The Favorite Poison of Smart People

There's a legal, free, socially approved drug that's taking your life away in monthly installments. It's not alcohol. It's not social media. It's not pornography.

It's something you're consuming right now.

The casino you carry in your pocket

A few days ago I read a line that left me thinking for several days:

"Your phone is a casino where the currency isn't money. It's the part of your life you were supposed to use to become someone."

Reread it.

The casino doesn't steal your money. It steals the time in which you were going to become someone.

And the trap isn't Instagram or TikTok. Those are obvious. The real trap is more sophisticated. It's educational content. Productivity podcasts. Videos about how to be more successful. Newsletters like this one (well, this one is trying to open your eyes if you keep reading).

Because when you watch TikTok you know you're wasting time. When you listen to a podcast about how to build a successful company, you feel like you're working. But you're not working. You're consuming content about working.

Smart people's favorite procrastination

Mark Manson wrote it recently with a clarity that hurts:

"Learning more is smart people's favorite form of procrastination."

Average people procrastinate watching series. Smart people procrastinate reading books on stoic philosophy, listening to CEOs talk about their routines and how they made their first million dollars. The result is the same. But the second one has better PR.

And here's the operational problem. If you're a senior professional, you read newsletters like this one, listen to podcasts on your commute, watch YouTube videos about AI and the future of work, you feel informed. You feel like you're doing something. Like you're preparing for what's coming. You're not doing anything. You're consuming content about what others are doing.

The difference between the real high performer and the sophisticated content consumer is not the amount of information they have. It's what they did this week with the information they already had three months ago.

Why success podcasts are a structural lie

There's a cognitive bias called survivorship bias. Let me tell you quickly with the story that best illustrates it. During World War II, bomber planes came back from missions full of bullet holes. The military decided to reinforce the areas where the holes were most visible. Logical, right?

A mathematician named Abraham Wald told them: no. Reinforce the areas where there are no holes. Why? Because the planes you're looking at are the ones that came back. The ones that took hits in the other areas didn't come back. They're not in your sample. You're only seeing the survivors.

That's exactly what happens with every success podcast you listen to. Diary of a CEO and all those Spotify Top 10 ones. They only interview the planes that came back. The ones it worked out for. The ones who survived.

They never interview the thousands of guys who got up at 5 a.m., took the famous ice baths, read Marcus Aurelius, worked 80-hour weeks, and failed anyway. Because those don't sell books or smart rings.

And there's something even worse. In 2006, a Columbia sociologist named Duncan Watts ran an experiment. He created an artificial music market with 48 unknown songs. He split 14,000 participants into groups. One group listened without seeing what the others downloaded. The others could see.

The result? The same song landed at number 26 in one group, number 1 in another, number 40 in another. Same song. Same quality. The only thing that changed was the luck of who downloaded it first.

The technical conclusion: success has a floor and a ceiling determined by quality. But within that range, luck rules.

Why gurus don't lie, but mislead anyway

When a successful CEO explains how they got to the top, they're not lying to you consciously. But there's something neurological worth understanding in that whole narrative. The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, after decades studying split-brain patients, reached an uncomfortable conclusion: the conscious mind isn't the one that makes decisions. It's the one that writes the press release afterward.

The brain decides first. Then it builds the explanation for why it decided.

When a successful entrepreneur tells you their story, they're not lying. They're telling you the version their own brain built retroactively to make sense of what happened. But that version isn't replicable. Because the important part of what happened to them was luck, timing, contacts. And luck, by definition, can't be copied.

You can copy Jeff Bezos's morning routine. But you won't have his father. Or his historical timing. Or the same contacts on Wall Street.

The only thing you'll have is the feeling, for half an hour in the morning, that you're doing something important. Then you'll go to your same old job.

Hedgehogs and foxes

There's a framework that changes how you listen to any success podcast from today on. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay in 1953 dividing thinkers into two categories. Hedgehogs know one big thing. Foxes know many small things.

The hedgehog has one organizing idea of the world. A formula. A framework. "Everything is explained by this." The fox has many ideas at once, some contradicting each other, and tolerates uncertainty without needing to close the answer.

Fifty years later, a researcher named Philip Tetlock ran a study that lasted two decades. He analyzed 28,000 predictions by professional experts (economists, political scientists, analysts) about real-world events. The conclusion: hedgehogs predict worse than chance. Foxes predict better than hedgehogs. And hedgehogs are the ones who show up most on podcasts and in the media.

Reason: hedgehogs sell better. They have a clear idea, they speak with confidence, they promise to explain everything. Foxes answer "it depends, there are multiple factors, you can't know for sure." That doesn't generate virality. But it predicts reality better.

You know who the guests on the famous Diary of a CEO podcast are? Hedgehogs. You know who the authors of the best-selling productivity books are? Hedgehogs. You know who has 100,000 followers on LinkedIn selling the secret to success? Same thing.

