your outcome depends on someone else’s choice. If that is the case, then you’re in a game.

2. You should always come up with the best response rather than trying to make the best decision.

3. Read a payoff matrix one column at a time. Find your best response to each column.

4. Look for the equilibrium. If the equilibrium is bad for you, then you may want to reconsider whether you really are eager to join in on the game or just cut your losses and leave.

That’s it for part one. The lesson’s over.

You now know how to read the structure of simple games and avoid getting into bad positions. But what happens in more complex scenarios, when trust is at stake or when the truth is blurred?

That’s what the premium posts cover. They are your ticket to transform high-stakes games into an advantage. 20% off until September 20th.

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How does one actually win?

Like genuinely.

Everywhere we look, people say, “Just work more,” and condemn you to grind away at your goals as if that would magically fix all of your issues.

This is modern, self-imposed slavery. Yes, the grindset is a trap. It teaches you only one thing: to move forward.

It largely overlooks that doing more of what already led to failure is not a viable strategy. It’s the perfect recipe for burnout. You cannot do the same thing a hundred times and expect the outcome to be different.

I, therefore, want to teach you something different. In a sense, it’s far less complicated because it will not add a thousand hours to your workload.

It hinges on one practical insight of game theory: the outcome of a game, particularly that of a competitive game, is settled before you make your first move.

You can picture it like a thick wall of stone. You can try to keep running at it, but that will only bring you another concussion in your failed attempt at crushing the wall.

Today, I bring you a sledgehammer. It’s not a scalpel or something precise. It’s a hard rule of thumb, one that you can use as you please—a universally effective approach.

I present to you the one audit to win more.

Contents Include:

1. Game Theory Glossary

2. Where People Go Wrong (The Hierarchy of Strategy)

3. A Game’s Anatomy

4. The Decision Framework

1. Game Theory Glossary

To make this as understandable as possible, we will provide you with a glossary that explains each term briefly so that you can use the following framework and understand the logic. No need to study microeconomics today.

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I tried to name a value I hold that has actually cost me something, a value that takes money from my account or one elusive conviction that costs me opportunities.

I found one eventually, though I suspect that it will not qualify: the conviction that we have no convictions anymore. The notion that we had killed the values we had sworn to uphold.

Morality. We killed it years ago.

We took it out back behind the barn, shot it like a mad dog, and told ourselves it never happened. Worse, we still mention its corpse in nearly every conversation.

But I know that this itself is just a position. And I also know that you are not credulous. Hence, selling this unfounded insight as a matter of fact is not my preferred approach.

So what makes this contemporary piece different from what Nietzsche already claimed a thousand times, 150 years ago?

I’ll prove it with game theory.

The Two Axes of Morality

Morality exists on two axes.

The first: what you exclaim, which is the low-cost essence. I can tell you everything I like because, as long as I have a mouth, I can manufacture excuses at will, and I can tailor them to the situation.

“It was just an excuse, a one-time thing; it will never happen again!”

A cheap signal.

The second: what you uphold. The costly component. The act of renouncing something because you would rather not tarnish your virtue. This is the one that will cost you something tangible. It will prohibit you from acting without consideration.

For example, if I were to tell you that money is the root of all evil, but someone were to offer me a million dollars, would I truly uphold my conviction? Would I decline because it is evil?

Therein lies the issue: by default, a stated intention is just a forecast of what we may do. That’s what studies back up: what people say they’ll do accounts for barely a quarter of the variation in what they actually do1.

And we happen to be terrible forecasters. What we aim to do is not at all what we will do. This is why you see a thousand different virtues flying around at all times: it’s easy to state but hard to back up. The effect has clearly been exacerbated by social media, because stating virtues sounds impressive and inspiring. Now people have a clear incentive to be a hypocrite, even if it’s just some minor recognition.

It’s Not Traditional Hypocrisy

… It’s worse.

I want to separate active hypocrisy from passive hypocrisy: if it were genuinely active hypocrisy—meaning the perpetrator is aware of their folly—it would be a considerable relief.

It would imply that they knew and that there was once a tangible position you failed to meet; it at least suggests that there was a standard, a genuine criterion. The whole situation would be akin to a hero’s tragedy.

But that’s not the case. What’s happening is somehow even more bizarre:

The value most people proclaim is something that was never tested. There’s no trial of virtue at play here. It could barely be called a lie at that point, and it’s more akin to an open question, which tainted the whole well.

Now, every time someone tries to preach a value, one has to ask, “Have you ever upheld that virtue in a situation in which it would have been genuinely difficult?”

The answer is no. The virtue was proclaimed because it looked nice to post on social media. And everyone magically assumes that this person is truly virtuous.

Logic has been totally subverted.

Why This Is Happening (Game Theory)

I am not here to pose a question. Beneath all this absurdity, there is a clear answer; perhaps it may even be a warning.

Morality used to be very expensive. Holding a position to its end meant that you risked your resources for it. That is a virtue.

But we sought to get rid of the cost of holding virtues. Today, you can broadcast your moral position with no cost to an audience foolish enough to reward you for it. It’s dangerous.

A gullible culture cannot sustain itself because it will believe the lies of others without thinking for itself.

But why did everything turn into cheap talk?

We cannot see clearly anymore. We are, in a sense, socially overstimulated.

For most of human history, we lived in smaller groups. Sure, some villages and cities grew to a few million. However, you were mostly limited to your own social circle, which was even smaller. Perhaps twenty people knew you closely; another thirty or so were simply coworkers and acquaintances.

Everyone outside this was nigh unreachable unless you made a deliberate attempt to do so. Everything was far more intimate. You knew these people and dealt with them repeatedly.

This is the whole idea of an iterated game in game theory: your interactions are repeated, so trust is essential. Being labeled a liar or being a social outcast was actively dangerous—you just had so much to lose.

Defect once, and you’ll pay a bitter tax for your transgression. Under such conditions, morality and rationality pointed in the same direction: you didn’t need to be a conscientious person to behave well. Having a neighbor and a working brain would suffice to foster morality in most.

Then we moved on to one-shot games. Modern advances have made it easier to be connected, yet it has paradoxically fostered isolation.

A stranger on a train or a flight.
A comment section on social media.
A sprawling city of nine million inhabitants.

Three of the most damning examples of this creeping isolation. You will never see these people again, and both you and that person know it.

Our nature has been revealed, not changed. Devoid of the shadow of the future, we began to favor defection strategies over cooperation.

Why should I care about upholding a virtue I proclaim on social media? I won’t see these people ever again; they cannot hold me accountable. Hell, if they did, I’d just block them—that’s the common way of dealing with it.

We have killed morality by slaughtering iterated scenarios.

This explains why it took me so long to find a value. I could’ve ignored it entirely or labeled myself a Nietzschean amoralist who is just “so above morality” and called it a day, and I would have fallen into the very trap I sought to critique.

I realize now that it would have been far more comfortable.

This has been an examination of our cultural collapse through the lens of game theory. Logic over metaphysics and belief systems. That’s the modus operandi we follow here—and we do it every week.

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In today’s world, people are practically enthralled by the idea of influence, or at least their very own interpretation of how they would wield it. While not everyone wants to rule the world, it is evident that everyone would like to influence the world, to varying degrees.

That itself is not something for which one should feel guilty. When viewed under the pure lens of rationality, having influence will always be superior to not possessing it, even if it comes with its responsibilities and tribulations.

This has made influence an envied trait. Though it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. There are plenty of people out there who actively profit from your desire.

You have likely already stumbled onto the edgy “dark psychology” branch of the internet. It’s repulsive with its red glowing eyes, manipulator, predator, and prey imagery.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for an edgy aesthetic; my whole visual style is minimal black and white. But I don’t sell the idea of you becoming the next Frank Underwood.

This contagion has stained the perception of influence to its last drop. Whether you indulged in it or not is of no importance. I just want to inform you of what this article is not.

I will be honest with you. All these fast-influence / manipulation strategies are not real. It’s just a cheap dopamine hit, because influence is not a big bang.

It is neither a single event nor a button you press, and suddenly everyone listens to what you have to say.

Influence is a road, and every engagement starts between two nobodies.

Just two strangers who know nothing about each other.

You have no influence here. Any quick strategy you take is a step toward pretending to have influence, and that is a vermin’s way of life.

As such, influence is a road leading toward a greater journey. If you genuinely elect to walk along this path, then this rundown is for you.

If you are here for quick and superficial tips (which do not exist), you are mistaken.

So let me restate this in the clearest way possible:

You start as a nobody. No one owes you anything. If this does not fit your worldview, you can try to cope your way out of this plain fact and forever live in this delusion, or start paving a way out.

Enough scolding. I will now outline to you precisely what this article includes. Note that this is a step-by-step breakdown, going over every important stage of influence.

Contents Include:

1. Influence Is An Ecosystem (Prelude)

2. The Nobody Stage (A Lesson in Body Language)

   1. Receive but Never Transmit

   2. Tune Before You Act

   3. Watch What They Leak

   4. The Unspoken Advantage

3. The Resonance Stage (A Lesson in Social Dynamics)

   1. Charisma Is Not a Trait

   2. The Leverage You Could Have

   3. Engineer the Surface

4. The Trust Stage (A Lesson in Neuroscience)

   1. Trust Is a “Prior”

   2. Predictability Outperforms Likeability

   3. Only Engineer Tests You Pass

5. The Anchor Stage (A Lesson in Economics)

   1. Build a Need, Solve It Later

   2. Surface the Problem No One Named

6. The Loyalty Stage (A Lesson in Personality)

   1. The Manufacturing Line

   2. Cults & Why Loyalty Isn’t Earned

7. The Pitfalls (A Lesson in Failure)

   1. When It Turns On You

   2. You Cannot Hold A Wasp

Each chapter will grant you a different skill that will increase your level of influence.

1. Influence Is An Ecosystem (Prelude)

Most people have a rather fantastical idea of what influence is. They assume the “influential person” steps into a room and magically pulls everyone toward them, commanding them at will.

If you practice influence like that, you will be resented, the others will rise against you, and you will fall as quickly as you arrived. It’s as poetic as it gets.

Influence is not a single big-bang event, nor is it an intrinsic trait a person possesses. You are not born with an “influence gene.” At most, some people possess a learned understanding of how influence works, but these behaviors are usually developed from childhood exposure. They likely arrived with biases your child-self could not fend off at that time.

Anyone who possesses at least a semi-solid grasp on the concepts of influence knows one thing for sure: influence is an arc. A journey of sorts. This makes it easier to build because it has a set order.

First, you read, then you resonate, then you earn trust, and then you build upon that trust. A simple sequence, but perilous to go through when uninformed.

It is essentially your task to guide the stranger you met toward accepting you as a figure of influence. Most people evidently ignore this fact and then ask themselves why no one listens to them.

I will tell you one thing from personal experience: do yourself a service and spare yourself this outcome.

The path ahead requires genuine effort and occasional restraint, which is arguably the toughest part.

We will not be trying to dominate others. That is a strategy of the past, of the age of conquerors and warfare.

If you try this strategy in today’s world, they will revolt and drag you down. Even in the time of state cruelty, every elite and every ruler feared the collective power of common men. Nothing is more treacherous than the potential cruelty of those who have felt oppressed; the misdeeds of the French Revolution in its late stages are a grim reminder.

That’s why influence is meant to be wielded courteously.

With that out of the way, you will now learn how to make the cost of removing you higher than the cost of keeping you.

2. The Nobody Stage

A lesson in body language.

People may not state their preferences outright, but they do not need to. They might try to deceive or lie when uncomfortable, yet leak their true state through their body language anyway. 1

This is the first stage of influence: two nobodies who are either complete strangers or vague acquaintances. Both of you only possess a flawed prediction or no clue about what the other person values, what they desire, who they are, or what their goals are.

Naturally, this stage is ripe for information asymmetry. In this section, you will learn how to read their body language and come to understand their natural responses.

Remember: the cost of not understanding a person tends to be an inevitable bill. One that usually arrives in the moments when you feel the safest.

2.1. Receive but Never Transmit

Let’s start with what you should not do.

People love to act unique. They frequently flaunt their talents or subtly brag about their past successes. They just cannot stop talking about themselves.

And you do the same. We all do, and every now and then, we are all aware that this is a huge mistake.

Every time you proclaim uniqueness, you are hosting your very own entertainment show while hoping to impress someone else.

Your life is not a circus. Not all the things that shaped you are meant to be entertaining, so you shouldn’t pretend like they are.

Stop performing at once. We are here to listen.

2.2. Tune Before You Act.

As stated many times before, the person in front of you is a stranger, so any strategy you decide to commit to is a wild guess. You quickly turn into a dart player trying to hit the bullseye while blindfolded, only supported by a delusional prayer…

Wild guesses like these do more harm than good. It’s hit or miss—usually more of a miss than a hit.

This then poses a grave danger: if the person in front of you suddenly considers you to be a dork within the first few minutes of interaction, you will never hold much influence over them. People just do not let themselves be influenced by those they deem to be beneath them. There is always a subtle and possibly treacherous hierarchy.

Before you attempt anything, you need to attain an understanding of their baseline. It will make your interaction dramatically smoother; in fact, you will notice the difference immediately.

Human interaction will suddenly not feel like a guess in the dark anymore. You may feel a revitalization of your social skills in extreme cases.

Now I know that most of you are well-read; nonetheless, the act of “tuning oneself to another person” can sound off-putting and overly complex.

It’s far less complicated than it sounds.

The gist of it is that everybody’s resting expression has some sort of baseline. It’s somewhere between closed and mildly guarded, perhaps even intense. First impressions alone won’t help you much in inferring this baseline.

The reason is that facial structure doesn’t tell you much about how the person behaves. Anatomy ≠ brain structure.

Someone with a piercing gaze will initially appear aggressive, but they could also just have a unique anatomical development in their eye region.

To truly “figure them out,” you’ll need to invest a few minutes of low-stakes talk. During this engagement, you will need to observe the following behaviors:

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They sell the fantasy of working less but never explicitly inform you what to prioritize.

Listen. I am not here to write an entire article about some fraudulent productivity hacks. So, if you’re looking for cheap tricks, then this is the wrong place.

It won’t be cozy in here either. Some advice will be strategically ruthless. You asked for payoff maximization after all, and that’s no trip to the playground.

I’ll show you the game theory on how you ought to maximize your payoff so that you can build a position that allows you to lean back in the long game.

The effort is front-loaded. Once you settle into your position, you’ll be sitting comfortably. You may call it high-functioning laziness.

Contents Include:

1. The Leverage Thesis

2. Axiom 1: Choose the Game Before You Try to Win It

3. Axiom 2: Asymmetry Devours Intensity

4. Axiom 3: Information Is the Real Game

The Leverage Thesis

Leverage is the name of the game. If you’re a long-term reader of this publication, you already know our love for leverage. And this time, we will be focusing on asymmetric advantages.

Most people assume that effort = results. A linear assumption: “Just grind harder to get better results.” And it’s true to some degree. Obviously, a writer who writes for 2 hours instead of 1 hour will get more work done.

But that’s beside the point. Because effort is a strict volume game that everyone can play. The issue is that most people don’t even know the following:

1. Which game they’re in

2. What position they currently hold

3. What information they possess that others lack

Effort is a multiplier to those aspects.

The reason a writer improves his payoff by writing more is that he knows that publishing strengthens his position and improves his writing ability (which is encoded in the form of information). His effort compounds into better positioning and superior information.

Now take a construction worker as a negative example of this. Working more means that he gets more done, but it worsens his position over time because his rest is essential for tackling the work of the coming days. His effort compounds negatively by accumulating fatigue.

These are two different extremes, and it’s not about blue-collar being bad and white-collar being superior; it should merely reinforce the argument that effort is not always a viable solution, and it’s about whether your effort compounds a renewable asset.

The writer’s hours establish something that’s still there tomorrow.
The construction worker’s hours cost him tomorrow to pay for today.

Now that we've settled this, let’s get into the actual strategies.

Axiom 1: Choose the Game Before You Try to Win It

The instinct to get better at what you’re doing is not guaranteed to improve your situation. The environment you play in is the problem.

Every time you partake in a game, you enter its structure. In 99% of cases, this structure is already predefined simply due to the existence of other players.

So if you’re not actively trying to reinvent the wheel or create a new language, you’re playing inside a system that isn’t concerned with your preferences, because you are not (yet) influential enough to impact its structure.

