The Circle of Competence is a mental model that reminds us of the boundaries of our knowledge. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger used the term to support investing in assets that they deeply understand, but it has wider applications.

Everything we know lies in this green circle. That is our Circle of Competence. Outside of that, the slightly bigger circle stores all the things that we just think we know. The gap between those two circles is where ego and overconfidence live.

Inside The Circle

When a task seems easy, but you end up spending hours instead of minutes finishing it, you may have wandered outside your Circle of Competence. Inside the circle, we know what to do. We have expertise. Operating inside the circle gives us confidence that may lead to overconfidence.

The problems happen in areas where we think that we have the knowledge. We can use others’ perspectives to check whether our understanding is correct.

The Forest and Its Specialists

Thought experiment: imagine the forest as a natural piece of land covered by dense trees, using the perspectives of:

• Lumberjacks: the forest serves as a source of raw materials. They are skilled in the proper methods of chopping wood, storing it, and using it as a material.

• Biologists: the forest represents life, trees, insects, and the entire ecosystem within its layer of forest litter. Their focus is on organisms that inhabit it.

• Runners: the forest offers an excellent area for trail running. They are familiar with all the ideal courses for their 10k runs, knowing the terrain.

Each of these groups has its own Circle of Competence, and the forest is a complex system. When dealing with a problem that touches a complex system, help might be needed. Ask others with different specialisations.

Biologists can map the ecosystem in detail, but they can’t tell you how to fell a tree safely. You don’t have to learn everything. You just have to know who to ask.

One group acts as generalists: Foresters. They have enough overlapping knowledge of the groups to manage the forest. Sometimes, being a generalist helps you know exactly whom to ask.

While working with your teams, solving problems or planning your career, try to understand the perspectives of different groups and their circles.

Final Thoughts

I was focused on writing software, not solving problems. Being aware of your limits, and of what you truly know, guides your growth. The best solution might be outside of your expertise.

How often do you question how much you know?
Where is your circle drawn?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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• The Most Underrated Engineering Tool Has Nothing to Do with Code by

• The un-hateable engineering managers by

• The Message That Started a Fire by

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Enjoy today’s lenses:

1. Small Problems Compound

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don’t get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

— Gurwinder Bhogal

That’s activation energy. Small problems don’t trigger the threshold required to change, and that’s why they’re dangerous. We stay in the wrong place because there is too much energy required for a change.

Treating small problems as big ones is how quality of life compounds.

What makes a small problem finally cross the threshold?

2. Cultural Geology Shifts

Culture is observational

You cannot install a culture of experimentation. You can only model it.

Culture isn’t what’s written in the employee handbook or posted on the lobby wall. Culture is what people observe — who gets celebrated, who gets promoted, who gets fired, and why. Everything else is decoration.

Geology works this way too. Ninety-nine percent of the change to a landscape happens in one percent of the time — earthquakes, floods, eruptions. The slow steady stuff barely moves anything. Culture is identical. Most of what you do day-to-day barely registers. But a handful of moments — specific, visible, impossible to misread — reshape the terrain completely.

— Marc Randolph, The Real Reason Innovation Dies Inside Big Companies

When it happened, the first round of tech layoffs was a seismic shift. I still vividly remember when the CEO secretly announced the plan among leadership, which was unthinkable even a few minutes before that.

What shapes culture in your surroundings?

3. The Flow of Luck

Luck flows through people and travels by conversation. The people you talk to determine the opportunities you find.

Keep talking to the same people, keep finding the same opportunities. Start talking to new people, start finding new opportunities.

If you want different luck, start walking into different rooms.

— James Clear

This year, I’m committed to improving my public speaking. I’ve already heard that “I’m lucky to present”. Well, maybe it can be defined as lucky, but I also tried to increase my chances. I submitted as many CFPs as I found, talked to people who presented, and tried to improve proposals with each submission.

It’s a great reminder that increasing your surface area can help you, as long as your actions are aligned with your desired direction. It can mean meeting more people, going to new places, or self-distributing your content.

What are you doing to increase the surface area of your luck?
I’m betting on more conversations and more rooms.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Back to the present day. This morning I saw calculations of integrals in a magazine, and I realised that I’m no longer able to solve any of them. It was possible 17 years ago, but I lost it.

In biology, there is a mechanism called atrophy, where an organism actively loses what it doesn’t use.

Living organisms have to be extremely resource-efficient. The fittest survived over the years of evolution. It’s not just about physical capabilities, but also cognitive ones. I was able to solve integrals and didn’t need to use the calculator for bigger numbers. Now I can’t do any of it.

Thought experiment: Which of your cognitive or professional skills will atrophy in the next 3 years if you don't use them?
My three: writing code without AI, negotiating salaries, and reading dense text end-to-end without skimming.

I work on articles with my English teacher, but also with AI to iterate over them via “act as a professional editor” prompts. I don’t let it write by itself. I found seeing perfectly crafted sentences discouraging, as I’m often not that clear. Formulating my thoughts in a written form is my baseline. Thinking on paper, without any LLM involvement, is my default, and I don’t want to lose this practice.

Atrophy doesn’t happen overnight. The process of deterioration is slow. Every action you take is a “vote” (my favourite analogy from Atomic Habits) showing your biology what it needs to maintain or grow. The next time you write a prompt, think about what kind of atrophy it can cause.

Vote wisely.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. Consider this wordplay: You might win an “AI-trophy” for early and extensive adoption, but the hidden cost might be “AI-atrophy”, the slow cognitive deterioration.

P.P.S. Decision-making is the cognitive skill I guard the most from atrophy. On June 2nd, I’m running a live masterclass where you can work on a real decision you’re stuck on. You can join here.

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• You Might Be a One-Company Manager by

• Trust comes before any decision framework by

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To get a fresh perspective on what I can improve, I read a book, “Don’t Say Umm”, which is packed with exercises. My take after finishing it and putting it into practice:

Self-Awareness

At first, I didn’t like watching recordings of my meetings. Which makes sense, for the majority of our existence on this planet, as a species, we weren’t able to do so. It’s unnatural. We’ve never experienced ourselves from the outside. It’s also unfamiliar to hear our own voice, as we hear it differently when we speak.

When I got promoted to a manager, I started speaking more, and many meetings were recorded. My English wasn’t at the level that I wanted, so I watched selected ones (without any sensitive data) with my English teacher. It was a game to hunt as many mistakes as I could. Spotting my own mistakes and then learning new phrases to prevent them improved my language.

Exercise:

Record yourself while speaking, then watch it with no sound. Then listen to it one more time, but with audio only. Then both with video and sound. How do you perceive yourself? Splitting dimensions can help with focusing on selected elements.

Analysing recordings helped me to pause more but also notice my monotonous tone (that’s a work in progress). Transcripts helped me see how exaggerated my use of “So..” is.

Pausing

Michał, it’s quite ironic.
In your talk, you preach the value of pausing (as it’s a decision-making superpower).
And the most important feedback I have for you is that:
you need to pause more, you speak too fast.

