PROLOGUE I was thirty-two years old, it was two in the morning, and I was sitting at the kitchen table in an apartment in Padova. My wife was asleep. My son was asleep. Outside the window --- that Italian silence you only get in winter: no scooters, no voices from balconies, just the distant hum of the ventilation from the bakery across the street. In front of me lay a laptop with a spreadsheet open. Excel. Green and red cells. There were more red ones. Significantly more. I had been staring at those numbers for forty minutes, trying to find the error. There had to be an error. Because if there was no error --- it meant my business was dying. The store I had spent years building. The store I had put not just money into --- nerves, health, relationships. The store I had moved to another country for, learned a language for, untangled Italian bureaucracy for --- the kind of bureaucracy that can kill anyone's enthusiasm. There was no error. The numbers were right. Expenses exceeded income by an amount that made my fingertips tingle. Not metaphorically --- literally. It was a panic attack, though I didn't know that's what it was called back then. Four months earlier, I had made the decision to scale. The logic was --- so it seemed to me then --- flawless. Sales were growing. Customers were coming. So we needed more: more inventory, more staff, more floor space. I took out a loan. Hired four people. Doubled the product range --- brought in what I would have wanted to buy myself. Launched an ad campaign I considered borderline genius: flyers, a banner at the entrance, posts in Russian-speaking groups. All of it cost money. A lot. And none of it worked. The new employees didn't pay for themselves --- they were busy, but there were no more customers, and revenue per worker was falling. The expanded product range --- the goods I considered necessary --- sat on the shelves and spoiled. I ordered what I would have bought myself, without asking what my customers wanted to buy. The advertising brought in the curious, who came in, looked around --- and left without buying. I was attracting the wrong people with the wrong message. And so I'm sitting there at night, in silence, with a spreadsheet, asking myself a question I had never asked before: where did I go wrong? Not "what went wrong" --- but precisely "where did I go wrong." Me personally. My decisions. My analysis. My thinking. It was an unpleasant moment. Because until that night I had considered myself a good strategist. Twelve years in marketing. Crisis projects, difficult clients, competitive markets. I knew how to read an audience. I understood how attention works. I knew the mechanics of persuasion --- not from textbooks, from practice. Dozens of launches, hundreds of campaigns, thousands of pieces of copy. And with all that --- I had just spent four months and money I didn't have on a decision that was wrong from day one. Why? Not because I'm stupid. Not because I was unlucky. And not because the market "changed." The market was the same. The customers were the same. Only one thing changed: I stopped thinking and started reacting. I saw growing sales --- and reacted: "Time to expand!" I didn't ask why sales were growing. Didn't check what was behind them. Didn't wonder whether the trend would hold. I saw a green line on a chart --- and I ran. It turned out sales weren't growing because of my marketing. A business center had opened next to the store, and its employees --- fifty or so people --- had started coming to us for lunch. A temporary factor that had nothing to do with me. But I mistook someone else's luck for my own competence. A classic error --- and I, a man who had spent twelve years teaching others not to make such errors, fell for it like a freshman. Five years later, I would fall for it again. Crypto. 2018. An acquaintance would tell me over dinner how he had "tripled his investment in three months." Eyes burning, numbers sounding convincing, dozens of success stories all around. I wouldn't verify a single one of them. Wouldn't ask: "Who lost while you were winning?" Wouldn't apply a single one of the tools I would already know by then. Because euphoria is contagious, and greed is the best anesthetic for critical thinking. I would lose money. Not catastrophic --- but enough to wake up at night again with tingling fingers. The same four bugs as in the story with the store. One for one. Different scenery --- same play. And that is the scariest part: bugs don't disappear. They wait. And when you relax --- they fire again. But that's for chapter seventeen. Right now --- that night. It was the beginning. The beginning of a long, unpleasant process in which I took my own thinking apart piece by piece --- and found defect after defect. I wasn't accounting for the system. I saw one element --- "sales are growing" --- and made a decision based on one element, without asking how it connected to the rest. Like a mechanic who hears a knock in the engine and changes the tires. I confused correlation with causation. A business center opened nearby --- and sales grew. I decided: my advertising is working. Two things happened side by side --- and my