Preconceptions

I started playing League of Legends when I was fourteen. For those who haven’t played it, League is a five-versus-five game where each team tries to destroy the other’s base. You get stronger by earning gold and experience, buy better items, level up your abilities, take down towers, and eventually crack open the enemy nexus.

When I first started, I had my own idea of what winning looked like: hunt down enemy champions and kill them. That’s what the game was about, right? Fighting. Outplaying. Making highlight plays. The waves of minions marching down each lane? Boring. I wanted action.

Then I started playing ranked. I got destroyed. Consistently.

I’d watch professional players stream, and it was like watching a different game. They’d win without getting many kills. They’d spend most of their time doing what looked boring: killing minions, managing waves, backing at weird times. They’d avoid fights I would have taken. They’d take fights I would have avoided.

It didn’t make sense. They always knew exactly what to do, and it was rarely what I thought was right.

Here’s what I eventually understood: everyone enters high-information games with preconceived notions about how to win. There’s a refinement process, sometimes brutal, where you discover the gap between what you think leads to victory and what actually does.

The guides didn’t capture this. Sure, they’d cover basics, but the real knowledge? When to push, when to freeze, when to roam, when to back. That wasn’t written anywhere. You had to develop theories. Test them. Get punished for being wrong. Adjust. Test again.

The winners have done this work. They’ve refined their understanding until it matches reality. They know what actually matters while everyone else operates on assumptions.

And everyone watching has opinions about what top players should do differently. But the people winning? They’ve already figured out what works. They trust their refined judgment over the crowd’s untested theories.

This pattern isn’t unique to League. It’s everywhere.

Directional correctness is aligning most effort toward the few causal drivers of your goal while tolerating mistakes elsewhere. It’s validated by fast feedback loops, not consensus or vibes. Put differently: we’re hunting causal rules that move the win condition, not proxies that merely correlate.

Beyond the Curriculum

The education system creates a powerful illusion. It presents a fixed menu of knowledge: these subjects, these textbooks, these courses. Master the right combination and you’ll succeed. Everyone believes the parameters for success are set. Get A’s in these classes, learn these documented skills, follow this established track.

But here’s what I’ve noticed: the competencies that actually matter often don’t exist in any curriculum. They haven’t been named. They aren’t taught in courses. Sometimes they’re novel combinations of existing knowledge. Sometimes they’re entirely new territories that nobody’s mapped yet.

Think about League again. There’s no university course on wave management or back timing. These are real competencies that determine who wins and who loses. But they emerged from play, from observation, from testing. They can’t be fully documented because they’re contextual, evolving, discovered through practice.

The people who win consistently? They’ve developed their own thesis for success. They start with documented knowledge, sure. But then they observe what actually works. They notice patterns others miss. They test combinations nobody’s tried. They identify levers nobody knew existed. They create their personal formula through constant experimentation and refinement.

And here’s why you won’t find their real formula in any book: the ones actively winning don’t document it. Why would they give away their edge? The people writing “how to succeed” books have usually already extracted their value and are monetizing the knowledge itself. But the ones still competing? They keep their thesis private. You have to watch and reverse-engineer.

Every field has infinitely more parameters than what’s written down. The fun part, the part that matters, is discovering which ones actually move the needle for you.

The Small Set

Here’s what directional correctness actually means: Among the infinite things you could do, only a small set actually matters for any given outcome.

In League, you can do thousands of things. Ward here, gank there, buy this item, take that objective. But the set of actions that actually determines who wins? It’s surprisingly small. Farm efficiently. Control vision around objectives. Don’t die unnecessarily. Push when ahead. The pros aren’t doing magic. They’re doing the few things that matter, consistently.

This applies everywhere. In any field, for any goal, there seems to be an overwhelming number of options. Different strategies, different paths, different advice from different experts. But the actual set of principles you need to operate with, the things that genuinely move the needle? It’s a small subset of all that noise.

Your job is to identify this small set. Develop your thesis about what actually matters. Test it through experimentation. Validate it through results. Then execute relentlessly on just those things while ignoring everything else.

