If someone “wastes” $100, someone else now has $100 extra to spend. Even burning bills deflates the currency, making other bills more valuable.

But people’s time genuinely can be wasted. The tragedy of someone spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a yacht is not the dollars spent but the enormous quantity of people’s time and all of those resources that could have gone towards much more societally valuable pursuits.

If you don’t believe this, just consider what happens after the yacht has been built – those dollars spent are now in the hands of the shipbuilders, ship captain, crew, boat insurance provider, etc., who can spend it themselves. So the money is not lost – not even a single dollar of it disappears; it just goes to other people to use! But all of those people’s time and most of the materials used in building the yacht are lost forever.

What do I mean by “lost” here? Well, time and resources can be spent creating lots of what conscious beings intrinsically value (e.g., happiness, positive relationships, freedom, justice, etc.), or they can be spent producing little to no value. Time and resources are “lost” when they produce little to no value in the process of using them up.

Someone buying an expensive yacht gets some genuine value out of it: some pleasure for them and their friends, social status, etc. But that amount of value is really tiny compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars of labor and resources permanently used up in the process (that could have been used to produce far more value). That vast sum of labor and resources could have produced large amounts of value for many people, but instead produced a small amount of value for one person.

This line of thinking has a surprising consequence: frivolous spending on things that are expensive due to labor and resource usage is much worse societally than frivolous spending on things that are expensive only due to taste preferences. It is much worse for society if someone builds a yacht for hundreds of millions of dollars than if that person spends the same amount on a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting that someone recently found in their attic. The latter scenario mostly just involves money moving around (which causes no harm), whereas the former scenario not only moves money around but ALSO uses up a ton of labor and resources.

There is a libertarian counterargument that may seem to refute what I’m saying. It goes like this: if people enter into transactions willingly and with full knowledge of what they’re giving and getting, then they are better off because of those transactions, so all transactions are good, even ones involving buying frivolous yachts for hundreds of millions of dollars.

To take this to an extreme, let’s suppose a billionaire goes around paying people to undergo torture (let’s assume that, like most people, these people hate torture). The billionaire offers enough money that these people are willing to accept the offer even though it is absolutely awful for them. Now by standard libertarian logic, the world is still better off since the billionaire chose to pay them, and the participants being tortured were willing to do it.

On the other hand, compare how much worse off the world is in that case compared to if the billionaire instead paid people to make beautiful things, or to run non-profits that seek to make the world better, or used that money to fund new startups, or just gave the money directly to those same people instead of requiring that they be tortured for it. In fact, the world would be better off if the billionaire did “nothing” with the money – leaving it in the bank so others can borrow it rather than using it to pay for torture.

The issue is not that the world is strictly worse off if a billionaire pays people to undergo torture (you could imagine a world where both the billionaire and the torture sufferers are slightly better off post-transaction – this only requires that the torture sufferers accept the deal with complete knowledge of the consequences and that they really do value the payments enough to make the torture worthwhile according to their values).

The issue is that there is a tremendous loss of value if a billionaire pays people to undergo torture relative to what could have been if the billionaire used the money for almost anything else. Paying people to be tortured does not destroy money (the money merely exchanges hands), but it does unnecessarily destroy value (people’s time is spent being tortured, which is horribly dis-valuable, instead of doing things with that time that are valuable). In this hypothetical example, the billionaire’s huge sum of money could have been spent on numerous things that would have produced value, and yet, they found one of the very least valuable ways to spend via voluntary exchange (by purchasing people’s suffering).

Buying a yacht is far less extreme than paying people to be tortured, but the torture example helps illustrate the point: using money never destroys that money; money always just moves hands, and some uses of money produce a lot of value in the world, and some don’t (and some even destroy value). Another way to put it is: buying a multi-hundred-million-dollar yacht creates VERY little value relative to the resources and amount of labor it consumes. A ten-million-dollar yacht, as a point of comparison, might make the billionaire slightly less happy, but it would produce a lot more value per unit of labor used. And a one-million-dollar boat is even better still on this ratio.