Most competitive games have a structure that resembles this:

1. The most influential players, or the founders, are at the top of the hierarchy. They have surpassed the game itself and are so influential that they can shift the behaviors of the players by themselves or adjust the structure. Think of how billionaires can impact the stock market or politicians creating laws that citizens must adhere to.

2. The payoff matrix/structure of the game. Whenever influential actors aren’t actively meddling with the structure of a game, it alone dictates the behaviors of the other players. Every game worth being in is a system that can largely sustain itself.

3. The players, which can roughly be categorized by skill and information.

   1. The advanced: they are the most experienced but don’t have the resources it takes to truly belong among the influential. They are good at maximizing their payoff and usually sit comfortably in a well-built position while possessing vital information about the game’s structure.

   2. The intermediate: Not quite beginners, but also not experts. They show promising progress and a good understanding but still have a long way to go.

   3. The beginners: This is where you are when you start. You know nothing of substance. The information asymmetry is strongest here, and you lack any positioning.

Notice what differentiates the beginners from the intermediate and the advanced. It is clearly not their effort. It’s their relative level of information and their position. An advanced player can allow themselves to be lazy because they have a solid supporting structure.

The beginner cannot compete with this, regardless of their level of excellence. It’s like being surrounded by strings and not knowing which one to pull, so you’re forced to go through every single string in hopes of finding the right one. That’s precisely what lack of information does to you.

Gathering Intel

Before you enter, familiarize yourself with the game’s environment. Look out for advanced and intermediate players, and analyze how they play the game. This is how you alleviate your initial lack of information.

More importantly, take a glance at the game itself. What is the most achievable outcome? If the ceiling of the outcome is low, then you’re usually not in a game that compounds your effort.

Look at the pieces on the board, analyze the figures, their position, and what they intend to do to maximize their payoff. Don’t reinvent the wheel; figure out what works and use that—then add effort to it.

Axiom 2: Asymmetry Devours Intensity

The whole reason “being lazy” is not immediately a losing strategy is that working hard won’t average out your results in your favor.

This effort grindset assumes symmetrical games. It applies a rigid logic to work: “Either work harder or suffer the setbacks.” But work is not a linear graph. Rarely, if ever, is your effort proportional to your results.

The most common delusion that leads people to continuously chase symmetric positions is that they believe every competitor is an equal. A noble idea, yet flawed nonetheless, because now you treat yourself and others like replicas of each other.

Think about it: if you assume that everyone can work hard to become rich/influential/powerful, then why would you waste your time with building something entirely replaceable? You end up going from one rat race to the next.

Prioritizing asymmetric positions is the polar opposite. They frequently require some investment to reach them, but compound upward. What makes them the lazier option is that they do not need a high hit rate. You set them up, and they turn into leverage.

This weaves into a solid rule of thumb:
Asymmetric positions are positions that work for you. They are leverage.
Symmetric positions are positions in which you work for them. They are a liability.

Think of a company trying to advertise a new product. They could limit themselves to their own channels, and work harder to get in front of more potential customers. That is a feasible possibility.

But it’s difficult. It demands immense effort and commitment over a long time.

That’s why most companies settle for the alternative: they pay for ads. They trade money for positioning. That’s the investment. Over its lifespan, the advertised product is likely to grant them a profit that far outweighs their cost spent, while saving time.

The Payoff Check

It doesn’t always have to be capital that converts your symmetric position into asymmetric leverage. Money, like many other factors, is a screwdriver. It fits one occasion, while being a mismatch to another.

Your imperative is to identify the screws, then methodically select the right screwdriver.

As such, you must examine the payoff. In most cases, there is a hidden amplifier in any game you play. Ask, “What multiplier can get me to my desired payoff?”

Sometimes it’s money. Other times it’s contacts. Every now and then, the solution may even be to build something long-lasting, like a social media presence.

What you must understand is that the asymmetric position requires an upfront sacrifice for an easier time afterward.

Axiom 3: Information Is the Real Game

Information. The cheapest resource that changes everything. “Work smarter, not harder”—you’ve heard it before. Even though it’s frowned upon in the “hustle culture,” it is nonetheless a very significant advantage.

In comparison to effort, information is not expendable. You either have it, or you don’t. Sure, you may forget the information, but that’s on you.

Should’ve brought a notebook.

The calculation for knowledge is particularly interesting because it is the rare resource where price doesn’t scale with stakes at all. That’s because an hour of research costs the same whether it saves you a weekend or three years.

Information is so incredibly valuable because it can eliminate the uninformed while crowning the insightful.

But what is information?

Most assume it’s some kind of recipe for success—some kind of knowledgeable life hack that alters your overall trajectory.

It doesn’t even have to be this drastic to enable success.

Sometimes, good information is centered around knowing the risks, the pitfalls, and what to avoid rather than what to do. The logic is simple: those who can avoid wasting time will advance to their desired destination far more expeditiously.

Reverse-Engineer Success.

The overwhelming majority of people lack information because they ignore it. Most advice can be found by yourself, if you care to look for it.

Find someone who succeeded in a similar or the same game. Ask them if possible. If that’s not an option, you must resort to research and careful study of their moves.

Yes, most people already pretend they do just that. I’ve genuinely heard the same thing a million times by now, something similar to:

“Oh yeah, I studied the greatest people in existence, like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and those guys.”

Now be honest with yourself. Did you study them, or did you just read a case study from someone else? The latter is only acceptable as information if you use it as your launchpad, as a map so that you know where to seek insight.

Then, it’s time to go to the drawing board and write down the steps they took.

A Lazily Written Conclusion.

This is a post about laziness; you don’t expect a grand conclusion, now do you?

Fine. I will at least ask one question: why do you think that I can simply end this article right here? It’s not really common; usually writers prefer rambling for another 500 words.

The reason is simple: I used the advice I just gave you. I know the game; I positioned myself as the messenger, and I delivered you information you lacked.

Your turn.

More Game Theory:

That is why this post centers on five game-theoretical tactics that you can immediately practice in the very next conversation you have with someone, and all of them grant you a substantial advantage.

No “learn this theory first” homework today. You will be surprised how much game theory hides in plain sight.

Contents Include:

1. Move 1: Stop Negotiating Against Yourself (Attrition Game)

2. Move 2: Ask What Would Change Their Mind (Screening)

3. Move 3: Name Constraints (Costly Signaling)

4. Move 4: Never Speak to Groups (Volunteer’s Dilemma)

5. Move 5: Shrink Your Asks Until Yes Is Cheap (Incentive Alignment)

Move 1: Stop Negotiating Against Yourself (Attrition Game)

The situation: You proposed an offer, and the person in front of you did not outright reject it. They simply did not respond or said something along the lines of “that’s not going to work.”

This is a case of a war-of-attrition game, one of the more frequent traps in both business and relationships.

It is riddled with hidden power dynamics, which most people never perceive:

As soon as the refusal of your offer hits, the game is halted without exception. Any subsequent move will be expensive because it must directly target the offer itself. You can either decline entirely or change your offer until one of you concedes.

In most cases, you will try to break the awkward silence, improve your offer, and repropose. The issue with this approach is that it is exactly what the other person wants you to do.

Their silence or rejection is a cheap signal for them. It costs them nothing while simultaneously enabling them to pressure you. That is because silence is the only move that does not carry a cost in this attrition game: it does not change the offer; it just extends the timeline of the game.

You could almost imagine it like “skipping your turn” and temporarily stalemating the game.

The real danger stems from you improving your offer. Because then you are teaching them that pressuring you is profitable—and you will frankly not have a fun time once they learn that.

Hence, there are only three viable options:

1. Wait it out and find peace in the awkwardness.

2. Ask them why something does not work and get them to cooperate willingly.

3. Leave without compromising your position.

Anything else will be nothing less than a very elaborate self-betrayal.

How To Know You’re In a War of Attrition

We all know that, in the heat of the moment, it is frequently extraordinarily difficult to realize whether you are in an attrition game. There is no way around this fact. The circumstances will be unnerving, and the compulsions will be tempting.

If you desire even the slightest chance at winning this engagement, you will need to understand the characteristics of an attrition game and the traps behind them.

• The central law is that pretty much every move you or the person in front of you commits to will bear a cost. As such, the person next to you will attempt to either stay silent or they will resort to vague statements. Both options reduce their cost while stalemating the whole situation until you make a mistake.

• Their response will not even minutely touch the substance of your offer. This means that they will flat-out refuse to name a term and instead may attempt to stall the game until you budge.

• Their rejections are lightly spoken and broad enough not to have any substance at all. They endeavor to avoid leaking information that you could take advantage of. It is, in essence, a concealed invite for you to conform and change your offer in a way that benefits them. I recommend that you decline this invitation unless you plan to sacrifice all your leverage. They aren’t remotely concerned about splitting the cake. They want the whole thing.

• Once they start to stall, you feel the urge to fill the silence. This can get dangerous really fast when they stop interrupting you. You may just talk yourself into a corner you can’t escape. You’re falling right into their fangs.

Move 2: Ask What Would Change Their Mind (Screening)

The situation: you are trapped in a disagreement that you suspect is about to become unwinnable. This classic “I already know where this is going”-situation is almost certain to put you in a dire position. Most people will try to argue immediately, which is always an option, but usually a premature use of time.

Fighting fire with fire burns the whole forest. You’ll be left with a few charred sticks and a bunch of smoldering stones, which is inappropriate if you want to prolong staying in the game. Never go scorched earth if the situation doesn’t demand it.

The issue with the confrontational approach is the information asymmetry present in the current game.

To paint a clearer picture, imagine yourself in a discussion with a romantic partner. You have no idea what happened, but they’re suddenly furious at you.

It’s a rhetorical cliché by now, but I will immediately go ahead and tell you that one simple question can resolve this entire problem. But don’t be fooled by the structure; this question can save your metaphorical head.

“What would you need to see to really think differently about this?”

Asking a question is the ideal technique for the uninformed player to alleviate the dangers of information asymmetry. Nonetheless, no one talks about it because it’s a boring tactic, and it really does not look impressive.

The reason it works is that, in most cases, people foresee being met with critique on their propositions in discussions. Inviting them to state out loud what they want to hear will have a distinct effect on the demand: you gain intel while they simmer down once they feel heard.

Now this may sound like sunshine and rainbows, but it’s not always this straightforward. If they cannot respond at all, then that tells you that their position is not even remotely evidence-based, and no argument will come close to shifting their position.

You will just find yourself throwing everything at a wall and end up standing silently, trapped in a state of awe and disappointment as you realize that nothing sticks at all.

Really just a pyrrhic victory.

Listen. If they cannot respond to reason, then you cannot really do anything with their whole argumentation.

If you tell me to do “x” and then proceed to get annoyed with me when I do “x,” then perhaps your request is the problem. This is probably both a lesson in self-respect and a lesson in game theory.

You need to find a different way that does not involve arguing further.

But let’s be real here. It doesn’t always end like this, and we do not need to catastrophize about what-ifs right now. Frequently, you will get a reliable answer—something that’s actually really plausible.

Now you know which strings to pull, and it only took one question. That’s a time investment of about 2 minutes to resolve a discussion that could’ve devolved into an entire week of torment and borderline psychological warfare.

When To Utilize Screening

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Welcome to Tactics, a game-theoretical mini-series of short operational posts teaching you how to act and navigate choices in life and business.

Each short issue of Tactics dissects one central mechanism, defining the problem most people are oblivious to and prescribing exactly what to do in such situations.

By the end of each article, you will have one more tool at your disposal.

In comparison to the already established Deep Dives, Tactics offer no history lesson because the value is the speed of application itself: they are immediately applicable and do not require heavy expertise.

“Everyone Around Me Acts Irrational”

… is a lie people have learned to tell themselves. No one is irrational. You are viewing them through the wrong lens.

You must understand that “a game” is three things at once: players, payoffs (their ideal reward), and strategies that help them reach their envisioned payoff.

Every single participant within the game has their “utility function”: a math rule that shows how much a player wants a specific result.

Most people fail because they project their idea of the world—and thus their payoff—onto other people1. As a result, everyone around them suddenly seems irrational because reason can only be defined in relation to a payoff structure.

While this sounds complicated at first, it is, in actuality, simple:

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No fancy introduction or ornamentation for this article. You have read the title. You know what it is all about.

Let me state one fact in the clearest possible way: This is not self-help.

I will not suggest reading three books a day. Nor will I ask you to “just get a gym membership.” That is insufficient advice, and you know it by now.

Instead, I will treat you as an intelligent adult while demanding your attention and funneling it strictly toward game theory.

Toward strategy over ambiguous philosophies.
Toward compounding progress rather than static positions.

If you are doing well right now, consider saving this article. It is always a favorable idea to save an exit route in this unpredictable world.

Contents Include:

1. The Truth About The Comeback

2. Precept 1: Survive the Round First.

3. Precept 2: When Behind, Add Variance.

4. Precept 3: You Cannot Rebuild at the Same Speed You Broke

5. Precept 4: Stop Paying Into Lost Positions

The Truth About The Comeback

You can come back from almost anything. That is a plain fact. You and nearly everyone else in this world already know that.

Until you are caught in a situation that demands a comeback.

Suddenly, all your prior escape routes, if you have prepared any, seem inaccessible or blocked. You begin fearing the idea of “building anew,” so you find yourself scrambling for ideas to plot a ‘recovery attempt.’

This is what causes just about every single great collapse.

Understand this: a flawed recovery attempt is worse than the initial fall simply because it opens pits no one could ever hope to anticipate.

This is where game theory steps in. It explains what caused your downfall and prescribes the exact, counterintuitive sequence that gets you back into the game.

PRECEPT 1: Survive the Round First.

You do not have to win the round you lost. But you need to survive it.

Whenever you lose something, your first instinct will always be to reach for an immediate recovery.

Usually, it manifests as a commitment to an initiative meant to erase all your losses in one single stroke. Remortgage on the comeback trade—all in to win it straight back tonight.

Surely, you already recognize it to be nothing more than a delusional Hail Mary. Yet you do it all the time.

The white lie in relationships.
The act of rapidly panic-selling stocks.
The immediate desire for revenge when crossed.

And it always ends the same way: you end up making it significantly worse than before for everyone involved and have now effectively opened an even deeper pit for yourself.

What you must understand is that just about every single game worth being in is an “iterated” game: one consisting of multiple rounds, where each round affects subsequent engagements.1

The future rounds are where recovery is meant to happen. Losing the current round does not automatically eliminate you from participating in the next phases.

Despite that, there exists precisely one singular state you cannot recover from: total elimination.

Absolute ruin is the only irreparable position. It offers no opportunity to participate in the subsequent phase of an iterated game, forcing you out for all time.

Committing to one last desperate act inadvertently creates the ideal downward spiral into your very own ruin. It is a bitter irony. All your resources, time, money, and focus will melt away just for one delusional shot at erasing a bad round.

In the process, you are gambling away the one thing that makes recovery even feasible: continued play.

It is akin to a doctor amputating your arm because you have a minor infection in a hemorrhaged index finger. The irrationality knows no bounds.

The Reversal: Survive Before You Thrive

Stop the bleeding first. Plan the return afterward.

Most of your downfalls are a cut at the calf. A movement-restricting annoyance, but it will not kill you outright. At least as long as you do not try running a marathon with it. The infected wound is the harshest death because everyone knows that it could have been treated.

The first move of an excellent comeback is therefore not a win. The first move is the attempt not to be permanently eliminated. You must preserve enough capital, credibility, health, or autonomy to return to the table in the next round.

Cut the loss and secure a solid floor before the situation turns into a bottomless pit—that is the first act of the comeback.

Learn to acknowledge that staying in the game is boring, unheroic, and the entire ballgame.

PRECEPT 2: When Behind, Add Variance.

After a downfall, you will inevitably find yourself assuming that you must “grind harder” along the concrete line that led you to your loss. More hours, more intensity, same strategy.

“I just need more of everything!”
The volume game fallacy.

Now, do not deceive yourself and think honestly about it. You will realize this is just rehearsing the same loss for the sake of it. Unless you are a deranged masochist, you should avoid this mindset, because the floor does not get softer the more you fall onto it. In fact, it will break down and sentence you to even lower depths.

The “grind harder” strategy is basically just the Hail Mary gamble in a more deceitful disguise. It surely looks like effort, and it probably is. That does not imply that it is good, though.

At least the gamble from Percept 1 either saves you or permanently terminates the game for you. The common grinding strategy does neither.

You risk rearranging the game around your losses and trapping yourself in a perpetual loop of increasing workload while decimating your payoffs. This is pure reactivity, and you will ultimately find yourself building sandcastles in an hourglass.

