{"id":"2068248923563573366","url":"https://x.com/incentivising/status/2068248923563573366","text":"","author":{"name":"Incentivising","username":"incentivising","avatarUrl":"https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1867937436828876800/gCZ3mSLQ_200x200.jpg"},"createdAt":"Sat Jun 20 08:25:44 +0000 2026","engagement":{"replies":6,"retweets":97,"likes":666,"views":298930},"article":{"title":"The Laws of This World (Game Theory)","previewText":"Friday, 5th June. 7 PM.\nIt happened again. As it regularly does.\nAs I scroll through my DMs on X, my eyes linger on one message in particular:\n\"(...) even though I put in a ton of effort, it seems","coverImageUrl":"https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HLPkaFfWYAA4Ykd.jpg","content":"![Enclosed.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HLPkqGDX0AAXlEM.jpg)\n\nFriday, 5th June. 7 PM.\n\nIt happened again. As it regularly does.\n\nAs I scroll through my DMs on X, my eyes linger on one message in particular:\n\n> \"(...) even though I put in a ton of effort, it seems like I never get anywhere.\"\n\nThis message did not draw my attention because it was something novel or substantially different.\n\nNo. I noticed it because it is already familiar.\n\nBy 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.\"\n\nAbove all, one thing needs to be put plainly: you are not deficient.\n\nBut 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.\n\nWorking 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.\n\nThis lack of guidance is a widespread issue. A particularly vicious one at that. Frequently, the principles that determine success are hidden in plain sight.\n\nThe real divide is not income anymore. It is an understanding of the world itself.\n\nBecause 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.\n\nIn fact, you may not even accept these laws.\n\nNevertheless, it always ends in the same drawn-out cliché: the worn-out idealist returns to embrace what he previously rebelled against.\n\nIn 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.\n\n## Contents Include\n\n1. A Lack of Direction\n\n1. Principle 1: Effort is Linear, Position is Exponential (The Types of Leverage)\n\n1. Principle 2: Invisible Competence Is Just a Hobby (The Costly Signal)\n\n1. Principle 3: The Market Is Indifferent to Effort (The Misconception)\n\n1. Principle 4: Most People Are Solving The Wrong Problem (The Harsh Diagnosis)\n\n1. Principle 5: Time Spent is a Cost. Results Are the Return (The Institutional Lie)\n\nThis 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.\n\n## A Lack of Direction\n\nBefore the modern age, life was much simpler. Work hard, get rewarded adequately, then buy a house and start a family.\n\nLooking 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.\n\nNow 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.\n\nThe clear path does not exist anymore. It is fragmented by uncertainty:\n\n\"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.\"\n\nThe result? People are still trying to work hard, just without the goals that the previous generations had.\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\n## Principle 1: Effort is Linear, Position is Exponential\n\nWhether 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.\n\nThat gap widens annually, and at year ten, the difference between a bad position and an optimal position is not even close anymore.\n\nThe bottom line: your position is a variable that multiplies your output.\n\nThat 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.\n\nThe entire mechanism behind this was identified by the American economist Sherwin Rosen, whose work on superstar markets explains how small differences in capability or position, when combined with leverage (scale, reach, reputation), produce enormous differences in outcome (Rosen, 1981).\n\nThey 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.\n\n## The Types of Leverage\n\nActive 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.\n\n1. 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.\n\n1. 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.\n\n1. 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.\n\n1. 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.\n\n![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HLPk6uBWwAAsJNf.png)\n\n## What You Must Ask Yourself\n\nThe 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?\"\n\nThe former is chasing immediate gratification; the latter represents genuine optimization.\n\n## Principle 2: Invisible Competence Is Just a Hobby\n\nLife 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.\n\nThey 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.\n\nBecause when life is a game of chance, the one electing to play it like a lottery never maximizes their actual odds of succeeding.\n\nWho is really to blame for these circumstances? The job market, or the inability to position yourself in a way that conveys your skills?\n\nThese questions are equally diagnostic and disturbing.\n\nWhat 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.\n\nEvery 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.