Since people’s time and physical resources are finite, when they are used on one thing, they are necessarily not used on another. To take it to extremes in order to illustrate the point, a society that spends most of its resources and work hours on making luxury goods that produce just a modest benefit for only a small number of people (as with yachts) is far worse at supporting human values than one where labor, time, and resources produce widespread benefit, with a higher “unit of what humans value” produced per hour of labor. A society that spends its time and resources building public parks and quality roads is a better one for flourishing than one which focuses instead on building pyramids to bury kings (even if the laborers are paid the same amount in each case).

I’m not saying it’s unethical to spend money on things you enjoy (I don’t think it is unethical so long as you don’t harm others). But it’s interesting to consider that, for very large expenditures for enjoyment (like multi-hundred-million-dollar yacht purchases), the amount of labor and resources they consume relative to the value they create may be bad societally relative to other equally frivolous-seeming purchases.

Note: as some commenters pointed out, there is substantial value in buying a yacht in terms of redistribution of wealth – it’s usually better for the world that the wealth moves from the billionaire to the yacht crew, etc. That’s absolutely true, but it would also be true for most usages of the money spent by billionaires, and the points I’m getting at here (about usage of labor and resources) are separate and independent from redistribution effects.

This piece was first written on February 24, 2023, and first appeared on this site on April 30, 2023.

The question of how to achieve true happiness has been debated for thousands of years. In this article, we’ve summarized ten approaches to happiness, new and old, that are popular today. 

How do you think about being truly happy?

You might find that your personal views on this topic are captured by one of these ten popular theories. We hope that understanding these different theories will help you to better refine your own views of happiness and understand the perspectives that other people take towards living a good life!

For each of these theories, there are lots of different variants with subtle differences – we’ve aimed to capture some central representative ideas that many variants have in common. 

We’ve also included some resources you can use to try and increase your happiness levels by applying these different methodologies!

Positive Psychology

A growing scientific field, positive psychology applies the tools of psychology to the question of what makes life most worth living.

“Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation. It is savoring; it is not taking things for granted; it is present-oriented.”

-Sonja Lyubomirsky

How to achieve true happiness: Keep a gratitude list, cultivate positive relationships, find ways to use your strengths/virtues, do activities that get you into a flow state, savor pleasurable things in the moment, anticipate fun things in your future, reminisce about meaningful things in your past, buy more experiences and fewer things, avoid the hedonic treadmill.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools: 

• Building Happiness Habits
• Tactics for Happier Living
• Savor Your Life
• Become a Great Listener

Other resources:

• To be successful, should you focus on your strengths or your weaknesses? (Podcast episode)

Stoicism

Stoicism is an ancient school of philosophical thought from 3rd Century BC Greece and Rome, which is now experiencing a resurgence in popularity.

“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.” 

– Marcus Aurelius

How to achieve true happiness: Deeply appreciate what you have now since it all could be gone tomorrow, only try to control what you’re actually able to, remember you’re not entitled to anything, learn to love doing the right thing rather than the pleasant thing, seek value in all that happens. Through these practices, aim for equanimity in the face of any circumstance, no matter how bad.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Reframing Negative Emotions
• Resolving Harmful Situations

Books:

• Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
• Stoicism and the Art of Happiness – Donald Robertson

Christianity

Based on biblical scripture and church traditions, many practitioners of Christianity view it as including rules and guidelines for living a good and happy life.

“The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.”

– C.S. Lewis

How to achieve true happiness: Be humble, love God with all your heart, love your neighbor, accept Jesus Christ as your savior, worship God, pray, have faith, be thankful and take joy each day in all that God has given you, be a devoted wife/husband/father/mother/child, obey the Ten Commandments, don’t cast the first stone, avoid lust, greed, wrath, sloth, gluttony, envy, and pride, avoid hell at all costs, live for eternity in heaven with God.

