The 7 most important things I've learned this year:

1. Success stems from some combination of intelligence, hard work, luck, and courage.

Courage ― the ability to take risks ― is in shorter supply than intelligence, hard work, and luck combined.

2. Decision-making is the most important skill because it amplifies the value of intelligence, hard work, luck, and courage by several orders of magnitude.

This has implications:

A lucky or courageous person who is right 51% of the time consistently over decades can outperform everyone by several orders of magnitude.

On the flip side, no amount of luck or courage can compensate for bad decision-making.

In a nutshell:

Success = (intelligence + hard work + luck + courage) x quality of decisions

Since anything multiplied by 0 is 0, bad decision-making can nullify every other advantage you possess.

Code, media, capital, and labour are also effective multipliers (aka leverage) but they're all downstream from quality decision-making.

Those 4 sources of leverage are a reward for good decision-making.

3. Rote practice is the only path to acquiring top-tier decision-making ability ― aka mastery.

Mastery requires an intuitive, indescribable, and instantaneous understanding of all the moving parts that can only come from thousands of repetitions and iterations.

4. Effectiveness is more important than efficiency on the path to mastery. It pays to learn to be very good at something before you try to scale it with leverage.

Premature optimization only leads to mediocrity.

Applies to both company-building and your career.

5. Working on your weaknesses instead of your strengths is also a great way to optimize for mediocrity.

6. Life is just an extended version of the marshmallow test.

The ability to delay gratification today for a larger reward tomorrow is the ultimate competitive advantage.

This is easier said than done because the set of decisions required to achieve multi-decade outcomes is so different from the set of decisions required to achieve short-term success that you will seem practically insane to all your peers.

7. All maturity boils down to having an awareness of your emotions and your thought process.

Once you can identify what thought patterns lead to which behaviours, everything else in your life automatically starts falling into place.

Thanks for reading. You can follow me at @heykahn for more writing like this.