Committing to a strategy that bears all the risks of a gamble and none of the payoff is worse than choosing between fighting or folding. It also changes nothing about what caused the loss in the first place.

Stop feeding the loop at once.

The Reversal: Change the Shape of the Bet.

If your current trajectory reliably produces losses, you need to commit to moves that widen the distribution. Unconventional moves, asymmetric bets—the doors no individual in a safe position would even consider opening because they are that uncomfortable.

This is not a lesson in total recklessness. This is not about encouraging you to take a ginormous gamble that risks eliminating you entirely.

It is about the realization that you, in your position of loss, possess one strategy that no one else possesses: the ability to abandon the safe line.

Analyze what led to your prior loss, visualize its trajectory, and then take a different path from there. Take any chance to deviate from the trajectory that led to failure, regardless of how outlandish it seems.

The position at the bottom gives free rein to experiment.

Likewise, a chess player in a losing position will not trade pieces. He knows that trading simplifies the board, and a simpler board favors whoever is currently ahead. Fewer pieces means fewer chances for the losing side to generate a tactic, after all.

So, the losing player deliberately makes the position messier and harder to calculate. A chaotic board at least contains a mistake the opponent might make.

He manufactures variance because clarity would kill him.

PRECEPT 3: You Cannot Rebuild at the Same Speed You Broke

Restore it all in one grand gesture. One dramatic move, a big announcement, the one act that will erase the fall and put everything back in place.

Similar identity to the gamble, yet fundamentally different. You will have a natural inclination toward this idea in particular because it creates a narrative.

Contrary to precept 1, the usual idea behind this strategy is not a desperate gamble but a sudden construction of a second empire. Such an idea is seductive to you for all the right reasons, yet leads to all the wrong decisions.

Destruction and construction are asymmetric in every domain. Construction is almost linear in its appearance, whereas destruction is exponential.

A reputation, a fortune, a skill, a body, a relationship: each is built additively over an extended run of consistent inputs, yet each can be destroyed in just one or two simple actions.

Even worse, stating that you intend to rebuild faster appears fake due to the emphasis on speed itself. Speed is a signature of a cheap signal. It is simply something anyone could assert at virtually any time.

As such, announcing that you have “completely changed” just one day after a catastrophe is both a comedically ridiculous sentence to utter while somehow also managing to be the cheapest sentence you could have constructed in the entire realm of language.

The Reversal: Use Time as the Signal

Time is the only thing that cannot be cheaply faked. Consistent performance across a span long enough that a pretender would have already quit is the single highest source of credibility you could attain.2

It is, quite literally, uncheatable proof, regardless of who your audience might be. Whether they are a lender, an employer, or a partner is not relevant.

If your comeback is contingent on the dependency that other people believe in a new version of you, then pay in a currency they can verify. A sustained cost of your time rather than a promise tainted by cheap talk.

The speed of your recovery is inversely proportional to how much any person believes it.

PRECEPT 4: Stop Paying Into Lost Positions.

“I have put three years/my savings/my whole reputation into this—I cannot walk away now!”

This is the sunk-cost fallacy expressed aloud. And particularly in today’s world, this is the most frequent and expensive decision a mind can make.

Resources you have already spent are gone, regardless of whether their investment paid off or not. They also convey exactly zero information about whether the next dollar, hour, or year is even worth spending.

“But I have already put so much in!” is the flawed reasoning a person uses before they convert a completely recoverable loss into a total collapse because they cannot get themselves to stop funding dead projects.

You need to spare the resources you still have. They are your only chance at making a comeback. Without them, you are doomed.

No one will explain it that plainly for you.

The Reversal: Forget the Past and Enter the Present.

There is no need to pretend that this is not the trickiest advice to adhere to in this entire article.

Your past decisions should remain in the past. Buried deep underground, locked in a place where it cannot influence you. The sole reason to revise a decision is to analyze it without permitting it to sway your judgments. Everything else is a brilliantly executed self-deception—a fable tainted by sunk costs, now masquerading as your own decision. 3

The only escape is to price every decision from the present as if you have just arrived and the past investments belonged to someone else entirely.

Only one single question is allowed to roam inside your mind: given today’s position, is continuing here the best available use of what I have left?

If a stranger in your position cut it, then cut it. The money, time, and pride are already spent. The payoff, or lack thereof, is a lesson. One that will stick with you, sharpen you.

Either way, the investment is gone. At this point, you must decide how much more you are willing to lose.

A Final Diagnostic

Most people do not lack the skill to pull off a comeback. In most cases, they lack the rationality and clarity required to survive a crisis.

When overloaded with emotion and fear, the rational choice happens to be the choice that feels the most inaccurate, yet is the only decision that offers a realistic escape.

This article is more like a survival guide than an advisorial piece. And you should use it accordingly.

The average person can hide in their blissful ignorance, asserting that “they just did not know how to react.” But today, you lost the right to this superficial excuse.

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Descend Deeper:

If you found this useful, this is the free tier. The paid library goes considerably further. There is a lot more to uncover.

Think back to a time when you tried to disguise your nervousness—recall a moment when you had to tell a lie in an exceptionally dire situation.

Remember what that did to your body. Do not just reflect on the subtle sensation of slightly uncomfortable warmth. It only tells half a story.

Above all, you must recall the trembling in your hands, the subtle sweat on your palms, the burn in your chest, and how your head vibrated as if you had been concussed.

Perhaps you were lucky.

You might have succeeded in feigning your reactions. It is likely that no one knew the real truth, so they took your word for it.

Now, you might assume you did well because they had no evidence.
But that is not what happened.

In actuality, you leaked everything.

The tremor, the cortisol-driven shift in your vocal pitch, the intense pupil dilation, and the cold sweat originating from a skin conductance spike—every conceivable signal was laid bare for the whole world to see.

Your accusers evidently did not know how to read it.
A trained observer would have been far more likely to have caught it.

They know that humans are physiologically incapable of hiding who they are. You cannot feign or pretend. Words may deceive, but the body reveals.

To put it more precisely, your autonomic nervous system leaks vital information in every interaction.

Your stress state, your dominance-posture, your sexual interest, and your fear—everything you try to hide is observable.

You cannot suppress these broadcasts. They are as readable as they are inevitable.

If your adversary had known how to cold read, you would not have gotten far with your deceit. They would have dug deeper, uncovered the true nature of your denials, and acted on what they uncovered.

Cold reading is not a parlor trick.

In fact, while you are reading this, the most prestigious law enforcement institutions around the world are teaching the techniques of cold reading to their most skilled behavioral analysts and profilers on a daily basis.

For they know what most ignore: the body has no poker face. Human physiology reveals everything you would rather keep hidden.

At its core, cold reading is applied neurobiology—and to gain the advantage this knowledge provides, you must learn how to implement its intricacies.

Contents Include:

1. The Biomechanics of Cold Reading

   1. The Scientific Criteria

   2. Exposing the Pretenders and Charlatans

2. Physiological Mechanisms

   1. The Dual Motor System: Facial Microexpressions

   2. Pupillary Response: Signals You Cannot Fake

   3. Vocal Architecture: Unwilling Broadcasts

   4. Thin-Slicing: First Impressions

   5. Porges’ Neuroception: A Social Engagement System

3. Case Study: Aldrich Ames (The CIA & The KGB)

4. Framework: The Leakage Architecture

   1. The Structural Law & The Five Pillars

   2. The Protocol: “Control,” “Calibrate,” “Provoke,” and “Converge”

   3. The Channel Reliability Ranking

   4. When To Discard A Channel

5. The Room, One Last Time

The article will begin by discussing the biomechanics of cold reading, then cover the physiological mechanisms and how they work. How to read these mechanisms will then be taught in Chapter 4’s operational framework.

1. The Biomechanics of Cold Reading

There is something you must understand about cold reading.
It has a reputation problem. And not a light one at that.

It is associated with psychics, mentalists, and con artists—those who exploit vagueness and your natural confirmation bias to feign supernatural insight. Nothing more than frauds wearing the guise of a saint.

But whether you personally believe in these people is beside the point, because that is not what this post is about.

In fact, it is not even what cold reading is about.

This post is about the empirically documented, neurobiologically grounded fact that the human body reveals its internal state through unfilterable channels, none of which can be suppressed by conscious effort.

All readable channels trace back to a traitor residing inside your own body: your autonomic nervous system.

Free readers, the diagnosis ends here.

You have read the table of contents; you know what this is all about: five channels of leakage the body cannot suppress, the four-stage protocol built to force them into the open, and the case where ignoring all of it cost a decade of buried informants.

In this piece, you will learn to read these channels properly.

At 12€/month, you get full access to this post and every past and future framework.

Subscribe now

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It was once again time for the weekly DM check on X. And straightaway, one message caught my eye:

“[…] everyone around me just seemed to already know the one thing that would have changed my decision, but no one told me. Why did they do that?”

For context, this person had been tasked with executing important decisions in their office. And reportedly, their coworkers knew it.

Yet they remained silent.

You, too, have felt this before.

Maybe in the same setting.
Perhaps in a close friend group.
Possibly in your family, where it hurts most.

Before this, you always assumed that “you are the exception,” that the people would tell you whenever they needed to inform you.

That assumption is the mechanism.

In this article, I want to convey to you the mechanisms that decide truthful behaviors in social interactions—and why the people you trust most never tell you the whole truth.

Do note that I am no guru, nor do I consider myself a self-help writer.

Contents Include:

1. Those Beside You Compete With You (Asymmetric Costs of Truth)

2. Those Above You Manage You (Reversed Principal-Agent Problem)

3. Those Below You Flatter You (Preference Falsification)

This article examines the three behaviors that determine dishonest behavior in social interactions. These are not sentiments, nor personal philosophies; just the fundamental theory behind life and the cost of truth.

1. Those Beside You Compete With You

Your peers are not correcting your blind spots and confronting you about your shortcomings because blind spots are not a shared problem. No one will put it that plainly to you.

You know it, and I need not convince you of it because you have felt it before.

Think back to that moment you presented a flawed decision—about a relationship, money, or a commitment—to your friend group with full conviction and expected their honesty.

Instead of truthfulness, you merely received flattering encouragement that prompted you to follow through with your flawed idea. Days or even months later, you suddenly discover that they had fiercely debated your decision among themselves, while noticing all the consequences you are now forced to live with.

They could have told you.
They genuinely cared.
They even discussed it.
You just weren’t invited in.

In most cases, there is no obvious perpetrator or a clear scapegoat to put the blame on. The flaw is not anthropological; it does not stem from the fact that “humans are evil or inherently selfish.”

Instead, the social structure running in the background is the catalyst. Yet, most people either ignore it because it is uncomfortable or because they are utterly oblivious to it.

Your peers—the ones you would expect to hear the truth from—are the ones who lie to you the most often. They occupy a position in your life with a clear view of where you fall short, yet regularly favor avoidance over disclosure.

The Asymmetric Costs of Honesty

What appears to be malice on the surface is, in reality, behavior governed by universal incentives that exist within any social group.

Telling someone about their flaws carries three hidden costs. Most people are intimately aware of them, yet they frequently lack the knowledge needed to define them.

The first negative incentive is irrational: the fear of reputational risk and its consequences. If they turn out to be wrong about their assumption, they will be forced to bear this misjudgment in front of others. For a human, that is the worst possible punishment.

This aversion to honesty in social environments is neurological: facing judgment from a group activates the brain’s fear circuitry—the subcortical system. This is due to the fact that in our ancient past, being exiled from a group resulted in certain death—and that fear never faded. As such, even the risk of a minor misstep can provoke this circuitry to fire and result in strict avoidance.

The second negative incentive is the exact opposite.
It is purely rational.

Ask yourself: What advantage does it have for you to tell someone about their mistake?

The answer is zero.

Your peers’ position does not benefit from delivering you a correction. In a truly competitive context, your resulting improvement is a direct cost to them. In such environments, you would be a fool to think they are not well aware of that.

The third negative incentive is the cost of silence.
Precisely because there is no cost of silence at all.

Saying nothing will bear no reputational exposure, no confrontation, no resentment risk, and no threat to their position.

Now put yourself in the position of your peer. Compare both options side by side, and you will see that the math is unforgiving.

For them, correcting you produces three costs for them and only delivers one potential “good payoff”: your thankfulness—which will be irrelevant in approximately two weeks from now when both of you have forgotten this incident ever transpired.

Silence, on the other hand, is not the path of least resistance. It is the path of no hardship. It is a strictly better move under every plausible variation of this scenario, which is exactly what makes it a dominant strategy rather than a personal preference.

The Real Threat & The Only Antidote

Most damning of all, this asymmetry requires no rivalry, no prior dislike, and no conscious strategizing. The person who likes you will fall victim to this—even worse, the person you love will be held captive by it under bad relational circumstances.

Your friend will thus be running a worse calculation than your most bitter enemy. Deep down, it is meant to protect you—and themselves.

It is a calculation you cannot outmatch.

The average person tends to ignore this behavior. It seems deeply cynical precisely because it is a rather cynical truth. As such, the implications of this mechanism are quite literally catastrophic if they are not dealt with.

What you must not do is assume every social group to be irrelevant when seeking honest feedback. The payoff matrix is unforgiving, but there is one lever that can flip it immediately:

Predictability.

Everyone will tell you to become less predictable. That is true when dealing with enemies but fatal when surrounded by allies: the unpredictable peer is the person who receives the truth last.

You must foster a genuine history of not punishing honesty.

Forget retaliation.
Discard any ideas of reputational blowback.
And most importantly, never punish them for speaking the truth.

You might now find yourself thinking, “I would never be angry with someone telling me a harsh truth.”

Exactly these people continue to be the ones who are most hurt when confronted with it. If you were truly not offended by it, you would not need to state it in the first place. They would have already told you.

And paradoxically, precisely this proclamation is what erodes trust the most. It is a cheap signal—and you know it.

So far, predictability has worked in your favor. This piece shows what it looks like from the other side—when someone builds it deliberately:

2. Those Above You Manage You

For as long as a person must answer to another person, they bear a negative incentive toward the truth, because all their mistakes trace back to one person: themselves.

Those above you—your “principals”—are not withholding feedback because they are too preoccupied. Your manager is ignoring it because providing you with the information you need in an honest manner is a structurally worse trade for them.1

And this is not a personal preference.

You must understand that the person above you is not your evaluator. They are an agent: a person who pursues specific goals within a strategic setting while serving the person above them in the hierarchy. Their autonomy is just as limited as yours is.

Especially for those working in office environments, this hierarchy runs deeper than most imagine. Your manager has his own supervisor, and even this supervisor invariably has his own boss to whom he must adhere. Not even the CEO is exempt from this—because he must appease the board of investors whose confidence he cannot afford to lose.

But it does not have to be restricted to business at all. As long as someone has to answer to another person, they are an agent. And agents are, by definition, restricted in their autonomy, regardless of how powerful they appear to be.

The assumption that your principal’s primary job is to develop you is structurally false. “They surely have the power to decide on their own, so why does he have to lie?” is a common belief. It is false nonetheless.

The behaviors of a principal are limited by three central threats to their own position.

Retention Risk

Picture the following: you are a semi-effective employee working at an office. You have some flaws—but they are relatively minor. You also know that you have options. A few other companies seem like a pleasant workspace to you, but nothing draws you to them, not yet.

Of course, you value the existence of your options. They grant you profound safety and comfort. What no one tells you is that your manager probably disdains your options.

Not because they hate you, but because you now possess a substantial amount of asymmetric leverage, and your manager cannot quite predict your reactions to their behaviors.

This leads to three possible scenarios:

1. They inform you about your flaws and blind spots; you accept them without holding grudges and improve accordingly. The absolute best case.

2. They inform you about your flaws and blind spots, and you consider it an insult to your performance. In the absolute worst case, you now resent them and are far more likely to consider your alternatives—they lose a valuable worker.

3. Silence. Nothing happens.

Once again, silence remains the undefeated option simply because your manager is not willing to risk the downsides and explain to their supervisor why their office's performance suddenly crashed. Absolute silence ends the game before it ever begins. It is both resource-effective (no costs or energy spent) and risk-averse.

You must ignore the corporate “teamwork” platitudes because you and your manager are not a team at all. They care about their own safety (appeasing their supervisor), while you care about being rewarded adequately. You two just happen to share the same space. That does not make you friends.

Legal Exposure Risk

Especially dominant in corporate settings. Every single honest, specific negative review is a potential exhibit in a future judicial proceeding.

