How High Performers Actually Think (Not What They Say)
Why the advice you hear and the decisions that actually created success are two completely different things.
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A successful founder gets asked for advice at a conference.
He talks about his morning routine. His productivity system. The habits that keep him operating at peak performance.
He doesn’t mention that three years ago, he shut down a profitable business making $15K/month because he’d already learned everything it had to teach him.
That part doesn’t sound like advice. It sounds reckless.
But that’s the actual pattern. What high performers say they do and how they actually think are completely different games.
They Quit Things That Work
Yosef Martin built Merchandize Liquidators from scratch.
A business buying and selling excess inventory. Unsexy. Tedious. But it worked.
By the time he was done, it was doing $10 million in revenue. A genuinely good business. Profitable. Sustainable. The kind most entrepreneurs dream of building.
Then he shut it down.
Not because it failed. Because it succeeded at teaching him what he needed to know.
He’d spent years in the excess inventory game. Learning how brands dealt with overstock. Understanding supply chain inefficiencies. Seeing where value was being destroyed.
Most people would have optimized that business forever. Scaled it to $20M, then $50M. Built systems. Hired operators. Extracted cash.
Yosef saw something else. A bigger application of what he’d learned.
He took that knowledge—how to acquire excess inventory at massive discounts, how to move products efficiently, how brands thought about overstock—and built BoxyCharm.
A beauty subscription box that solved the same inventory problem for cosmetics brands, but with better unit economics and a model that could scale faster.
BoxyCharm sold to Ipsy for $500 million.
The $10M business was just expensive education. The real business came from applying the lesson.
Most people can’t process this decision. You found something that works. You’re making money in your sleep. Why stop?
Because “working” and “worth doing” are different calculations.
The product worked. It would keep working. And continuing would mean spending the next two years maintaining something he’d already figured out.
High performers optimize for learning rate, not success rate.
Once they’ve extracted the lesson—how to build, how to launch, how to sell, what the market actually wants—continuing feels like running the same experiment twice.
That’s not being flaky. That’s being efficient with what actually matters: how fast you’re learning.
Money compounds. But learning compounds faster.
The $15K/month looks like a win. But compared to what he learned building the next thing? The cost of staying was higher than the cost of quitting.
This is why their careers look chaotic from the outside. They abandon strategies that are working. They quit when everyone tells them to keep going. They start over after they’ve already won.
They’re not chasing novelty. They’re chasing the next lesson. And the next lesson isn’t where you already are.
They Optimize For Cycle Time, Not Perfection
Here’s another pattern nobody talks about.
High performers fail more in one year than most people attempt in ten.
Not because they’re reckless. Because they’ve compressed the time it takes to find out if something works.
Most people’s timeline:
Three months planning
Three months building
Six months trying to make it work even when the data says it won’t
One year to learn one lesson
High performers’ timeline:
Two weeks building a rough version
One week getting real feedback
One day deciding if it’s worth continuing
Three weeks to learn the same lesson
After a year, most people have one major attempt, still in progress, probably not working.
After a year, high performers have tried twenty things. Seventeen failed. Three worked. One took off.
They’re not better at picking winners. They’re better at finding out fast which things are losers.
This is what “fail fast” actually means. Not as a motivational phrase. As literal strategy.
Speed of failure compounds. Each failed experiment eliminates a path. Each one costs less time, less money, less ego than the last one.
By the time you launch your first polished version, they’ve already eliminated twelve wrong paths and are operating from better information.
The advantage isn’t talent. It’s that they can fail in three weeks while you’re still planning.
More attempts per year means more learning. More learning means better pattern recognition. Better patterns mean better decisions. Better decisions compound into outcomes that look like genius but are actually just higher cycle count.
This connects back to quitting things that work. If you can test an idea in three weeks, you can afford to quit the ones that succeed at the wrong thing. You haven’t invested a year. You’ve invested three weeks. The switching cost is low.
Low switching cost means you can optimize for the right success instead of being trapped by the first success.
They Detect The Wrong Success Earlier
There’s something else high performers do that looks insane.
They’ll be three months into something. Making progress. Everything trending up.
And they’ll stop.
Not because it’s failing. Because they realized it would succeed at the wrong thing.
Most people can’t see this distinction. Success is success, right?
Wrong. Success is only success if it takes you where you actually want to go.
You can succeed your way into a trap.
Build a business that requires you to do work you hate. Grow an audience that expects content you’re bored creating. Master a skill that leads to opportunities you don’t want.
Success at the wrong thing is worse than failure. Failure frees you to try something else. Success at the wrong thing traps you.
High performers have learned to feel this earlier. They can sense when something would succeed but in a direction that doesn’t serve where they’re actually trying to go.
So they stop. Before the success makes it expensive to leave.
This looks like quitting to everyone watching. “You were so close.” “It was starting to work.” “Why give up now?”
They’re not giving up. They’re avoiding a trap.
Most people don’t course-correct until after they’ve succeeded at the wrong thing. Then they’re stuck. The business works but they hate running it. The audience expects content they don’t want to create. The income depends on continuing.
Hard to exit at that point. Everyone sees you as successful. Identity wrapped up in it. Bills to pay.
High performers exit before success locks them in.
This is second-order thinking applied to your own trajectory. They’re not asking “is this working?” They’re asking “if this works, where does it take me? And then what?”
The first question most people ask. The second question separates those who control their trajectory from those who get dragged by their own success.
The Actual Game They’re Playing
Here’s what all of this reveals.
High performers aren’t following a different routine. They’re playing a different game with different rules.
The game most people play: Pick a path. Commit. Work hard. Hope it works. Pivot only if it fails catastrophically.
The game high performers play: Test multiple paths simultaneously. Kill the ones that aren’t working. Kill the ones working toward the wrong thing. Double down on what’s working toward the right thing. Repeat.
Completely different optimization functions.
The first game optimizes for looking committed. The second optimizes for finding what actually works.
The first game treats quitting as failure. The second treats quitting as navigation.
The first game values consistency. The second values learning speed.
The results speak for themselves. Different games produce different outcomes.
Why They Don’t Tell You This
You can’t learn this game by copying someone’s morning routine.
The morning routine is what they do now that they’ve already learned how to play. It’s maintenance. It’s optimization of something that’s already working.
What got them there was messier.
More failures. More false starts. More uncomfortable uncertainty about whether any of it would work. More things abandoned mid-success.
That’s the part they don’t package into advice. Because it doesn’t sound responsible. Because it requires room to be wrong that most people haven’t built yet. Because by the time you’re asking them for advice, they’ve forgotten what it felt like to not know.
But that’s the actual pattern:
Test faster. Fail cheaper. Learn quicker. Quit more—especially things that work but teach you nothing new.
The polished systems come later. After you’ve already learned which game you’re playing and figured out how to win it.
That’s what they won’t tell you. Not because they’re hiding it. Because they genuinely don’t remember.
Success has a way of making the path look cleaner than it was.
Thank you for reading.
– Scott
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