Books:

• Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life – Craig Groeschel

Insight Meditation

Vipassanā, or insight meditation, is a Buddhist practice popular before the 10th Century AD, which gained widespread popularity in the late 20th Century, including in the USA. This practice emphasizes mindfulness meditation as a path to gaining insights into the nature of reality.

“As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts.”

– Buddha

How to achieve true happiness: Follow the eightfold path, train your concentration through meditation until it is stable and precise (e.g., practice maintaining subtle focus on the breath), use your refined concentration to carefully observe the true nature of reality, mind, and self, realize the three marks of existence (impermanence, dissatisfaction, non-self), learn to stabilize your new experience of reality, become free from craving and aversion.

Books:

• The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S. N. Goenka – William Hart
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book – Daniel M Ingram

Other resources:

• Waking Up (meditation app)

Traditional

This set of values may strike you as a familiar blueprint to a traditionally good life.

“The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more.”

– Edmund Burke

How to achieve true happiness: Work hard, marry a good person, have multiple children, spend time with family, fit into your role, remember that many others have it worse than you, don’t complain, avoid vices (gambling, excessive drinking, drugs), don’t waste money, achieve stability in life.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• The Relationship Review
• Managing Arguments in Relationships

Common sense

A common-sense approach to happiness focuses on meeting all your needs and making sure you have stable sources of fulfillment. No surprises here!

“Philosophy is common sense with big words.”

– James Madison

How to achieve true happiness: Sleep enough, eat healthy food, exercise, spend your time with people you like, have a pet, seek work that’s enjoyable/challenging/meaningful, make sure your basic needs are met, try to make enough money to achieve financial security, save for retirement, marry someone you love who treats you well, have a fun hobby.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• 40 Winks: Better Sleep Made Easy
• Your Greatest Sources of Pleasure
• Career Fulfilment Diagnostic

Other resources:

• Choose a fulfilling life path using these five exercises from “Designing Your Life”

Introspection

Introspective theories say that the path to true happiness is through truly understanding yourself, healing your past trauma, and being authentic with others.

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

– C.G. Jung

How to achieve true happiness: Use psychedelics for self-exploration, listen to and get in touch with your body, engage in self-care and self-compassion, investigate and heal your trauma, find a daily practice that works for you (e.g., meditation/yoga/prayer), be vulnerable around the people that you trust, share your true feelings, explore and have compassion for the different “parts” of yourself that are afraid of and desire different things, investigate your “true self” and be true to it, learn to pay attention to your intuition, find a way to look at the world that resonates with you. 

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Life-Changing Questions
• Your Primal World Beliefs
• Defining Emotions

Books:

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma – Bessel van der Kolk
• Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself – Kristin Neff

Other resources:

• How many minds do you have? (Podcast episode)
• The 10 Most Important Components of Self-Compassion
• Could You Be in One of These 8 Psychological Traps?
• How to Communicate Better with the People in Your Life (podcast episode)
• Exploring your Shadow and Healing your Traumas (podcast episode)

Self-help books

Books advocating techniques for self-improvement have exploded in popularity since the mid 20th Century. Each takes a different angle on how to be happy – here, we have collected some common themes.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

-Thomas Edison

How to achieve true happiness: Repeat affirmations that motivate you, form healthy daily habits, always work on becoming a better version of yourself, try new things, figure out what you really want and then plan to get it, prioritize, set ambitious goals, keep your home organized, think positive thoughts, believe you can do anything that you put your mind to, wake up early, make at least a little progress towards your goals each day, don’t let fear stop you, don’t give up, avoid negative people, surround yourself with people who inspire you and make you a better person.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Daily Ritual: A Habit Creation System
• Design Your Own Self-Experiment
• Achieve Your Goals
• Get Going: Overcome Procrastination

Books:

• Atomic Habits – James Clear
• The Motivation Hacker – Nick Winter

Other resources:

• How to Achieve Self-Control Without Self-Control
• How to Hack Your Own Brain (podcast episode)
• The Secrets of Effective Learning (podcast episode)
• By the Book (podcast)

Hedonism

As an approach to life, hedonism is all about doing whatever you can to experience pleasure and avoid pain.