Direct reviews, such as “struggles with strategic thinking,” are a scandal waiting to happen. Vague reviews, on the other hand, protect the manager.

“Meets expectations” is a legally defensible position, even if you do not meet any.

Your Importance Is Relative

When your principal is forced to manage a whole portfolio of agents rather than a single one, your individual effort and trajectory stop being quantifiable units that matter.

Your individual output is merged with that of the collective, which both diminishes your strengths and hides your flaws. That is synergy—for your principal. And it does not work in your favor.

The result is indifference. Your individual blind spots are thus both statistically irrelevant and frequently not visible within the aggregated output.

Your principal could spend extra time carefully managing each piece, but that will only produce marginal returns and cost a lot of time. They have no incentive to do so until you become the person who is underperforming enough to warrant actual countermeasures—by the time that happens, the correction is not meant for you. It is an act of damage control for them. You get told the truth exactly once it stops being useful to you and becomes a necessity for them. A lose-lose that turns you into a nuisance and leaves them furious.

In a massive device, the secondary motors become irrelevant.
You are unremarkable. By design.

Escaping the Cycle

Your retention can be a liability.
Your rights can be a danger.
Your importance can be overlooked.

In all three scenarios, you are either a risk or an asset, potentially both. This makes you undesirable to confront.

Your principal does not passionately bear grudges against you purely because they follow their rational calculations. Their actions are simply what a rational player would do in that scenario.

They are incentivized to work against you.

And until you invalidate their calculation, nothing is altered. You will remain an asset without a face, and they will continue playing safe because it is the dominant strategy.

Nonetheless, all three calculations can be transformed in your favor:

First, your retention is only a liability if you are unpredictable. Disarming this situation is simple: actively request feedback and cultivate a reputation for accepting feedback without turning defensive. Predictability pays off—in the right areas.

The same applies to the second risk your principal faces: legal exposure. Regardless of how much they trust you, it will always be an inherent risk. One thing needs to be stated above all: your aim is not to shrink this risk down to zero—that is logically impossible. What you can do is reduce your principal’s risk by following the previous advice: cultivated, strategic predictability.

Nevertheless, none of this will work if you do not give your principal a reason to look at you specifically. Your lack of positioning is your greatest liability.

Thus, the actual solution to this problem is to stop blending in. Specialize in one output that only you produce, an item that is integral to the machine itself—one that cannot be absorbed by the collective. A generalist is interchangeable by definition, and being interchangeable is what makes you safe to ignore. Contrary to that, the specialist is not a secondary motor; he is the load-bearing mechanism within the engine. Suddenly, your desire to improve is closely aligned with your principal’s incentives. Overlooking you turns expensive fast, and improving you creates a tangible result.

3. Those Below You Flatter You

Until now, you have been the subordinate.

You have become subject to the strategies of those above you and the victim of various calculations of those beside you. People generally assume all of this dishonesty will finally fade once they grow powerful enough to oversee their own “subordinates”—whether in an office, a hierarchical friend group, or a sports team.

You think to yourself, “Now that I am their leader, things will surely be easier to sustain.”

You slowly begin assuming yourself to be entitled to the truth. Because you need their truths to manage them effectively, after all.

What actually happens is the direct contrary of everything you assume, and it is the trap most naive leaders fall victim to.

Granted, your role as a leader does not make you an indirect threat anymore: you have no group that worries about you, nor a principal that overlooks you while worrying that your actions might cause future issues.

Instead, you are the direct threat now—the immediate and unambiguous danger, the one whose actions may carry harsh consequences at their expense. As a result, your subordinates are not explicitly agreeing with you. Much rather, they are sympathizing with your stance because dissent carries a cost only they pay.

Most readers will now claim that they would never penalize someone for speaking the truth. But whether you are even intending to punish their dissent in the first place does not matter at all—because it will never change the calculation.

Your inherent influence is the risk. This is not about you, not your character, and not your preferences. You are merely the quiet component of the mechanism perpetuating their dishonesty.

Preference Falsification

In 1995, the economist Timur Kuran coined the term “preference falsification” in his book Private Truths, Public Lies2.

On the surface, it appears to be just like lying.
But it has far deeper systemic consequences.

According to Kuran, preference falsification is the systematic misrepresentation of one’s actual views under perceived social pressure across an entire population simultaneously.

And it is not occasional flattery. Public opinion—what’s expressed—and private opinion—what’s truly believed—can diverge permanently. Suddenly, each individual assumes that their private dissent is rare and socially unacceptable, even when most others share the same view. A silent majority.

The result? Once you acquire status and authority over someone, you become a part of their social pressure by definition. Your influence is the crux that suppresses their honesty, and it is a central threat—whether realized or not. That pressure is then immediately calculated into everything your subordinates do.

This effect is further exacerbated by the fact that powerful individuals frequently become less accurate at reading the emotional states of others3. The result is a vicious cycle: not only does your status suppress what reaches you, it simultaneously degrades your own capacity to detect that suppression is happening.

Every semblance of status you attain chips away at the path toward truth. That alone is a bitter realization, but a necessary one.

The Art of Leadership

The answer to this dilemma is not “have less status,” nor will I condemn you for the desire for influence. Out of all three mechanisms causing others to feed you lies, this one appears to be the most hopeless.

Power—but for what?
To be lied to?

This is not a question about morality. It is a plain disadvantage and a danger to you and your career. The bill for this blind spot tends to arrive late, when you feel most safe. And it is silent.

But you cannot stop being the source of the pressure—that fact is structurally fixed and comes with your role. But you can change your position.

You can become the smaller pressure relative to the threats you are shielding your subordinates from (such as market conditions, board demands, chaos above you, and competitors below them).

You should understand that this is not about “being a better boss.” You need to be the superior calculation to the threat they would face without you. The moment you attained power, you stopped being read as a person with intentions and became a fixed term in someone else's risk calculation. A threat by position.

Let their calculations remain rational. You do not need them to like you; you ultimately need to be better than the threats they would face without you.

That is enough.

Become the superior calculation, the rational decision, and the source of relative safety, neither affectionately warm nor coldly detached—just the better option.

Instrumentalize yourself.

Your greatest mistake is to assume that you are constrained to one position at a time.

You are not always a colleague.
You are not always a subordinate.
You are not always the master of others.

This week alone, you have already occupied all three of these positions, and you were largely oblivious to it. And far worse, you were the perpetrator of all three.

You have stayed silent beside someone.
You have managed someone below you.
You have been flattered by someone who needed you.

And you never noticed it. What you have here is an answer to a mechanism only a handful of people even know exists.

And that, by definition, is leverage.

Delve Deeper into the Science:

For a few years, I have kept a private list.

It was informal, handwritten.

The kind of record you keep not because you intend to do anything with it, but because something keeps repeating, and you desperately need somewhere to put it.

I confess the list was a test. It consisted of people I had watched win situations they had no business winning.

I wanted to know if the pattern I kept seeing was real or if my brain constructed it.

It took longer than expected before I noticed any repeating patterns. And when the pattern clarified, the answers were never what I had been told to look for. The research it prompted only solidified the unease.

The dominant winning variable was legibility. The ability to read a layer of social architecture that other people cannot see.

Granted, it sounds like intelligence, but it is far different.

Contents Include:

1. Your Standard Model is Wrong

2. Pillar 1: Large Groups Will Fail You. (The Bystander Effect, Game Theory)

3. Pillar 2: Most of Your Wins are Losses. (The Winner’s Curse, Game Theory)

4. Pillar 3: Your Body Decides Before Your Mind. (The Somatic Marker, Neuroscience)

5. Pillar 4: The Discovery That Explained Everything Was Explaining Far Less Than You Were Told. (The Empathy Collapse, Neuroscience)

6. The Colonnade (Framework)

7. Fatal Diagnostics

The following truths are neither easy to comprehend nor particularly forgiving if misinterpreted—and they may very well undermine your prior beliefs.

A note before you begin: this post is structured as a rabbit hole. The further you read, the stranger and more unsettling the material becomes. You can read the pillars in any order, but reading them in sequence will guarantee a unique experience.

Your Standard Model Is Wrong

Every framework for winning you adhere to was manufactured by people who never studied winners. No one will put it that plainly to you.

Instead of analyzing the gaps in knowledge between the average person and the successful individual, they started emphasizing output: books read, hours worked. What they call “defying the rat race” or “escaping the matrix” is, in reality, just another cage that happened to be more gilded than the previous one.

As a result, you still operate on three principles: intelligence, effort, and purpose. You know these principles already. But not because you chose to. They were imposed on you before you could form your own virtues.

These principles are nothing more than a highly sophisticated game of “telephone” where everyone tries to repeat the same obscure message while losing its true meaning in the process.

A structural flaw no one warned you about—because no one can name it nowadays.

The intelligence principle tells you to read more. At the same time, you must also learn more and memorize more. Only then can you truly succeed. The result is a highly sophisticated consumer who prides themselves on theory without ever experiencing practice.

The effort principle instructs you to work harder. Suddenly, working inhumane hours without a clear vision became a virtue—something previously reserved only for slaves. You chase hours, and you expend your energy on a task no one needs you to solve. The result is someone who builds nothing anyone wants.

The purpose principle is the most insidious by far. It promises the discovery of true calling and insists everything else is merely provisional. Its logical endpoint is a continuous chase, suspending your life while you wait for a delusional revelation that may never arrive. The result is someone who never begins.

All three principles stem from the same underlying architecture: they outsource your agency to something you cannot even clearly define. Intelligence is a ceiling. Effort is a commodity. And purpose is a fairy tale handed over to people who request permission to begin their lives.

What my list taught me—and what the research confirmed—is that people who consistently win do not even consider operating on the better versions of these models. They have abandoned them. They follow rules no one will hand you, precisely because no one can name them.

The reason no one can name them is entirely structural. The standard model only glances inward: it assumes that the winning variable is already inside the individual—your discipline, your intelligence, and your calling. The principles of the successful are entirely different. They focus outward, on the architecture of the situation itself: how the mechanics of groups operate, how competition distorts rationality, how the body routes decisions before the mind even forms a sentence, and how social cognition deteriorates when people trust it most.

This is what the four pillars are built on. A different architecture of reality.

Pillar 1: Large Groups Will Fail You.

Let me ask you a question: what causes the death of an empire?

A war?
A harsh winter?
Perhaps a political feud?

The answer is: nothing.

The longest-lasting empires rarely ended in a single catastrophic moment. Instead, it was a slow, agonizing stagnation. The direct result of an empire growing so large that the rulers became indifferent toward managing it.

“I will just let someone more capable do my work” was a common thought among the councils of the ruling class as it grew in number. Thus, entirely without notice, the empire decayed over decades, dying from outsourced responsibility.

The same applies to you.

All large groups you think you belong to will inevitably fail you. Not because of malice, rivalry, or fallouts—that would be far too simplistic. Instead, this is orchestrated by hidden incentive structures within large groups that actively operate at your expense.

Picture the following:

An elderly person is knocked down on the empty street in front of you. He was violently tackled by another man—it appears they had a volatile disagreement.

As the fighting escalates, you begin to realize that there is no end to the chaos. A harsh realization hits you; someone will need to step in to resolve it.

At the same time, you find yourself surrounded by dozens of other witnesses. In the flood of faces, you notice many of them look more than capable enough to help the man. In fact, even you yourself are qualified.

But no one intervenes. The group watches in silence, gazing upon the ensuing fight as if locked in stasis.

Perhaps you will now try to assert, “I will intervene and help the poor man!”

Statistically, you will not even move an inch. No—you will watch the turmoil just like all the other spectators around you.

Today, this is what everyone knows as the “bystander effect”: the more witnesses, the less likely anyone is to intervene. Yet practically no one knows that it has a rigorous and ruthless game-theoretical model behind it.

The actual science behind it is far more grim than the folk theories suggest. Precisely this was proven in 1985 when the economist and social scientist Andreas Diekmann formalized it as the “volunteer’s dilemma.” 1

The volunteer’s dilemma is a game in which a group encounters a problem that only requires one person to solve it. But helping carries a tangible cost, such as time expenditure, risk, unwanted exposure, or perhaps a foregone opportunity. If literally no one steps up to the task, everyone pays a cost far worse than the cost of helping.

Now, the players find themselves in a dilemma in which everyone structurally benefits if someone volunteers, but everyone would prefer that someone else be the one to pay the cost.

The Grim Solution

What most people fail to understand is that this is not a game of cooperation. Instead, it is a cruel game of sacrifice.

Do not be fooled. You are not “in this together.”

It may not be blatantly obvious, but the faces that surround you are your opponents. Every time a player chooses to do nothing and wait for another player’s reaction, they are actively defecting via inaction.

You are not evil for that.

No one is to blame for these circumstances. While it seems as if there is a choice, the player’s defection primarily manifests unconsciously—simply by being paralyzed.

Diekmann went on to discover that once the game is solved, it produces a ‘mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium’: the point at which the game freezes. In this state, no player can change the payoff structure by adjusting their own strategy.

Neither side has any moves left—much like a stalemate in chess.

Beyond that, this equilibrium contains a vicious quality: as the number of bystanders (N) increases, the probability that any single person volunteers goes down for each individual. Most vital, the probability that no one volunteers at all increases as the group grows.

With two bystanders, the chance of intervention is virtually certain.
With twenty bystanders, the chance of intervention is practically zero.

Weakness in numbers.

Thus, what most people understand as a vague social phenomenon is a mathematically rational outcome of everyone unconsciously modeling everyone else’s incentives: no one wants to bear the burden of intervention, but everyone wants someone else to do it, so no one does.

It is not that these individuals are failing to notice the emergency. They are not coldly indifferent or sadistically interested in the carnage. Whether they know it or not, they are calculating an outcome in which their own payoff—usually their own safety—is maximized. And you are not exempt from this.

The Implications

The bottom line: large groups make personal crises worse.

You have never been purposefully abandoned by your own group. Similarly, you have never intentionally left another group member behind.

Subconsciously, you saw the number of bystanders; your brain calculated a move and concluded that helping was not yet your equilibrium move. So did everyone else standing right next to you.

Not indifference, but rationality. A truly bitter rationality.

You cannot expect a large group to help you out in times of need. Everyone will shift the ‘burden’ of helping you onto another person, which ultimately means that no one moves at all.

The mechanism itself can also be weaponized by reverse-engineering its outcome: if you require help from a group, keep the number of contacted individuals (N) below 5, preferably at 2 or 3. At this quantity, pressure remains personal as there are only one or two people to deflect onto.

Also note that the bystander effect is not only about helping a person in need. Large groups are universally more stagnant than small, more personal groups.

In a small group, the lines of sight between individuals are unambiguous. If a task needs to be done, it cannot fade into the dark corners of the collective. When everyone is highly visible, the group is routinely forced to delegate.

On the contrary, that burden subsides within massive groups. Each member unconsciously deflects the responsibility into the void of the enormous crowd. The prevailing thought is not “I shouldn’t do this” but “Surely someone more qualified, available, responsible, and efficient than me will easily handle the situation.”

The former fosters delegation, whereas the latter breeds indifference. Thus, small groups delegate while large groups deflect.

Pillar 2: Most of Your Wins are Losses (Winner’s Curse)

Particularly those in which you seemingly outlasted your rivals.

Most people preach perseverance and venerate the idea of total obsession. They assert that you must be “so convinced of your goals and ambitions that you will pursue them at any cost.”

As a metaphor, this is hardly bad advice.
But when taken literally, it turns catastrophic.

The person implementing this instruction will focus their entire energy and resources on one singular goal—whether that be a job offer, acquisition bids, or dating dynamics. For simplicity’s sake, we will call these ambitions “assets.”

On its own, this does not seem like a negative at all. In fact, it may very well be beneficial: focused attention allows for unparalleled output. What it does not allow is sustainable output.

Every time you pursue assets, you place a bid. Usually, people bid with their invisible, personal resources (time, energy, emotional investment). They begin asking, “How long can I persevere in comparison to my competitors?” The winner takes the prize, after all. Right?

High Investments, Catastrophic Returns

In 1971, three petroleum engineers—Capen, Clapp, and Campbell—noticed something that should have been obvious for a long time: oil companies winning offshore drilling-lease auctions were systematically overpaying. 2

And it seemed to happen just about all the time.

You might now assume these companies were simply incompetent or did not care about their return on investment—yet that was not the case at all. The people behind these investments were not new to any of this. They were quite literally paid well, as any financial advisor would be.

