Peter McKinnon set out to make his work more efficient, so he did the sensible thing. He went and asked the people who track their lives harder than he does.

One of them was John Grimsmo, who logs his days in fifteen-minute increments, quarter hours rather than whole ones. Sleep, exercise, tasks, project progress, one line each. By the end of a week, he has something most people never get: an honest account of where the time actually went.

Ask most people how they spent yesterday and they’ll give you the highlights. A meeting. A workout. Dinner. Three or four blocks that felt like the day. But a day isn’t four blocks. It’s closer to a hundred of those fifteen-minute lines, and the honest ones aren’t flattering. The scroll that was going to be two minutes. The tab you opened and forgot why. The half-hour that dissolved between one task and the next, leaving nothing behind.

I know how to read that page, because I’ve read a thousand versions of it in another form. When you underwrite a business, the dangerous losses are never the dramatic ones. A company rarely fails on a single catastrophe. It fails on the slow leak nobody logged, small outflows week after week until the year is gone and no one can say where. So when I look at those empty fifteen-minute boxes, I see what the job has trained me to see. Leakage. And time is the one account with no facility behind it. You can refinance a loan. You cannot refinance an hour. Every quarter is drawn down once and closed for good.

So I assumed I knew where the video was going. Find the leaks. Seal them. Grid your life until nothing escapes.

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That’s not where it went.

McKinnon tried the fifteen-minute method and walked away from it. Not because it was hard, but because for creative work it did the opposite of what he wanted. It didn’t sharpen him. It sealed the very gaps he needed open. The drift, the half hour that left nothing behind, the empty box I’d just called a leak: that turned out to be where his ideas came from. Measured, it stopped producing. He went back to the same pen and paper for something else entirely, inspiration and loose plans and a photo tucked between pages that might become the next thing. Casey Neistat, the other man he went to, had drifted the same way over the years, away from minute-by-minute logs toward a notebook whose ideas now go straight into the work.

It’s no coincidence that two people who once tracked everything both drifted away from precision. Some things change the moment you measure them. Accountability wants the empty box filled. Creation needs it left alone. The same untracked half hour is a leak in one man’s ledger and the raw material in another’s, and no system can tell you which one you’re holding. Only you can.

The part that stayed with me wasn’t about the video. It was about me. I audit for a living. I also make things on the side, quietly, the way a lot of people do. And the instinct that makes me good at the first is the same one most likely to strangle the second. I sat down expecting the video to confirm what I already believed about wasted time. It did the opposite. It told me the man who audits everything should be careful where he points the ledger.

So track your hours for a week if you’ve never once seen where they go. Everyone should, once. But then stop reading the page like an examiner. Not every gap is a loss. Some of the emptiest hours on the page are the ones doing the most work.

2026 has been quite a year in sports. The Knicks ended their 53-year trophy drought this summer. In soccer, Arsenal Football Club won their first Premier League title in 22 years. And with Argentina’s win last Saturday, it moves up the bookie’s list of favorites to win — the first back-to-back World Cup win since Pele’s Brazil in 1962.

(Disclaimer: We apologize to international football fans for our occasional use of the term “soccer” — and especially during the World Cup — but we will also be talking about American football, so bear with us)

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This had us asking: What makes a champion? And what could turn that team into a dynasty? The question is as old as competition itself, and we won’t be the ones to give that definitive answer. But by looking at research, quotes from legends who have made championships, and the analysts who’ve studied them, one thing (well…) consistently comes up.

It’s all about consistency (D’uh): One of the strongest findings across sports analytics is that consistency outperforms individual outcomes (clutch moments and such) or peak performance. We see it in countless examples, from the aforementioned teams or other historical legends such as the Patriots, the 90s Bulls, the Spurs’ quiet 15-year run. It seems obvious, but we very rarely get to dissect its nuances.

So how does consistency make winners? And how have champions harnessed it?

#1- Trusting the process over singular outcomes: Many championship teams are built over a long duration. That’s because consistency takes time to build. While Gregg Popovich did win the San Antonio Spurs their first championship in his first year as head coach, he was the team’s GM for five years, building the team and the processes that eventually got them there.

It forces players to focus on what’s important: Coach Nick Saban’s “process” philosophy emphasizes ignoring the scoreboard, championships, and rankings, and instead focusing on performing your day-to-day job at the highest level on every play (watch a clip of his 60 Minutes interview here).

#2- Consistency raises the floor and not just the ceiling: We’ve all heard the expression that a team is only as good as its weakest link. Consistency is designed to raise the team's minimum standards while reducing statistical variance and uplifting team stats across the board.

Rising tide raises all ships: What ends up happening is that the team’s overall stats rise along with the minimum standards.

And that is consistent with the data: The Knicks led on the majority of post season team stats in the 2025-26 season, including averaging the highest number of points scored and the lowest number of points scored against them. They also led on field goal percentage and points differential, according to ESPN. This is typical of NBA Champions, who rank in the top of five of offensive and defensive efficiency. In football, elite teams rise through leagues by consistently defeating weaker teams rather than relying on marquee games.

#3- Dynasties are built on repeatable systems: If you look at all the great dynasties across sports, you’ll find the foundations were designed around systems, with processes and players that fit those systems added. These systems are designed to be repeatable, regardless if individual players leave.

We see this across the board (s): In basketball, we can see it with the Chicago Bulls, who built their team around a solid defense and the famous triangle offense. Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots prioritized rigorous preparation, versatility, and unselfishness as core components of their philosophy.

#4- The importance of rituals and culture: Consistency needs to extend beyond the field or court and the rigorous adherence to practice and schedule. It’s also in the team rituals that help bind sports organizations and build cultural and social cohesion.

Admittedly, these rituals seem cringe and silly on the outside, but we’ve consistently seen how champions have rituals. Phil Jackson implemented many rituals and practices that emphasized mental unity (“one breath, one mind”), including meditation and breathing exercises. Gregg Popovich — a famous foodie — used to hold secret team meetings, which many later credit for helping build the Spurs’ dominance of the NBA in the early 2000’s.

#5- Marginal gains from consistency compound over time: Wins and gains from consistency compound incrementally and over time. The hope is that this will eventually cascade into a winning tide. Think about it: Mathematically, if a team improves by just 1% each day, the cumulative effect after a year is dramatic because each improvement builds on the last.

Arsenal’s compounding five years: Mikel Arteta’s five-year tenure as the head coach at Arsenal seems to demonstrate this effect. In his first year, Arsenal finished eighth in the Premier League, its worst showing in over three decades. His second season saw him finish fifth. It followed that up by finishing as runner-ups for three seasons in a row, before winning the title last month.

And it applies beyond the world of sport

Organizational psychology supports the idea that consistency is at the heart of building sustainable businesses and institutions. Research by Karl Weick and others suggests that high-reliability organizations (such as aircraft carriers, air traffic control systems, and emergency medicine teams) succeed not because they avoid mistakes entirely, but because they consistently execute reliable processes and detect small deviations before they grow into failures.

The lesson from sports is clear: Consistency creates reliability under pressure.

August 5, 1949. A canyon in Montana called Mann Gulch.

Sixteen men are walking toward a fire they were told was small. Fifteen of them are smokejumpers, the Forest Service’s best, dropped in by parachute that afternoon. The sixteenth is a fire guard who had quit smokejumping the year before because it scared him. It is 97 degrees. The grass is so dry it sounds like paper underfoot.

They are heading downhill toward the Missouri River, toward safety, when the wind shifts. The fire jumps the gulch and lands ahead of them, between the men and the water. The route to safety is gone. The fire is now between them and everything they planned.

So they turn and run uphill. And the fire follows, racing up the slope faster than men can climb. During the blowup, it covers 3,000 acres in 10 minutes.

This is the moment. The foreman, a man named Wag Dodge, does two things almost no one would have thought to do. First, he yells at his men to drop their tools. The saws, the shovels, the packs. Drop them. Then, with the fire less than a hundred yards behind him, he stops running, kneels in the grass, and lights a match.

He sets the ground in front of him on fire.

Then he lies down in the patch he just burned, in the ashes of his own small fire, and waits for the big one to arrive. The main fire reaches him, finds nothing left to burn where he is lying, and splits around him like water around a stone.

Dodge lives. Two men who reach a crack in the rock live. Thirteen men do not.

Some of them died still carrying their tools.

The question that should haunt anyone who runs anything

Decades later, an organizational psychologist named Karl Weick studied the Mann Gulch fire and asked the question that has stayed with me since the first time I read it: why would a trained man sprinting from a fire refuse to drop a heavy shovel that is slowing him down?

His answer has almost nothing to do with fire.

The men kept their tools because the tools were who they were. A firefighter without his tools is just a frightened person on a hillside. Dropping the shovel did not only mean dropping weight. It meant dropping the entire story they were using to understand the situation. We are firefighters. We fight fires; we do not flee them. The fire had already walked out of that story. The men had not.

Which is the part nobody warns you about. Adaptation does not start with a better answer. It starts with surrender.

Weick had a name for what collapsed that day. Not courage. Not training. Not calculation. He called it sensemaking. The quiet, constant work of turning what is actually happening into a story you can act on.

And the escape fire? When Dodge knelt down and lit that match, he was doing the opposite of everything he had been taught. There was no procedure for it. He read a reality that broke every rule he knew, and he built a new answer in the few seconds he had left.

That is the whole game. Let me try to convince you.

Most hard problems aren’t hard to calculate. They’re hard to see.

A pile of facts is not an understanding. Declining margins. One customer who is suddenly forty percent of revenue. Financials that arrive three weeks late, every quarter, with an apology. Individually, these are just entries in a file.

The real work is the sentence you write underneath them.

Management is losing control of the business, and liquidity is tighter than they are willing to admit.