The operator you want to be is not a hedgehog. It's a fox. It has no formula. It has accumulated judgment, humility about what it doesn't know, and a willingness to iterate when something doesn't work. That willingness is exactly the opposite of what the podcasts sell.

The triangle that does matter

A few days ago, George Mack published something I find the best operational synthesis I've seen in years. He called it "the High Agency triangle." And it's just three phrases:

"I'll figure it out." "I'm willing to be misunderstood." "I can fix it if it breaks."

Those three phrases aren't learned by listening to a podcast.

The first is practiced when something doesn't work and you choose to look for the solution instead of complaining that you can't find it.

The second is practiced when you say something most people don't want to hear and you withstand the social discomfort knowing your point of view is valid.

The third is practiced when something you did fails, and instead of passing the blame, you repair it (without complaints).

That's High Agency. It's not mindset. It's not positive mental attitude. It's a concrete practice exercised every day.

I like to say it in English because translating it complicates and dilutes the concept. But if I had to define it from my point of view, it's the absolute capacity of an individual to act with total autonomy, bend reality in their favor, and find paths where others see a wall. It's the person who says: "I make things happen." Rewrites the manual. If there's an obstacle, they immediately look for an alternative. They master the system.

And the only way to develop it is by doing, not consuming.

Why I write and run marathons

Here comes the most uncomfortable part of this week's newsletter. The part where I have to apply my own analysis to myself so it serves as a real example of what I'm talking about.

And for that I'll leave you two examples. I write this newsletter every Tuesday. It's not a project that changes the world. It doesn't generate income for me. It consumes hours I could use for other things.

But why do I do it? Not for the formula of success. I don't have it. Not to build an audience (building is slow and painful). Not to sell them something later (there's no product yet).

I do it because practicing High Agency requires real friction. And for me the friction is publishing something every Tuesday knowing it could go wrong. That most people might not read it. That some will disagree. That the algorithm won't reward me.

Every Tuesday, "I'll figure it out" (what do I write, will the people it shows up for in the feed like it?). "I'm willing to be misunderstood" (someone will read me wrong). "I can fix it if it breaks" (if I mess up this week, I come back the next).

But at the end of the day the newsletter is about building a platform for thought, sharing knowledge and ideas with people who think similarly or are on the same wavelength of this whole concept of what it means to be Above Average. Not just in the tech sphere of work itself, but in life itself.

Same with the marathons. I'm at 19. Number 20 I'm training for right now, coming back from an injury a few weeks ago, with 17 weeks to go. Nobody runs 19 marathons for the formula. The formula is absurd: you get injured, you get bored, you get hurt, you lose weekends, you spend a lot of money on registrations, travel, shoes, you have to go out and run when it rains.

But that's exactly why it's what it is. Because it can't be faked. Because the only way to do it is by doing it. AI can fake a newsletter, a post, a comment. It can fake a video. But it can't fake 42 kilometers. That you have to earn. That sense of achievement isn't bought, it's made.

And most important of all: when my kids are grown, they won't remember the newsletters I wrote. They'll remember that their old man got up to run when it rained. And to write when he didn't feel like it. And to keep going when it would have been easier to stop. When the easiest thing is to consume. That, on a personal level, seems to me a good example of High Agency. That's not Proof of Work for an audience. It's an example for two people: my kids Max and Mía.

And these two examples can be anything that makes you feel alive. Because yes, being a High Agency person has that side effect. It makes you feel alive. It sets you apart from the mass. It helps you achieve what you set out to do. Whatever it is.

The question for this week

It's not: what podcast are you going to listen to?

It's: what are you going to do this week that requires real High Agency?

Find one concrete thing. With friction. That could go wrong. That when it goes wrong, you have to fix it. That's being Above Average. It's not being better than average at consuming content about being better. It's being better than average at doing "something."

Smart people's favorite poison is believing that learning more equals doing more. It's not true. Doing is the only thing that replaces doing.

Pablo / En Producción

P.S. This newsletter breaks a streak of four straight issues on SAP and Enterprise AI. Not from topic exhaustion. From structural necessity of the brand. Above Average has four pillars: Enterprise & AI Survival, Builder Mindset, Biological Clean Core, Full Stack Human. This issue is from the fourth. The next one returns to the first. But all four are the same practice from different angles.

References:

Mark Manson. Substack, May 2026.
George Mack. "The high agency triangle." Substack, May 2026.
Barry Lam (Barry's Economics). "Diary of a CEO is the worst thing for your success." YouTube, May 2026.
Tetlock, Philip. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton University Press, 2005.
Berlin, Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox. 1953.
Gazzaniga, Michael. Split-brain research. Accumulated work since the 1960s.
Watts, Duncan. "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market." Science, 2006.
Dunning, David & Kruger, Justin. "Unskilled and Unaware of It." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999.