There was a mechanism that led these experts to overpay. A mechanism they could not control or properly understand.

In an auction game where the asset’s true value is the same for all bidders but simultaneously unknown to any of them, each bidder will independently estimate that value with some degree of error.

While some companies viewed the drilling lease as an investment of disproportionate value, others stayed more neutral and assumed the drilling lease to be radically less important.

Logically, the bidder who ends up winning is, by definition, the one who makes the highest bid. But the deeper implication is far more severe: the winner is disproportionately likely to be the person who overestimated the most.

Winning the auction is not proof of superior perseverance anymore. It is not a tremendous victory or a brilliant investment.

It is an admission of being wrong. Moreover, it is statistical evidence of having catastrophically overestimated an asset’s value. A catastrophic financial overestimation.

Again, these experts were no fools. They were just not safe from the mechanism; their rational vision became distorted through fierce competition. The heat of the rivalry led them to frequently miscalculate absolute value and made them fully commit to atrocious investments.

Ever since, economists have named this phenomenon “the Winner’s Curse.” And it is a mechanism capable of collapsing even the most well-educated individuals.

This extends beyond auctions. Every single competitive pursuit—whether a job, a contract, or even a person—runs on the same “bidding-war” logic. You won because you were the one who overestimated the value the most, which is why you won in the first place. So you stayed and prided yourself on your perseverance while proclaiming it to be superior discipline.

It is what the hustle culture conditioned you to. What the “growth gurus” preached and the principles those supposed “life advisors” swore by.

What you likely never saw was the smile on your rival’s face as they realized the asset was not worth what you paid for it.

This rival was not weaker than you. He was simply not as obsessed with the payoff as you were. Because he was more informed than you.

The relentless pursuer is not devoted to anything. He is the most likely to have recklessly overestimated.

Bitter Implications

The Winner’s Curse proved that there is no definitive end to a zero-sum bidding war. No moment of closure or brief pause is granted to you that could lead you to reflect on what is truly transpiring and the damage your decisions cause.

Only once every rival has quit does this game conclude. The winner is then forced to bear the scars of their investment on full display, while the apparent ‘losers’ are free to gather their strength once more.

That is precisely what makes these victories both superficially glorious and particularly devastating. In a poetic irony, the winner only discovers that he has lost after he glances at his own injuries.

Winning a game like this does not warrant celebration. It should trigger suspicion. Always count the total cost. Relying on the price is a fickle path that only leads to painful decisions.3

After a substantial fight, your first instinct must not be to celebrate. Instead, ask yourself if that win is truly a worthy return on investment.

Count your losses, scrutinize your prizes.

Pillar 3: Your Body Decides Before Your Mind Does

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26th May, 3 PM.

I received a DM. From a founding member. It was a request for an article—an article which I likely should have authored a long time ago.

The topic? Partnerships—alliances. Something you, the reader, will inevitably be confronted with in the future.

For some, it may be tomorrow.
Others may have to wait quite some time.

Regardless, your life will converge on this precise point: a moment in which a contract is signed or a handshake is given, in hopes of building a long-lasting partnership.

It is the most dangerous moment in your life, and it will decide vital aspects of your future.

I am not going to reproduce the full message verbatim, but the observation underneath it deserves to be shared, because it is the most precise diagnosis of partnership failure I have encountered in a while:

Bad actors do not undo most partnerships. They fail due to their asymmetric design. Everyone, blinded by the best intentions, builds exactly the structure David Deutsch warns against in The Beginning of Infinity:

A static system.

One that treats the knowledge, tools, and incentives available today as sufficient to govern a relationship that has to survive years it cannot yet see, with people whose incentives will not stay where they started.

The founding moment of an alliance—the first handshake, the paralyzing excitement, the first true contract—is the worst possible time to design a partnership.

And it is a truth most people will never forget after recovering from the ensuing catastrophe.

He then posed the question: What do we do? How do you bring a dynamic framework to a future that has not happened yet?

That is what the rest of this is for.

Contents Include:

1. The Founding Errors

2. The Predictable Catastrophe (BATNA, Incentives)

3. A Close Call At Microsoft (Case Study)

4. The Mending Architecture (Framework)

5. Lasting Amendments

Note: Although this article leans heavily on business alliances, the following framework can be used in any sort of partnership that involves high-stakes scenarios.

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1. The Founding Errors

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Friday, 5th June. 7 PM.

It happened again. As it regularly does.

As I scroll through my DMs on X, my eyes linger on one message in particular:

“(…) even though I put in a ton of effort, it seems like I never get anywhere.”

This message did not draw my attention because it was something novel or substantially different.

No—I noticed it because it is already familiar.

By now, I have likely already lost track of how many times I have received near-identical DMs. It is always a variation of the same message: “I am not where I want to be.”

Above all, one thing needs to be put plainly: you are not deficient.

But you lack a component of success: knowledge of mechanisms. You have resorted to the idea of merit because life does not grant you a clear passage anymore.

Working hard to secure measurable results seems reasonable—and, on the surface, appears to be perfectly logical. But this worldview lacks both direction and position, both of which are vital.

This lack of guidance is a widespread issue. A particularly vicious one at that. Frequently, the principles that determine success are hidden in plain sight.

The real divide is not income anymore.
It is an understanding of the world itself.

Because now more than ever, the world operates on a set of constants that no institution will teach you. Not because they are a well-kept secret, but rather because they are uncomfortable.

In fact, you may not even accept these laws.

Nevertheless, it always ends in the same drawn-out cliché: the worn-out idealist returns to embrace what he previously rebelled against.

In this article, I want to convey to you the direction you should have received a long time ago. Do note that I am no guru, nor do I consider myself a self-help writer.

Contents Include:

1. A Lack of Direction

2. Principle 1: Effort is Linear, Position is Exponential (The Types of Leverage)

3. Principle 2: Invisible Competence Is Just a Hobby (The Costly Signal)

4. Principle 3: The Market Is Indifferent to Effort (The Misconception)

5. Principle 4: Most People Are Solving The Wrong Problem (The Harsh Diagnosis)

6. Principle 5: Time Spent is a Cost. Results Are the Return (The Institutional Lie)

This article examines the five principles that determine the discrepancy between effort and results. Not sentiments, nor personal philosophies; just the raw science behind life and success.

A Lack of Direction

Before the modern age, life was much simpler. Work hard, get rewarded adequately, then buy a house and start a family.

Looking back, it was a restrictive worldview, but it worked. Morale was high, institutions held strong, and the economy was stable—at least as stable as modern economies can be.

Now look at where we are today. A precarious position: morale has largely been shattered, the world is as divided as ever, and an unstable economy exacerbates these issues.

The clear path does not exist anymore. It is fragmented by uncertainty:

“If I work hard, I may get rewarded adequately, then buy a house if I have enough money, and start a family if I meet a special person.”

The result? People are still trying to work hard, just without the goals that the previous generations had.

The person working incredibly hard and going nowhere is not deficient. The reason they go unrewarded is precisely that the model that enabled success in the past broke down. But the effort put into it did not.

The result? Asymmetric investment—you actively put in more work for less result. That is the direct result of a model failure, not a competence or skill issue.

The average person is now operating on a false model that steadily undermines their progress: “Show up, work hard, get rewarded” is incomplete at best and actively misleading for anyone who wants outcomes that exceed the equilibrium.

Principle 1: Effort is Linear, Position is Exponential

Whether hard work translates to success depends almost entirely on position. Working three years in the wrong position produces far fewer results than two years of moderate work in the right position.

That gap widens annually, and at year ten, the difference between a bad position and an optimal position is not even close anymore.

The bottom line: your position is a variable that multiplies your output.

That is why you always see various successful individuals repeatedly preach hard work. What they do not tell you is that it worked for them because their position was simply superior to the one you held.

The entire mechanism behind this was discovered by the American economist Sherwin Rosen. In his paper, ‘The Economics of Superstars’, he explained how small differences in capability or position, when combined with leverage (scale, reach, reputation), produce enormous differences in outcome. 1

They earn ten times, or a hundred times, more than you because their output scales in ways that linear effort cannot. Though you should understand that the same applies in the opposite direction: effort without leverage either scales linearly or does not scale at all.

The Types of Leverage

Active leverage is the most undervalued asset by the average person. To wield it properly, you should be able to differentiate between the different types of leverage.

1. People. Life is about the hands you shake—a corporate platitude. While not reflecting the whole truth, it is undoubtedly a special type of leverage. Everywhere you go, you should aim to make new contacts. Having contacts is a multitool, a failsafe, and an unfair advantage that you can bring everywhere you go. You just need to talk more.

2. Capital. Most people reduce the idea of capital to the number in their bank account. That is false. Good capital is working money—investments. It is “liquid power”; you should exert it to buy a product that will make it easier to sustain your work, indirectly boosting your positioning. The millionaire who does not leverage his capital is in a worse position than the middle-class man who invests frequently.

3. Media. Content that reaches people you will never meet. Take this article as a practical example, because it is fundamentally built on this leverage type. Without the media, I could not convey my skills in this article. It would not matter how hard I work, because my work would simply not be visible. Use media to your advantage. Post successes, build a persona—it is the easiest type of leverage because it can be entirely curated.

4. Code. Now more than ever. Especially with the rise of AI agents, work does not have to be labor-intensive anymore. Having an automated assistant is a leverage point that was previously only attainable to the rich who could afford secretaries. It is the single most ignored leverage type.

What You Must Ask Yourself

The correct question to ask at any point in your career is not, “What produces the most output now?” Instead, you must ask yourself, “What compounds the fastest from this position?”

The former is chasing immediate gratification; the latter represents genuine optimization.

Principle 2: Invisible Competence Is Just a Hobby

Life is a game of odds. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the competent individual who goes unnoticed. Not so much from lack of talent, but from their invisibility.

They are passively waiting—hoping—to be discovered. For them, waiting feels like a viable and clever strategy because it requires no extra effort. This assumption keeps them invisible.

Because when life is a game of chance, the one electing to play it like a lottery never maximizes their actual odds of succeeding.

Who is really to blame for these circumstances?
The job market, or the inability to position yourself in a way that conveys your skills?

These questions are equally diagnostic and disturbing.

What you must inevitably realize is that people can only act on information they receive. And visibility is the primary source of information 99% of the time. Thus, picking the more visible person is not “unfair”; it is plain logic, because the market cannot price what it cannot see.

Every single person’s market value is determined by others’ model of their value. That model is updated every time new information is fed to the observers.

But not all sources and signals conveying information are made equal. Game theory has a specific name for this: the “costly signal.” 2

The Costly Signal

A costly signal is an action that is expensive or at least challenging to fake. Yet, what most understand far too late is that the costly signal is not corporate jargon or low-level persuasion.

Never is the costly signal merely a product of a few cleverly constructed sentences or words. Its potency and value stem from the fact that you will be paying for any adverse effects.

Astute examples of the costly signal are documented results, public demonstrations, and verifiable claims (with sources). They are costly because you opt to broadcast them in public, and you have to shoulder the blame whenever a dire incident occurs.

Acts like these radiate confidence while demonstrating visible competence and expertise. That alone is more persuasive than a thousand clever declarations of value.

Your odds are entirely dependent on the costly signals you decide to convey to others. Mere competence is not costly, nor is it visible. If you produce exceptional results, show them openly by demonstrating your knowledge or documenting your findings.

Furthermore, you must always remember that what people cannot see virtually does not exist to them.

Principle 3: The Market Is Indifferent to Effort.

It only pays for perceived value delivered. I am writing this principle in a straight-to-the-point manner because it is an acute disease that you must be cured of. Working hard is the status quo assumption.

Everyone acts like it is the secret key and that you must continue working harder. Yet not even the world’s most successful individuals work that hard. Most of their time is spent delegating and managing those who work for them.

That is the strict difference between a CEO who exerts and controls leverage and a worker who is tasked with mere input.

Nobody cares that you “grind” 10 hours a day.
Nobody is bothered by your productivity routine.
Nobody cares how well you fold your bedsheets before working.

In the end, they only see the results they actually get.

Someone who works for ten hours but produces fewer results than the individual who works for five hours but generates quantifiable outcomes will always be placed last.

That’s because reward is not calculated by the hours you put in or by the sacrifices you made along the way.

The market only rewards outcomes, and more specifically, the extent to which a problem was solved for someone who needed it solved. Because price is inherently determined by the value to the buyer, not the cost to the producer.

This is a lesson in basic, rudimentary economics that most people apply to products but somehow refuse to apply to themselves.

You are the product.

A person who works for sixty hours a week usually works on problems the market does not urgently need to solve and will thus be paid less than a person who works thirty hours on the acute issues.

The market’s indifference to effort is real.

Ask yourself, “What problem do I solve?”

If that concern is too niche for the market to care or so broad that a million others already work on it, then you have lost and must aim to reconsider.

No one will put it to you that bluntly.

Principle 4: Most People Are Solving The Wrong Problem

And they do it in a very efficient manner. Which is a shame, considering that you could get everything right, master the product, develop an optimal position, end up being visible, but nonetheless fail because you chose the wrong issue to solve.

Getting better at what you do is structurally useless if what you do is irrelevant in the grand scheme of the market. Is what you do actually connected to a desired outcome?

Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer's 1993 research on deliberate practice found that undirected effort does not produce expertise3. Whether effort is compounded into skill is contingent upon feedback and the selection of appropriate problems.

You can be extremely efficient at a task and still stand still because efficiency has never really mattered in the grander scheme.

Now, for my (aspiring) entrepreneur readers: Do not even attempt to say something like, “I show people how to develop mindsets, so the desired outcome is having a strong mindset!”

Yes, that is a viable outcome. But there is one issue.

Millions already do that. And you are probably not as unique as you assume. That in itself is not an issue—even I started with a rudimentary concept like that and believed I solved world hunger when my account was once a precise replica of standard self-help nonsense.

You do not even need to scrap the whole concept.

You need to rebuild—adequately.

For this specific goal, decide on five values you want to actively wage war against. Broad values that most people have an intimate relationship with.

Then create your philosophy and modus operandi around that. As long as these values are actual values and not just platitudes like “being lazy = bad,” you now have an exponentially higher chance of succeeding.

Mastering the wrong problem is worse than failure because it drains your energy as if you were working on something that mattered.

Principle 5: Time Spent is a Cost. Results Are the Return.

“Time is the most valuable currency.” A widespread platitude—but it is undeniably correct. Hours worked, tasks completed, and effort expended are real costs. And they tend to be invisible.

You cannot see the extent of the return you work for. Hence, time spent is an invisible cost that will appear on your bill nonetheless. And it is ruthless. You already know that—working on a project only for it to yield no return.

Certainly, it is always tragic when grand expectations are shattered into mere confusion. That underscores the central issue.

When we think of costs, our minds usually wander to money almost immediately. Most people already track the money they spend rather well. The same cannot be said for time.

The person who tracks how hard they are working is actually measuring a cost, not a result. Time spent does not equal results. The person who calculates what has actually changed as a result of their time spent is measuring a return.

Two distinctly different approaches.

Time/Output Equations

Output (what you produced) is never the same as outcome (what changed because you produced it).

• An email is output. A decision by the recipient that was caused by the email is an outcome.

• A meeting attended is an output. A relationship changed by the meeting is an outcome.

• A book read is output. A behavior changed by the book is an outcome.

Institutions reward outputs because they are measurable and attributable, not because they are inherently equal to the outcome. For the institution, relying on output is far easier because the cost of focusing on outcomes would exceed the bureaucratic cost contingent on outputs.

What you need to realize is that you are not an institution. You likely have less money than one, fewer workers than it, and far less external funding. They do not play strictly optimally because they can afford to play the game of mass: more workers produce more output, and across enough volume, some output becomes an outcome. They can also measure each worker's individual efficiency—a luxury the average person cannot afford.

Institutions brute-force success because they have the capacity to do so. So, they spread the lie that hard work equals success.

That is only true when operating within an institution. Not when you are working alone. The market rewards outcomes because the outcomes matter. Most people resort to output alone. That is the metric the institution needs and rewards—the market is indifferent to it.

Track your outcomes. Every significant expenditure of effort must be intended to produce an outcome. Effort has a habit of producing output without return, and that cost has no payoff.

The honest accounting of this is extremely uncomfortable, but it is the only diagnosis that leads to correction.

Bitter Diagnostics

The person who sent that one DM is not lazy. Nor are the countless others who sent similar DMs. They are also not undisciplined, nor are they deficient.