That sentence is not in the spreadsheet. You made it. And everything that follows, the tighter covenant, the lower rating, the harder phone call, follows from the sentence, not from the numbers. The numbers were always going to sit there politely. You had to decide what they meant.

Analysis takes things apart. Sensemaking puts them back together into something you can act on. Most people are decent analysts. Very few are good at the second thing. The gap between those two skills is roughly the same as the one between a sharp associate and an actual leader.

I learned this the embarrassing way

I love chess. Chess teaches you a great deal. To calculate. To see past the obvious move. To sit on your hands when your gut wants to lunge.

But here is what I eventually came to understand about chess. The board is complete. Every piece is visible. The rules never change mid-game. Your opponent cannot invent a new way for a knight to move. Chess is the cleanest analytical environment ever designed, and that is exactly why it is a terrible model for almost everything that matters.

Real life never shows you the whole board. Pieces are hidden. The rules change while you are still deciding. And whoever is across from you, if there even is anyone, is improvising too.

Running a company requires not playing chess in a room where jazz is playing. I optimized. I calculated. I waited for complete information that was never coming. I treated ambiguity as a problem to solve instead of a medium to move through. By the time the board was finally clear enough to analyze, the game was over.

Leadership is jazz, not chess

Weick used jazz to explain sensemaking, and the metaphor is exact.

A jazz ensemble has no full script. The musicians listen, catch a shift, read what the others are doing, and respond in the same breath. The song is not pulled from memory. It is made live out of pure attention. That is improvisation. And improvisation is just sensemaking with the clock running.

For the advanced version, watch Jon Batiste. A smaller musician asks whether a piece is classical or blues. Batiste asks what becomes possible if he stops pretending they are different things and builds one coherent thing out of categories everyone else keeps in separate boxes.

That is sensemaking as an art form. Not choosing between the stories. Finding the deeper one that lets all of them belong to the same song.

Weak leaders see finance, operations, technology, and customers as four separate buckets. Strong leaders see one situation wearing four costumes. The synthesis is the job.

The ladder I keep on my desk now

Match the environment to the skill it actually demands.

Stable → you analyze Complicated → you bring expertise Uncertain → you make sense Fast and uncertain → you improvise

When the world is stable, the answer is sitting in the data. When it is complicated, the answer lives in someone who has seen this exact thing before. When it is uncertain, there is no answer yet, so you build the most honest story the facts will support and you move. And when it is uncertain and moving fast, you improvise. That is sensemaking with a fire behind you.

Most careers stall in the same spot. People get very, very good at the first two rungs, analysis and expertise, and then they get promoted into a world that only pays out on the last two. They keep reaching for the shovel because the shovel is what made them. They keep calculating a board that is already on fire.

So before you ask what problem you are facing, ask the harder question. What tool, what identity, what assumption am I still carrying that no longer fits the reality in front of me? It is an uncomfortable question on purpose. The shovel feels like competence right up until it is the thing that gets you killed.

What I actually do for a living

In analyzing Credit, there is rarely a clean policy for the situation in front of me. The sponsor doesn’t inject the promised equity. Guidance quietly changes shape between calls. None of it is in the manual. So I do a much smaller version of what Dodge did. I read the reality I am actually standing in, not the one the file was built for, and I build the answer on the spot.

Drop your tools

Thirteen men died on that hillside in 1949, and the deepest reason was not the wind or the slope or the heat. It was that they could not let go of a story the world had already left behind. The fire had changed the rules. They were still playing by the old ones, sprinting uphill with shovels they no longer needed, toward a ridge they would not reach.

When your own gulch lights up, and at some point it will, here is the one thing worth carrying:

The most dangerous thing you are holding is rarely the heaviest. It is the answer that used to work.

Drop your tools.

If this one landed, do three things before you close the tab.

Reply and tell me: what tool are you still carrying that the fire already made useless? I read every response.

Forward this to the one person you know who is sprinting uphill with a shovel they should have dropped a mile ago.

And if Mental Mosaic isn’t in your inbox yet,

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Every week, I take one cinematic story and one rare idea and turn them into a framework you can actually use the next day.

It’s Hari. We’ve often spoken here about the nature of leadership and decision-making. And one could be forgiven for thinking that we (as with many other advice-related platforms) only encourage determined and decisive action. Sometimes that encouragement to act can seem to come even when there’s not enough data to support a decision, or when the timing and the way forward aren’t clear. Almost like a crowd at a roulette table encouraging a gambler on a hot streak. When they win, we feel like we were a part of the moment. If they lose, well, we simply forget about them and move on.

Our next Mosaic Minds contributor is here to set the record straight: Not all choices are opportunities that must be pounced on, and sometimes the best time to make a choice is after the feeling of FOMO goes away. John Field is a trader and financial writer who pens The Trading Path on Substack, where he focuses on cycles, risk, and making better decisions in markets without relying on perfect timing.

The Most Profitable Decision I Made Was Doing Nothing

Most of the mistakes I’ve made in both trading and business came from the same place. Not bad ideas. Not lack of knowledge. Just acting when I didn’t need to.

In trading, this shows up late in a cycle. Everything looks strong. Prices are moving. Confidence is high. It feels like there is still opportunity left. So you act. You add. You chase. You convince yourself there’s one more move.

Sometimes you’re right. But more often, you’re stepping into a phase where the quality of opportunity has already started to decline. That’s the part most people miss.

I had a moment like this recently in business. An opportunity came up that, on paper, looked right. It would have added revenue. It felt like progress. There was a bit of urgency around it as well. The kind of decision that’s easy to justify.

But something didn’t quite sit right. Not in a dramatic way. Just a quiet sense that the timing wasn’t aligned. That it would add complexity rather than clarity. Everything around me was pushing towards action.

So I paused. I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no. I just did nothing.

At the time, it felt uncomfortable. There’s always a sense that you might be missing out. Not acting is the same as falling behind. But over the following weeks, the picture became clearer. The opportunity didn’t improve. The urgency faded. The downsides became more obvious. And the decision made itself.

That’s when it clicked. Doing nothing wasn’t hesitation. It was part of the process.

We tend to think of decision-making as action. Choose. Commit. Move. But in reality, good decisions are often about filtering. Removing what doesn’t align. Letting time expose what isn’t obvious at first.

I now think about decisions in a much simpler way. Before acting, I ask:

• Am I responding to pressure or to clear conditions?

• Does this still make sense if I remove the urgency?

• Would I be comfortable if this doesn’t work immediately?

If those answers aren’t clear, I wait.

This applies just as much to business as it does to markets. In trading, doing nothing late in a cycle protects capital. In business, it protects time, energy, and focus. Both matter more than any single opportunity.

The instinct to act is strong. It feels productive. It feels like progress. But some of the best decisions don’t look like decisions at all. They look like restraints.

Because the goal isn’t to take every opportunity. It’s to stay aligned long enough to recognize the right ones.

By 1980, the dollar’s value was dissolving. A bill saved at the start of the decade had lost more than half its purchasing power (Sound familiar today?). Grocers re-stickered shelves so often that the markup gun was the busiest tool in the store. Saving was a way to get poorer. Borrowing and spending quickly was the rational move, which only fed the fire.

The country printed buttons that said “Whip Inflation Now,” asked people to carpool their way to stability, and watched prices climb anyway. Economists had to invent a word for it, stagflation, because the textbooks insisted you couldn’t have soaring inflation and soaring unemployment at the same time. The 1970s didn’t read the textbook.

Then came Paul Volcker.

When Jimmy Carter appointed him to lead the Federal Reserve in 1979, Volcker was a six-foot-seven, cigar-chewing economist who looked past the symptom. Most people saw high prices. He saw something deeper: a country that expected prices to keep rising and behaved accordingly.

Volcker’s lesson wasn’t that leaders must be tough. It’s that unpopular decisions become necessary when three things are true:

• You can name the disease.

• You can price the pain.

• Waiting costs something you can’t get back.

He believed inflation had become a habit of mind, and the only way to break a habit was to make it hurt.

So he did the thing every politician dreads. He tightened monetary policy and drove interest rates toward 20 percent, knowing it would push the economy into recession.

It did.

Unemployment climbed above 10 percent. Homebuilders mailed him pieces of unsold lumber. Farmers blockaded Federal Reserve buildings with tractors. Car dealers shipped him the keys to vehicles nobody could afford to finance. (We’re not there yet, but sound familiar today?)

Everyone wanted him to blink.

He didn’t.

Volcker understood that a central bank’s most valuable asset is credibility, and credibility cannot be cheaply repurchased once it’s gone. He chose a deep wound now over a slow bleed forever. The recession was brutal. The recovery proved him right.

His example suggests a simple test for unpopular decisions.

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The Unpopular Decision Test

Before making a difficult call, answer four questions.

1. What’s the real problem?

Don’t treat the symptom.

Volcker didn’t see inflation. He saw inflation expectations.

Ask:

Can I describe the actual problem in a single sentence?

If not, you’re probably solving the wrong thing.

2. What’s the cost?

Every decision worth making hurts someone.

Volcker knew his decision would cost jobs, businesses, and political goodwill. He refused to pretend otherwise.

Ask:

Can I say the pain out loud and still choose this?

The leaders who get into trouble are the ones who make the hard call while insisting it won’t hurt.

3. What does waiting cost?

The easy path is rarely free.

It usually borrows against something valuable:

• Trust

• Culture

• Product quality

• Capital

• Credibility

For Volcker, it was the Fed’s credibility.

Ask:

What irreplaceable asset am I wasting by delaying?

When the comfortable choice is funded by tomorrow’s foundation, the unpopular decision stops looking optional.

4. How urgent, and how sure?

The first three questions tell you whether the decision is right.

