Everyone wishes each other success.

It's the socially acceptable blessing we throw around at graduations, job interviews, and New Year's resolutions. "I wish you success!" we say, as if we're gifting someone a lottery ticket.

But I've stopped saying it.

Instead, I wish people clarity.

Clarity about what they're actually buying into. Because success isn't what most people think it is, and the price tag is hidden until checkout.

## Success Is Going Against the Cows

Here's what people get wrong about the "natural order" of things.

We're told success flows from simplicity to calm, like water finding its level. But that's backwards. The natural order of things is chaos—what I call "cows." Herds moving together, following the path of least resistance, grazing where everyone else grazes.

Success means breaking from the herd. It means friction. It means defying the gravity of comfort and convention.

Most people know their destination but have zero clue about the hurdles waiting between here and there. That's the problem with wishing someone success—you're essentially saying "I hope you win a game without knowing the rules."

## Success Is a Trojan Horse

Here's the brutal truth: success is more expensive than people think.

It arrives disguised as a gift, but inside it's packed with costs nobody mentions:

- Relationships that don't survive your growth
- Comfort zones you'll never get back
- Sleep you'll lose to anxiety about losing what you've built
- The person you were before, who dies a little each level up

Success demands sacrifice, but it never tells you what's on the altar until you're already holding the knife.

The hustle culture peddlers selling "just grind harder" are lying by omission. They show you the destination photos but never the receipts for the journey.

## The Price of Moving Worlds

Every successful person I know has paid prices they didn't expect:

The entrepreneur who built a million-dollar company but lost their marriage to 80-hour weeks. The artist who achieved their dream show but discovered fame felt nothing like they imagined. The executive who climbed the ladder only to realize they hated the view from the top.

Success isn't cruel—it's just honest about physics. You can't move from one place to another without friction. You can't defy gravity without burning fuel. You can't break from the herd without walking alone, at least for a while.

## Why I Wish You Clarity Instead

When I say "I wish you clarity," I mean:

Clarity about the real price tag. Not just the obvious costs like time and effort, but the hidden ones like who you'll become and what you'll leave behind.

Clarity about your actual destination. Not the Instagram version of success, but what you specifically want and why you want it.

Clarity about the hurdles. The obstacles aren't bugs in the system—they are the system. They're not roadblocks to success; they're the price of admission.

Success without clarity is just expensive confusion.

## The Gift of Knowing What You're Buying

I don't wish you success because success is a decision, not a destination. And decisions require information.

I wish you the clarity to know exactly what you're signing up for. To understand that success means choosing your hard, not avoiding it. To realize that breaking from the herd means walking alone until you find your tribe.

The most successful people I know aren't the ones who had it easy. They're the ones who knew the price and decided to pay it anyway.

That's not luck. That's clarity.

So here's my wish for you: May you see clearly what success actually costs. May you choose your struggles consciously. And may you never mistake the Trojan horse of success for a gift with no strings attached.

The cows will keep grazing. The question is: are you clear about why you're walking away from the herd?

And if you know me, you know how obsessed I am with being smart.

By the way, I noticed the very huge white space there. I was supposed to add an image but I'm too lazy to do that so bear with me and just ignore it.

For some reason that I struggled to explain for a very long time, it was becoming hard for me to write New Year's resolution. So I had to do a deep down introspection to understand a little bit what was happening to me. And this is what I came out with.

The smarter you get, the shorter your planning cycles should become

Most people treat goal-setting backwards. They think big, annual commitments show ambition. Actually, it shows you don't understand how intelligence works.

Smart people adapt fast. Their decision-making improves, their pattern recognition sharpens, their priorities shift based on new information. Locking yourself into January's version of success is like coding in a language you'll outgrow by March.

The Intelligence Evolution Problem

Here's what happens when you're relatively intelligent: your brain gets better at seeing the world every few months. Not every year. Every few months.

You spot patterns you missed before. You develop new frameworks for thinking about problems. Your understanding of what's actually important shifts as you gather more data.