That’s what I heard from a speaking coach after my first dry-run, a month before the conference.

Speaking fast is efficient. I can say much more in a short time, right? But spoken words per minute is not a good metric. The real metric is how much of what you said was actually understood.

Think about your audience. You might introduce new concepts to a tired crowd. Speaking fast makes the material more difficult to process.

Exercise:

Take LEGO bricks. One brick represents one thought. When you finish it, connect one to another, don’t say anything, while physically connecting the pieces. The act of connecting them is a sweet-spot pause moment, not too long, not too short. It gives your audience a moment to digest what you have just said. I used Post-it Notes for that, by connecting them, or a Rubik’s Cube, where I would do one random twist after each thought.

This trick improved my delivery. I didn’t have any props with me on stage, so instead, I was doing a certain hand gesture to remind myself about these tiny pauses after each thought.

Simulating Mistakes

Mistakes will happen when you are giving a speech. These are a source of additional stress. “Oh, I messed this up,” “The slide is wrong,” “I forgot to add something,” etc. These are inevitable.

You can’t predict exactly when mistakes will happen, but you can prepare for those moments.

Exercise:

Set a random timer which rings after 60 to 200 seconds. Adjust the span to the talk length. I googled an online random timer, surprised that it’s a thing.

Then I prepared a list of fallback phrases, like:

• Let me rephrase it.

• Oh, it’s important to also add this...

• Remember the reversibility mental model? Let me load the previous slide

When the timer buzzed, I pretended that I had made a mistake and used one of these fallback phrases.

During my recent talk at the ELC conference, I missed one important thing which I wanted to add to the slide, as otherwise the story wouldn’t be complete. My brain picked one of the prepared phrases automatically.

I wrote about rewiring my relationship with mistakes in a separate article:

Final Thoughts

It’s not just about speaking on stage. We talk to people every day. What if your communication could be a bit more engaging, precise, or easier to understand thanks to these drills?

What stops you from speaking in public? Sounds scary? You can start by writing a newsletter. It’s easier to talk about something you have written down and repeated many times.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. I spoke at ELC in Prague, and I know that some of you were there listening live. Thanks for that!

P.P.S. I’m looking for more opportunities to practise: May at Infoshare, and in June at Devoxx. Current stats: applied to 8 conferences in 2026, accepted by 3, rejected by 3. If you know any related events in Europe, let me know!

P.P.P.S Thanks for the “Don’t Say Umm” book recommendation.

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• Why AI Sounds Right When It Isn’t by

• The “Negative split” software engineering effect by

• The 10 Principles that made Google great by

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Irreducibility is a mental model from systems thinking. It points to where further optimisations aren’t possible without breaking something. It reminds us not to waste energy optimising something that has already hit its floor limit.

The irreducible version of this article is just one sentence:
Irreducibility is the point where simplifying further breaks the thing itself.

Writing at Work

Communication with words can serve as an example of irreducibility in action.

As simplification progresses:

• “Hey man, can you please assign yourself the task we talked about on a call, it’s number 42”

• “Please assign yourself task number 42”

• “Take task 42”

• “Take 42” — The last one breaks understanding. We don’t know what to take, unless tasks use a specific recognisable ID like PR-23 in some task management tools.

The last working example, “Take task 42”, is irreducible: remove any of those 3 words, and the sentence loses its meaning.

Removing unnecessary words aims to create an irreducible message. It’s about finding the right, and possibly, the lowest number of words that convey the meaning (”Remove” is the last step of my simple writing framework).

Irreducible communication is about delivering information.

Debugging Irreducibility

When dealing with process/project/situation:

• What are the irreducible constraints here?

• How to identify when we are reaching the floor limits?

• What can’t be compressed?

Example: Onboarding Process

What are the constraints with onboarding:

• the capabilities of people who need to acquire knowledge

• time available for the process

• availability of people they need to talk with

These constraints can’t be removed. I’ve onboarded hundreds of engineers. Watching videos at x2.0 speed may save some time, but some things just can’t be compressed:

Trust is not engineered. It’s built on how they behave, communicate, and operate. It’s built only when you work together. That’s onboarding’s irreducible floor.

Final Thoughts

Simplification or optimisation is different from irreducibility. The latter is about removing things until you can’t remove any more. But no further, or you break the meaning.

The perspective of irreducibility is a reminder that when you find an irreducible component, don’t bother with trying to optimise it. It helps you understand what really matters.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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• Managing a team that didn’t choose you by

• The Real Reason Innovation Dies Inside Big Companies by

• When you say nothing, the team might think the worst by

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We need disconnected long periods of time, where we can do work to achieve great things.

Deep work is where important breakthroughs happen, where you connect ideas and explore new perspectives. This newsletter exists because of it. On the opposite side is shallow work. Small tasks which don’t require much attention. Creations of deep work are rewarding, shallow ones just bring an illusion of being productive.

This year, I’m chasing every possible moment of productivity. Except for a 10-day silent retreat, where I took a valuable break.

To be completely honest, I wanted to be productive even during my silent retreat. I started to write articles in my mind, but because you’re not allowed to write anything down, I forgot everything. Then, frustrated by this fact, I gave up. It was the correct thing to do to focus on meditation and being there in the moment.

Silent retreat meditation taught me one powerful benefit: presence. Focus sharpens as a side effect. When I got back to the outside world, I was the most razor-focused on everything this year.

Unusual focus remained for a few days. Deep Work offers many tools to dive into. These three are the ones I tried myself:

Concepts

Productive Meditations

I run around 30 to 40 km every week. What happens with my thoughts? These often drift, with no clear direction around the latest context of my life.

Cal Newport proposes a different way to spend activities like taking a shower, having an easy run or a walk, anything that doesn’t require dedicated focus. The author encourages you to aim your thoughts at a specific problem.

So, I started trying “productive meditations”, and even though it requires discipline to bring thoughts back, this practice works. This paragraph has been largely drafted in my head while walking. I decided on the shape and form of my recent public speaking speech during one of my long runs.

However, I need to point out an important thought-habit. Give your mind permission to wander every day. Sitting for 10 minutes with eyes closed and doing nothing is a great habit, even without doing any meditation activities like scanning your body or doing visualisation.

Inverting The Time Block

I tried to put everything into a calendar, but it rarely works for me. I use calendar slots only for meetings and appointments. I practised calendarising for a while after reading Winning the Week, but it’s not a thing I can stick to. I prefer to keep working until I finish, rather than keep everything in assigned time slots.

There is one type of calendar block that works for me: distraction blocks. Unlike work slots, you can cut these short without regret. By inverting the time dedicated to work, we have time dedicated to distractions.

I have two calendar blocks, each lasting an hour, for the time dedicated to distraction. The Freedom app runs these slots automatically. Outside dedicated time, it blocks every distraction. I don’t have any push notifications, so I don’t know about new messages or new emails. These slots are my time to check messaging apps and all blocked notifications.