This one tells you what to do next.

Conviction without urgency means building support.

Urgency without conviction means test quickly.

When both are high, you’re usually not looking for information. You’re looking for permission.

The Same Test, a Smaller Desk

I learned a smaller version of this lesson the hard way. I founded three startups. All three eventually failed.

Long before they did, I spent most of my energy pulling one brutal lever: people’s hours.

When the cash runway tightened, I cut hours. When revenue improved, I added them back. Sometimes I cut them again weeks later.

Every adjustment was a cell in a spreadsheet to me and a grocery bill to someone else.

Nobody thanks you for that, and nobody should.

But the alternative was worse. I wasn’t protecting a spreadsheet. I was protecting the company’s ability to make payroll at all.

The only way I could make those decisions without freezing was to plan them before I needed them. I mapped the actions I’d take at sixty days of runway, thirty days, and fifteen days. I priced the pain in advance so that when the moment arrived, I was executing a plan instead of inventing one. When you contingency plan, the arrival of a problem doesn’t blindside you.

The same logic applies outside business.

Sleeping when you’d rather stay out.

Skipping the second drink.

Eating like someone who plans to be healthy in thirty years.

Each is an unpopular vote. The crowd you’re overruling is simply yourself.

The disease is the same: today’s comfort borrowing against tomorrow’s foundation.

The Rule

When you can name the disease, price the pain, and see that waiting costs something you can’t get back, the unpopular decision stops being a choice.

It becomes an obligation.

The crowd’s disagreement is not evidence you’re wrong. Sometimes it’s the price of being right early.

Stability is never something you have. It’s something you defend, usually before anyone agrees it needs defending.

What’s an unpopular decision you have made? Did it work out? Leave a comment.

There’s a version of leadership that looks great in a bull market.

Confident. Decisive. Visionary. The kind that fills keynote slides and gets quoted in LinkedIn carousels. But that version — the polished, undefeated version — has never really been tested. Because leadership that only works when things are going well isn’t leadership. It’s just good timing.

The real reveal happens in crisis. When the product is failing, the market is collapsing, or the team is looking at you for answers you don’t have. That’s when character stops being theoretical.

What I’ve noticed, studying the leaders who actually held when things broke, is that they didn’t all share the same style. Some were aggressive. Some were methodical. Some got lucky with a single right call. But they shared one thing: they stayed in the room. Physically, mentally, strategically — they didn’t exit the problem. They moved deeper into it.

The seven figures below didn’t share a playbook. What they shared was that quality — the refusal to look away. Here’s what it looked like in practice.

Michael Jordan — Being Clutch

As we anxiously avoid the murky waters of the “Jordan-LeBron GOAT” conversation, we’d be remiss not to include one of the best clutch performers of all time. Jordan was famous for wanting the ball in critical moments and never shrinking from pressure — so much so that in the legendary 1997 “Flu Game,” he played through illness and scored 38 points. Not to mention the countless times he pulled the Bulls back from the edge almost single-handedly.

The lesson: leaders rise to the challenge and step into the fire — not only to save a situation, but to set an example. Leaders don’t make excuses. They embrace the challenge, adapt, and deliver. Despite his incredible success, Jordan was famously clear-eyed about the role failure played in getting him there:

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. I’ve failed over and over again. And that is why I succeed.”

How often do we prefer the easy way out? How often do we prefer to pass the ball to someone else at the first sign of trouble?

Genghis Khan — He Who Laughs Last

While not the nicest of guys — a few pages of Secret History of the Mongols will confirm that quickly — Genghis Khan may be history’s most extreme case study in refusing to quit. His father was murdered when he was a child. In adulthood, his wife was kidnapped in a Merkit raid. He was sold into slavery more than once. He was defeated in battle by his greatest rival and former blood brother. If anyone ever had a legitimate excuse to give up, it was him.

But he didn’t. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The lesson: persistence, sustained long enough, becomes dominance by attrition. His rise was marked by betrayal, exile, and constant setbacks. Yet he kept moving without fear: “If you’re afraid — don’t do it. If you’re doing it — don’t be afraid.” By the end of his life, he ruled more land and more people than anyone before him.

As we’ve discussed in prior issues, stress test your downside. There will come a moment when you have to go at it scared.

Dana White — Keep Tossing at the Board Until Something Sticks

Far from any Mt. Rushmore of business, UFC president Dana White still deserves credit for turning mixed martial arts into a global sensation. But it was not a smooth ride. By 2005, Dana and his partners had sunk millions into the company and had almost nothing to show for it. His last hope: a reality TV show called The Ultimate Fighter, whose finale transformed the sport overnight — from an outlet for pent-up adolescent rage and Bruce Lee enthusiasts into a mainstream phenomenon. A decade later, he sold the company for $4 billion.

The lesson: during its lowest moments, he tried everything until something stuck. Not through business acumen or grand strategy — through a Hail Mary play on reality TV that most serious operators would have dismissed. The Hail Mary only fails if you don’t throw it.

Reed Hastings — Adapt or Die

Before “Netflix” replaced “sitting in a tree” with a loved one, it was a dying online video and DVD rental shop — one that almost seemed destined to go the way of Pets.com and the other stoner tech business ideas that died in the dot-com crash of 2000. But unlike those others, Netflix adapted. First as a pioneering streaming platform that changed the television landscape forever, then as a production house that challenged the big content makers.

The lesson: each pivot came at a moment of existential pressure and required betting the company on a creative vision others hadn’t yet seen. Leaders may fear change, but the good ones feed off it. You never know what ideas a crisis will surface — or how completely they can shift the gears of an organization. In a crisis, your biggest liability is often your attachment to what worked before.

Steve Jobs — Clarity as a Weapon

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company had dozens of products, shrinking cash, and no coherent identity. His first move wasn’t to build — it was to cut. Aggressively, almost ruthlessly. He walked into one of the most iconic companies in the world and started saying no to nearly everything it was doing.

He eliminated product lines, reduced the roadmap to a handful of things Apple could do exceptionally well, and rebuilt the company around simplicity at a moment when complexity felt like safety. In a crisis, the instinct is usually to do more — more options, more contingencies, more meetings. Jobs went the other direction. He treated a crisis as permission to eliminate everything that wasn’t essential. The noise went down. The signal got louder. The rest followed.

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”

Andy Grove — Paranoia as a Discipline

Andy Grove survived the Holocaust as a child in Hungary, arriving in America with little more than the lesson that the world could turn on you without warning. He did not arrive at his worldview accidentally. That experience — of watching safety evaporate overnight — shaped everything about how he led.

His central belief: danger rarely announces itself. It hides inside success and complacency, arriving gradually — until suddenly it isn’t gradual anymore. During Intel’s memory chip crisis in the 1980s, Grove engineered one of the most decisive corporate pivots ever executed, shifting toward microprocessors before most competitors even recognized the threat was real.

“Only the paranoid survive.”

This isn’t a call to anxiety. It’s a call to sustained attention. The leaders who hold in crisis are usually the ones who never fully relaxed when things were good — who kept pressure-testing assumptions even when no one was asking them to.

Lloyd Blankfein — Survival Is a Strategy

The 2008 financial crisis didn’t just test balance sheets — it tested the psychological composure of every leader in financial services. Major institutions collapsed not only because of bad positions, but also because leadership froze. Goldman survived both.

Blankfein’s approach wasn’t inspirational — there were no rousing speeches. What he brought was analytical calm, relentless risk management, and a commitment to operational normalcy that kept the organization functional when panic was the rational response. He maintained client meetings. He communicated regularly with his firm via voicenotes. He kept the rhythm going when the world was losing it.

“The markets don’t like uncertainty, but they can live with transparency.”

In deteriorating conditions, the instinct to go quiet is almost always the wrong one. Whether it’s a collapsing market or a troubled credit relationship, the leaders and borrowers who maintain communication — even when the news is bad — preserve more trust than those who disappear. Blankfein understood that in a crisis, how you show up operationally is the message.

The Through-Line

Seven leaders. Seven crises. No single playbook.

Jordan ran toward pressure. Genghis Khan outlasted everyone who quit. White threw the embarrassing pass. Hastings let go of his identity. Jobs cut ruthlessly. Grove stayed paranoid when everyone else relaxed. Blankfein held the rhythm when the world was losing it.

A crisis is the stress test that strips away the performance of leadership and leaves only the substance.

The question it asks is simple — and it will find you eventually:

When the room gets hard, what do you do to manage the crisis? Leave a comment.

It’s Hari. Another month, another Mosaic Minds — our monthly feature penned by leaders in business, finance, and other sectors, who’ll share their hard-won wisdom, experiences, and lessons.

The Black Line is a geopolitical and macroeconomic intelligence publication on Substack. It maps the physical, logistical, and financial forces that move global capital before they become headlines.

Below is a brilliant piece on challenging consensus and looking at the data behind it.

Email: theblackline.ops@gmail.com
Substack: substack.com/@theblackline1

Your portfolio, your company, or your career has already lost money because someone trusted the wrong briefing. You may not know when. But the mechanics are always the same: an institution said the terrain was safe, the leader believed it, and the ground collapsed.

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In March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank carried an investment-grade credit rating. Regulators repeated that the banking system was sound. The institutional narrative was unequivocal: no structural problem.

Meanwhile, anyone with access to the bank’s public balance sheet could verify 3 data points. $91 billion in long-duration securities with $15 billion in unrealized losses. A deposit base concentrated in startups burning cash at record speed. Over 93% of deposits above the $250,000 FDIC insurance limit, meaning any loss of confidence would trigger an instant bank run.

The narrative said “stable.” The data said “one trigger away from collapse.” Within 48 hours, the bank ceased to exist.