\n\nBut not all sources and signals conveying information are made equal. Game theory has a specific name for this: the \"costly signal,\" a concept formalized in Michael Spence's job market signaling model (Spence, 1973).\n\n## The Costly Signal\n\nA 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.\n\nNever 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.\n\nAstute 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.\n\nActs like these radiate confidence while demonstrating visible competence and expertise. That alone is more persuasive than a thousand clever declarations of value.\n\nYour 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.\n\nFurthermore, you must always remember that what people cannot see virtually does not exist to them.\n\n## Principle 3: The Market Is Indifferent to Effort\n\nIt 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.\n\nEveryone 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.\n\nThat is the strict difference between a CEO who exerts and controls leverage and a worker who is tasked with mere input.\n\nNobody cares that you \"grind\" 10 hours a day.\n\nNobody is bothered by your productivity routine.\n\nNobody cares how well you fold your bedsheets before working.\n\nIn the end, they only see the results they actually get.\n\nSomeone 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.\n\nThat's because reward is not calculated by the hours you put in or by the sacrifices you made along the way.\n\nThe 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.\n\nThis is a lesson in basic, rudimentary economics that most people apply to products but somehow refuse to apply to themselves.\n\nYou are the product.\n\nA 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.\n\nThe market's indifference to effort is real.\n\nAsk yourself, \"What problem do I solve?\"\n\nIf 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.\n\nNo one will put it to you that bluntly.\n\n## Principle 4: Most People Are Solving The Wrong Problem\n\nAnd 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.\n\nGetting 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?\n\nThe 1993 research by Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer on deliberate practice found that undirected effort does not produce expertise (Ericsson et al., 1993). Whether effort is compounded into skill is contingent upon feedback and the selection of appropriate problems.\n\nYou can be extremely efficient at a task and still stand still because efficiency has never really mattered in the grander scheme.\n\nNow, 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!\"\n\nYes, that is a viable outcome. But there is one issue.\n\nMillions 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.\n\nYou do not even need to scrap the whole concept.\n\nYou need to rebuild. Adequately.\n\nFor this specific goal, decide on five values you want to actively wage war against. Broad values that most people have an intimate relationship with.\n\nThen 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.\n\nMastering the wrong problem is worse than failure because it drains your energy as if you were working on something that mattered.\n\n## Principle 5: Time Spent is a Cost. Results Are the Return\n\n\"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.\n\nYou 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.\n\nCertainly, it is always tragic when grand expectations are shattered into mere confusion. That underscores the central issue.\n\nWhen 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nTwo distinctly different approaches.\n\n## Time/Output Equations\n\nOutput (what you produced) is never the same as outcome (what changed because you produced it).\n\nAn email is output. A decision by the recipient that was caused by the email is an outcome.\n\nA meeting attended is an output. A relationship changed by the meeting is an outcome.\n\nA book read is output. A behavior changed by the book is an outcome.\n\nInstitutions 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.\n\nWhat 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.\n\nInstitutions brute-force success because they have the capacity to do so. So, they spread the lie that hard work equals success.\n\nThat 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.\n\nTrack 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.\n\nThe honest accounting of this is extremely uncomfortable, but it is the only diagnosis that leads to correction.\n\n## Bitter Diagnostics\n\nThe 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.\n\nBecause 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.\n\nYou 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.\n\n[More Articles available on Substack.](https://structuralist.substack.com/)\n\n## Sources\n\nRosen, S. (1981). The Economics of Superstars. American Economic Review, 71(5), 845-858.\n\nSpence, M. (1973). Job Market Signaling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355-374.\n\nEricsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363-406."},"adhxContext":{"savedByCount":1,"publicTags":[],"previewUrl":"https://adhx.com/incentivising/status/2068248923563573366"}}