Directional correctness isn’t doing everything right; it’s doing the few things that determine the outcome—and iterating fast.

• Startup growth: find 1–2 channels that compound; cut broad-channel thrash.
• Sales: prioritize qualified pipeline and follow-ups over top-of-funnel vanity.

How to Find Your Small Set

• Observe outcomes: list wins and losses; hypothesize 2–3 causal drivers.
• Measure minimally: pick 1–3 leading indicators tied to those drivers.
• Test behaviors: run small, isolated experiments on one lever at a time.
• Prune ruthlessly: stop what doesn’t move the indicator; double down on what does.
• Lock the loop: review weekly; update the thesis; retest.

Causal Rules, Not Proxies

Directional correctness targets real rules and primary outcomes, not convenient dashboard metrics. A rule is causal: if you do it, it moves the win condition across contexts. A proxy is a correlated number that can be gamed or drift away from the goal.

• Causal mechanism: derived from the game’s mechanics, physics, or incentives; changes outcomes directly.
• Primary outcome: reduces to the win condition (e.g., in League: gold → item power → objective control → towers → nexus).
• Proxy metric: easy to track but not causal; can rise while real outcomes stagnate or worsen.
• Means vs ends: team fights, picks, split-push are means; the end is sustained objective pressure and conversion on the nexus.

Simple tests to tell rules from proxies:

• Counterexample test: can the metric go up while you lose? If yes, it’s a proxy (e.g., K/D without tower pressure or dragons).
• Intervention test: when you improve the rule, do downstream outcomes reliably improve?
• Transfer test: does it hold across patches/opponents/contexts? If it breaks quickly, it’s likely a proxy.
• Manipulation test: can adversaries push you to trade the true goal for the metric?

Non-gaming parallel:

• Startups: the rules are retained value creation and efficient acquisition; proxies like clicks or impressions can be maximized without retention or revenue.

Use proxies only as weak signals to monitor your thesis, and revalidate them against primary outcomes regularly. Goodhart’s Law shows up when proxies are mistaken for rules.

Why It’s Hard to Transfer

Even when people try, the real edge rarely transfers cleanly because:

• Tacit knowledge: timing and context are hard to codify in prose.
• Incentives: active competitors rarely publish live edges.
• Non-stationarity: what worked last quarter decays as others adapt.

You’d think successful people would share exactly what works. They don’t. And there are good reasons.

Consider business courses: you’ll get the basics that sound right, not the live edge that actually created the advantage. As Peter Thiel says, every great business is built on a secret—and once it’s common knowledge, it stops being an advantage.

The only people who share the complete truth are those who’ve already won their game completely. They’re retired, self-actualized, giving back. But the ones still competing? They’ll tell you just enough to seem helpful while keeping the real formula hidden.

Signal vs Noise

Once you identify your small set, most opinions become irrelevant. Many will point to metrics that don’t matter or predict failure because you’re not following convention. Ignore them. They haven’t tested their theories against reality.

This is what you see with controversial successful people. The media focuses on their failures, their mistakes, their violations of conventional wisdom. Meanwhile, they keep winning. Why? Because the metrics the media focuses on don’t matter for what these people are trying to achieve. They’re directionally correct on the few things that matter, and everything else is noise.

Your refined understanding, validated through experimentation and results, is worth more than the untested opinions of everyone around you. Once you know what actually moves the needle in your field, you can ignore the chorus telling you you’re doing it wrong.

Pitfalls

• Proxies as rules (Goodhart’s Law): optimizing a metric instead of the objective breaks the link to outcomes.
• Overfitting: a thesis that wins in narrow contexts fails elsewhere.
• Survivorship bias: visible winners hide a large, invisible graveyard.
• Environment drift: drivers shift; keep updating and revalidating the thesis.

They’re measuring the wrong things. You’re optimizing for what actually matters.

That’s the power of directional correctness. Not just knowing what to do, but knowing what to ignore.