“Don’t worry. Be happy.”

– Bobby McFerrin

How to achieve true happiness: Remember that you get just one life, so you might as well enjoy it, live in the moment (don’t worry about the future), dance, party, seek out cool experiences, do exactly what you feel like, ignore societal pressure, have sex, eat tasty food, do fun drugs, spend money on fun things, don’t let others tell you what to do.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• 2 Minute Mood Boosters

Other resources:

• Atlas Obscura – Curious and Wondrous Destinations
• Happiness and Hedonic Adaptation (podcast episode)
• When is Suffering Good? (podcast episode)

Altruism

An altruistic approach to happiness is about devoting yourself to helping others and making the world a better place – the theory says you can gain fulfillment through knowing that other people are better off thanks to your efforts.

“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”

– Nelson Henderson

How to achieve true happiness: Give to charity, volunteer your time, choose a career that lets you help others, become a part of something meaningful (e.g., a cause or movement) that is much bigger than yourself, work hard to be kind, generous, and thoughtful, think hard about how you can do good, help strangers, build communities and projects to improve the world.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Leaving Your Mark on the World
• Charity Effectiveness Test
• Change Behaviour for the Better
• What Causes Match Your Values?

Books:

• Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help – Larissa MacFarquhar
• Doing Good Better – William MacAskill

Other resources:

• Four ways to have a positive impact on the world right now

Which of these theories resonates most with you?

It might be challenging to decide whether and how to apply each of these different theories of happiness. An experimental approach could be useful – you could explore the resources we’ve linked above, try applying some of the techniques, and see which theories deliver on their promise of true happiness for you. 

We hope that exploring these theories has helped you conceptualize your own approach to happiness. Which theories of happiness have you lived by previously? How did you choose them, or did you pick them up unconsciously from your environment? How could you tweak these theories, combine them with other schools of thought, or replace parts that are unhelpful for you? What other theories of happiness do people live by?

A big thank you goes to Adam Binks for his help with this post!

Note: To help fund the free decision-making tools and programs that we provide, ClearerThinking.org is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com). If you buy a book using the links in this article, you’ll be supporting ClearerThinking.org in its mission to make free tools that help the world make better decisions.

Note: here, I use the term “success” merely in terms of achievement, career success, or high levels of expertise, NOT in terms of happiness, living a good life, morality, having strong social bonds, etc. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be successful in the way this post focuses on. But if you DO want “success” in the sense in which it is used in this post (or you are interested in being able to predict it in others), you may find some of the models here useful.

I’m also interested to know: which model (below) do you find most useful for thinking about success, and which one of these factors (used in the models) do you think is currently most limiting your success?

1. Noise theory:

success = luck

2. Genetic determinism:

success = (innate) aptitude + luck

Note: whenever I use “luck,” I mean random factors not already accounted for in the other factors in the model. So in the case above, “luck” means luck other than the random chance of what your aptitude is.

3. Traditional right:

success = aptitude + surrounding culture + hard work

4. Social justice left:

success = privilege + luck

5. Economic left:

success = social/economic class you’re born into + luck

6. Cynical theory:

success = some combination of self-promotion, bullshitting, social skills, good-lookingness, starting resources, and luck

7. Gladwell: 

success = whoever practiced for 10,000 hours + luck

8. Dweck: 

success = aptitude + growth mindset + luck

9. Duckworth: 

success = aptitude + growth mindset + grit + luck

10. Seligman: 

success = skill * effort * self-promotion * luck

11. Psychometrics: 

success = IQ + conscientiousness + low neuroticism + luck

12. Ericsson: 

success = luck + hours spent doing “deliberate practice” (i.e., with specific goals and tight performance feedback loops, while analyzing mistakes and dividing skills into micro-skills that can be practiced independently, ideally all done under the supervision of expert coaches)