Because your model of the market is your true enemy. Everyone shares their own assumptions of what the market may reward—and they are almost certainly wrong or naive.

You likely do not need to work harder or “grind” more. Gurus will tell you otherwise, because blaming the individual is easier than admitting the mechanism.

Working harder is always available. It never requires confronting your beliefs and directions. That is the full truth behind why most people choose it.

—Incentivising

Delve Deeper into the Sciences:

—Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908)

A Pawn in a Game

We speak of loyalty with a reverence that cannot be ignored. A vow of such immense value that we attach our very identity to it.

“I am a loyal person!”

You are bound to hear this sentence somewhere. Perhaps you have already uttered this affirmation yourself.

It is the single most dangerous sentence in our modern world—for reasons no one would suspect.

Expressing loyalty is a direct declaration of identity. It represents the foundation of how people understand their relationships and their own character.

Loyalty is the virtue people are most attached to as a self-definition.

More than honesty.
And far more than generosity.

But there is a flaw in the logic—a ghost in the machine. Something deeper, more calculating, governing loyalty with an invisible influence.

That “ghost” is your nervous system. And it presents a fact most people will immediately rebel against: loyalty is not a character trait. At all.

It is conditional.
It is manufacturable.
And it is exploitable.

The people who benefit most from your loyalty frequently did not earn it. They manufactured the conditions that produced it. And without knowing, you unintentionally bound yourself to them.

The almost mechanical conditions these people engineered are doing the work for them, and you continue to be blind to it—following them regardless of whether they deserve your loyalty or not.

The mere idea of loyalty invites you to choose comfort.
A comfort that incidentally occludes your vision from the facts of objective reality.

The friend you would once have done anything for.
The relationship you defended to others long after you should have left.

This behavior is the result of the loyalty mechanism operating under conditions that were either passively induced or actively engineered.

Even when the mechanisms and conditions under which loyalty is instilled shift, the target remains a constant: you.

The result is always the same: catastrophe—and a loss of autonomy.

A pawn.

Contents Include:

1. An Unsettling Insight

2. On the Evolutionary Origins

   1. Hamilton’s Rule

3. Exposing Loyalty: The Tight Grasp of Oxytocin

4. The Conditions of Loyalty

5. Historical Case Study: The Roman Legion

6. The Binding Architecture Framework: How Loyalty Turns to Obedience

Throughout this article, you will witness and study the biological architecture behind loyalty, why it persists, and how it is engineered.

1. An Unsettling Insight

Imagine you find yourself in a room with nineteen strangers.

Almost immediately, you recognize that your fellow participants appear to be split into distinct groups you do not yet understand.

On the left side, you encounter a group of ten people assigned to the color blue.
On the right, you can see a group of nine assigned to the color yellow.

You cannot help but ponder the purpose of these groups.

As a researcher approaches, you are forced to take a brief survey.

Another mystery enters your mind—what is the meaning of it all?

Afterward, he elucidates that based on your answers to the survey, you have been designated to the “blue group.” Yet, a clear reason has never been stated. You merely notice the intense conviction in the researcher’s voice.

Finally, he assures you that the assignment into the groups was arbitrary—they do not mean anything.

But that does not seem right.
Something is off.
It has to be.

As you dismiss these fleeting thoughts, you begin looking around. You have never met any of these people. And you will almost certainly never see them again. To put it bluntly, they are not significant to you in any conceivable way.

But then, the researcher asks you to anonymously distribute a sum of money between a Blue member and a Yellow member. You do not know them; neither the blue nor the yellow member is familiar to you.

You will never interact with them again. And the distribution is entirely anonymous.

You give more to the blue member. Significantly more.

Not because you know them, but because you were both assigned the same arbitrary label fifteen minutes ago.

This experiment resembles what the researcher Tajfel discovered in 1970 and 1971. Categorization, regardless of how arbitrary it is, produces in-group loyalty behaviors in the span of just 15 minutes. 1

It invites a question—an honest reflection:

What have years of shared adversity, shared identity, shared history, and accumulated investment done to your loyalty calculations?

The answer is not reassuring.

2. On the Evolutionary Origins

In their natural state, humans are fragile beings. Lacking the thick hide, large claws, or sheer physical presence that enable other animals to survive, man was born into an unforgiving world that paid no regard for his innate shortcomings.

Alone, they had no capacity for complex hunting and no innate abilities to survive illness or injury. A precarious position to be in—and one that can only spell doom for the individual.

By all accounts, they were prey. Victims of the far superior predatory creatures relentlessly roaming the earth.

And so it is, as always, that the weak realize they cannot survive alone. They began to form intricate collectives to make up for their deficits.

In our ancient past, survival was a group problem.

The forsaken individual was a dead individual, turning into prey targeted by vicious predators looking for their next major feast. A losing strategy that costs everything.

Group formation became a dominant strategy—and a necessity to survive in a cruel world.

Under the influence of “reciprocal altruism,” it came into being: a game-theoretic solution to group survival. Over time, these primal beings realized that cooperation pays off over iterated interactions when the parties are likely to meet again and remember past behaviors.

Reciprocal altruism virtually serves as a direct definition of a tribe.

But it did not stem from a benevolent nature or a genuine care.

It is a purely rational move that benefits both parties equally: “I help you now; you help me later.”

Not originating from morality, but from a calculated and expected payoff.

As a result, the early human tribes were fiercely egalitarian. Once an individual aimed to consolidate power and exert it over the group, they would be ridiculed, perhaps even banished—a death sentence to be avoided at all costs.

Yet this behavior has since faded. Today, some people inevitably rise above others in today’s world.

The reason is simple: altruism was never innate to a human. It was a strategy to secure the group from domestic threats in a time when collectivism outweighed individualism.

And in 1964, the British evolutionary biologist William Donald Hamilton created a formula that drained altruism of all its mystique: 2

Hamilton’s Rule

Most people have never heard of it. Yet, they are all universally governed by it—one way or another.

Before this breakthrough, biologists were puzzled by the concept of altruism.

According to standard Darwinian evolution, traits that lower an organism's chances of survival and reproduction should die out.

Altruism is practically the definition of that. It is naive, foolish even. It should—by all accounts—be a death sentence in a cutthroat environment.

Yet it persisted.

We see worker bees sacrificing their reproduction to serve a queen and birds risking their lives to scream a warning cry to their flock.

And then there were the early humans; even they were remarkable altruists, frequently favoring the collective above the wants of the individual. These humans fiercely enforced their egalitarianism, even banishing those who sought to concentrate power within the tribe.

Naturally, there were all kinds of mystical interpretations of these behaviors.

”It is totally random!”
“It is the soul!”
“It is God!”

A civil war in the midst of biology itself.

Until Hamilton’s discovery.

A Shattering Discovery

W.D. Hamilton realized that an organism can pass on its genes not only by having its offspring but also by helping close relatives who share those same genes.

He calculated that altruistic behavior would be favored by natural selection if the genetic benefit to the recipient, scaled by their degree of relatedness, outweighed the reproductive cost to the giver.

With this discovery, Hamilton shifted the center of evolutionary biology toward “selfish genes.”

He outlined a grim reality: how even the most altruistic behaviors can reflect a primarily self-serving nature.

r: The relatedness coefficient. How genetically or socially close are the two parties?
B: The benefit to the recipient of the altruistic act.
C: The cost to the actor.

Loyalty persists when rB > C. The loyalty you feel toward someone is, at its biological foundation, a calculation.

And that is it: that is what he found out—loyalty is a result of genetic closeness. Nothing more than that. Except that is wrong.

Hamilton achieved an outstanding triumph when it comes to explaining loyalty. Yet even his framework has a striking caveat.

The brain cannot run a real-time genomic analysis on every person it encounters. It uses proxies as shortcuts in the absence of actual genetic data.

Shared experience.
Shared adversity.
Shared identity.

These shortcuts act as proxies, estimating relatedness without the need to resort to a full genomic picture. And each of these can be manufactured.

The Tajfel experiment proved the most minimal case: an arbitrary label was sufficient. A color. No history, no shared experience, no adversity—just a meaningless category.

And the arbitrariness of the color assignment had been revealed beforehand; nonetheless, it was enough to produce in-group loyalty behavior within fifteen minutes.

It was a product of perception, not objective reality.

If a label alone can do this, consider what years of engineered shared adversity, accumulated cooperative experience, and carefully constructed shared identity have done to your own loyalty calculations.

Consider the acts of altruism. The situations in which you defended another person so valiantly.

Was it engineered or genuine?
Where is the line between the two?
Is there even a line in the first place?

It was never about the character. Instead, it was always about the calculated protocols. You were subjected to engineered signals that blurred your perception and stirred loyalty in a location you did not consent to.

Read more

Another day in the perfect morning routine.

As you wake up, you immediately control the impulse to grab your phone.
“You’re not that person anymore,” is what you subconsciously say to yourself.

Having finished making your bed, you instinctively jump into a freezing cold shower; the stinging sensation felt invasive at first, but you eventually got used to it.

Everyone says it is “optimal,” so there must be some truth to it.

Finally, you go on to recount your accomplishments in your leather-bound journal. As you lift the pen, you begin noticing a strange sensation—or rather an absence of sensations.

An underlying rigidity fills the air as you try to express your thoughts on paper with deliberate intent.

That is when you realize it.

You wrote the same passage as yesterday.
Once again.

Nothing has changed.

But you were not the problem. The sensation was. Each perceived improvement offered an immediate rush of dopamine.

And that dopamine turned you into an amnesiac. It offered the illusion of progress while quantifying nothing.

Contents Include:

1. The Neurological Trap: A neuroscientific dissection.

2. The Identity Lie: When self-help turns into identity.

3. The Drug Habituation: How self-help exploits your dopamine.

   1. The Conflict of Interests: They do not care about you.

4. The Bait-and-Switch Antidote

This article is a dissection of self-help through neurobiological and game-theoretic lenses. And the science does not hold back.

As usual, sources are cited below—I do not intend to gatekeep my research.

But I must warn you: what you are about to uncover may not be comforting. Nonetheless, you will find the antidote to self-help at the end.

1. The Neurological Trap

In retrospect, some may laugh at the sheer absurdity of the self-help epidemic. Behaviors once celebrated and almost subjected to cult-like worship are now frowned upon.

The books that gave rise to the pillars of self-help are now ridiculed for their platitudes and their inherent emptiness.

They speak of wisdom, yet offer nothing of substance. It has been exposed as a philosophy of emptiness. Not guidance, but rigid adherence to principles that ultimately lead to stagnation, culminating in the absence of anything.

Yet “self-help” has not vanished. Instead, it consolidated. The doubter had been excised so that the believers remain.

The imagery of the cult is not an exaggeration but an accurate diagnosis because it has operated like a cult on a neurological level for almost its entire lifespan. Hiding behind the guise of “help” is something significantly more insidious.

And you are its primary prey.

A Slave to Dopamine

You already know that self-help has a delicate and thoroughly complicated relationship with dopamine. On the surface, it may seem like self-help is the natural counterpart of the sinister dopaminergic traps we fall victim to on social media. Almost like a natural antidote for a sickness of the mind.

Most gurus shiver at the mere thought of dopamine consumption, strictly warning about it and sharply advocating for a “dopamine detox.”

The bitter irony could not be any more blatant.

Most people—including the self-help crowd—still assume that dopamine is strictly a reward signal. That is false—at least partially. Dopamine calibrates for anticipation. It fires on the expectation of reward, not its delivery. 1

Even though they may despise it, it is undeniable that dopamine is the very essence of self-help. Reading a self-help book about making money, becoming disciplined, or building confidence triggers this dopaminergic anticipatory reaction. Not because you are actually doing something, but because your brain imagines you doing something.

And most self-help authors know this very well. They compose their books in an almost personal style, cultivating the image of a close friend or benevolent advisor. And the brain cannot distinguish between planning to change and changing.

The result? Planning suddenly feels like progress.

In itself, this does not seem dangerous. However, the real problem arises once you realize that this partial satisfaction reduces the motivational pressure that would otherwise drive your behaviors.

You are discharging your potential through consumption.

The Truth

The motivational spikes you feel after finishing a self-help book are real. There is no denying that. But so is the subsequent inaction and the ensuing inertia. The spike was the release; there is no further need to pursue another source.

This is why people feel most inspired after reading and least inspired six days later when nothing has changed at all. Because that is the precise moment when the dopamine has cleared.

And that is a grave danger.

Dopamine was once meant to actively modulate behavior. In our evolutionary past, it has driven us to confront challenges head-on. But now it is unwillingly used as a sedative: social media, drugs, and alcohol—they thrive on the same receptors as self-help.

The Visualization Trap

A dominant mechanism within self-help is the act of positive visualization, which is the process of imagining a desired future state. Every single motivational book, speech, and podcast illustrates a vision.

A diffuse goal, sugarcoated in potential outcomes.

What they truly invite into their minds is often not the result they desire—at all. Visualization alone reduces motivation and behavioral follow-through. It tricks your brain into assuming the imagined future has already been achieved. 2

The sweet fantasy is nothing more than an illusory sedative for your internal drive.

2. The Identity Lie

Humans have an innate drive to shape identities. On the surface, this may seem like a psychological need to express oneself uniquely. But that is not the whole truth. Identities are needed on a neurological basis.

The human brain is a massive resource optimization machine. Even though it makes up only 2% of our total body weight, it consumes roughly 20% of the energy available to us, running at about 20 watts.

And it is not even working anywhere near its maximum capability.

What we experience daily are actually just the “optimized processes.” Our brain utilizes shortcuts (such as biases) to enable more efficient processing, not because it is “lazy,” but because it is desperately needed.

If you were to force 100% of your neurons to fire continuously at their maximum biological limit (estimated at 100 to 200 times per second), the brain's power demand would leap from 20 watts to a catastrophically expensive number between 2,000 and 4,000 watts.

In terms of pure survival, a brain that could use 100% of its capacity simultaneously would require you to eat roughly 50,000 to 100,000 calories a day just to stay alive.

You would spend every waking second scavenging for food. And that number assumes that your cardiovascular system would allow this much energy to be produced via aerobic respiration.

Hence, the brain needs to build certain shortcuts and leaps in logic to sustain a relatively high level of processing speed and executive function. One of these shortcuts is identity. Identity is how your brain solves a massive engineering problem: how to keep you alive, stable, and socially connected in a chaotic world without needing to expend too much energy.

A vicious behavior resulting from this is the compulsion to utilize symbols—purchases, affiliations, or stated intentions—to complete identity goals without actually working for them. 3

A maladaptive shortcut within a shortcut.

And that is how self-help hijacks your identity to drive sales: every act of consumerism under the guise of “improvement” is driven by an identity signal. Buying a book symbolically completes the process of becoming someone who reads “self-help,” which is usually the real underlying and subconscious identity goal.

The content itself is not relevant, and the quality is a mere afterthought. The symbolic shortcut makes up for even the greatest, most damning flaws.

However, the process does not stop there.

Think back to the years 2022 and 2023, when self-help and Redpill4 were at their peak. Everyone suddenly wanted to disappear for 6 months, become rich, or turn into the next Wolf of Wall Street. Most apparent is that these were not isolated incidents.

It was a mass hysteria—an unimaginable amount of money was basically printed for the gurus during this time. That social movement drastically increased self-help’s infectivity. Posting or talking about a book you are reading, the morning routine you have built, or the mindset you are developing was a clear status play that directly thrived on identity signaling. It granted a rush of dopamine before any action was ever taken.

It was the second pandemic.

3. The Drug Habituation

You have witnessed a bold take in the opening. Equating self-help to a neurological disease while simultaneously framing it as a drug is a sure risk to alienate readers. That risk was not caused by a purely unfortunate accident. It was a calculation to build up to this section.

As you already know by now, self-help is a dopaminergic behavior—a stimulant. One that does not need to be injected. The barrier to entry is low. Yet that does not make the price to pay more benign.

All dopaminergic behaviors are prone to habituation. The brain adapts to the stimulus and requires escalating doses to produce the same response on subsequent exposures.

Indeed, it is the same way an addict returns to his dealer. The framing is harshly absurd, perfectly mirroring the reality of it.

The first self-help book produces a huge motivational spike. A rush of dopamine—the sensation of anticipation. But the twentieth book? It produces almost nothing. Thus, the committed self-help consumer automatically migrates toward increasingly extreme content.

Radical frameworks. Longer retreats. Intense programs.

