The success tree

The model#

Pick a future date. Say success happens on Jun 18, 2027. You don't need to define success perfectly yet; it's a point in the future. Success is the result of certain actions, so you can draw a tree (a DAG) of the actions that lead to it, and give each action a weight.

• Survive (10/10): sleep, eating, health at a survival level.
• Direct tasks: actions that lead straight to success. To earn $100k: decide what to sell, build the product, a landing page, marketing (SEO/GEO, social, newsletter).
• Indirect tasks: reading business books, meeting people and role models, getting inspired.
• Non-actions (to cut): travel, gym, improving English, TV, social media, tennis, painting, meeting friends.

This is a good start. Fixing a date and working backwards is the core of Gary Keller's The ONE Thing, Goldratt's Prerequisite Tree and the Critical Path Method. Writing down what you won't do is rarer and more useful than a to-do list.

The flaw: weight isn't fixed#

The model assumes every action has one weight, so it's either in or out. In math terms that's wrong. Weight is a marginal value: how much one more hour raises P(success by the date). And it falls the more you do.

• Hours 1–7 of sleep carry huge weight. The 10th hour carries almost none.
• The first gym session of the week counts a lot; the seventh, little.
• The first business book is useful; the twentieth is mostly procrastination.
• The 60th work hour of the week adds little. John Pencavel's study found output at 70 hours a week was barely above output at 55.

Follow that rule and you never end up at zero for everything outside "direct". You end up with a lot of direct work plus small doses of several other things.

Four more problems#

1. Undefined success is why "direct tasks" have no weight. You can't weight the branches without the goal at the top. Write it as a number: "$X revenue by Jun 18, 2027."
2. The tree is a guess, not a fact. Each link is a probability. Marketing raises your odds; it doesn't produce success. And "decide what to sell" is not one task among many. It's the root: if it's wrong, every hour below it is wasted.
3. The non-action list mixes two kinds of thing. TV and scrolling are junk. Gym, friends and painting build capacity, or simply are your life.
4. Missing tasks: talking to customers and selling (the most direct action there is), using AI to multiply direct work, a weekly review, rest, family.

Three circles, not one list#

Sort every action by which circle it sits in: Survive (keeps body and mind running), Success (moves you toward the date) and Life (worth doing for its own sake).

What the sort shows:

• Only TV and scrolling are junk. Everything else on the original "non-action" list sits inside at least one circle.
• Sleep and gym aren't chores. They multiply every direct hour. Cutting sleep to add work hours loses output overall.
• Friends are closer to eating than to TV. People with strong social ties had about 50% higher odds of survival in Holt-Lunstad's 2010 review of many studies.
• Split social media by producing vs consuming, not by app. Posting is marketing; scrolling is nothing.
• English is filed wrong if your customers read English. Every page, post and email is written in it.
• Nothing is in all three circles, and that's worth designing. Tennis with founder friends. A walk while talking to a customer. A conference trip with a friend.

What goes wrong if you cut everything else#

Say you keep only the success zone for a while. How long before it hurts?

Risks at any length:

1. You lose the way to learn you're wrong. Conversations, travel and outside reading are where you discover the tree is off.
2. Busywork hides inside the success zone. Polishing a landing page counts as "direct". Measure customers and revenue, not hours.
3. Hours get worse without recovery. Sabine Sonnentag's research: switching off, and learning something unrelated, predicts better energy the next day.
4. It's a lopsided bet. Giving up the rest of life is a certain cost; success is uncertain. If the date passes without success, you've paid both.
5. In the AI era, direct tasks are what's getting cheap (Chapter 5). Judgment, taste, trust and relationships are what's getting scarce, and they're built in the zones you planned to cut.

A better rule: minimums, then everything to success#

• Cut to zero: TV and scrolling. Posting stays; it's marketing.
• Minimums you never skip: 7+ hours of sleep; exercise 3× a week (tennis counts); one real social contact a week; one full day off a week; one "pointless" hour a week (paint).
• Fold into work: English into the marketing writing; meeting people into customer and founder conversations.
• Defer: leisure travel, as a reward for hitting a milestone.
• Every 12 weeks: a mini Think Week. Re-weight the tree, check early signals, continue or change course.

Who says the same, and who warns#

Cal Newport's Slow Productivity is where both sides meet: intense periods are fine as long as they're seasons that end.