13. My mega model:

success at a fixed goal = luck^a

* (resources+opportunities)^b

* (community/collaborator quality and supportiveness)^c

* (innate aptitude at relevant skills)^d

* intelligence^e

* rationality^f

* (creativity and resourcefulness)^g

* (social skills)^h

* (hours of deliberate practice)^i

* (unitary or obsessive focus on the goal)^j

* (conscientiousness and self-control)^k

* (physical or mental health)^l

* confidence^m

* (ambition and agency/self-directedness)^n

* (self-promotion skill and effort)^o

* courage^p

* (goal/task-specific factors)^q

* (efficiency and prioritization)^r

Each exponent a, b, c, …, r is a different number from 0 to 1. Note that each of these traits is selected because I believe, on average, having more of them improves the chance of success – that’s why I exclude negative exponents. Furthermore, I’m claiming that these factors, on average, each have diminishing marginal returns. That’s why the exponents are each less than 1 (making a concave function).

The values of the exponents vary depending on the field and type of skill. For instance, in some areas, courage is a minor factor (in which case the courage exponent, n, would be close to 0, and in other fields, courage is essential, in which case n would be close to 1). So, in other words: success is a PRODUCT of roughly 18 factors, and how much each factor matters depends on what you’re trying to do.

Note that this is designed so that if you have literally 0 of any factor, then the level of success is automatically 0 (since 0 times any number is 0). For instance, if you have literally no physical health, you are, presumably, dead, and if you have literally no ambition, presumably you just sit around all day or do the minimum you need to eat.

It’s worth noting that the factors above are not completely statistically or causally independent in reality (becoming higher in one may make you higher in another, on average). But I think the enormous extra complexity of trying to account for these dependencies probably is not worth it in practice.

How do you improve your odds of success?

A lot of times, when people are extremely successful, I think it’s because they avoid being TOO low in any of the factors, and they have one or two factors where they are exceptionally high. Many factors are “bounded” ones: for instance, you can’t work more than 24 hours per day. So it’s impossible to work more than 3x the amount the average person does. But there are some “unbounded” factors where you can potentially be WAY higher than the average person (e.g., “creativity”), which can drive the success score very high (as long as no other factor is close enough to zero to drag it back down). Hence, this model leads to an approach for thinking about how to be more successful (if that’s something you care about).

Put simply, success often flows from not being TOO weak on really important factors and having one or two really strong (and relevant) strengths.

Getting into more detail, here is a process you might use to consider how to increase your odds of great success:

1. For the goal/task you’re trying to succeed at, figure out which of the above factors matter substantially (which maps onto trying to – very roughly – figure out the exponents for each factor).

2. If your strong/weak factors are not a good fit for the goal, consider changing the goal to better play to your strengths, or consider teaming up with someone (e.g., a co-founder) to compensate for your weaknesses.

3. Once you have settled on a goal, identify any especially low factors (relevant to that goal) that are driving your potential for success down, and think about how you can improve at those. Due to multiplicative effects, very low factors can really drag down your potential for success. For instance, if you have severe mental health challenges that interfere with your day-to-day tasks, working on that first can be a great idea (even if you’re just optimizing for success).

4. Identify your strongest factors (that are relevant to that goal) and think about how you might improve at them or hone them to get them VERY high. You can also figure out how to make even more use of these great strengths of yours to achieve good outcomes. Often, one of the most effective things we can focus on is leaning into our greatest strengths (for instance, by designing a path towards our goals that leverages them or working to enhance them even more). This is especially the case once we’ve gotten barriers to success out of the way (i.e., we’ve worked on improving our especially low factors).

A question for you: right now, which of the factors listed above is the one that is most significantly limiting your success?

This piece was first written on September 12, 2021 and first appeared on this site on March 25, 2022.