All the subsequent movements drawing from self-help are the perfect illustration of this: from self-help to redpill to holistic health and NXIVM to whatever doctrine offers the next greatest rush. The hedonic treadmill is working as intended. Dopamine now modulates behaviors—and biology wins once more.

You have not outwitted dopamine through your self-help detox; you have just handed it fancier chains. A prison of gold—a house of sand built in an hourglass. It is almost poetic.

Be aware that these mechanisms are not accidents; they are part of a deliberate design to create repeat customers. By the time you finally realize that self-help does not offer any feasible progress, you have already bought the 20th book.

The Conflict of Incentives

The grimmer issue is that self-help does not care whether it genuinely “helps” you. Because there is a clear conflict of incentives.

For instance, if a book truly made you rich, you would never buy that one fancy course that the author is currently selling. Thus, you are mostly granted incomplete information.

These insights are just poetic enough that they seem profound but vague enough not to be truly actionable. Here is a perfect example:

“You are one decision away from a completely different life.”
—Mel Robbins

Clean. Famous. And hollow.

There is a vital mechanism it omits: decisions are downstream of resources, environment, and constraint sets that one singular choice cannot hope to override.

Now factor in that Robbins sells the “5 Second Rule”, courses, and a Netflix special. If one decision actually fixed you, the entire funnel collapses.

What you must learn to realize is that these quotes only help the author—and their cash flow. Whether you succeed as a person is background noise.

This is not a crusade against the authors; they are merely optimizing a product and are shaped by their current incentives. In fact, their writings are perfect examples of persuasive sales and a mastery over illusion; anything they touch seemingly turns to insightful wisdom.

That is a great skill to have. But it is utterly useless for the reader.

You are the product. Your opinions are an afterthought at best. As long as you buy, you sustain the cycle, perpetuating the cash flow of the creators.

Nobody will put it that plainly to you.

4. The Antidote

The brain operates at different levels of abstraction depending on psychological distance—that distance may be temporal, spatial, or social. Self-help relies on abstract thinking: “I want to become disciplined!”

That activates approach motivation but not behavioral planning. That is the maximum distance—a diffuse concept on the horizon, rather than a genuine goalpost. In neuroscience, this is called high-level construal thinking.

Low-level construal thinking is the precise opposite. It relies on specific and contextual thinking: “At 6 AM on Monday, I will do X in location Y before Z.”

The difference may appear insignificant, but it activates specialized implementation circuits in your brain. While the former provides dopaminergic satisfaction, the latter can activate executive functions.

The Inversion: Bait-and-Switch

The usual self-help sequence relies on the principle of consume → feel inspired → (maybe) act. That sequence is highly construal. It is diffuse and usually only leads to stagnation, not genuine action. As a result, the anticipation fires before the behavior, offering satisfaction before the drive to change ever occurs.

It is a sedative—a substitution for action. And that makes it a paralyzing poison.

The antidote is the inversion of this vicious cycle: act first, consume second. Always build the smallest possible version of the target behavior before consuming content on it.

That way, you leverage the sunk cost and get a real taste for the sensation to hook your brain not just on fantasy but on genuine change.

An Honest Piece of Advice

This sequence is not perfect. It is an antidote to a poison you should not have contracted in the first place. Sure, you can continue like this—but it requires immense mental effort.

And without caution, you will fall back into these very same behaviors that once condemned you to inaction.

What you should seek is not more self-help, better self-help, or no self-help at all. The genuine alternatives are operational frameworks. 5

Specific mechanisms—applied to specific contexts. And not motivational posts to satisfy a fantasy that will not come to fruition.

The Negotiation Playbook is one of them. The neuroscience of charisma is another. Each covers one mechanism, applied to one context, with a specific protocol—without telling you who you need to become.

I have no horse to bet on in this conflict. What your future holds—and what content you elect to consume—is yours to decide.

You felt as if you understood everything, yet you couldn't repeat anything.

Most people blame tiredness.

The real reason for this condition is neurochemistry, specifically, acetylcholine.

1. The Hidden Power of Acetylcholine

Our brain receives enormous volumes of input simultaneously. At all times. Most people still imagine our brain like a sponge that can absorb knowledge automatically.

This is profoundly false.

The sheer amount of information makes it practically impossible to consciously analyze every input. Therefore, our brain has to prioritize distinctive information somehow.

That is precisely where acetylcholine (ACh) steps in.

It is released from the basal forebrain and acts as a natural neurochemical filter capable of amplifying some signals deemed important while suppressing background activity and noise whenever it deems them to be irrelevant.

During severely low-ACh states, our brain does not actively narrow our focus on one specific topic at hand. Suddenly, everything seems broad and diffuse. It is a dull feeling clouding your judgment and interpretations.

The resulting cognitive overload leads to shallow interpretation; the inputs may have been registered on the surface, but they have not been deeply ingrained into your brain.

Without the ACh acting as a map, the brain never finds a suitable path to fully digest the information. A keen reader may have already made a conscious connection to ADHD by now—and you would not be far from the truth. 1

It is the precise opposite of the high-ACh state: a sudden, narrow, seemingly “high-resolution” sight that coincides with intensely deep processing: the signal is processed with a dramatically higher fidelity while background noises and irrelevant signals are substantially suppressed.

What you perceive as higher resolution is not an illusion. ACh release actively contracts the cortical field of active processing, literally increasing the resolution within that narrowed focus, akin to the increased resolution of a camera lens.

This is what most people call “the flow state.”

In 1988, researchers paired an auditory tone with direct electrical stimulation of the nucleus basalis—the primary ACh-releasing structure—in rats. The results were dramatic: the auditory cortex reorganized dramatically toward the paired tone, massively expanding its cortical representation, even without the animal actively trying to learn. 2

This means that, through the release of ACh, the researchers were effectively able to fundamentally rewire the rat’s brain on demand. And the following implications are severe.

But there is a caveat.

We are obviously not actively linked up to a machine that electrically stimulates certain parts of our brains.

In our everyday lives, ACh is released upon being focused, which drives the brain to physiologically restructure towards whatever is being attended to, regardless of whether the result is beneficial or malevolent. Therefore, ACh does not solely increase concentrated effort but also severely strengthens the learning process itself.

You must be fully aware that attention is not a byproduct or a trigger for learning anything. It is the literal mechanism of learning made manifest in the form of an intense physical sensation.

When you aim to learn a topic that seems otherwise irrelevant to you or your interests, your brain only truly encodes the information properly if you actually attend to it on a chemical level.

Simply “working more” will not increase your overall learning because it will not fix your cholinergic system.

2. Why Your ACh Is Already Gone

Your basal forebrain does not have an infinite supply of ACh. It is a depletable resource that must be actively synthesized in your brain.

Each cognitively demanding task draws from the same finite pool. Every decision, every distraction, and every context switch costs ACh that cannot immediately be replenished.

The result? Decision fatigue. A vicious cholinergic depletion phenomenon arising from an intense ACh demand. Suddenly, the quality of attentional filtering declines sharply, and working memory collapses.

As your internal filter “breaks,” your brain begins steering into an ocean of information, now lacking the ability to properly filter noise from value.

But you will not perceive this feeling as a literal fatigue. It does not feel like a crushing weight on your shoulder but rather like a cycle of scattered thoughts. Everything begins feeling viscerally louder than usual; each little tone of noise is transformed into a scream, demanding your attention.

That is how cholinergic depletion truly feels. And it is corrosive because, despite something being so clearly wrong, you will feel systemically fine—you find yourself frustrated and perhaps pessimistically doubtful about your talents.

And the attention economy you partake in does not help your condition. Every notification or time spent on social media extracts your ACh, potentially costing you days of focus at a time. And the more you consume, the more your brain needs to filter information—resulting in a higher ACh expense.

The person who checks their phone a hundred times a day has spent over a hundred micro-doses of their attentional chemistry on inputs with near-zero returns. And these habits compound for years as you train your cholinergic system to release in response to every minor stimulus while expecting rapid and constant switching rather than sustained engagement.

Your brain now needs twice the chemical resources to stay focused on a single task because it already anticipates a change in topic and a new filtering sequence.

How To Use Your ACh

The first 4-6 hours after waking up carry the highest natural cholinergic tone. Never spend this window on the mundane tasks such as writing emails, doing low-grade administrative tasks, going through your notifications, or scrolling social media.

You simply do not need high ACh levels for these operations.

Start your day with your most important task, the one that necessitates your full, uninterrupted attention. The most heinous mistake most people make is to actively shift their most valuable work to the late afternoon or evening while spending the majority of their high-ACh state on mundane tasks.

The rules for maximizing your return on investment could not be simpler: no phone for the first 30 minutes, minimum. If you desperately need to use your phone in the morning, minimize notifications and turn on filters. Early phone usage is deliberate sabotage—the worst way to spend ACh is to immediately lose it in the morning.

This should be your holy doctrine on how to use your ACh and maximize your focus on the task that matters most.

Now you know how you can maximize your current ACh. And that is where most people stop. Yet, the grim reality is that most people have lower levels of ACh due to modern behaviors and poor nutrition.

And as a devastating result of living so impulsively, their ACh is depleted substantially faster than it is synthesized, leading to crippled attention spans and a distressing lack of focus.

Nutrition: ACh Synthesis

First, you must understand that ACh is synthesized through a specific enzyme from two precursors: choline and an acetyl group (from acetyl-CoA).

While your brain can stimulate acetylcholine production through deliberate focus (“neurological intent”), your body will nevertheless be reliant on the substrate to build it.

And that is precisely what most people forget. The cholinergic system is a biological infrastructure that can be built, maintained, and improved; however, due to its architectural nature, it is also severely vulnerable to destruction and degradation.

If either choline or acetyl groups are insufficient and not readily available, synthesis is effectively crippled regardless of how hard the brain is trying to produce them.

The Blind Spot

Most nutritional interventions target the choline side because it is the easiest to truly maximize. Granted, that approach is the easy way out—simply eating an egg, salmon, red potatoes, chicken breast, or grass-fed beef is a very low-effort task.

But that low-effort assumption is lethal.

If you maximize your choline while failing to supply your body with a steady supply of acetyl groups, something truly profound occurs:

Nothing.

You can flood your whole system from bottom to top with choline3, but without the acetyl key to turn the lock, the entire system sits in a state of metabolic stagnancy. You now have an abundance of one material and an utter lack of the other—that does not change your synthesis capability at all.

The corresponding enzyme (ChAT) cannot complete its single synthesis job. So, it holds onto the excess choline, waiting for an acetyl group that ultimately never arrives.4

The manufacturing line completely halts.

Understanding the Acetyl Group

At its core, the acetyl group required for the synthesis stems from acetyl-CoA, which is produced from the metabolism of carbohydrates, fats, and amino acids.

While the body can utilize any of these pathways to generate Acetyl-CoA, carbohydrates serve as its most efficient and primary contributor. Yet, ironically, carbs remain one of the foremost universally demonized nutrients.

A Grim Misconception

Most people still believe the widespread misconception that carbs are completely optional for your metabolism. Sure, if your whole focus is survival, go ahead and focus on the proteins and the fats that are imperative to our survival.

But surviving is not thriving.

Most of your body’s energy stems from glucose—directly synthesized from carbohydrates. As your cells cannot use glucose directly to power their everyday functions, they must convert the energy stored in glucose into a usable “energy currency” called adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

ATP acts as your body’s “battery.” Without it, indispensable bodily functions, such as organs, stop working.

Both ATP and acetyl-CoA are indispensable for focus. While acetyl-CoA relies on B vitamins and proteins for its structure, its primary fuel component stems directly from carbohydrates.

But be aware that not all carbs are created equal. Good carbs are usually referred to as “complex carbohydrates,” which are naturally high in fiber and nutrients.

Regarding carbohydrates, most individuals are in good health. The same cannot be stated for B1: thiamine.

On Thiamine (Vit B1)

When glucose is broken down into pyruvate, it cannot just magically transform into Acetyl-CoA on its own.

It requires a massive factory-like enzyme complex within the mitochondria called the Pyruvate Dehydrogenase (PDH) complex. You should visualize it looking like a ginormous factory that requires a constant stream of fuel.

This enzyme complex is completely dependent on a coenzyme called thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP), which is merely a fancy biochemical name for the activated form of vitamin B1.

Without thiamine, this entire factory shuts down.

No matter how many complex carbohydrates you eat, and no matter how much glucose flows through your bloodstream, the breakdown process will be sealed in a state of stasis.

It is a biochemical bottleneck; without the active TPP to turn the gears, pyruvate (carbs) cannot be converted into Acetyl-CoA.

While a mild deficiency already produces measurable cognitive slowing, severe deficiencies produce Wernicke's encephalopathy—a catastrophic cholinergic collapse. 5

Thiamine-rich foods

Thiamine is most often found within whole grains, meats, and fish. Naturally, not all thiamine sources are created equal, and some contain far greater amounts of thiamine than others.

Pork provides the largest amount of thiamine. A 3-ounce serving of pork tenderloin provides about 65% of your daily value.

Trout and salmon are great at delivering thiamine and omega-3 fats, making them a solid choice for overall brain health and not just focus.

Liver, especially from beef or pork, is one of the best ways to enhance your overall nutrition while also offering a solid amount of thiamine.

At last, you know what provides the substrate to synthesize ACh and how to raise your thiamine levels adequately.

Yet one major mystery remains: how can one effectively stimulate ACh release? The solution is found within behaviors—behaviors most people do not exhibit.

3. Behaviors of the Focused

You can eat all the eggs and liver you want and optimize your whole nutrition to its maximum to fill your biological engines. But that will not contribute to anything in your actual life. Because an idle engine will never move you forward.

Having a raw chemical substrate is half the work. And it is arguably the easier side of hyperfocus. But the real progress is dictated by your overarching behaviors and the tasks you fulfill.

At its core, the brain is still a massive biological optimization machine. Its ancient optimization behaviors stem from an imperative to survive, not from a desire to thrive. Whenever it does not feel a concrete need to deliver a result, it will instinctively not exert effort toward said result—because that would be a metabolic death sentence.

Nonetheless, there are still “tricks” and conscious behaviors that can persuade the brain into utilizing its full potential to drastically increase overall focus and concentration.

Novelty Design

The most damning of behaviors regarding the human brain is its most immediately visible distrust of the unknown. The optimization machine demands the ability to predict with certainty in order to adequately deliver a quantifiable and effective optimization.

When it is met with novel uncertainty or actively experiences a prediction error, the brain concludes that it must now focus its mental resources on clarifying the inputs it receives and resolving the mystery. Should it fail to do so, the consequences may lead to an unknown catastrophe.

This internal pressure in regard to the unknown is omnipresent. It may arise from a real threat or an otherwise irrelevant piece of information that it cannot properly analyze. But the result is always the same: ACh release.

Because in this instance, the brain determined that high-resolution processing is worth the steep chemical cost. That is precisely why familiar tasks produce minimal ACh release, regardless of their difficulty.

Novelty is a trigger.

Physical Exercise

When you are sitting at a desk trying to study, you are primarily burning through the battery of your basal forebrain system to force focus. This is the exact system we already discussed in the prior sections.

But when it comes to physical exercise, ACh synthesis works in a highly unexpected way.

Because it utilizes an entirely different system.

Aerobic exercise (activities that raise your heart rate and increase oxygen use) activates the septohippocampal cholinergic pathway, increasing ACh in the hippocampus, which is the area responsible for memory consolidation.

This phenomenon is entirely separate from and additive to the basal activation and explains why most people report increased focus and more efficient learning after exercising.

Due to it being entirely separate, it naturally does not drain any resources from the focus systems you need for thorough analytical thinking.

Instead, it accumulates on top of them, providing a dangerously sharp synergy.

The Nuclear Option (Nicotine)

“The second productivity drug,” and the nuclear option.

In section 1, which described the effects of acetylcholine, I purposefully omitted one vital fact about the relation of nicotine and ACh.

Nicotine structurally mimics the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and acts as an agonist6 at nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. It is the single most potent cholinergic agonist available without a prescription.

Yes—that is the entire pharmacological mechanism behind tobacco’s cognitive effects, stripped of the delivery method. The actual addiction liability is primarily facilitated through the delivery, such as the speed of absorption, rather than the molecule at low doses. 7

Nicotine patches and low-dose oral nicotine provide measurable increases in attentiveness and working memory while lacking the highly addictive profile of invasive smoked delivery.

However, you must be aware that nicotine has a significant negative impact on your overall cardiovascular health. Overall, it is far from a benign substance and has no regard for your overall well-being.

The effects of isolated nicotine administration are still under active research; as such, it may result in unintended and unforeseen consequences.