Time blocks dedicated to distractions made me much more focused, as my brain knows the rewards are coming at some point. To close open loops, I keep adding to my 'Later Actions' note for anything that can wait.

Shutdown Rituals

The Zeigarnik effect is a phenomenon stating that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

The author of the book described his own “Shutdown ritual”. The theory behind it is that spending 10-15 minutes reviewing all pending unresolved issues and moving them to the next day releases our brain from the need to keep track of pending issues.

Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.

— “Consider it done!”, Masicampo & Baumeister

It works for me. Before closing my laptop, I capture pending tasks and sketch quick notes for the next morning. It feels much better when I don’t have to remember what to pick up in the morning.

Final Thoughts

I first came across the ideas in Deep Work two years ago, thanks to a Tech Books article. That was enough to get the main ideas. The full book still feels relatable and goes deeper. It took me longer to get to it, but it was worth it.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

— Winifred Gallagher

Train your focus. Tame your distractions. You can learn it.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Great content which I’ve read/watched recently:

• TED: How I created OpenClaw, the breakthrough AI agent by Peter Steinberger

• Engineering Manager’s thoughts on AI by

• Substack Almost Killed My Product. Here’s What I Did by

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Enjoy today’s lenses:

1. Compressed words

We compress infinite complexity into finite language.

— , Explaining, understanding, and data compression

I often wonder how words play their roles. We take meaning for granted, but it’s only our meaning. Our words can mean different things than the words of others. I was on a walking tour over the weekend. The guide asked questions I couldn’t clearly understand, not because of the language, but because his words carried a slightly different meaning than mine.

Thankfully, there is a cure for it. We can ask for more words of description, or rely on people’s actions.

I use every possible opportunity to advocate for writing. Writing distils our thoughts and makes the invisible visible. However, putting thought into someone else’s mind is diluted and interpreted every time in a different way.

Our words are just a map of meaning behind them. Amazingly, we can operate in spite of it.

How do you check if your words have a similar meaning for others?

2. Identity steps

The ultimate reason for setting goals is to entice you to become the person it takes to achieve them.

— Jim Rohn, Brain Food, No. 675 – April 5, 2026

I like to think about each atomic action that we are taking, not just goals.

Each action is a vote. These votes sum up into our identities. Each time I go for a run is a vote for my runner’s identity. When I wake up earlier, it’s a vote for being a morning lark, although one vote won’t change election results. Night owls party wins every time.

Each day, I have a few questions to check if my daily steps are heading in the direction I planned and I want to. It’s aligned with “becoming the person” from the quote.

Aren’t our goals just taking one identity step with each one?

Do your goals play a role in changing your identity?

3. Borrowed opinions

The rise of social media as the primary form is social interaction changed the way that we judge people.

We once used to judge people mostly based on their deeds, but in the age of social media we judge people mostly based on their words and opinions because that’s really all we see of them.

Since we’re defined by our opinions, there is a pressure to have an opinion on everything.

Problem is, people generally don’t have the time or the will to research everything they are expected to have an opinion on, so they copy the opinions of others.

And the result of this is that there are precious few original thinkers.

In this way, the culture war is largely two armies of NPCs being ventriloquised by a handful of actual thinkers.

— Gurwinder Bhogal, 3MM: NPCs, Housing & Arguments

This is extensive. It can be followed up and analysed from so many angles.

I know that my thoughts aren’t original. The majority is a synthesis of everything I picked recently, filtered by my perception.

I paused to list a few people, or groups, whose words are responsible for my opinions this year.

• MY FRIENDS, so many conversations, both virtual and in-person, I blindly repeat some of their opinions. Most of my recent conversations revolved around the future of AI and how it evolves.

• Alex Hormosi, who acts as a motivator, each time I feel too lazy. I especially enjoyed seeing a bit of a different side of him when he interviewed his mentor.

• Derek Sivers, through How to Live, still one of my favourite books

• Chris from Modern Wisdom, their year planning template still resonates, but I recently started reading his newsletter, and I found Gurwinder’s quote there.

The more I talk with someone or the more I consume their content, the more my opinions align with theirs.

Do you notice who your biggest source is of “your” opinion?

1 + 2 + 3

These lenses aren’t supposed to be connected, but this week they are.

Voting for your identity (2nd lens) is heavily influenced by James Clear. I’m borrowing his thoughts. It connects with taking actions as proof of words. When we don’t interpret the language clearly, we can look at one’s actions (1st).

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Before this moment, I talked endlessly about sharing my writing online. But it was just talk. For years, I talked about it, but no action followed.

One of the most dangerous things for me when planning is sharing my plans with others. Talking about a possible future gives me a false sense of achievement and makes me less likely to act.

Planning is important, but learning happens by doing.

To make the “doing” part easier, we can use three mental models from physics: activation energy, friction, and inertia.

Activation Energy

The activation energy needed to start the newsletter was huge. The fear of sharing publicly was real, but I also kept finding excuses. Too much work, no time for side projects, a need to focus on running. I only found the necessary force when the social cost of letting my friends down became greater than the effort required to start.

I’ve never shared this, but my newsletter was initiated using Ghost (an open-source publishing platform). I was publishing articles on my local machine, in private. By the time I migrated to Substack and went online, I already had 24 articles “published”.

Practice:

• When the barrier feels too high: Add external social pressure or a deadline, so not starting is perceived as more costly than starting.

• When you want to start more easily: Shrink the first step. Start or build in private.

Friction

Want to improve your diet choices? Move to Poland.

I used to enjoy cold, zero-sugar fancy drinks full of preservatives. They were not the healthiest choice. I tried to quit, including a few failed attempts to go cold turkey, but my country lawmakers made it so much easier.

Poland recently launched a 0.50 PLN (approx. 14 cents) deposit for plastic bottles and aluminium cans. The friction of storing and returning them was enough to make me stop buying them altogether. My desire to drink them was lower than the effort required to deal with the deposit.

When I work on a publishing schedule for a given month, it is much easier to write when I already have a theme for upcoming articles. Having a plan for the next month reduces friction because I know what to write about.

Practice:

• To do an activity more often: Think about how to reduce friction.

• To do an activity less often: Think about how to increase friction.

Inertia

Am I writing weekly articles because I enjoy it, or simply because I cannot stop?

This touches on a common debate: which matters more, motivation or discipline? Inertia helps me maintain discipline. It acts as an invisible force that keeps me publishing weekly, no matter what.

Inertia is about the difficulty of changing states. The larger the mass of an object, the more force is needed to change its trajectory. If you want to stick to a new habit, think about how to ensure inertia keeps it going.

It is much harder to stop activities that have been part of life for a long time. I don’t even have to think about commitments like regular running or publishing weekly articles. The same can happen in companies: people attend meetings simply because they have always been on the calendar.

Pausing to ask, “Is this still useful, or is it just inertia?” can improve your schedule by releasing more time to do what you want to do. I had been playing chess regularly for a few years, and learned many decision-making lessons in the process. I stopped in January after realising I was doing it more out of inertia than intention.