With that definition in mind, there are many reasons a work team may have low productivity. To make a team more productive, I suggest first trying to pinpoint the predominant causes of inefficiency, since different failure points typically have different solutions. The key is to identify and then focus on just the 1-3 of these causes that seem to be the biggest recurring blockers of team productivity.

Once these biggest blockers are identified, an analysis needs to be made of why they are occurring (e.g., using a method like the “5 whys”, where you try to uncover the root cause of the issue). Then, strategies need to be developed to try to resolve the blockers, and one or two strategies that have sufficient team buy-in need to be selected for implementation. Finally, re-evaluation needs to occur to make sure the problems are actually improved by those strategies.

Below is a list of these potential failure points or blockers.

There are four main facets of team productivity (Planning, Effectiveness, Resources, and Communication), which break down further into specific reasons for low productivity. You can use this list by considering each potential reason and scoring the degree to which you think it’s a problematic factor on your team (or having all team members anonymously score each potential reason for how big a problem it is, and then aggregating the responses to find the few most important seeming issues).

—

Reasons For Low Team Productivity:

—

(A) Planning

(1) Wrong Goal – the work is focused on achieving a goal that is not actually particularly valuable.

      e.g., the team is building a new feature that customers don’t want

(2) Poor prioritization – rather than focusing on the very most important things, the team focuses on things of secondary importance.

      e.g., the team lead keeps pushing team members to make tiny improvements to existing features, even though there are really major features where implementation hasn’t even begun.

(3) Slow Path – the planned route for achieving the team’s goal is not as efficient as other routes to achieving the same goal.

      e.g., the team could use a well-tested plugin to help them solve their problem, but the team lead insists they build their own alternative to this plugin.

(4) Incompletion – there is no pressure to finish projects, or team members work on far too many projects at once, so work doesn’t get completed, or takes much longer than it should.

      e.g., when a crisis comes up, the projects already in progress are abandoned, and rarely are they picked up again.

(5) Feature Creep – the project takes a really long time to be released because its scope or feature set keeps unnecessarily increasing, repeatedly delaying the launch.

      e.g., the client keeps making more and more requests about what to include in the next version.

(6) Missing Buy-in – team members don’t actually care about achieving the team’s goals (i.e., they don’t view the goal as valuable, and don’t feel like a genuine team, such that they care about the team’s success).

      e.g., Bill doesn’t think the product they are building is worthwhile, Sally doesn’t feel invested in the success of her team members or the team overall.

(7) Incentive Misalignment – some team members have incentives that cut against the project going well, or are focused on optimizing for personal goals at the expense of project goals.

      e.g., team members know that if they succeed at the goal, then someone else will take all the credit, and if they fail at it, there will be no negative consequences, and Bob actually wants the project to fail because then he’ll get to move on to a different project he likes more.

(8) Missing Skills – certain skills are needed to accomplish the goals, but no one on the team has these skills, and there are no external consultants that can be called on.

      e.g., no one on the team has a good eye for design, so the interface you’re building has the right features but looks bad.

(9) Reactivity – the team is constantly reacting to crises or imminent deadlines, which means there isn’t time to focus on achieving the long-term goals.

      e.g., every month or two, there is a major system failure, followed by weeks of scrambling simply to get things back to normal.

(10) Groupthink – team members do not feel comfortable sharing their unique ideas, or challenging the team lead, or getting their ideas heard above the most vocal person, or contradicting the group consensus, so the best ideas don’t filter to the top.

      e.g., the first proposed solution to a problem was accepted because no one wanted to challenge the person who proposed it, and since no one spoke up, everyone assumed the other group members must be in consensus.

(11) Guessing – the team doesn’t have enough data or information to solve the problems they are working on, but rather than gathering this data or information, they guess at solutions that aren’t very likely to work.

      e.g., the team has the goal of reducing customer churn, but they haven’t conducted customer interviews or carefully analyzed the churn data, so they are merely guessing at why churn is occurring and developing inadequate solutions based on those guesses.

—

(B) Effectiveness

(12) Insufficient Time – people not working enough hours.

      e.g., a culture of showing up at 10 am and leaving at 4 pm.