What matters here is not the SVB story. It is the pattern. When the institutional narrative and physical reality diverge, most leaders follow the narrative. The cost almost never surfaces at the moment of the decision. It surfaces later, when correction costs 10x or 100x more than prevention would have.

The bias that no MBA teaches

Institutions produce narratives. Central banks publish statements calibrated to manage expectations, not to describe reality. Rating agencies use methodologies that penalize abrupt revisions, because every sudden downgrade erodes the stability perception that sustains their own business model. Consulting firms sell reports whose conclusions need to justify the fee, creating a structural incentive toward optimism.

None of these institutions is necessarily lying. Each operates with its own incentives and an implicit commitment to maintaining the coherence of its narrative over time.

This is not a conspiracy. It is incentive mechanics. Institutional narratives remain stable even when reality changes fast. They function like a map that was accurate when drawn, but that nobody updates while the terrain transforms underneath.

Leaders use these outdated maps because it is cognitively cheaper. Reading a Fed statement takes 5 minutes. Auditing the data behind it takes days. So they trust the map. And 80% of the time, it works. The other 20% is where the most brutal losses in recent history have occurred.

The 3-question filter

For any strategic topic, two layers of information operate simultaneously: What institutions say and what physical data shows. Narratives can be sustained artificially for months. Physical data on scarcity, logistical pressure and capital flows does not respond to public relations. When both layers align, the decision is simple. When they diverge, the physical layer wins. Always.

Over time, I compressed this into 3 questions any leader can apply before a decision that matters.

Question 1: What is the dominant narrative? Name the consensus before analyzing anything. Most leaders already operate inside the dominant narrative without recognizing they are inside it. Naming it in two clear sentences is the first act of cognitive separation.

Question 2: What is the verifiable physical data behind it? Not an analyst’s opinion. The raw data. If the narrative is “the supply chain has normalized,” the data is: What is the actual transit time on major corridors? Is freight above or below the 5-year average? Are there active bottlenecks in Suez, Panama or the Red Sea? The narrative is the map. This question forces you to step on the terrain.

Question 3: Is the gap large enough to create risk or opportunity? When the narrative says “safe” and the data says “fragile,” there is hidden risk. When the narrative says “dangerous” and the data says “resilient,” there is ignored opportunity. The gap between narrative and physical reality is where money changes hands.

The Terrain Always Wins

Return to SVB. The narrative said sound. The data showed $15 billion in unrealized losses, concentrated deposits and 93% exposure above the federal guarantee. Any leader who had asked these 3 questions would have moved funds weeks before the collapse. Not because they predicted the future. Because they read the present with more precision than the institutional narrative allowed.

The filter does not turn anyone into a prophet. It turns them into someone who audits the terrain instead of trusting the map. The costliest errors of the past decade did not happen because leaders lacked information. They happened because the information was an edited version of reality, produced by institutions with incentives structurally different from their own.

The map is useful. But the map is not the terrain. And it is certainly not the institution that drew it.

A veteran I used to work with once told me something that stuck with me. Most of his friends back home hated any talk of defense spending cuts — and not just because of national security. They grew up in a town that made parts for fighter jets. When the defense budget got slashed in the ‘90s, the jets went with it. And so did the town. While the rest of the country rode a decade-long boom, his neighbors watched their hours get cut and their houses foreclosed on.

He said it created a tension he never fully resolved: he understood the budget deficits were unsustainable, but understanding something intellectually doesn’t make it hurt less when it’s your block.

That tension is exactly why the federal budget matters — and why most people tune it out at their own expense. Government spending isn’t an abstraction. It shapes which industries survive, which towns thrive, who gets healthcare, and which jobs exist in the first place. The budget isn’t just a spreadsheet. It’s a map of the country’s priorities — and if you don’t know how to read it, someone else is making those decisions for you.

Part 1: What Is the Budget — and What Is It For?

A Tool for Fiscal Policy The federal budget is the government’s primary lever for managing the economy. By adjusting spending and tax policy, Washington can stimulate growth during downturns or cool an overheating economy.

A Financial Tool to Track and Limit Spending and Revenues. At its most basic, the budget is a ledger — it accounts for every dollar the government expects to collect and spend in a given year. It sets hard ceilings on agencies and programs, making it the mechanism through which Congress controls the national purse.

A Comprehensive National Strategy and Policy Document. The budget is also a statement of priorities. Where the money goes reveals what a government actually values — far more than any speech or platform ever could.

A Gauge for the Economy Economists and markets watch the budget closely as a signal of the country’s fiscal health. Deficit levels, debt-to-GDP ratios, and spending trajectories all tell a story about where the economy has been — and where it’s headed.

Part 2 - Reading the Budget FY2025:

A. Revenue: Let’s begin with sources of revenue for the US Government - mainly taxes:

Most federal revenue comes from three sources: what you pay as an individual (income and payroll taxes), and what corporations pay on their earnings.

B. Expenses: When you add it all up, the federal government is largely in the business of three things: taking care of its people, paying for its protection, and servicing the cost of years of doing both on credit. This results in the following categories, which are well known:

Strip it down to the essentials: the US government spends most of its money on four things — healthcare, Social Security, defense, and the interest it owes on money it already borrowed.

C. The Growing Budget: The math isn’t subtle: $5.3 trillion in, $7.1 trillion out — a $1.8 trillion gap. The reason it keeps happening is structural. Sixty percent of the budget is locked in by law and is called mandatory spending. Congress generally cannot cut back on this without a change in law:

Add onto it what must be paid, and very little of the budget is actually negotiable each year, which makes controlling our deficits very difficult:

The Debt Conclusion:

The National Debt: $38.5 Trillion

The national debt has two components: money the government owes to outside lenders, such as foreign governments, pension funds, and everyday investors (public debt), and money it owes to itself — borrowed from programs like Social Security (intergovernmental debt). Then there’s the cost of carrying all of it: interest payments, or debt service.

The debt accumulates the same way it does for anyone who spends more than they earn — they borrow the difference. Every year, the government runs a deficit, and it finances the gap by issuing Treasury bonds. Investors buy those bonds, the government gets cash, and the total balance grows. Do that enough years in a row, and $38.5 trillion is what you get.

Combined, the total sits at $38.5 trillion. As a share of the economy, public debt has now reached its highest level since World War II — the last time the country spent like the bill didn’t matter.

So what’s the big deal?

America’s debt matters. Rising interest costs reduce flexibility, and long-term deficits cannot grow forever. But the United States is not a normal borrower. The world stores capital here because of deep financial markets, strong property rights, relative political stability, military strength, innovation, and the enduring belief that contracts will be honored. U.S. Treasury bonds remain the foundation of the global financial system because investors still trust the American economy more than the alternatives. The real risk is not simply the existence of debt — it is whether growth, productivity, and institutional trust continue to outpace it. For now, America’s greatest asset is not just its balance sheet. It is confidence.

Fun facts:

1. There have been 13 government shutdowns since the modern budget was established in 1976, with the longest being in 2025 (45 days).

2. 2020 saw the largest budget deficit of USD 3.1 trillion.

3. The last time the US was in a budget surplus was in FY 2001.

Mosaic Signals are mid-cycle updates between our twice-monthly flagship pieces. High signal and improvisation.

Hi Reader,

It’s Hari. Over mediocre chicken satay, a few friends and I fell into a conversation about distrust — in data, in facts, in numbers that used to feel settled. Some of it is the AI era: when anything can be generated, nothing feels verifiable. We couldn’t even agree on whether New York or Florida had more COVID deaths. A fact. Publicly available. Still contested at the table. Mosaic Signals wants to help — each installment will take data points, break down what they actually measure, where they fall short, and what they mean for your decision-making.

PS: On a completely separate note- Recently went on a Flushing, NY Food Tour that’s a bit off the beaten path (and inexpensive). Reply if you want the list of restaurants!

Signal 001:

Fed Decision: Rates Held at 3.5–3.75%

Who: A small group of government officials, led by Chair Jerome Powell, meets several times a year to decide how expensive borrowing money should be in America. Most agreed on this one; a few didn't. That decision ripples through everything: your mortgage, your car loan, your credit card, and the entire stock market.

What: They decided to leave interest rates right where they are. Translation: borrowing money stays about as expensive as it’s been. Your mortgage rate isn’t getting any relief today.

When: Last week’s meeting. But their eyes are on what comes next.

Where: All about the U.S. economy, though what’s happening abroad (think Middle East) is very much on their radar.

Why: Honest answer: it’s complicated. The economy is still humming along. People still have jobs. But hiring has slowed down, and prices are still higher than the Fed would like, especially for gas and energy. Add in global uncertainty, and they’d rather wait than risk making the wrong call.

How: Watch and wait. They’re not on autopilot. They’re tracking jobs, prices, and markets closely and have made clear they’ll act if things shift.

Bottom line: Nothing’s broken, but nothing’s fixed either. So for now, they’re holding their breath a little.

Many think rates should be cut to stimulate the economy. Why, you ask? Mental Mosaic has a Federal Reserve primer in the works. No spoilers. Interestingly, Devil Wears Prada 2 also touched on this. Now we have to beat the mythical four-part series. No pressure.

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Signal 002:

Second Signal: Inflation is Up

1. Inflation is back up, 3.5% (PCE)

Biggest jump in about three years. And here’s the thing: it’s not because people are suddenly spending recklessly. It’s mostly energy prices, driven by geopolitical developments. That said, when energy gets expensive, everything gets a little more expensive. So the ripple effects are real.

2. People are spending more than they’re earning

Income grew 0.6% last month. Spending grew 0.9%. The gap has to come from somewhere, and right now it’s coming from savings and a little bit of financial stretch. Consumers are still showing up, just not quite as comfortably as before.