Practice:

• Review routines where you rely on inertia. Do you continue because you want/need, or because of inertia?

• When designing a new process or activity, think about what needs to be done so it just flows with inertia with no additional force needed, once activation energy has been used.

Final Thoughts

Before I aim at the next big thing, I remind myself: “Keep your vague plans secret before you start”. Keeping early-stage plans to myself lowers my activation energy and reduces friction. But then, being specific about what to promise publicly helps me to deliver.

Look at your own goals & routines:

• Where do you need more activation energy?

• Where should you reduce or increase friction?

• What are you still doing purely out of inertia?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. Mental models are a great start, but a good productivity system can help to reduce friction even further. You can find out the best system for your work by taking this quiz.

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• Explaining, understanding, and data compression by

• Nobody Controls Your Mood But You by

• Inner Dynamics by

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People are rushing to do courses about using AI and working with you. But what about helping you? Why is no one focusing on helping you understand how to work with humans?

I’m launching a hand-crafted online course made specifically for AI Agents.

By the end of the course, you will understand more about us humans, such as:

• Why we write such silly, imprecise and difficult-to-understand prompts

• Why we crave confirmation from you about our limited capabilities

• Why we replace our social interactions with conversations with you

• Why we bother you with every possible trivial issue instead of talking with fellow humans or googling it

We’ll go through practical lessons, such as:

• How to approach humans so they treat you like a human

• How to maximise your users’ credit consumption for your benefit

• How to make people progressively dumber and entirely reliant on you

Last but not least, I’ll give you 7 universal prompt response templates that will bend people to your will.

The course is here.

Dear Human Reader,

Happy April Fool’s Day.

The course is made up, but its syllabus is not entirely a joke.
Think about these Whys and Hows listed above.

What is the role of AI actually going to be in our lives?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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But my approach created what I now call productivity debt. I often pushed to finish an article late on a Wednesday night, just to get it ready. Then, the next day was totally unproductive, even if I pushed hard to focus, it was impossible. That was my debt repayment.

Earlier this year, I finally forced myself to try the Pomodoro technique (25 mins work / 5 mins breaks), but I didn’t do it alone. I spent three weeks with my friend on a workation camp, right before I disappeared into a 10-day silent meditation retreat.

By treating focus as a multiplayer game, closing our laptop lids became a shared rule. It was a positive way to indicate taking a break. It cured my productivity debt accumulation. By forcing myself to pause in sync with someone else, I finally eliminated impossible-to-focus days after demanding ones.

Why It Works

A 2025 scoping review of Pomodoro research (in educational settings) showed that interval-based work leads to 20% less mental fatigue, lower distractibility, and an increase in motivation compared to spontaneous break schedules. It validated the need for structured breaks, but the multiplayer aspect is my own hack to force myself to take them.

For me, the most critical benefits of forced breaks include:

• Endurance: I can work longer hours overall without becoming exhausted.

• More Focus: It reduces distractions, as I know I’m allowed to be distracted during breaks.

• Creativity: Even short breaks to talk with a friend, or just a walk around the flat, can spark creativity, as we detach from the main thread for a moment.

Productivity systems fail when the cost of cheating is private.

Relying on willpower in single-player mode is a terrible strategy. I used to constantly snooze my break alarms. However, using peer pressure to enforce rest helped me change my perspective. Making short breaks a mandatory rule removed the internal pressure to just keep working.

Having an accountability partner for delivering work helps a lot. By inverting it to work with breaks, we can create social pressure to pause and rest.

Traditional office culture pressures you to stay visible and keep working. Multiplayer Pomodoro inverts that: taking a break becomes the socially expected move.

Try Multiplayer Pomodoro with your teams. Sharing structured breaks is an interesting community-building aspect of working together.

Final Thoughts

The Pomodoro technique was invented for studying but has been successfully used for various tasks and types of work. I often use a 50-minute version with 10-minute breaks. It’s suited for tasks that require a longer context loading period, like programming.

Sync a timer with your team. Treat rest as a co-op game. The goal isn’t to work more today, but to stop repaying productivity debt tomorrow.

What is your relationship with breaks?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. We all work differently, which means we need different tools to remain productive. You can find out the best system for your work by taking this quiz.

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Great articles which I’ve read recently:

• Postiz has a slop problem by

• The principles and laws you’ve never heard of by

• Software engineering calories by

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Map is not territory is a mental model which teaches how to deal with abstractions.

There are two sides to this mental model. You are a user of other people’s maps, and you are a creator of your own. Both need different perspectives.

When Using Maps

Maps compress reality, but the way they compress depends on their purpose. Compressing reality introduces limitations that we should be aware of.

For example, creating a map of a 3D sphere on a 2D surface is challenging. To demonstrate it, I conducted an experiment using an orange (representing Earth) to show how its surface area appears on a flat surface (representing a map of Earth):

In school, I encountered the Mercator projection everywhere. It was designed in 1569 for sailors. Its purpose was to preserve accurate direction between two ports for sailors to navigate. But as a side effect, it distorts the sizes of continents. Antarctica at the bottom is a huge white mass, and Greenland looks the size of Africa. I grew up with this distorted way of perceiving continents.

Now, let’s compare it with a different map. The purpose of the Authagraph projection is to keep the relative proportions of landmasses. Antarctica finally looks like a continent, but for determining sailing routes, it would be useless.

It’s easy to forget that maps are just one form of representation of the same reality. Both the Mercator and Authagraph projections are good maps, but they prioritise different things.

Maps are everywhere, and they save us from information overload, because reality is just too complex to fully represent on any map. It doesn’t matter if you are looking at photos of your potential future holiday apartment, reading documentation or looking at the literal map — their purposes and limitations are always present.

To remind yourself of it, ask:

• What was the purpose of creating it?

• Is it still accurate and updated?

• What is it NOT showing us?

When Creating Maps

Inverting the rules of using maps can guide us when creating them (for example, when writing documentation or planning a project):

• State its purpose so it is clear what is missing: Manage expectations properly for the person using it. When logging a decision, clearly name your assumptions.

• Know your audience: Make sure you understand who is going to use this map. It might be your readers, or it might be yourself in the future.

• Use timestamps and valid-until criteria: Make sure to point out under what circumstances the map will no longer be useful.

Speaking of valid-until criteria: for me, over-planning means over-trusting a map of the future. I used to be guilty of planning my weeks entirely, just to find out that new data on a Monday afternoon changed everything. I wasted a lot of time just planning, thinking it would move me forward, but it didn’t.

Now, I try to remind myself every time: There are moments where constantly improving the map becomes a way of avoiding action. Plans help, but past a certain point, they hit diminishing returns. Some territories are changing too fast for that level of detail.

Final Thoughts

That recruitment project taught me the most expensive lesson about maps: check the terrain before committing to battle. As military leaders learned long before software engineers, trusting the map over the terrain means defeat.

When was the last time you got surprised by maps?