If your planning system can't keep up with your cognitive evolution, it's not a planning system—it's a cognitive anchor.

Why Annual Planning Fails Smart People

When you set 12-month goals, you're making two bad assumptions:
1. That future-you will want the same things current-you wants
2. That current-you is smart enough to predict what future-you should be doing

Both are wrong.

The version of you that reads your January goals in December has processed thousands of new data points, refined dozens of mental models, and developed capabilities you can't even imagine yet.

You're essentially taking strategic advice from a less intelligent version of yourself.

The 3-Day System

I switched to maximum 3-day planning cycles with one concrete objective per cycle. Everything else stays fluid.

Why 3 days? It's long enough to make meaningful progress, short enough to pivot when you learn something new.

This isn't about being scattered or uncommitted. It's about building a system that scales with your intelligence rather than constraining it.

The Retrospective Trap

Same logic applies to year-end retrospectives. Writing detailed "lessons learned" for your future self assumes the person reading them won't have evolved beyond needing that advice.

If reading your old journal entries doesn't feel a little cringey, you're not growing fast enough.

The gap between who you were and who you are is where growth happens. Don't try to bridge it with advice from the past—leverage it with systems that adapt to the present.

Systems Beat Goals

Smart people need systems that get smarter with them:
- Short feedback loops over long commitments
- Adaptive frameworks over rigid plans
- One clear next action over dozens of distant targets

Your planning system should enhance your intelligence, not limit it to what you could imagine 12 months ago.

“Hey, I wanna rent a luxury ship, float it near the ass-end of Argentina for two weeks, fill it with rich people, scientists, and fancy food, and charge $14,000 per person…”
You’d look them in the eye and say:
“That sounds like a loss-making PowerPoint deck, not a business.”

And yet, it’s a thriving business.
Not just thriving. Booked-out-in-advance kind of thriving.
So what’s going on here?

A friend of mine actually did one of these cruises. Over the weekend, we spent nearly 50 minutes watching the documentary that was made about her trip. There were whales, glaciers, and scientists explaining the local ecosystems. It was surreal. She told a little behind-the-scenes things, like how they had to wear boots just to go ashore, and how the penguins didn’t even care that humans were standing a few feet away. The whole thing felt part safari, part TED Talk, part five-star resort. It made me realize: this isn’t just a vacation. It’s a very specific kind of dream.

And the part that’s hard to wrap your head around, especially if you’re used to building “normal” products, is that this is an extremely expensive idea targeted at a very narrow group of people. Renting a ship, getting a highly trained crew, bringing in scientists and chefs, coordinating excursions in places that barely have Wi-Fi? The logistics alone sound like a nightmare. And yet, they sell out.

So here’s the question I keep coming back to: did the cruise idea come first, or did they already know there were people willing to buy something like this?

Maybe it’s a mix of both. What’s clear is that the people behind this understood something deeply: there’s a group of travelers who don’t just want a vacation, they want an experience so rare, so curated, so immersive, that it feels like a story they’ll be telling for the rest of their lives. These aren’t tourists. These are explorers with credit cards.

And what they’ve built isn’t a mass-market cruise. It’s a floating, French-speaking, luxury classroom with wild animals as supporting characters. The ships are small, the staff is highly trained, and the destinations feel exclusive. That’s the product. That’s the value proposition.

What I find most fascinating is that they didn’t try to appeal to everyone. They aimed straight at the top, people who want education and elegance in the same sentence. And they priced accordingly.

For someone like me, who’s used to thinking about scale, affordability, reach, this breaks all the usual rules. But maybe that’s the lesson. You don’t always need to create something for millions of people. Sometimes, all you need is 100 people who really, really want what you’re offering, and are willing to pay for it.

This cruise wasn’t built to convince the masses. It was designed for the few who already knew they wanted something like it, even if they couldn’t quite describe it yet. That’s what a sharp, unique value proposition looks like. And for all its absurdity, it’s also kind of brilliant.

But...how do you even find these people?