The (slightly simplified) chain of events, if you zoom out

1. Oil gets expensive

2. Producers raise prices to protect their profits, so items in the checkout aisle get expensive

3. Salaries don’t keep up, real wages shrink quietly

4. Consumers keep spending anyway, just with less cushion

5. The Fed wants more data before acting

6. Repeat

Bottom line: The economy is still moving. But it’s being carried by consumers running a little hotter than their wallets probably should.

Signal 003:

Five companies basically make up the market.

The five biggest Magnificent Seven names now total $15.5 trillion in market cap — that’s 35 to 40% of the S&P 500 and nearly a fifth of the entire U.S. stock market.

• Recent earnings were mixed. Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon had good quarters. Meta and Microsoft lagged.

Why it matters: A handful of companies aren’t just leading the market. They’re writing the entire story. When people wonder why they may not feel as prosperous as the stock market does, this is partly why.

AI doesn’t run on code. It runs on electricity and water.

Data centers use about 3-4% of all U.S. electricity today. By 2030, that could hit 8 to 10%. A single large AI facility draws as much power as a city of 400,000 people.

• Cooling is the hidden problem. We’re talking millions of gallons of water per day at peak.

• The bottleneck isn’t chips or software. It’s power grids and access to water.

Why it matters: The race to build AI is quietly becoming a race to secure infrastructure most people never think about.

Where you build is now a competitive advantage.

A one-tenth-of-a-second delay costs companies roughly 7% of their sales. Why?

Online shoppers are impatient. A tiny lag is enough to make someone click away, and at the scale these companies operate, even a fraction of a second translates into millions in lost revenue. So companies are moving data centers closer to users, even when it costs more.

Why it matters: The cloud isn’t abstract. It’s physical, and location is starting to determine who wins.

The big picture: Money flows into Big Tech, Big Tech bets on AI, and AI hits real-world constraints like power, water, and geography. That’s the pattern worth watching.

Bottom line: The market’s AI giants have a software lead. Their next constraint is whether they can keep the lights on and the servers cool.

The first dictionary definition of entropy is boring — lots of random equations. The second one stops me every time: gradual decline into disorder.

The most obvious example is cleaning. The moment you finish, disorder sets in. Before long, it’s like you never started.

One Sunday morning, I learned this the hard way. Full of energy, Wu-Tang locked in, I spent three hours on a kitchen and laundry pile that had been building for weeks. By hour three, the dust and my age were winning. And then the thought crept in: What’s the point?

Not existential angst. Thermodynamics.

The second law states that systems always move toward greater disorder. Left alone, things fall apart. It’s true for kitchens. It’s true for the rest of life too — lose weight, gain it back. Become smart, stop reading, forget. Don’t invest in a relationship; become strangers. The decline can be so severe that it’s like the progress never happened.

Ignorance gives entropy permission to steal your hard-won gains. It’s the law.

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It shows up everywhere

It’s not just personal. In organizations, entropy doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates.

Strategic entropy is the quietest killer. A winning strategy decays as rivals imitate, markets shift, and needs evolve. Companies that stop investing in renewal don’t fail dramatically — they become gradually irrelevant.

Cultural entropy is slower still. Early values get diluted as teams scale or short-term pressure overrides long-term principles. Cynicism and disengagement aren’t morale problems. They’re symptoms.

Talent entropy is the most personal. Skills become obsolete. High performers leave when treated as an afterthought. Institutional knowledge walks out the door — and nobody notices until it’s gone.

The other face of entropy: randomness

Entropy isn’t only about decline. It’s also about randomness — the curveballs that derail best-laid plans, and occasionally, the ones that exceed them.

How often do we make room for random events disrupting what we’ve built? And how often are we open to something completely unexpected that would require us to rewrite the plan entirely?

Our logical minds want to assign blame when things go wrong — build a theory, find a culprit, restore the illusion of control. But sometimes things fall apart because systems tend toward disorder. Giving yourself a break and chalking some of it up to the universe isn’t weakness. It’s physics.

Fighting back

Treat nothing as sacred. Periodically reassess whether the things you’ve built — habits, roles, processes, relationships — still serve you. Reorganization isn’t failure. Refusing to reorganize often is.

Make your strategy a living thing. In work and in life, schedule the reviews. Be willing to kill what no longer fits. A plan that hasn’t been stress-tested recently is probably already decaying.

Don’t let what matters live only in your head. Write it down. The things worth preserving — processes, values, intentions — need a home outside memory.

Ave, Sisyphus

Entropy always wins by default. The only question is how fast.

The most resilient people — and organizations — treat entropy as a permanent condition to manage, not a problem to solve once and forget. That means continuous reinvestment. It means acting like an open system that draws in fresh energy, rather than a closed one quietly running down.

It does feel like shoveling dirt against the tide. But that’s not a reason to stop. That’s just the nature of the work.

So before committing to any new venture — professional, personal, creative — ask yourself two things: can you preserve the gains you already have, and do you have the fortitude to push through the randomness ahead?

Because if not, the tide already won.

What are you committed to not letting decay? Tell me below.

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Hi Reader,

It’s Hari. This week, it is my pleasure to introduce Elizabeth Blake, a former Certified Financial Planner with 25+ years of experience guiding hundreds of families and thousands of investors through real financial decisions.

She has written three vignettes guiding her clients through incredibly tough decisions. Her vulnerability and honesty deeply resonated with me.

Thank you for sharing, Elizabeth.

There’s a moment every financial advisor dreads: You’re sitting across from someone – a client, a team member, sometimes a person you love - and you can see it. Clearly. The bridge to walk across is out. You ran the numbers, read the room, lived through enough versions of this story to know exactly how it ends. And they’re nodding at you with the particular confidence of someone who has already decided, and is now simply waiting for you to finish talking.

Call it the gap – the distance between what you can see and what the person across from you is ready to hear. The gap is where leadership actually happens. Not in the confident announcement or the clean decision, but in the uncertain space between I know, and they’re not there yet.

The gap has three dangerous edges. Push too hard, and the person digs in; you lose the relationship and any chance of helping. Yield too easily, and you become a nodding validator, watching preventable harm unfold with your permission. Or you push with full conviction and discover you were wrong. That the certainty you mistook for clarity was just confidence.

I spent 25 years as a Certified Financial Planner, leading myself through uncertainty, a small team through real change, and clients through some of the most consequential decisions of their lives. I’ve come to believe this work shows up at every level – in how you handle your own hardest choices, how you show up for people close to you, how you behave when someone needs a guide more than they need agreement. Three stories. None of them is clean.

I. The founder who couldn’t let go: He was self-made, sharp, and knew – in the way you know things you’re not ready to say out loud – that it was time to step back. Every metric confirmed it. His own words confirmed it, in unguarded moments. And yet timelines kept moving, new reasons to wait kept appearing.

What I understood slowly, then all at once: I was asking him to make two decisions simultaneously. The financial one was straightforward. And the existential one, which had no spreadsheet. That company wasn’t an asset. It was the answer he’d given every morning for decades to the question of who he was. Selling it wasn’t a transaction. It was a kind of death.

I made mistakes. There were sessions where I pushed the logic harder than the moment called for, felt him retreating, and kept going anyway because I was right about the numbers and confused that with being right about him.

What eventually moved him wasn’t a better argument. It was a different question: What do you want your life to look like when you’re no longer responsible for this? The decision followed – not cleanly, not at my timeline. The gap wasn’t closed by being right. It was crossed by staying present long enough for him to find his own footing.

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II. The client who made the wrong call anyway: He was over-concentrated in a single stock, his former employer trusted with the specific blindness that comes from building your career inside something. I showed him the math, the history, the asymmetric risk. He heard me. He didn’t move.

The stock collapsed.

There is a specific quality to the call you receive from someone you tried to protect, calling from inside the damage. I didn’t revise my prior position to make it easier on both of us. I told him directly what I had recommended and why. I told him we were going to figure out the solution together. And we did. He stayed a client for another decade because I didn’t become a stranger when being right stopped being comfortable.

Sitting with the mess of that decision and its consequences clarified something: people can survive making the wrong call. What they don’t easily survive is making it on their own.

III. The team that was terrified: When I began planning my succession – bringing in two younger partners to eventually take over my practice – my team of long-tenured assistants went quiet. Productivity dropped. The energy changed. They were too professional to say what they were afraid of, so they said nothing, which was considerably louder.

I had a choice that felt logistical but was actually about what I believed guidance to be. I could manage the optics - keep negotiations private, let reassurance trickle down in careful increments.

Or I could do something riskier: bring them in. Not to the deal terms but to a different conversation entirely. I asked them what they wanted the practice to look like when the transition was complete. We called it “Vision Daydreaming.” The incoming partners were in the room.

Something shifted. Their fears hadn’t disappeared, but now their energy had somewhere to go besides dread. They stopped being subjects of a change being executed around them and became, in some real sense, its architects. The gap wasn’t between a client and me. It was between the future I could see and the one my team was afraid to imagine. Crossing it didn’t require a better plan. It required changing who was in the room when the plan was being shaped.

What the gap asks of you: These three situations look different on the surface. Underneath, they share the same demand: stay present inside the discomfort without forcing resolution or abandoning your conviction. Hold the ‘I believe I can see something you can’t yet.’ Push without forcing. Guide without steering.

This is what separates the people who last – as advisors, managers, partners, guides – from those who are just endured. Not superior judgment, though that matters. Not confidence, though you need it. The thing that actually separates them is harder to name: they’re still in the room when it gets difficult. They didn’t know how the story ended, but they decided, somewhere, that showing up through the mess was the job.

The people who most need your guidance will remember, long after they’ve forgotten your advice, whether you were still there when it cost you something to be.