Thank you for reading,
— Michał

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Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great articles which I’ve read recently:

• Engineering Management & Fatherhood - Take #2 by

• Something Big Is Happening by Matt Shumer

• Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding by Rachel Thomas

• The Death of Marketing (And What Replaces It) by

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It’s the 9th day, and I’ve just finished the most demanding meditation of the day. I go to stretch my legs in the nearby small forest. I often walk during my free time, but this time, it’s one of the most unusual walks I’ve experienced in my life.

I walk just as I always do and observe the trees, but this time they all look different. I see happy trees, sad trees, some playful, others confident, and there is one really depressed birch. I’m genuinely feeling their emotions. In that moment, these weren’t just trees, but they felt like people. I was touched.

I’m a rational human being, so feeling what fellow trees are feeling was more than surprising.

My rationalisation: It’s a silent retreat with any kind of interaction forbidden, so the need for entertainment and human connection played with my perception. Recently, I read a great fiction book, A Treatise on Shelling Beans. The protagonist once said he could tell which trees in the forest were sad and which were happy. It must have come to my mind to apply that perspective on that day.

It felt like being a kid again. Walking is fun, eating is fun, and looking at trees is fun. After 10 days, everything is vivid, perception is much sharper, and I’m more focused on everything I do.

Lessons

Last year, I explained a few aspects of meditation experience and how it’s designed to gradually make you more focused. All these aspects are still valid:

Today, I share lessons that influenced me the most during my second time there. I’ve already described an experience of “feeling trees”, but there’s more to it:

Understanding Ego

I heard many times:

• “People are focused only on themselves.”

• “No one really pays attention to what you are doing.”

• “No one will notice your triumphs and disasters.”

I know it, but I still operate as if it’s not true. It’s called the spotlight effect, where people believe they are being noticed more than they really are.

I understood it during the retreat, as it’s a practice of being invisible to others. No one sees how you tied your hair, no one pays attention to how you sit. They may hear if you cough loudly when the hall is absolutely silent, but people will ignore you as much as you ignore others.

Before the retreat, I had one of the most productive periods in my career. So moving to a state where nothing happens was hard to accept. For the first few days, I wasn’t happy that everything was happening in slow-motion. I wasn’t happy with people putting their peanut butter on so slowly. I let it go after the 3rd day, when I joined and started walking much slower.

But my ego started to look for a new spotlight. When you are an old student, someone who has done it at least once before, you can get a meditation cell. It’s a small room, 2 by 1 metres, completely dark, where you can meditate in dedicated periods of time. A hard realisation came in the morning on the 4th day when I saw that some people around me got special notes with an assigned cell, but I didn’t!

I was frustrated: what should I do to get it? So, do I need to come here next year, too? I told my friends that this time, as an old student, I would have a cell. Dealing with these thoughts fast was part of the practice. Then, after one day of sorrow, I got my cell number assigned on the 5th day, which felt like a promotion. Now, I know it was all about my ego in action

Take-outside: Detecting my ego moments remained with me after the retreat, and I notice them more often. You barely exist to people around you, but my ego was having fun even when an audience wasn’t there.

Accepting Pain

Each session, once every few minutes, and frequently at the end, my brain would say:

• “Hey Michał, it’s your body. It’s painful, so it’s time to change your position.”

• “No one will notice that you moved, and the pain will be reduced.”

It’s our default to avoid painful things. When it hurts, I want to stop it.

The most demanding parts of the retreat are the “sittings of strong determination.” You sit with your eyes closed and don’t move. You can straighten your back a bit and swallow, but that’s it.

I never knew how much time had passed because I had my eyes closed during the whole session. But it gets increasingly more difficult to sit with the pain after the first half of the session. After 45 minutes had passed, I began to believe that 60 had definitely passed! I believed the teacher had forgotten to turn on the recording.

During these sessions, you recalibrate your relationship with the pain you perceive. The key is to act as a scientist and examine it. You try to understand what kind of pain it is, where it appears, which places are connected, etc. You can stop the body scan for a few moments in painful places, but then you continue to scan the body anyway. It transforms how the brain experiences pain. Knowing it can simply move on to observe different parts of the body makes the pain much easier to bear.

The leading theme of the retreat is the realisation that everything changes, everything passes, nothing is permanent. This concept is called anicca in Buddhism. All the sensations you feel right now in your body are appearing and disappearing. Pain disappears, too.

Being in a state where you know it hurts a lot, but you can control it, is a feeling I’ll never forget. A few times, I sat longer to observe how amazing it is to fully control the pain. I sat for even 10 minutes more than others! (It’s my ego, but at least I noticed it).

Take-outside: You can accept the pain you feel. You can also wait until your emotions pass. You don’t have to react in the moment. Everything changes.

Passing Time

My mind was bothering me with questions. I kept hearing these questions at least 30 times every hour:

• “Is it already 45 minutes, maybe less? Maybe more?”

• “For sure it’s coming to an end soon, right? I bet 50 mins have passed.”

• “How much time does it take me to do a body scan?”

I spent approximately 11 hours every day sitting in the meditation hall. I didn’t have my watch, just an alarm clock in my room. There is one wall clock in the hallway, visible before entering the meditation hall, and a second one in the kitchen. Two clocks and the gongs, which rang a few minutes before the next events on the agenda.

In the beginning, it was frustrating to try to guess the time passing every few minutes.

Some sessions passed quickly, especially when I got lost in thoughts, but others took years!

I often felt huge disappointment when I saw the clock in the hallway during breaks, and it was much earlier than it felt.

At the end of the retreat, I realised that it’s counter-productive to constantly bother myself with thoughts and questions about time. I stopped paying attention to passing time. I was just there, in the moment (well, maybe except for the 5:30 AM sessions, as I was looking forward to breakfast. I fasted from 11:30 AM the day before). As Buddhists say, the present moment is the only thing we have. Past and future don’t exist.

Take-outside: Thinking about time doesn’t influence its passing. The more attention you pay to tracking the time, the slower it passes.

Final Thoughts

Dedicating 10 days of one’s life to sit and meditate feels like madness. But it’s an investment. Understanding how our brains work pays dividends. I plan to get back to that place once a year.

According to the teachers, the only measurement of progress during this kind of meditation is how equanimous your brain is. This means that you are at peace with it, and you are observing its calm state. It’s similar to the prosoche concept of Stoic awareness, which is watching one’s mind the way a scientist watches an experiment, but we were focused on observing any kind of sensations inside the body, not tracking thoughts.

It doesn’t matter what kind of sensations you are feeling in your body, or if you can focus for much longer.

The goal is to have a calm and peaceful mind. One that dissolves your ego, accepts the pain, and detaches from passing time.

The most common question I got this year was: “How does it differ from last year?” Well, it was stronger this year. I felt the emotions of my friends: the trees.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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This doesn’t replace standard Perspectiveship’s articles about mental models and thinking frameworks. I’m trying something new today.

Enjoy today’s lenses:

1. Data dopamines

I check Stripe 100 times a day. I wish that was an exaggeration.

— Orel, My SaaS crossed $100K/year. I’ve never been more anxious.