(13) Waste – spending time engaged in unnecessary processes or pointless meetings.

      e.g., a culture of constant meetings where you have little time to get your actual work done, or a requirement to tediously document all your work.

(14) Distraction – people may not be able to get “in the zone” on their work because of frequent distractions, or an environment where it is hard to focus.

      e.g., a noisy office environment where colleagues continuously interrupt you to ask you questions.

(15) Burnout – people may feel stressed, depressed, disinterested, bored, or exhausted, and find it is psychologically difficult to get their work done.

      e.g., a culture where bosses regularly yell at, blame, and fire employees for things that are not their fault.

(16) Bad Foundations – the work may be building on other work that was not well made, slowing down additional progress.

      e.g., programmers inherit a massive, buggy, and poorly written spaghetti codebase (i.e., high levels of technical debt).

(17) Disempowerment – team members are not allowed to do certain things (or make certain decisions) that would move the project forward, or they are required to follow a bureaucratic or standardized process that is not an efficient or effective process.

      e.g., a user experience researcher is not allowed to pay customers for doing interviews, but customers won’t do the interviews for free.

(18) Intrinsic Difficulty – the work may genuinely be intrinsically difficult, with progress speed inherently limited.

      e.g., work involving proving new theorems that others have failed to prove.

—

(C) Resources

(19) Slow Platforms – the systems or platforms on which the work is performed make progress more difficult, slower, or more complex than it needs to be.

      e.g., teams are forced to work on Windows 98 and experience regular computer crashes, or teams are forced to work using old and out-of-date software.

(20) Lacking Tools – the team members don’t have the best tools to do their work.

      e.g., a construction team is forced to use a saw that is inappropriate for the job because they don’t have access to the right kind of saw.

(21) No Training – there is a lot of relevant information about how to do the job well that team members are not told, and have to laboriously figure out on their own, or struggle to get by without.

      e.g., programmers are expected to figure out how the undocumented API works on their own via trial and error.

(22) Insufficient Assistance – when team members are stuck, they have no one knowledgeable they can go to (or that they feel comfortable going to) for help.

      e.g., a machine learning researcher can’t get her neural network model training properly and has no one she can ask for advice.

(23) Insufficient Skill – team members are not sufficiently skilled at the tasks they are trying to do.

      e.g., the team members responsible for writing documentation are not skilled at clear communication.

—

(D) Communication

(24) Blocking – team members are waiting on each other to do things before they can get their own work done.

      e.g., Sam needs approval from Sally to move forward, but Sally requires approval from Samantha in order to give Sam permission.

(25) Conflict – team members dislike each other, don’t trust each other, or have clashing personalities.

      e.g., Bill refuses to work with Sam, Jill thinks that Jenny is trying to undermine her, Tim and Tammy get into heated arguments.

(26) Discordant Goals – different team members are working towards different long-term goals, because they are not on the same page about what the purpose, mission, or primary goal of the team is.

      e.g., the product manager is trying to add features, whereas the engineering team is trying to do a feature freeze so they can focus on stability and efficiency.

(27) Ambiguity – the goals are not clear enough, leading to confusion, false starts, and stops, or circling around problems without directly solving them.

      e.g., there is agreement that the user interface needs to be “easier to use,” but little clarity on what that means.

(28) Duplication – team members end up repeating work that has already been done (or that is in the process of being done) by others, either because they don’t know that other work exists or because they don’t trust the quality of it.

      e.g., the new lead engineer doesn’t trust the code developed by the prior lead engineer and so decides to rewrite it from scratch.

(29) Unassigned work – it is not clear who is supposed to tackle certain work (e.g., it is not in any particular person’s job description or current assignments), so some important work just doesn’t get done by anybody.

      e.g., nobody has been assigned the responsibility of bug testing, so bug testing simply doesn’t get done, and therefore, the product is highly buggy.