Hari here. After years at the intersection of credit, lending, and markets, what I’ve noticed is this: the same handful of concepts keep surfacing — in business decisions, in geopolitical headlines, in conversations about strategy. Most people have heard the terms. Fewer have had someone sit down and actually explain them. Mental Mosaic Explains (ahem, better title suggestions welcome!) is my attempt to do that — one concept at a time, clearly enough to be useful whether you’re watching the news, having a debate with a friend, picking up the Wall Street Journal, or running a business.

The first topic: Tariffs

Tariffs have become a political football — but they carry real-world consequences. While the exact figures are often debated, tariffs trickle down to everyone’s pocketbook. Cars, for example, are expected to cost $2,000–$4,000 more due to higher steel prices. Appliances often cost hundreds more.

As a practitioner who finances loans for companies, I see consequences that ripple far beyond the headlines. Companies that import goods suddenly face cost increases they didn’t budget for and can’t always pass on. So they adapt — buying their goods upfront to beat the next round of increases, cutting costs wherever they can, laying off workers, and raising prices when margins leave no other choice. Each decision is rational in isolation.

Together, they signal something more troubling: a business under pressure, making short-term moves that quietly erode the foundation a lender underwrote (rant over).

It’s been on people’s minds, and, perhaps because the topic has been politicized over the last decade, it isn’t surprising that I am frequently asked to explain what tariffs are.

Back to Basics — What are tariffs, anyway?

A tariff is a tax, duty, or levy on an imported good. Primarily used as a protectionist measure, tariffs work by making foreign products more expensive, nudging consumers toward domestic alternatives.

Who imposes them? The government. More specifically, here in the U.S., Congress has the right to collect taxes (as affirmed by a Supreme Court ruling in February). But throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, it has largely delegated that power to the Executive branch.

Who pays for them? The importer of that particular good is under the tariff. Goods arrive at a port of entry, and the buyer pays customs duties and tariffs, usually before the goods are cleared to leave the port.

But who REALLY pays?

It’s the rest of us: Because a tariff is an added expense on an importer, who hopes to sell these goods domestically or use them as a production input in their own operations, they would likely defend their margins by passing those costs on to the consumer.

And we’re at the mercy of the importers: If there’s a 10% tariff on a $100 imported good, assuming a 100% pass-through rate, that product effectively costs $110 after the tax. Now, in reality, the importer often tries to find ways to cut costs: push back on the producer, take a slightly lower profit, or find other efficiencies where possible. Very rarely do a 100% of the tariff pass through to the consumer.

And it doesn’t just hurt buyers; it hurts market efficiency: Those who would have purchased at the lower price don’t, and, assuming a foreign country isn’t dumping goods into the local economy, resources flow toward less efficient producers. In short, tariffs transfer money from consumers to producers and the government — and create waste in the process.

FYI — who doesn’t pay for them? Foreign governments. But they do hurt as well. Exporters from countries whose goods are subject to tariffs might end up losing buyers in the country imposing them. All in all, not good for free trade.

So, why do countries impose them?

#1- Level the playing field: When foreign goods are priced artificially low, domestic companies can’t compete. Tariffs close the gap and protect jobs.

Ex: The U.S. has repeatedly imposed tariffs on imported steel sold below cost, protecting domestic steelmakers from being undercut by cheaper foreign production.

#2- Keep harmful goods out: Some imports are unsafe or low quality. Tariffs make them less accessible, nudging consumers toward better options.

Ex: The U.S. imposed steep tariffs on imported tires in 2009 after foreign manufacturers were found to be flooding the market with cheaper, lower-quality alternatives.

#3- Control critical supply chains: Chips, energy, defense materials. If another country makes it, they can cut you off. Tariffs incentivize making it yourself.

Ex: The U.S. has pushed heavy tariffs on foreign semiconductors and backed domestic chip manufacturing through the CHIPS Act — reducing dependence on overseas production for technology critical to defense and industry.

#4- Retaliation: You tax us, we tax you.

Ex: During the 2018 trade war, retaliatory tariffs by China of U.S. soy imports hurt American farmers.

In Conclusion:

Tariffs are not inherently bad. They have their place. In the 1990s and 2000s, as manufacturing jobs migrated to lower-wage countries, tariffs were seen by many as a legitimate tool to protect domestic workers. During COVID, the vulnerability became visceral — basic drugs, medical supplies, and critical goods were being produced overseas because it was simply too expensive to make them at home. A well-placed tariff might have changed that calculus.

• Tariffs have been in use for around 6,000 years: The imposition of tariffs goes back to ancient Mesopotamia, through to ancient Egypt, Greece, and into our modern times, where it was imposed for pretty much the exact same reasons noted above.

• Tariffs were the government’s main source of revenue pre-1913: Before the enactment of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, which allowed for the income tax, tariffs were the primary source of U.S. government revenue.

• The word “tariff” comes from Arabic: The word tariff comes from the Arabic word ta’rif, which pretty much means the same thing. The Arabic word comes from the root ‘Arafa, which means to make known.

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We're drowning in data. I'll throw you a lifeline with three important numbers impacting you.

1. Oil has its groove back

For a while, Tesla, solar panels, and wind farms made it easy to write oil’s obituary. Then came Iran. Now it’s front and center of every discourse — and for good reason. Brent crude oil is trading above $111 a barrel, up nearly $48 from a year ago.

Setting aside the complexities of pollution and climate for a moment, the reality is that oil touches everything.

The cost to ship goods, the raw materials in your favorite shirt, the fertilizer that grew your food — it all traces back to oil. When the price goes up at the source, it goes up at the register.

Does this mean more “Buy Now, Pay Later?”

Source: Colorado Oil and Gas Association

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2. Should you have been a Doctor?

The unemployment rate held steady at 4.3% in March — layoff headlines and the Iran conflict haven’t moved the needle. AI hasn’t replaced humans. Yet.

Who’s hiring: Healthcare added 76,000 jobs.

Who’s firing: The federal government shed 18,000, finance another 16,000.

Hold your horses: A spike in healthcare hiring reflects the end of a workers’ strike and seasonal warming — not a structural shift, economists tell Reuters.

Elsewhere, employers are firmly in “wait and see” mode.

3. Richie Rich?

A 50-year American Enterprise Institute (AEI) study says 31% of US households are now upper-middle class — up from 10% in 1979. This is defined as USD $133,000- $400,000.

The share living in poverty (earning <$40,000) dropped from 30% to 19%.

The unconventional thesis: Maybe the middle class is hollowing out because they're moving on up.

The catch: Income went up. So did everything else, from housing, schooling, child care, and transportation. Many of those upwardly mobile families don’t feel richer, and feelings vote.

Share with someone who might be interested.

As always, I deeply appreciate your time reading.

Thanks,

Hari

“Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.” - Khalil Gibran.

Sooner or later, you're sitting across from someone who wants something different from what you do. And it is often a sad fact of life that negotiations, by their very nature, place both sides in an antagonistic, zero-sum tussle (if not an actual struggle). When both parties come into it with that mindset, what is said between them during the talks is only the tip of the iceberg. Go below sea level, and you will find that each side has an underwater frozen mountain of intentions, desires, stresses, and conflicts driving that tussle and ready to sink the deal.

It got me thinking about the aforementioned quote by Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran. Swap love for deals. Swap it for peace. The gap is the same.

Ultimately, every negotiation has two layers: what’s being discussed, and what each party actually needs — the visible and the invisible. The argument on the surface is never really the argument.

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The Conflict: Every Demand Has a Shadow

The visible is what people argue about. These are the obvious stated agenda items. These can include price, terms, structure, time, stated positions, and perceived options.

The invisible is what’s actually driving the negotiations. They’re what the parties are actually fighting for and what has brought them to the negotiation table. These are things like causality (why they’re there), the narrative they tell themselves (history, identity, culture, emotion), the true constraints they face, their actual options, and timing (as opposed to time).

We see these factors come into play in almost any negotiations.

Zoom in: Take a typical divorce settlement:

• The visible: Add up the assets, subtract the liabilities, split the difference.

• The invisible: Anger, betrayal, rage, and grief — emotions that rarely get a seat at the table.

Zoom out: We can even see this interplay in global affairs, including the current conflict in the Middle East:

• The visible: We have sanctions, strikes, and nuclear brinkmanship, and the Strait of Hormuz.

• The invisible: We have survival, sovereignty, historical ethnic and religious grievances, and the control of a region that powers the global economy.

The Conflict: Ignore the invisible at your own peril

On the surface, it seems pretty obvious that people negotiate for the material and stated outcomes, and that they won’t engage in an inherently antagonistic interaction with their cards on the table. So, why bother with the invisible? (What’s underneath the iceberg.)

Because for most, the visible is there to satisfy the invisible need. Without satisfying the latter, most negotiations either break down or one side ends up feeling wronged by the deal. And deals can fall apart after an agreement is reached.

Furthermore, engaging only on face value is inherently limiting and risks one losing the prize. That is because:

• Limitations of language: Negotiations are verbal, and language only approximates intent, not necessarily reflecting each party's needs. Language can also become a tool of misdirection as much as communication.

• Fog of War: People guard information like currency, revealing only what advances their position and withholding what might expose their need, true position, and real constraints.

• BATNA: And by failing to analyze the invisible properly, one fails at discovering their true leverage: When to walk away or their Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA). A BATNA gives the clearest picture of what walking away would actually cost. It forces a reckoning with reality rather than ego.

The Framework: Drive to unearth the invisible

When entering a negotiation, the first job isn’t to state your position — it’s to map the invisible needs beneath it by:

• Understanding each side’s real pain points: What are their true constraints, including time, financial and other material costs, and reputational damage?

• Running an honest BATNA analysis to figure out when and at what point to walk away.