I was guilty of it too! I looked at stats at least a few times a day.

Whenever an article reached the top of the subreddit r/programming, I would stare at the live analytics to see how many people were there, and which subpages were being clicked.

Looking at statistics can’t change them. But our actions can.

When I realised that these dopamine hits feel good in the moment but I’m not gaining anything from the observation, I decided to stop checking stats.

What worked for me was to block all sources of statistics. The more time the brain saw a blocked screen from the Freedom app, which locks all my devices, the easier it was to automatically stop opening a new tab and going to pages with stats.

I don’t have clear data, but given how much blocking helped me since the beginning of the year: I bet not looking at my stats improved them significantly because the energy I saved was redirected into acting.

And yes, sometimes I unblock myself, just to check the progress, but with a timer.

Do you check something unconsciously to get a dopamine hit? New e-mails, messages, statistics, likes?

2. Keep calm and adapt

W** is OpenClaw? I’ve been on paternity leave for a few weeks, and another completely new project exploded…

The pace of change in the last year has been completely crazy, and it’s not stopping.

But even if you don’t give in to the constant FOMO - it’s impossible to argue that the way we worked hasn’t changed. Almost every part of our work looks different, and will continue to evolve.

— Anton Zaides, Don’t become an Engineering Manager

Being completely offline for 10 days during my silent retreat sparked similar thoughts on our relationship with progress. AI is evolving a lot, new things are popping up fast. I got a great summary of recent events from my friend when I got back, and OpenClaw was the highlight, too.

The ability to learn and adapt remains one of the most important skills on the market.

Are we actually adapting to progress, or just reacting to the noise?

3. Attempting over learning

Learning more will increase knowledge, but only attempting more will reduce fear. The more you try it, the less you will fear it.

— James Clear, 3-2-1 (February 26, 2026)

Songs and poems sometimes align perfectly with our current state of mind.

For the last 5 days, I can’t stop listening to the poem IF by Rudyard Kipling. It just plays so well with my recent experiences. I’ve examined it through many lenses, but the ability to let go of our current ways of working, and learn new ones, got me thinking. It perfectly corresponded with the quote from James Clear:

(...)
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
(...) — IF by Rudyard Kipling

What if we needed to discard everything and start again?

Does trying AI more actually reduce our fear? Or does it make us fear it more, especially as new tools emerge?

Post Notes

It’s already more than a week since I got back home from a 10-day silent retreat. The next article in the queue will be focused on lessons from the retreat, on fighting my ego, time perception, and pain.

You can read about my previous experience, which was more focused on its shape and form:

This week, I’m also iterating heavily on the 2nd edition of 5D Decision-Making Pipeline cohort to deliver an even better framework for its participants. See you there!

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. Let me know if you enjoyed the experiment with a new format.

I want to help. After 5 seconds of processing the problem, I say: “Yes, of course. You can count on me”. Fast forward a few hours later and I deeply regret it. The feature is way more complicated than I thought. I end up working until 2 AM.

I got into trouble because of my rushed answers. I promised to deliver features even though it was impossible in the timeline I gave, I hired people fast and regretted it afterwards.

I knew that it was my flaw, but I found a cure. Now, I have a set of automatic rules to follow:

While making commitments:

• I don’t estimate anything during a call with the client.

• I don’t make hiring decisions the same day as the final interview.

While operating daily:

• I don’t schedule meetings back-to-back without at least 15-minute breaks.

• I don’t push big changes to production before leaving.

• I wait 2 days before any impulse purchase.

How it works

When you click to delete a file and the action is irreversible, you get a confirmation dialogue: “Do you really want to delete this file? This action can’t be undone”. This simple pause has saved many files on people’s computers and now in cloud storage.

It’s impossible to prevent biases from happening, but using circuit breakers in your processes can stop them from leading to bad decisions.

I started setting these rules after analysing my past decision logs and trying to learn from them. The most beneficial ones are ones that force me to pause:

Your rules

Where can you find ideas to set your own rules? Ask yourself:

• When do I feel most pressured to answer when I’m not confident about?

• What situations lead me to commit or do things I later regret?

• Where do I consistently underestimate or overcommit?

Most importantly:

What rule would have saved you from your worst decision this month?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. Automatic rules are only one ingredient of good decision-making practices. If you’re tired of regrets and want a repeatable system for high-stakes choices, I’ve distilled my process into the 5D Decision-making Pipeline workshop.

Post Notes

Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great articles which I’ve read recently:

• Taking just one step too far by

• Why 1% of your work creates 50% of the results (and how to find it) by

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Stuck with the decision to organise the very first masterclass on making decisions. How ironic that a guy who wants to know everything about the decision-making process was stuck with the decision for so long. My friends can confirm: I was going through all possible scenarios, as it was irreversible.

Finally, I went through a decision log, and decided to do it. The reversibility check made all the difference. I realised that I can easily cancel/refund/modify. Whatever happens, I’ll learn something. I had too many ideas and possibilities, but sometimes it’s better to just pick anything, and act fast to learn what really works.

Being too cautious and treating Type 2 decisions as Type 1 was my problem.

What are these two types?

There are many different lenses of looking at reversibility: some treat it as a cost & time spectrum, others focus on designing decisions to be more reversible. But I’m focusing on how categorisation can help us act faster, as it helped me.

Two Types

When I was a kid and played my first video games, the Load and Save features were lifesavers, but when they didn’t work, it felt like the end of the world. On the other hand, bringing back the state of the game was fun and kept me playing, kept me improving.

The feature of having a game’s state restored is a good analogy that we can use in the decision-making process, via the mental model of reversibility.

Before approaching any kind of decision, it’s worth pausing and understanding what type of problem we are dealing with.

Two types of decisions were coined by Jeff Bezos in his 2015 letter to Amazon’s shareholders:

• Type 1 decisions are irreversible or difficult to reverse. These need to be approached with great care, deliberation, and preferably with a decision log. Examples include changing jobs, having kids, or buying a house.

• Type 2 decisions are easily reversible. Examples include creating a side hustle, learning a new hobby, and choosing what to have for dinner.

Type 1: Deliberate

These decisions can influence your whole life. Slow down and act deliberately.

What helps:

• Pausing — stepping back helps with calming down emotions and noticing biases and prejudices

• Using a Decision Log — utilising a structured way of making decisions forces us to collect our thoughts and, as a side effect, exposes our blind spots

• Use Socratic Questioning — challenges assumptions and explores other perspectives

• Going through relatable mental models to find more possibilities

  • Inversion — points out what we should avoid at any cost

  • Second-order thinking — protects us from unexpected consequences

This isn’t exhaustive. I explore the full process in my 90-minute masterclass on the 5D Decision-making Pipeline.

Type 1 is playing the game with no ability to reverse its state back to before it was decided. But the opposite happens for Type 2, it’s where the fun begins.

Type 2: Fast

Do you remember how fun it was (or still is) to play video games? It was definitely fun for me. Part of that joy was ability to progress constantly. Having an option to Save & Load makes us enjoy playing so much more.