brain instantly, without checking, drew a causal link between them. I didn't ask my customers a single question. Not one. In several years. I decided for them what they needed. Brought in goods I would have bought myself. Arranged the shelves by my own logic. I projected myself onto people who were not me --- and was surprised my forecasts didn't come true. I ignored data that didn't fit my picture. Several times my salespeople told me customers were asking for certain goods we didn't carry. I waved them off: "Those are isolated cases." They were not isolated cases --- they were feedback from the market, which I refused to hear because it didn't match what I had already decided. Four bugs. Running simultaneously. Each one on its own --- I probably would have caught it. All together --- they created an impenetrable illusion of a "reasonable decision." My brain built a convincing narrative: "You're doing everything right, it just needs a little more time." And I believed that narrative --- because it was mine, and because it was comfortable. A comfortable narrative is the most dangerous kind of lie. It doesn't feel like a lie. It feels like common sense. "Of course we need to expand --- sales are growing." "Of course I know what customers need --- I've been in this business for twelve years." "Of course the advertising works --- look how many people come in." Every "of course" is a red flag. But when you're inside the narrative --- you don't see the flags. You see only confirmations. And everything that doesn't confirm --- the brain quietly filters out, like spam. I got lucky. I clawed my way out. Slowly, painfully, through humiliating conversations with my wife about the money running out. Through selling off goods that should never have been bought --- at seventy percent off, below cost. Through firing people who should never have been hired --- and through the shame of looking a person in the eye and saying: "I'm sorry, I made a mistake." Not their mistake --- mine. One conversation from the kind that stays in your memory forever. The kitchen. Morning. Larisa sits across from me, holding her cup with both hands --- the way she does when she's nervous. > "Valya, how long can we hold out?" > > "Three months. If we cut everything." > > "And if we don't?" > > "A month and a half." Silence. A long one. Outside the window --- sparrows on the ledge. The sound of the milk steamer from the bar downstairs. > "Then we cut. What exactly?" Not "how could you." Not "I told you so." No tears and no hysterics. "What exactly?" A concrete question. In that moment I understood two things. First: Larisa thinks more cleanly than I do --- no husk, no self-deception, straight to the point. Second: I had married someone smarter than me and hadn't noticed for twelve years --- because I confused volume with depth. The store survived. But I came out of it a different person. Not smarter. More honest about my own mind. I began studying how thinking works. Not philosophically --- practically. Not "what is consciousness" --- but "why did I make this specific decision, and what mechanism in my head fired." I read Kahneman --- and recognized myself in the descriptions of cognitive biases. I read Stanovich --- and understood why my twelve years of experience hadn't protected me from stupidity. I read Dörner --- and saw how my mistakes repeated the mistakes of the participants in his experiments: smart, educated people who systematically destroyed virtual cities because they couldn't think in systems. I remember one specific moment. Evening, the kitchen --- again the kitchen, always the kitchen --- and Kahneman's book on the table. The chapter on confirmation bias. I'm reading the description of an experiment in which people were given a task --- test a hypothesis --- and instead of looking for refutation, everyone looked for confirmation. Every single one. No exceptions. And I think: "Well, sure, that's how people are wired, interesting stuff, but I get it..." And I freeze. Because at that very second --- while I'm reading about confirmation bias --- my brain is doing exactly what's described on the page: looking for confirmation that I "get it" and am "not like that." The bug is running in real time, right now, while I'm reading about it. Like a virus that activates when you open the antivirus program. I put the book down. Sat for a minute. And for the first time in a long while I felt real humility --- not the humiliated kind, the working kind. Like a surgeon who realizes his hands shake too. Not a reason to drop the scalpel --- a reason to train. The deeper I dug, the more clearly I saw one thing. Frightening, but liberating. I was not an exception. Most of the people around me --- entrepreneurs, managers, specialists, my friends, my partners --- lived exactly the same way. Made decisions on autopilot. Confused activity with progress. Were sure they were thinking --- and weren't. Around ninety percent of startups fail. The most common reason, according to CB Insights (an analysis of 431 companies, 2024), is "poor product-market fit": founders built something the market

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