• Perception vs Reality: Understanding what the perceived options are as opposed to the actual options.

• Narrative vs price: Taking the other side’s emotions, history, and grievances seriously enough to actually understand them. Addressing the narrative, not just the price, may keep the deal alive well after the talks are done.

Not to agree. To Understand

And when mapping the invisible, it helps to ask the following questions:

• What are they saying? (visible)

• What must be true for them to say it? (invisible)

• What can’t they change? (constraint)

• What story are they protecting? (narrative)

• How many options do they think they have? (perception)

• Who is under real-time pressure? (timing)

• Will they regret this deal later? (aftermath)

Remember, a deal is only real when both sides feel they gave something up. The best negotiators don’t just win. They make the other side feel like they did too.

The iceberg doesn’t warn you. It just waits.

Tell us about a recent negotiation:

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Hey there, Reader

Hari here. We’re trying something new and giving you a little reprieve this week from my musings (please hold the applause until later).

I want to give a special thank-you to for being the first contributor to Mental Mosaic’s new series.

Mosaic Minds is a monthly feature penned by leaders in business, finance, and other sectors, who’ll share their hard-won wisdom, experiences, and lessons. It will be a peek inside the mind of some of the smartest, most insightful, engaging, and funny people I’ve met who’ve built and achieved much.

Please, give this a read, and support Dead Hand Capital. They publish an investment newsletter devoted to the forgotten virtues of patience, silence, and rationality in a world addicted to motion, written by someone with 20 years on Wall Street.

The Velocity Of Conviction

The investor’s mind is paralyzed by the illusion of choice. We have been taught that the ultimate luxury is to keep our options open, to delay commitment until every variable is known, every risk quantified, and every outcome guaranteed.

But the stock market does not reward the hesitant, nor does it spare the frantic. It rewards those with the capacity to make committed decisions.

In the market, there are two distinct species of participant: the Weather Vane and the Forge. They are defined entirely by their relationship with conviction.

The vast majority of market participants are Weather Vanes. They are paralyzed by the abundance of information and when presented with an opportunity, they do not act. They run a thousand simulations, wait for the macroeconomic clouds to part, for the central bank to issue a guarantee, and for their peers' consensus to validate their intuition. They decide slowly because they are searching for a mythical state of perfect certainty.

But perfect information only exists in the past, and the past pays no premium. By the time the Weather Vane finally musters the courage to allocate capital, the opportunity has already been seized by the decisive. And because their decisions are born of consensus rather than internal, unborrowed conviction, they are terrifyingly fragile. The moment the wind changes, they vomit up their holdings in a fit of maximum capitulation disguised as “risk management.”

Enter the Forge: To the untrained eye, the man who reaches decisions promptly appears reckless. When the market violently dislocates, throwing the shares of a magnificent, irreplaceable institution into the gutter, the Forge deploys capital with a speed that looks impulsive.

But it is not impulsivity, and the decision was not made in a moment of chaos. It was made months, perhaps years prior, in the solitude of quiet study.

The testing ground: Back in 2020, the world had stopped spinning. The pandemic had frozen global logistics, shattered supply chains, and driven the market into a blind, indiscriminate panic. Concurrently, the geopolitical anvil dropped: the U.S. Department of Commerce added China’s premier foundry, SMIC, to its Entity List. The financial press sounded warnings about the death of globalization and the collapse of the semiconductor cycle.

In the crosshairs of this dual shock was ASML, the Dutch masters of extreme ultraviolet lithography. The stock plunged as the Weather Vanes frantically liquidated.

Our decision to aggressively accumulate ASML in that moment of maximum terror was prompt. But it was not made in 2020.

The decision had been pre-loaded years prior. We had already spent the time considering the physics of EUV. We knew that ASML possessed a literal monopoly on light—an unbreachable moat built on precision engineering that bordered on sorcery.

When the pandemic and the SMIC blacklisting intersected to drive the price down to that exact threshold, there was no need to form a committee or run a simulation. The spring was already coiled.

We knew that a virus does not alter the laws of physics. We knew that the blacklisting of SMIC did not reduce the world’s need for smaller, faster silicon. If anything, the geopolitical fracturing weaponized that need, turning ASML’s machines into the apex capital goods of the 21st century. The underlying reality of the enterprise had not been impaired; only the quoted price had become temporarily inconvenient.

We executed the standing order. And then, we engaged in the second, far more grueling half of the equation: we changed our minds very slowly.

This is the agonizing burden of true conviction. Once the concrete is poured, you do not dig up the foundation every morning to check if the steel is still there. We ignored the daily infection rates, the geopolitical posturing, and the erratic, red flashes of the stock market. We anchored ourselves to the weight of ASML’s monopoly, ignoring the volatility of the headlines.

The lesson? The market is a machine designed to make you doubt your prompt decisions. It will tempt you to “do something” to alleviate the discomfort of looking foolish in the first-order timeframe. But if you have done the reading, if you have verified the structural advantage, you must grant your investment the dignity of time.

We are entering an era of accelerating noise. The machines will generate infinite reasons to hesitate, and infinite reasons to panic. The premium placed on the velocity of conviction will only widen.

You must be intentional in your outlook. Will you be the Weather Vane, spinning wildly in the crosswinds of consensus, always deciding too late and abandoning too early?

Or will you do the quiet work in the dark? Will you know the price of your convictions before the market asks for them?

When the pitch finally crosses the plate, you must swing. And once you have swung, you must have the courage to watch the ball fly—even if its flight looks uncertain.

Stay still.

Win slow.

Theodore

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In Manhattan’s Diamond District, jeweler Howard Ratner convinces Kevin Garnett to leave his NBA championship ring as collateral for a supposedly priceless Ethiopian opal. Howard, played by Adam Sandler, subsequently pawns the NBA ring and bets everything on Garnett’s next game.

Watching Uncut Gems feels like a panic attack. Howard’s entire world depends on five things going right simultaneously: the opal sells, the bet hits, the collectors wait, the next loan closes, and nobody pulls the thread early. He sprints through Manhattan, dodges debt collectors, sweet-talks jewelers, and places bet after bet with unshakable certainty that this time, everything will land.

Every successful person will tell you to bet on yourself. Howard believed that, too. The best operators carry his certainty.

They just never let the whole structure depend on every variable cooperating at once.

Howard only ever ran one scenario. No fallback. No downside case. Just the version where everything lands.

Here is what makes Howard so unsettling: he is not delusional. He is not stupid. He reads the room, he knows his market, he moves fast. He just didn’t understand the probability of success and the swings. In another life, with one or two variables rearranged, he is a success story. The problem was never his conviction. It was that he had no answer for what happens when things go wrong. And in that silence, every bet he placed was really just a prayer dressed up as a plan.

Most people operate closer to Howard than they would like to admit. They run the optimistic scenario in their head: the promotion comes through, the big house will be affordable, the client signs, the market holds, my idea is the best. And they call it a strategy.

The greatest investors, operators, and leaders share Howard’s fire. What separates them is a habit most people find deeply uncomfortable: they spend as much energy imagining failure as they do engineering success. They are, in the best possible sense, paranoid.

Howard was intensely optimistic. He just skipped the second half.

In lending, we make large loans that may take years to repay. We are, by definition, forecasting the future—will the business work out, will competitors stay at bay, will the economy hold up —some may say a fool’s errand.

But being unable to predict the future isn’t an excuse to stop preparing for it. It’s exactly the reason you must.

The Stress Test

The tool we use to understand the future is called stress testing. Every loan we underwrite runs three cases, and the order matters.

Start with the downside. Before optimism, before the base assumptions, ask what can go wrong and whether you can survive it. Not just financially. Professionally. Emotionally. Most people overestimate their risk tolerance until the risk is actually in the room.

1. Ask yourself the downside case: What if I’m wrong, and what exactly breaks? What must go right? Where are the single points of failure? How much margin do I actually have, not the margin I’m assuming? If the worst scenario occurs, will I survive it? You can use math, common sense, and your worst critic.

2. Then build the base case: Not the dream, not the nightmare. The honest, unsentimental answer to one question: if nothing goes particularly right and nothing goes particularly wrong, what happens? The base case lives in the uncomfortable middle, which is exactly why most people skip it. It forces you to separate what you know from what you’re hoping for.

3. Finally, run the optimistic case. But give it a job: does the upside justify the exposure? This is where Howard lived permanently, and it’s a fine place to visit. It is a catastrophic place to live. If your downside is ruin and your optimistic case is merely good, the deal doesn’t work. Howard’s optimistic case was life-changing. His downside was everything. That asymmetry should have stopped him cold.

It didn’t.

The best operators run all three. They carry Howard’s certainty into the optimistic case and Howard’s outcome into the downside, and they let the gap between the two tell them whether to move.

Why It Matters

Good decision-making isn’t about pessimism. It’s about clarity. The downside case doesn’t exist to talk you out of things. It exists to ensure that when you move, you do so with your eyes open.

Also, when things go wrong, you have thought through what changes you can make.

Years ago, we looked at financing a large tool manufacturer. On the surface, it looked attractive: a near monopoly in its niche, a strong brand, loyal customers. The numbers were good. The story was better.

But when we stress-tested the projections, something uncomfortable emerged: If revenue dropped just 5%, the company wouldn’t be able to service its debt.

Why would revenue drop? It hasn’t in the past, and now we are leveraging the company. Bet the Opal: “This is how I win.”

It would have been easy to convince ourselves of the upside.

So we walked away. Not because the company was bad. Not because the brand wasn’t real or the market position wasn’t earned. We walked away because we recognized what was happening: we were being seduced by a good story. The upside was loud. The risk was quiet. And in that gap, between what the numbers said and what we wanted to believe, was where the decision lived.