This is not medical advice. I am a researcher, not an MD.

Attention is not a habit but a chemistry problem.

4. Acetylcholine Maximization Doctrine

You now know the biology of focus. And now you can work with it properly.

The following section is a behavioral and nutritional synthesis of the content discussed within this post.

This section includes both behavioral and nutritional doctrines you should adhere to.

• Work during peak ACh windows and avoid using your phone within the first 4-6 hours of the day.

• Commit to 20-30 minutes of aerobic exercise before any cognitive work to activate the septohippocampal pathway, offering additive ACh.

• 90-minute work blocks are the hard limit. The brain oscillates between peak and trough alertness in ~90-minute cycles, and beyond this window, encoding efficiency deteriorates. During this downtime, the brain consolidates information for 15-20 minutes.

• Work at the edge of your ability. Comfortable and predictable practice results in minimal ACh release—a lack of real challenge causes the brain to consider the task at hand irrelevant and not worth attending to.

The Nutritional Side

• Prioritize dietary choline. Eggs, liver, salmon. An adequate intake is about 425-550 mg/day. The average person only consumes about 300 mg.

• Alpha-GPC supplements at 400-600 mg 30-60 minutes before any session. It is the most bioavailable choline precursor, directly crossing the blood-brain barrier and increasing ACh synthesis at the source (Parnetti et al., 2001).

• Watch the ceiling. The upper limit is about 3,500 mg/day, which is a lot, but aggressive supplementation can easily reach these levels faster than expected. Anything above this will lead to severe nausea and poisoning.

The Exact Daily Protocol

1. Wake up and avoid your phone for at least 30 minutes.

2. Aerobic exercise for 20-30 minutes.

3. Supplement Alpha-GPC.

4. Work in 90-minute blocks.

5. Rest for at least 15-20 minutes to consolidate information.

This is the fully optimized biological protocol; skipping these steps is akin to skipping your warm-ups and ending up wondering why the engine cannot operate at full efficiency anymore.

Attention is chemistry.

To assume that negotiations are not an integral aspect of life has led to the demise of numerous brilliant ideas and successful relationships.

It is also undeniable that negotiations are an unforgiving, omnipresent byproduct of the modern age that numerous people desperately strive to avoid.

Some declare it “a waste of time.”

Others try to hide their tragic lack of ability with feigned superiority and calculated delusions.

Either way, the result remains the same.

Utter devastation.

The real issue is unveiled once you reach the state of awareness in which you inevitably acknowledge that negotiations are a fundamental component of our existence.

Every delicate moment of debate you will inevitably face is a negotiation in its own right.

A derailed argument, a botched salary dispute, and even a conflict over a dinner spot for a date are all negotiations.

Yet, it is always the exact same game—just played with different surface variables.

That relentless game has its distinct structure, carving outcomes even before words are ever expressed.

And those willing to face their dread rarely lose these rigorous negotiations due to simple aspects such as a deficiency in confidence or a lack of preparation.

The truth is far more unforgiving.

They misidentify which game is being played, optimizing for the wrong sequences. A vicious occurrence in a procedure that does not forgive.

Game theory explains this condition without remorse.

Contents Include:

1. The Ruthless Anatomy of All Negotiations

2. A Looming Shadow (δ-Factor)

3. All In: Credible Commitment

4. Strategic Synthesis & Negotiation Systems

   1. The Conflict Negotiation

   2. The Salary Negotiation

   3. Negotiations of Boundaries and Expectations

5. DIAGNOSIS: Why Most People Lose Negotiations

1. The Ruthless Anatomy of All Negotiations

Every single negotiation follows a certain set of invisible laws governing every possible outcome. Most people remain blind to these rules, yet they govern every interaction ruthlessly.

At the very spine of every negotiation is information. It is the first principle that governs all negotiations, and every further decision is built atop that central body. Essentially, a negotiation runs two games simultaneously:

First, the stated game, which explains what we are even negotiating about, and the information game, which dictates what each party knows and what they reveal.

The negotiation game is akin to the skin tissue of the negotiation: clear and visible. Everyone knows about it; almost all the time, you already understand what is being negotiated because it is rarely occluded from your eyes. It is a universal truth that a car salesperson will not—and definitely should not—be required to inform you that you are negotiating about the price of a car. You should have already instinctively recognized that fact well before the negotiation takes place.

The second, much more grim and obscure game is the information game. It acts as the central nervous system of any negotiation and is the real battlefield in most scenarios.

Every signal your body sends, and every word you utter, is information. And that can be a real problem, because information given freely is leverage surrendered permanently. Once it is out there, it cannot be taken back. That is a vicious truth most people ignore.

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A Dissection of Awkwardness

Think back to the last time you were confronted with silence.

Not just a few seconds of mere idleness.

Real silence.
Screaming silence.
A stasis more vocal than any shout could ever be.

For most, it was an awkward situation on a date. For others, it was a successful negotiation that suddenly devolved into a vicious catastrophe without notice.

Remember what you felt in that exact moment.

All those feelings of comfort, confidence, and credibility you built with such deliberate effort were suddenly crushed and occluded.

But not by the surgical sting of criticism or distrust.
No—the real pain stemmed from a false prediction.

You anticipated volume. But reality gave you entropy. That shifted something deep within your brain.

In that unexpected crisis, a truly ancient neurological system awoke once more, firing on all fronts; countless signals were rampantly racing through your mind until they overwhelmed your logic.

The result?

Panic.

An intense confusion and a real compulsion to fill that crevice. And in the attempt to conquer the source of your perceived discomfort, you ruined it all.

In the fight against awkwardness, you revealed something you should not have.

And the costs that followed were severe.

Why You Fear the Silence

In the heat of the moment, you might feel as if the awkwardness of the silence only existed within your head.

You become short-sighted and purely driven by the compulsion to say something. And that led to utter catastrophe.

You began to stutter. You started a sentence only to stop abruptly upon coming to the cruel realization that you have not thought it through to the end or—even worse—realized you said something not meant to be revealed.

These are not unique experiences. They are universal pains.

In that very moment, the discomfort that had perpetuated your boundless irrationality stemmed from a biological process anchored deep within your neural architecture. More precisely, it originates from the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

This brain region continuously monitors for conflict, uncertainty, and expectation violation.1

The ACC registers social silence as a significant conflict—it is perceived as an open loop that the brain urgently strives to eliminate.

A common misconception is the notion that your brain labels the silence itself as uncomfortable.

This is entirely false. The brain regions fostering your behaviors have no particular definition of silence itself.

In fact, they have no concrete definitions of anything at all.

Your brain depends on the continuous gathering of signals that may be pertinent and may hold significance. This function enables the creation of predictions—a central way our brain engages with the world.

And it runs at all times, without ever stopping.

What causes your acute panic is revealed in the fact that silence is the inversion of what constitutes a signal.

It is nothing. It is entropy. The brain begins panicking profusely; the system is forced to default to a state of alarm.

The ACC then signals the prefrontal cortex (PFC) to come up with a strategy to fill the silence while also stimulating the limbic system. The limbic system is a fast-acting neural system driving behaviors frequently labeled as irrational. When the system is sufficiently stimulated, it primes your muscles while adrenaline and cortisol levels experience a significant increase, causing uneasy and unruly jittering.

This begins a neurological war for consolidation.

On one side, the PFC tries to create something well-thought-out with a high chance of success, all while the activation of the limbic system simultaneously releases cortisol capable of interfering with logical top-down processing.

The Fatal Issue

By desperately trying to create a signal to fill the void, we often manufacture a “noisy” signal indicating insecurity.

And that is fatal in nearly every situation. Here is the grim truth neuroscience actually uncovered about silence:

To the dismay of many, the ACC is not only responsible for signaling the absence of information. Far from it. It takes proactive effort to resolve it—in almost all the undesirable ways you could think of.

It crudely attempts to assign status to whoever appears least disturbed by the silence. This is the deeply uncomfortable finding of Burgoon’s Expectancy Violation Theory2.

The theory established that whenever another individual violates conventional norms, observers do not merely register the violation in an isolated manner. Far from it. The brain automatically runs an unforgiving attribution process.

They ask themselves, “Why didn’t they fill it?”

If that person holding the silence already carries certain preestablished competence signals—such as deliberate and thoughtful speech or a noticeable lack of anxious jittering—that violation is read as confidence and charisma.

This serves as an immediate status signal. The conclusion: this person is comfortable breaking the status quo.

As such, silence is the amplifier of previously established status signals. It amplifies all other signals until they transform into an irrefutable assertion.

This is the moment you win and take it all—or lose everything.

Involuntary Confessions

You now know what happens if you are comfortable with the silence. But what if you are not? What if your brain insists, “You must fill that internal void”? What if the absence turns overwhelming?

A secondary effect occurs. More unforgiving than the last.

When the ACC fires and cannot sufficiently tolerate the processing silence, the brain comes up with filler words.

“Um. Uh. You know? Yeah, kind of… I mean…”

You might consider them to be “just a weird tic.” In actuality, they are the brain’s problem-solving behavior at play. Granted, it closes the silences effectively… while creating a whole host of other issues.

It is a cruel condition; in that moment, the fillers feel like a brief moment of ownership. They buy time and maintain presence.

But the listener does not interpret it the same way as you.

Neuroscience shows that filler words downgrade confidence assessments of the speaker. Researchers found that the same message, when injected with filler words, is immediately rated as less confident3. The remainder of the sentence bears no particular role anymore. Your confidence has already been assessed.

High-status speech is the polar opposite.

What Makes Speech “High-Status”

High-status speech is characterized by fewer hedges—the use of cautious or vague language—far fewer fillers, and the act of declaring statements directly.

The verbal padding you utter under anxiety is not treated as a mere stylistic weakness. It is an active broadcast of status insecurity to whoever is listening, whether you like it or not.

The Negotiation Case

The absolute cleanest demonstration of this in action can be found inside hiring negotiations:

As you state your preferred number, the hiring manager pauses abruptly. A few seconds pass. Nothing happens.

Your ACC fires, compelling you to add, “But I’m flexible, depending on the full package!”

A position abandoned under no real pressure. That is how hiring managers win most of the time. The number moved without them needing to say a single word.

By running an ancient protocol, your nervous system did all the work for them. The ACC cannot distinguish between a vile predator and a harmless pause. It only perceives a loop that must be closed, whatever the costs.

The Insight

The human brain assigns status to whoever is comfortable in silence. Filling an uncomfortable gap in conversation is interpreted as a crude status confession, even if your competence shines in numerous other categories.

The compulsion itself is not a character flaw. Luckily for you, it is merely a neural default that can be reprogrammed through specific patterns.

The Silence Doctrine

This framework is meant to guide you safely through the pitfalls of everyday conversation. This is not a physiological training guide. It only requires your awareness of the mechanisms and a deliberate decision to act on them.

Rule 1: Hold Your Ground.

After stating anything—whether a position, number, opinion, or statement—stop. Do not elaborate or qualify, and do not check whether it was understood.

To make your words gain weight, you must let your statement occupy the space it needs. Every single further clarification strips the statement of its profoundness and meaning, reducing it to mere noise while demonstrating that you cannot tolerate the silence.

Hold for a minimum of four seconds—even when it feels awkward.

Rule 2: Replace Filler Words Completely

This rule should not come as a surprise to anyone. Filler words are the silent admission of unconditional surrender. Wherever you frequently produce an “um” or “you know,” aim to produce nothing. Just a clean pause. Whenever you feel the urge to add a filler word—stop.

Once that mindfulness is achieved, your fluency drastically improves. Filler words are habits, not compulsions. Eradicate them accordingly.

Rule 3: Never Immediately Answer Under Pressure

Whenever someone asks you something that carries any weight to you, such as a question about your salary or a direct ask, your internal instinct will immediately jump towards signal preparedness. Avoid that.

Take two or three seconds before answering anything where you feel the pressure to respond fast. Typically, statements prompting a fast response are a vicious trap to be avoided—they can be far more vile than they seem at first glance.

A single pause can derail entire assessments in your favor.

Diagnosis: Why Most People Cannot Hold Silence

• They confuse filling the silence with projecting confidence. The speaker’s brain frequently reads the act of filling silence as a powerful assertion of control—the person does not interpret it the same way.

• They add qualifications after strong statements. Immediate follow-ups drain your statements of their weight and undermine your confidence. Avoid that.

• They use filler words as proof of thinking.

What you have read is the neuroscience of one single system. Holding silence incorrectly hemorrhages status and perceived confidence. As you fill the silence, you lose.

But there is more to status than just the ability to hold silence properly. Magnetism. Energy. Charisma.

The free issues only represent the surface of what is unfolding.

The following paid issue is a >7,000-word deep dive into mirror neurons, amygdala downregulation, dopaminergic compulsion, and the neural entrainment that separates the performers from the genuinely magnetic:

Close your eyes to the dialogue and open them to the signals.

You will inevitably encounter one individual who functions as if they were the gravitational center around which the others merely orbit.

A presence with weight and a seemingly indescribable pull.

It is not the loudest person, nor the one with the most expansive gestures, nor the most emotive.

It is the person whose presence seems to lock the focus of every other orbiting presence in stasis.

Now take a look at the people around this person.

Watch as their pupils slightly dilate.
Witness their leaning posture subtly mirror.
And observe as their breathing patterns softly synchronize.

Whereas most are quick to call this charisma, the laboratory calls it neural entrainment.

Long have we romanticized charisma as a mystical “spark” or an innate genetic trait—a hallucination occluding our perception and prohibiting us from securing this so exceptional “something” for ourselves.

Reader, no longer should this deceiving illusion hold you back.

Because the truth behind charisma is found in neuroscience: it is a synthesis of biological states triggering profound neurological cascades resulting in a sense of safety and reward to the observer.

And soon, you will learn how to pull these levers.

Contents Include:

1. Charisma Without Empathy (Psychopaths)

2. Mirror Neurons & Deep Social Resonance

3. A Sedation of the Limbic System

4. Dopaminergic Compulsion

5. Neural Entrainment and Dominance

6. A Masterclass in Magnetism (John F. Kennedy, Case Study)

7. Layers of Charm (Operational Framework)

8. The Untold Truth About Charisma

9. An Acute Diagnosis: Why Most People Remain Uncharismatic

What follows is a full neurobiological dissection of charisma, exposing the mechanisms that enable certain individuals to be magnetically compelling. At the end of this intricate strategic deep dive, you will learn to deploy these same mechanisms to inevitably rise above the status quo.

Reader, be warned: the following may shatter your prior beliefs on everything you thought you knew about charisma.

1. Charisma Without Empathy

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—David Eagleman

Dissecting Experience

Think back to the last time you changed your mind after hearing an exceptionally crafted argument.

Take your time.

Do not be fooled by this; I am not expecting an immediate answer. In fact, you may experience trouble thinking back to this time. Your vision is likely occluded. Some of you may not be willing to admit that something as drastic as this occurred in your past.

Now think back to the time when reality forced you to change your mind: The moment your “master plan” failed or your ideals and expectations were violently shattered.

It left you feeling open. Vulnerable. Weak.

You may have sucked it up, but deep down, something shifted. Perhaps you felt it in your gut—a nauseous psychosomatic feeling hitting you like a vicious pathogen you could not defend yourself against.

Sometimes these occurrences reshape you without notice, occasionally reassembling your beliefs in pain.

In arguments, you are always able to talk yourself out of it.

“That’s not what I meant,” or “you just don’t understand,” are saintly saviors in such times. You changed your mind for a day, then reverted to your old habits, beliefs, and personal ideologies.

But the second one—the pain of experience—lingers with you seemingly forever.

Because let’s shatter the illusion: it was not you who ‘received’ the change. Something within you generated it, and now it is woven into your neural architecture.

And the person who understands this intricate mechanism can change what someone believes without ever uttering a single argument.

Contents Include:

1. Psychological Reactance: Why Even Your Best Arguments Fail

2. Predictive Processing: A Dissection of Unfounded Beliefs

   1. A Surgery on Thought (Persuasion Imperatives)

3. Illusory Truths & Neural Architecture

   1. The 3 Persuasion Imperatives

4. The Persuasion Layers

5. The Operational Framework

But be warned: What you are about to read is a detailed neurobiological and game-theoretical breakdown of the human mind, exposing how politicians persuade and salesmen exploit your natural tendencies—and how to leverage these mechanisms.

It may certainly shatter some of your prior beliefs.

1. Psychological Reactance: Why Even Your Best Arguments Fail

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