(30) Siloed Information – team members need information from each other to do their work well, but this information is not transmitted reliably.

      e.g., the team member doing customer interviews isn’t reliably communicating what they learn to the team member planning UX changes.

A big shoutout goes to Eddie Liu, who helped develop this framework.

This piece was first written on July 3, 2019, and first appeared on my website on January 22, 2026.

The high level components necessary for accomplishment in tennis are the same as they are in nearly every field. Accomplishment relies on the following factors:

1. Ambition. While it is possible to accomplish things that you don’t set out to achieve, when that occurs it is usually just due to luck. Setting something as your goal is the first step towards accomplishing it. If we have low ambitions, we are unlikely to achieve great things.
2. Talent. Most accomplishments require a certain starting level of skills relevant to the accomplishment. To be become a great singer, it helps to have good pitch. To be a great investor, it helps to have a personality that allows you to act calmly when others are afraid. While abilities can be honed with training, your current level of talent represents your starting point in the accomplishment race. If you start too far behind, even really good training may not get you to where you need to be.
3. Reasoning. The path towards almost every major accomplishment involves making difficult decisions. Which job should you take? Which helpful books should you read? Who should you make an effort to get to know? Which skills should you work to hone? Which training methods should you apply? The superpower of being able to reliably answer these kinds of questions will make your accomplishment much more likely. One very bad decision early on may lead you to failure.
4. Time. Most big accomplishments require a very large investment of time. You are not going to be able to invent a better type of microchip without first learning a lot about computers, electrical engineering, and materials science. This will take years.
5. Resources. These can be both physical (e.g. money) or social (e.g. knowing the right people to help you achieve your goal). If you have an incredible business idea, but don’t have the money to fund it, and can’t get in contact with someone who will fund it for you, you’re out of luck. A strong social network can make achievement much easier. It often takes the well-coordinated effort of many people to achieve great things. There may even be a person out there whose advice or help is exactly what you need for success. And sometimes involving others in our projects can make up for our own lack of talent, lack of money, or lack of time.

Any of these five factors can prevent you from accomplishing great things. If your goals are unambitious, your achievement will probably be low. If you are lacking in relevant talent, you’re unlikely to ever achieve great heights of ability. If your reasoning is poor, you’ll be likely to make bad decisions related to how to achieve your goals. If you don’t put enough time into achievement, you’ll probably not accomplish very much. And many goals require some money, or the help of others, and without either of these, your ambitions may not get off the ground.

Flipping this analysis around, we see that we need to make sure that we have these five factors in place if we are going to have the best chance of accomplishing what we hope to. Sure, we might get lucky, and not need them all. Maybe we’ll win the lotto and so won’t need to worry about physical resources anymore, or maybe our bad reasoning will happen to not harm our project. But if we want to maximize our chance of success, we should have sufficient ambition, talent, reasoning skills, time investment, and physical/social resources. Whichever of these is our weakest point is likely what we should focus on improving. We can consider how we can try to affect each of these factors:

1. Ambition may be hard to change. You simply may not care about accomplishing much. But reflecting on what you would like to complete before your die may make you realize that you do in fact care about achieving certain goals.
2. Your current level of talent is fixed, but you can make up for a lack of it by involving other people whose talents complement your own, and by reasoning about how to improve your skills and then investing sufficient time into doing so.
3. Reasoning can be honed with practice.
4. Time simply needs to be invested. But reasoning can help you make your time more productive and efficient, and involving others in your goals lets you pool your time with theirs. If at your current rate of time investment, your goals may take decades to achieve, you may need to start taking time away from something else.
5. If you don’t have the money or social network required to complete your goals, that may be solvable with further time investment. You may need to take a job to make the required money, and devote time to building new social contacts that are relevant to what you’d like to achieve. For instance, you can start introducing yourself to more people at places where those who are likely to be helpful are likely to be.

If you want to maximize your chance of accomplishing your goals, figure out which of these five factors is your weakest point, and fix it. Then, if necessary, repeat.