The hardest part of good judgment isn’t identifying risk. It’s catching yourself in the moment when optimism has already dressed itself up as analysis.

Howard never caught himself. He was too busy running. Don’t be Howard. Carry his fire. Build his floor.

Be intensely optimistic about the future.
Build the downside first.

Hi Reader,

It’s Hari. Mosaic Signals are mid-cycle updates between our twice-monthly flagship pieces. High signal, less polish, and improvisation. Thank you for going along for this ride with me.

A. Tax season has me looking at last year’s expenses. They went up. They always go up. Not because we decided to spend more. Because we never decided not to.

Zero-based budgeting rejects that entirely. Every expense justifies its existence from scratch. No autopilot. 3G Capital made it famous at Kraft Heinz (yes, the Ketchup!). Every department, every dollar, defend it or lose it. They stripped the company to the studs.

The job. The habits. The commitments you inherited from a younger version of yourself.

Anything that wouldn’t survive that question is legacy overhead.

Try it. Pick one area of your life and zero it out. What makes it back in?

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B. Last week, a friend and I nearly came to blows over whether the Giants have a real shot this year. Voices raised, stats flying, neither of us budging. Then we ordered another round.

We already know how to disagree well: sports, pizza, movies. We go back and forth on what we know, what we don’t, what we love, and what drives us crazy. We don’t belittle someone for backing the wrong side. In fact, we cheer them on for being loyalists. And when the final whistle blows, we share a drink.

Maybe those conversations need a final whistle too.

C. When I was building Periodikal, I’d get anxious about asking. For advice. For a follow-up. For anything that felt like imposing.

Always ask. Always follow up. Silence isn’t a no.

Thanks,

Hari

The small sushi shop was off the beaten path, away from tourists. Google Maps struggles to navigate Kyoto’s byzantine streets, bustling with activity. Little crooked lanes branched off the main ones. We finally found the hole in the wall. A sign hung on the corner with deference: ‘Sorry, I can only seat five people.’

As we entered, the sushi chef smiled as though he’d been expecting us. We were relieved to be the only ones there. As we sat down, from the corner of my eye, I could see little notes of customer affection for the elderly chef: ‘We had seven sets. Wish I could eat more.’ ‘We had five sets.’

He pulled out his phone, spoke in Japanese, and let it translate to English. He carefully handed us the menu. Asked where we were visiting from. When we mentioned New York, he asked whether we thought the new mayor could bring down prices. He kept detailed notes on every customer who visited. He knew exactly when the person who sent us had visited, down to the date and time.

Once we placed the order, it was all business. His hands moved with quiet precision, each cut deliberate, each placement intentional. He had been operating the restaurant since the 1970s. A little boredom would be justified. There was none. As he placed the sushi in front of us, he told us which to eat with and without soy sauce. This was a command. We were not to mess up his work.

Japan, as I found out, has a lot of amazing sushi. But the unreasonable care of this man in his tiny restaurant will stay with me forever. Not because of the fish. Because you could feel that this was his life’s work, and he refused to be casual about it.

That refusal is becoming rare. In the age of technology, gross margin protection, and quarterly earnings, most businesses have optimized the care out of the process. The customer feels it immediately. Not as outrage. As indifference. A shrug where there used to be a standard.

The pattern is simple. When people care about what they do, customers never have to ask for more. When they don’t, no amount of process can fake it.

So the question worth sitting with isn’t how do we improve the work.

And if the answer is no, the honest move is to stop doing it and find the thing you’d refuse to be casual about. The sushi chef didn’t need a mission statement. He had a five-seat counter and fifty years of proof.

He’s not alone. But he’s increasingly outnumbered.

The Case for Unreasonable Care

We’ve all sat through the call tree. Pressed 1, pressed 3, repeated our account number twice, only to reach someone reading a script. Now the script is an AI chatbot. The human has been optimized out entirely, and it’s celebrated as a win for the bottom line.

Care is increasingly reserved for the top end. We’ve all walked past business class to economy. But care was never supposed to be a seating class. Some companies still prove it doesn’t have to be:

Zappos: A customer once stayed on the phone with a Zappos rep for 10 hours and 43 minutes. The call covered life, relationships, and yes, shoes. Reps weren’t measured on call time. They were trained to build connections, not rush. Founder Tony Hsieh built the entire model around one idea: treat support as marketing, not a cost center. Long-term loyalty over short-term efficiency.

Chewy: When customers call to cancel after a pet passes away, Chewy doesn’t process the transaction. They send handwritten sympathy cards. Flowers. Refunds with no return required. They tell customers to donate the unused food to a local shelter. If you’ve ever loved a dog, imagine that call. That emotional moment doesn’t just resolve an account. It defines the brand. Emotional intelligence scales.

The Omakase Principle

Omakase literally means “I’ll leave it up to you.” It’s the ultimate expression of trust between customer and craftsperson. But that trust is only earned through obsessive care. The framework has four steps:

Seat — Define your constraint. What’s your five-seat counter? Shrink the surface area until you can feel every interaction.

Select — Audit ruthlessly. Do I care about this? If yes, go deeper. If no, cut it. The chef didn’t offer mediocre tempura. He made sushi and nothing else.

Command — Find your soy sauce moment. If you don’t have an opinion about how your work should be experienced, you don’t care enough yet.

Sustain — Apply the boredom test. Fifty years and still no boredom? That’s care. Boredom creeping in? That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a signal to move on.

The beauty of omakase is that the customer surrenders control and gets something better than what they would have chosen. That only works when the person behind the counter has cared long enough and deeply enough to be trusted with the choice. The framework is the path to earning that trust.

In Closing: The Care Compound

The reality is that speed, shortcuts, and margin often take precedence over lasting relationships and great products. And there’s a feedback loop: the more employees feel like a number on a spreadsheet, the harder it is for them to care about the customer on the other end. Apathy compounds. It moves from the boardroom to the front line to the customer and back again.

But the reverse is also true. Care compounds, too. Showing a little of it to everyone around you and in the work you do doesn’t just improve the product; it changes the environment. And that might be the most unreasonable thing of all: that something so simple is so rare.

Hi!

It’s Hari. I’m sending this from Japan! Any recommendations? Please comment away!

First, thank you for going along this journey. I deeply appreciate it. We have grown together, beginning from zero:

Many newsletters focus on selling you an AI-generated course, pushing you through an email funnel, or using clickbait (emotionally charged) headlines. Mental Mosaic gives you lifelong tools to navigate day-to-day problems at work and even in life. Each letter is thoroughly researched and carefully considered, drawing on decades of experience.

If someone is trying to build something or increase their influence in an organization, please share this with them.

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On Space:

Spaced Repetition helps you recall concepts better.

Instead of cramming, you revisit an idea just as you’re about to forget it.
Each return strengthens the neural trace, making recall faster and more durable.

The timing matters more than the effort.
Short exposures, spaced over time, beat long sessions done once.

Learning isn’t built by intensity.
It’s built by return.

In the spirit of that, I’m sharing the key concepts of three of our most popular newsletters:

1. The Mathematics of Courage

2. Your Amygdala Is Running the Meeting

   

3. The Edit

Why mess with an Icon?

In a 2017 Harvard lecture, he revealed his core method:

“I was only interested in restraining myself and only editing it 3 percent.”

Favorite Reader Comments:

Two Recommendations:

1. Acquired: History of Rolex

2. How could we not? High Agency

Thank you.

To many more,

Hari

Six people at the same party. Six completely different versions of what happened.

Not fuzzy details—major plot points. Who said what. Who flirted with whom? What the room felt like.

All six were telling the truth.

This wasn’t a mystery thriller. It was Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell. What began as a search for her biological father turned into something more unsettling: proof that multiple honest versions of the same truth can coexist and contradict.

They always joked that Sarah didn’t look like her dad. Her parents weren’t getting along before she was born. Her mother took an acting job and became the belle of the party circuit. Sarah arrived shortly after. Her mother always insisted Sarah was her father’s daughter.

Years later, Sarah made the film tracing her biological father. But what lingered wasn’t the paternity mystery. It was how memory actually works.

We treat memory like a camera roll. It isn’t. It’s a living document—edited by emotion, identity, and repetition.

Conflict doesn’t always come from lies. Sometimes it comes from two people telling the truth—and meaning different things by it.

The Framework

For leaders, the harder question isn’t who’s lying. It’s about deciding when information arrives secondhand, filtered through people with incentives, fear, ego, and reputational risk.

Map the Emotion

We were underwriting a deal where two partners were locked in a bitter dispute over a past project. The numbers worked. Structure was sound.

Then one executive said the quiet part out loud: “The real risk here is the emotion.”

Ego. Revenge. Loss aversion. Two people, each convinced they were wronged. No model captures that.

Ask Five Whys: Without Stopping at the Flattering Answer

Taiichi Ohno popularized the practice of asking “why” five times. The insight isn’t persistence but resisting the urge to stop when the answer protects your ego.

“I missed the deadline because the other team dropped the ball.” True. And incomplete.

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Decide What “Enough Truth” Looks Like

A DNA test might get you to 99.9%. Remarkable—and still not absolute.

Most business decisions don’t even get close.

You won’t know if the regulation will shift. If a supplier fails. If a key person quits six months in.

So the job isn’t the perfect truth. It’s decision-grade truth.

The Fact-Checking Illusion

The New Yorker rigorously fact-checks names, dates, and quotes—and still receives letters when stories feel wrong. Because truth isn’t just factual. It’s psychological: framing, omission, motive.

We think truth is something you uncover. In reality, it’s something you triangulate.

Facts don’t fail us. Stories do—because stories demand coherence, and life refuses to cooperate.

Truth Triage is how you lead anyway.