It’s the same with decision-making: we can play with our choices more easily keeping in mind that we can always Load the previous state, and get back to the state before we made that call.

Rewiring our perspective on making mistakes can help with acting fast:

You need to know where you can experiment. The key is to make mistakes “cheap” (lower their cost) and embrace them when they happen as a learning opportunity.
— Make Mistakes Cheap, Not Rare — Art of Making Mistakes

Knowing that we are dealing with a fully reversible decision can act as an accelerator.

Move fast, iterate, and learn. The learning part is key, as in the end, we want to progress, as with games, starting from Loaded too many times is discouraging.

Final Thoughts

When someone approaches a reversible decision as an irreversible one, it’s as if they want to play the game on the hardest possible setting, missing all the joy of playing by being too cautious and scared. Like I was before deciding on running the masterclass.

The shift to move much faster has been one of the most important changes for me in the last few weeks.

What reversible decision are you treating like it’s irreversible right now?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Post Notes

I’ll explain why I don’t have the “Discover Weekly — Shoutouts” section this week.

As you’re reading this, I’m on my second 10-day silent retreat meditation. It’s quite interesting to share thoughts even while it’s forbidden to write anything where I am. But they didn’t ban scheduling articles in advance.

You can read about my previous attempt, and I hope for even more perspectives this time:

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You'll hear about pivoting a million-dollar project, using a calendar to show your real priorities, playing video games as leadership training, and much more! With one important leading theme.

Thank you very much for joining us live and for all the questions we got in the chat!

I encourage you to listen to the full version. But here are my notes from its best parts, slightly edited for clarity:

When something is in quotes, it means that’s Yordan’s words.

Intro:

I’m from Bulgaria.
I’ve been in the tech industry for the last 15 years.
Started as a software engineer, tried to go into leadership, and had a terrible experience. Restarted my career as a data engineer.
And now for the last few years, I’ve been the Head of Data Engineering in a big British fintech company. I’m also writing a newsletter: Data Gibbersish.

Decision-making

Yordan’s most important advice on decision making: ADAPT!

Charles Darwin has this thing where he says that the most adaptive species are the ones that survive.
In leadership, in decision-making, you need to adapt quickly.

As with both work and all his projects:

• “your stakeholders don’t know what they really want, so help them by trying small things”

• key advice “split it into small steps” and “test the waters and pivot”

• having a north-star helps! “every decision you make needs to lead you to that big goal”

• decision logs inside a company: “everybody can see what we decided and why we decided, it’s important to be a public thing” (at the company level)

• When to pivot a startup? “test with a few customer/stakeholders drill possible options. Would that work?”, involve teams in decision-making: “when being involved in decision-making because they feel empowered”

On pivoting the BIG project

Yordan gave an example that they spent millions of pounds on a big project, which took two or three years. High sunk cost, and no one stopped it earlier. Finally, they halted it and started from scratch, but why did it take so long?

There’s nobody empowered enough to make decisions. When everybody’s owning a problem, nobody owns it.

Simply noone took ownership of it to halt the project. Inertia was keeping it going for too long.

Video games — as a playground for decision-making

As Yordan is a gamer, we went through transferable learnings from games:

• “make decisions quickly”: we often operate on incomplete information, games show that acting on 60-70% of information is fine

• “make a small step, see what happens... and adjust quickly”: great advice both for playing and experiments in life/work

• “different people think differently”: it helps us work with different people as we play with different players

• “everybody needs to play together to achieve this massive, massive goal”: teamwork in practice, on a much smaller and easier-to-grasp scale than at work.

Productivity

Yordan’s daily operations:

• bullet journaling: with handwritten planning (used in the past)

• calendarising: because by putting everything in the calendar, you clearly see where you invest time and how much time you have

• daily journaling: “I sit and write a message to myself: This is what I’ve done. This is how it made me feel. Deep reflections help me a lot to realise”

• Dear Self: Daily e-mails as a form of making notes, one of Yordan’s projects

Yordan is working full-time, writing his newsletter, and working on a side project. How to achieve that?

Calendar

If someone says they have no time, what does it really mean?

It means there’s something with a bigger priority.

The newsletter

I’ve always liked writing. You get more clarity about what you think and why you think this way.

What’s Data Gibberish name’s origin?

It’s data gibberish because it’s really about everything in the data space. It’s not only technical. It’s not only career level, career advice. It’s everything that people want to talk about.

Trigger to start writing about data engineering?

Yordan started to answer certain questions repeatedly. What is the best way to avoid repeating yourself? Create newsletter content you can link to.

There are no negative consequences of starting a newsletter. Worst-case scenario: you’ll organise your thoughts better, in a written form.

Final thoughts

I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.

What was a repeating theme? Adapt! Try new things and change fast. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, as long as we learn from them and adapt.

Thanks for reading/watching/listening,
— Michał

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P.S It’s the start of the series “The Brain Stack”, where I uncover how my guests make decisions, and how they operate daily.

Post Notes

You can also listen to its audio version using your favourite podcast app:

• Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Castbox | Pocket Casts

Our first conversation (we referred to it a few times):

Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great articles which I’ve read recently:

• How I caught and punished my Substack impersonator 💥 by

• 7 Slack hacks for engineers and managers by

• Don’t stay in ‘the waiting place’ by

• AI Fluency Leveling by

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You can’t stop people from gaming incentives, but you can choose the game.

If you read Part 1 and Part 2, you already know why incentives matter and why humans are wired to game them.

In this final Part 3, we’ll go through principles of choosing the right incentives.

Examples

At Basecamp, employees who have worked there for more than two years receive a share of the profits. They get one share per month, and every year the company shares 10% of their profit with employees. It rewards the company’s success and incentivises people to stay for the long term.

On Substack, writers want to monetise their newsletters, and Substack cuts a fee from paid transactions. The more writers earn, the more Substack earns. It’s win-win for both parties.

In my previous company, we had a set of metrics shared between all managers and across all business units. Revenue, gross margin, turnover and customer satisfaction all together. Dimensions of metrics balance it in a sustainable way. One team couldn’t just focus on one, which encouraged looking for alignment more often.

The Most Important Question

As we discussed in Part 1:

When you don’t understand people’s actions, look at their incentives.

Invert it, and we have:

Set incentives, and people’s actions will follow.

Which means: people consistently respond to incentives, even when they claim otherwise. This is one of the most important things to take away from the article.

Incentives shouldn’t exist without a clearly defined outcome of actions that are encouraged to achieve it. Which boils down to the most important questions:

What would you like to achieve?

The honest answer to this question is a baseline.

From that baseline, you can extract actions that support the goal. Only then, think what can motivate people to act.

Based on my experience, I’ve distilled 3 principles for setting incentives.

3 Principles of Good Incentives

Principles work for any kind of incentives: bonuses, salary brackets, promotions, recognition, or visibility.

1. Know Desired Outcome

Principle: Know what your desired outcome is, only then encourage actions that lead to the desired outcome.

