Another post, another feature, another hand. Why they all feel like work, and what the research says works instead.

Three things I keep noticing

Since I went out on my own, I have been watching myself and everyone else who is trying to build something. Three things keep showing up.

What people actually buy

Investors say it out loud: they pick people, not products. A survey asked 885 venture capitalists what decides a deal.¹

Survey of 885 venture capitalists at 681 funds, 2020

These are professionals, with money in the deal and time to check the product. They still buy the people and the story. When a weaker product raises more, nothing strange has happened.

And being the best? A computer model followed 1,000 imaginary careers for 40 years, with talent spread the way it is in real life and random luck along the way. The person who finished on top was almost never the most talented. It was usually someone average with an unusual run of luck.² It is a model, not a measurement, so take the narrow lesson: talent is necessary, and it is not enough.

The goalkeepers who should stand still

On a penalty, the goalkeeper has half a second to choose. Researchers watched 286 of them in top leagues.³

Staying is the better bet, and keepers almost never do it, because a goal conceded standing still feels worse than one conceded in mid-air. I wrote about what the same pull does at the poker table in the piece on exploitative play.

What the extra action costs

Two researchers matched the trades of 66,465 households against their returns, over six years.⁴

Same information, same market, same tools. The difference was how much they did.

Likes are not customers

Then there is posting. A sharp post or a clever comment feels like it promotes the business, or moves society forward. It gets a few hundred likes, and it feels like it is working. Often the people who reacted are not the people who would ever pay.

So likes show who already agrees with you, and how good it felt to post. They do not show who will buy. Before you count reactions, look at who reacted. Three messages from the people you sell to are worth more than three hundred likes from colleagues and friends.

Why we cannot sit still

Put them together. Doing something feels better than waiting, and visible effort is what other people reward when they cannot judge the work itself. A post, a feature and a session are all evidence of effort. None of them is evidence of progress.

Why one more always feels worth it

Shopping, scrolling, one more pot. They run on the same loop, and the loop pays less the more you feed it. Here is what dopamine cells actually responded to in the classic experiment.⁹

So dopamine tracks surprise, not pleasure. A reward you can predict stops paying, and a missing one costs you. That dip is what "just one more" feels like.

Unpredictable rewards hold us hardest. A reward that arrives after an unpredictable number of tries produces the most persistent behaviour of any schedule,¹⁰ and feeds, slot machines and poker hands all work that way. The gambling comparison carries animal experiments over to people, and the shape is the same. At the heavy end it is measurable: in addiction the dopamine response is blunted and ordinary rewards fade too.¹¹ The everyday version is milder. The same amount gives less, so you reach more often. I wrote about what to do with that in the piece on dopamine.

What a hunter does instead

Ecologists have measured this trade-off in desert lizards. Some ambush, some roam.¹²

The ranges overlap, so neither style wins everywhere. That is the lesson. A later model spells out the condition, and adds a nice detail: when horses reached the Great Plains and snowmobiles reached the Arctic, moving got cheaper and hunters switched from waiting to searching.¹³

So the question is not "am I working hard enough?". It is: in my market, at these stakes, does moving more bring in more, or only cost more? The ambush lizard is not resting. It is in the right spot, facing the right way, ready to spend everything in one short burst.

Seven ways to tell a real move from a busy one

1. Name the number that is money.

   Paying customers, booked calls, big blinds won per hundred hands. If you cannot link an action to it in one sentence, it is a hobby this week.

2. Decide what you enter before you are in it.

   Which hands, which clients, which opportunities, written down while nothing is at stake. In the moment, the urge arrives before the reasoning.

3. Give waiting a job.

   Watch the table, note who folds too much, review the last session, prepare what you will send. Waiting with a job is not freezing.

4. Separate the move from the audience.

   Would you still post it if nobody could see it? If not, it is effort for the audience, not work for the result.

5. Count attempts, not hours.

   Hours measure effort, which we already over-reward. Attempts at the thing that makes money is the honest number.

6. Change one thing at a time.

   Add a new line, a new channel and a new bluff in the same month and you will not know which one worked, so you will keep all three.

7. Set a stop line in advance.

   How many weeks, sessions or sends, and what result means keep going or drop it. Without it, activity becomes the proof that you are trying.

What this looks like in the app

Identity-First Poker Coach is the app I built for live players, and most of it answers one question: which of the things you do at the table actually cost you. You log a hand in a few taps between hands. After a few sessions, Insights shows the spots that cost you most, including how you play after a big pot.

Alerts are for the moments when the urge to act shows up. You set them before the session, while you are calm: after a big loss, after a big win, when your stack gets short, a few hours in. They fire while you log a hand, with a reminder in your own words.

Sources

1. Gompers, Paul A., Will Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan, and Ilya A. Strebulaev. "How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?" Journal of Financial Economics 135, no. 1 (2020): 169-190. www.sciencedirect.com
2. Pluchino, Alessandro, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda. "Talent versus Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure." Advances in Complex Systems 21, no. 3-4 (2018): 1850014. An agent-based simulation. www.worldscientific.com
3. Bar-Eli, Michael, Ofer H. Azar, Ilana Ritov, Yael Keidar-Levin, and Galit Schein. "Action Bias among Elite Soccer Goalkeepers: The Case of Penalty Kicks." Journal of Economic Psychology 28, no. 5 (2007): 606-621. www.sciencedirect.com
4. Barber, Brad M., and Terrance Odean. "Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors." The Journal of Finance 55, no. 2 (2000): 773-806. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
5. John, Leslie K., Oliver Emrich, Sunil Gupta, and Michael I. Norton. "Does 'Liking' Lead to Loving? The Impact of Joining a Brand's Social Network on Marketing Outcomes." Journal of Marketing Research 54, no. 1 (2017): 144-155. dash.harvard.edu
6. Kristofferson, Kirk, Katherine White, and John Peloza. "The Nature of Slacktivism: How the Social Observability of an Initial Act of Token Support Affects Subsequent Prosocial Action." Journal of Consumer Research 40, no. 6 (2014): 1149-1166. www.journals.uchicago.edu
7. Hsee, Christopher K., Adelle X. Yang, and Liangyan Wang. "Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness." Psychological Science 21, no. 7 (2010): 926-930. journals.sagepub.com
8. Kruger, Justin, Derrick Wirtz, Leaf Van Boven, and T. William Altermatt. "The Effort Heuristic." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 40, no. 1 (2004): 91-98. Partially replicated in Collabra: Psychology 9, no. 1 (2023). www.sciencedirect.com
9. Schultz, Wolfram, Peter Dayan, and P. Read Montague. "A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward." Science 275, no. 5306 (1997): 1593-1599. www.science.org
10. Ferster, Charles B., and B. F. Skinner. Schedules of Reinforcement. Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957. The gambling application is an extrapolation from animal experiments. psycnet.apa.org
11. Volkow, Nora D., Gene-Jack Wang, Joanna S. Fowler, Dardo Tomasi, and Frank Telang. "Addiction: Beyond Dopamine Reward Circuitry." PNAS 108, no. 37 (2011): 15037-15042. www.pnas.org
12. Huey, Raymond B., and Eric R. Pianka. "Ecological Consequences of Foraging Mode." Ecology 62, no. 4 (1981): 991-999. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
13. Ross, Cody T., and Bruce Winterhalder. "Sit-and-Wait versus Active-Search Hunting: A Behavioral Ecological Model of Optimal Search Mode." Journal of Theoretical Biology 387 (2015): 76-87. www.sciencedirect.com