The Invisible Hand That Shapes Everything

Hello!

It’s Thursday, 6^th November 2025. Welcome back to Bold Efforts, where we unpack the hidden forces shaping how we live and work. Let’s start with something simple. People don’t act on what you tell them. They act on what you reward them for. That single truth explains more about human behavior than most management books combined.

Every choice we make sits on top of an invisible architecture of incentives. You can see it in how people work, lead, invest, vote, or even believe in things. The world runs on stories, but it moves on incentives. They are the silent script behind every act of compliance, rebellion, innovation, or decay. You can fight them or ignore them, but they’ll still decide what happens next.

Look closely at any organization that failed, and you’ll find incentives that quietly rotted its foundation. Not bad strategy. Not bad people. Just rewards that pointed in the wrong direction. The financial crisis wasn’t born from greed alone; it was born from incentives that paid people to ignore risk. The corporate scandals of the last few decades follow the same pattern: systems where the fastest way to win was to cheat the very system itself.

When you reward speed, you get shortcuts. When you reward compliance, you get silence. When you reward visibility, you get politics. When you reward growth at all costs, you eventually pay the cost. None of this is moral failure. It is design failure.

Every system produces exactly what it’s built to reward. The problem is that most of us don’t see the design until it’s too late.

A simple example: think of performance reviews. They pretend to measure performance but often measure proximity to power. Employees spend more time managing perception than creating value, because perception is what gets promoted. Or take the corporate obsession with meetings. Why do we fill calendars with them? Because being seen talking feels safer than being judged on the work itself. It’s not laziness. It’s incentive alignment.

The deeper you go, the clearer it gets. Managers who say they want innovation also fear losing control. Startups that talk about culture often tie rewards to short-term metrics. Politicians who promise reform depend on the same donors who profit from the status quo. Families, too, fall into incentive traps. Parents reward grades over curiosity, obedience over honesty, appearance over character. And then we wonder why children grow up playing roles instead of discovering who they are.

Money is only one layer of this. The most powerful incentives are emotional. Status. Recognition. Belonging. A sense of importance. A young employee might chase praise from a boss more intensely than a bonus. A founder might cling to control not because it pays more but because it feels safer. We tell ourselves stories about purpose and vision, but underneath, incentives pull the strings. They determine whose opinions matter, what risks are worth taking, and which truths are better left unsaid.

The tragedy is not that people follow incentives. It’s that they rarely know which ones they’re following. We confuse loyalty with fear. We mistake alignment with ambition. We forget that incentives can turn integrity into calculation and creativity into compliance if we’re not careful.

Incentives don’t just shape actions. They shape perception. Once a reward structure is set, people start seeing the world through it. A journalist rewarded for outrage starts noticing only scandals. A marketer rewarded for clicks starts optimizing for anger. A CEO rewarded for quarterly growth starts treating employees as costs instead of people. Slowly, the frame becomes the reality. The game becomes the truth.

That’s how civilizations drift too. When power rewards obedience, societies shrink into conformity. When power rewards performance, innovation blooms. The Renaissance wasn’t a moral awakening. It was an incentive shift. Patrons paid artists. Merchants funded thinkers. Cities competed on progress. Incentives moved, and culture followed.

The challenge is not just setting better incentives but keeping them honest. Over time, every system gets gamed. Bonuses become loopholes. Titles become shields. The scoreboard stops measuring what matters. What once encouraged excellence now rewards survival. That’s when institutions decay quietly from within. You can feel it before you can prove it. The people stop believing the game is fair. That’s how decline begins.

The only antidote is awareness. You have to ask, constantly: what behaviors does this system truly reward? And are those the behaviors we actually want? It’s a simple question, but few dare to ask it honestly. Because the answer often points to us. Our comfort. Our vanity. Our complicity.

If you lead people, you are designing a game. Whether you admit it or not. Every rule, every metric, every reward tells your team what you actually value. And once you see that, you realize leadership is not about inspiration. It’s about architecture. You can’t preach long-term thinking while paying for short-term gains. You can’t talk about innovation while punishing mistakes. You can’t build trust while rewarding obedience. Systems are louder than speeches.

Incentives are not evil. They are neutral energy. They can destroy or transform. When they align with truth, they elevate. When they drift, they corrupt. They don’t shout. They whisper. And most of the time, they sound like reason.

The smartest leaders understand this. They know human nature doesn’t need fixing. It needs designing. They treat incentives as levers of culture, not tools of control. They don’t try to motivate people into behaving differently. They build systems where the right behavior becomes the easiest path.

In the end, everything is incentive-driven. Markets, governments, relationships, even art. The trick is not to escape them but to make them visible. Because the moment you see them clearly, you regain control. You stop mistaking compliance for commitment. You stop confusing applause with impact. You start asking better questions. What am I really optimizing for? Who benefits from my current behavior? What game am I actually playing?

At the risk of repeating myself n^th time, incentives explain everything. They are the invisible hand that shapes our choices, our culture, our future. The world bends toward whatever it rewards. And the people who understand that are the ones quietly shaping it.

Thank you for reading. See you next week!

Best,
Kartik

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Who am I?
I’m Kartik, founder of Polynomial Studio, a holding company and product studio building AI-driven businesses for the future of work. The way we work and live is being rewritten. AI, remote work, and shifting economic forces are reshaping careers, businesses, and entire industries. The big question is where it’s all heading.

For the past eight years, I’ve been at the forefront of these shifts, working across real estate, technology, startups, and corporate strategy. I’ve helped businesses navigate change and stay ahead of what’s next, always focused on understanding the forces shaping our future and how we can use them to build something better. Click here to know more about me.

Why Bold Efforts?
I started Bold Efforts because I believe work should fit into life, not the other way around. Too many people are stuck in outdated systems that don’t serve them. This newsletter is about challenging the status quo and making the effort to design work around life. It brings together bold ideas and actionable insights to help you build a healthier, more balanced relationship with work, leading to greater purpose and fulfillment. If you’re looking for fresh perspectives on how to work and live better, you’re in the right place.

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