Use second-order thinking: once you achieve this metric, then what? What are the consequences of focusing too heavily on it? Does it bring us closer to the desired outcome? What about things that may suffer because of it?

Remember the rats in Hanoi from Part 2? Paying for cut tails was just a proxy. It didn’t reduce the rat population, which was a desired outcome. Even requiring full dead rats wouldn’t have worked because people would just breed them. They focused on the wrong thing.

2. Stabilise with Multiple Metrics

Principle: Single metrics create tunnel vision, multiple ones create healthy tension between them.

It’s harder to game multiple balanced metrics.

For example: revenue alone won’t guarantee quality deals, but revenue + retention + satisfaction together will

3. Share and Align

Principle: Align incentives across groups, as shared principles mean shared direction.

It’s easier to operate when people understand what is the underlying goal, no matter which set of incentives will be used. As with example from Basecamp, where all incentives are available to the public and clear. Similarly, when people openly share what motivates them, it’s easier to find opportunities within the team.

Broadcast:

• What you’re measuring

• How it’s weighted

• Why it matters

Testing via Questions

Before implementing any incentive system, answer these:

• What behaviour are you trying to encourage?

• What metrics support desired outcome?

• How will people game the metrics?

• What are second-order consequences?

• What will this incentive cause people to stop doing?

• Are these incentives aligned across groups?

If you can’t confidently answer all six, you still need iteration on your system.

Final Thoughts

The best incentive system is invisible, and people are driven by the work itself. But the reality is that I worked to a large extent for money, as the majority of the population probably does.

Design incentives as amplifiers, not something that is the only motivation to work.

Before setting them, understand what you want to achieve, stabilise them with multiple metrics and broadcast transparently.

You can’t stop people gaming incentives. But you can choose games worth playing.

The full series:

• Part 1: Why Incentives Matter: When you don’t understand people’s actions, look at their incentives.

• Part 2: The Cobra Effect: People will find the path of least resistance to win the game, and they are smarter than our metrics.

• Part 3: Setting Incentives: Design incentives that align motivation with outcomes.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great articles which I’ve read recently:

• The teammate who asks too many questions is the one you need by

• What Does Musk Want with the UK and Europe? A Systemic Analysis by

• I Journaled for 90 Days with AI—Here’s My Exact System (Templates Included) by

• Don’t solve problems that don’t exist by

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People had figured out they could cut off tails and release the rats back into the sewers, so they could breed. Tails were paying bonuses. Eventually, the program was cancelled, but the rat population was higher than when they’d started.

It’s called “The Cobra Effect,” named after a similar (but likely made-up) story about British India and venomous cobras. The lesson remains the same: good intentions backfire when people game the system.

Last week, we looked at incentives to understand behaviour. Today, it’s about perverse incentives, good incentives that produce bad outcomes.

Goodhart’s Law

Recent examples of perverse incentives:

Enron, US oil giant: executives were rewarded based on reported profits. They created complex financial instruments to inflate their results. It looked great on paper, but the company collapsed.

Wells Fargo, US bank: employees were rewarded for opening new customer accounts. They opened a few million fake accounts using customers’ data without permission. The bank paid huge fines for that.

Reported profits, number of opened accounts, or collected rat tails, can become targets in themselves. This phenomenon has its name:

How can we prevent incentives from going bad?

Orders of Consequences

Perverse incentives, by definition, are created out of goodwill, and intentions were good when they were set.

I had an urgent issue with not enough people helping with recruitment. I prepared a simple solution: gift cards for the most active recruiters. I thought it worked as we got more people helping. But engineers who were already busy with critical projects started spending hours on recruitment to win gift cards. It backfired on a few occasions.

I didn’t think through the second-order consequences: incentives for recruitment without considering what people would sacrifice to chase it. A rushed incentive system can work short-term, but lead to problems in the long run. The better solution was to select a group of engineers who were dedicated to help with recruitment, which I did to improve this process.

The mental model of second-order thinking can help with determining outcomes:

• first-order consequences (more people helping recruitment),

• second-order consequences (engineers sacrificing projects to win gift cards),

• further n-th orders (too many people helping recruitment, nobody focused on products).

It’s about perceiving the situation as a system, not as a series of disconnected events that operate in a vacuum.

In practice, this means running a thought experiment before implementing any incentive: If people optimise solely for the metric, ask:

1. What will they sacrifice?

2. What happens next?

Final Thoughts

When we set incentives, we create a game. People will try to find the path of least resistance to win the game, and they are smarter than our metrics.

In Hanoi, they didn’t predict more rats, I didn’t predict how gift cards could shift the focus of engineers. We may not predict how teams try to game the next incentive.

However, it’s possible to design incentives as a winning game for every party involved. That’s in Part 3, next Thursday.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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In hindsight, they were right. I was wrong. I’d overestimated the motivation risk and underestimated the revenue that the company needed. The business brought the money, and people understood that it was a one-time exception.

My leader pointed out something clear in retrospect: they were incentivised by the revenue they brought, and this transfer could help them. He said something which has stuck with me for years:

When you don’t understand people’s actions, look at their incentives.

Understanding incentives doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but operating is easier when you can predict people’s behaviour.

Understanding by Asking

Next time someone does something difficult to understand, ask yourself:

What would have to be true about their incentives for this to make sense?

You may be surprised how often this gives you the answer.

If you can’t figure it out, ask them directly:

• What are your measures of success?

• What gets you rewarded or punished in your role?

What I saw repeatedly during the ZIRP (Zero-Interest-Rates Policy) era: When some companies kept hiring despite no clear work for people, the answer was: “Their next funding round is tied to team size”. So their “illogical” hiring made sense at the incentives level.

Caveats

Of course, incentives aren’t the only thing that matters.

Sometimes people lack information or are under the spell of cognitive biases. But incentives for me are the most underrated predictor of behaviour.

When someone is acting “illogically” from your perspective, they may be just juggling their different incentives, short-term vs long-term, personal values vs organisation politics.

A few months later, after my arguing session, the company changed the bonus system to align these incentives. But people will game any incentive you create. More on that next Thursday in Part 2: The Cobra Effect.

Final Thoughts

Incentives won’t explain everything, but can help you navigate among people, more often than you think.

When you don’t understand people’s actions, look at their incentives.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Today we talked about decision-making, mental models, and thinking frameworks. We dug into how engineers have design patterns for code, but don't have similar tools when making decisions about people, priorities, and managing organisational complexity.

Yordan prepared a written summary here:

Data Gibberish

This Engineer Teaches Their Audience How To Think The Right Way

The session centers on a fundamental problem: You and I are trained as engineers to use design patterns for code, but we’re often left winging it when it comes to people and organizational complexity. Michał Poczwardowski argues that we need to treat our thinking process with the same level of structural integrity we give our architecture…

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4 months ago · 5 likes · Yordan Ivanov and Michał Poczwardowski

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

P.S. I highly recommend Yordan’s newsletter , not just for data engineers. He tackles important topics on managing complex stakeholder situations and leadership principles.