Deserve What You Want
Munger's principle: the surest way to get something is to deserve it.
"Earn the result. The shortcut path is the long path."
What is Deserve What You Want? Munger's principle: the surest way to get something is to deserve it. Sustainable career and company strategy.
Building real capability beats positioning for the role you want.
Sustainable career and company strategy.
Ask: 'What would make us obviously deserving of this outcome?'
Use the model. Pick the move.
Munger's principle: the surest way to get something is to deserve it. You've just seen this: Building real capability beats positioning for the role you want. Which lever does the model recommend?
Pick a lever. There are no neutral ones — every incentive funds a behavior somewhere.
Pick a reaction to Deserve What You Want
One tap. We'll point you at the most useful next surface based on how this hits.
The full taxonomy entry
Every concept in the Atlas uses the same structure — so Deserve What You Want can be compared, recombined, and cited like an element on a periodic table.
- Business
- Leadership
- Government
- Healthcare
- Education
- Sales
- Marketing
- AI
- Negotiation
- Media
- Public Policy
- Relationships
- Where in our org would Deserve What You Want most often show up unnoticed?
- Which metric, ritual, or contract clause quietly rewards Deserve What You Want?
- If we removed every payoff for Deserve What You Want, what behavior would replace it?
- Who benefits when Deserve What You Want persists — and who pays the cost?
- People defend the status quo using the language of deserve what you want.
- Decisions cluster around the easiest narrative rather than the strongest evidence.
- New data changes the slide deck but not the decision.
- Anyone naming the pattern is treated as the problem.
Every Atlas entry is a node in a knowledge graph. See the related rail below to follow the connections.
See Deserve What You Want through 2 lenses
Each layer of the Incentives OS reframes this concept with its own thinkers, vocabulary, and diagnostic question.
Do you actually know Deserve What You Want?
Three quick questions. Result is saved into your review streak — come back when the term is due to lock it in.
Which best describes Deserve What You Want?
Worked example, counter-example & concept map
On-demand AI analysis grounded in the Lab's research. Cached on your device after first run.
When you encounter Deserve What You Want, your prefrontal cortex has to do extra work to override the automatic response — and that override budget is finite.
Executive control, planning, impulse override, working memory, System 2. First thing to go offline under stress, fatigue, or low blood sugar. Why your 4pm decisions are worse than your 9am ones.
See Prefrontal in the Brain Atlas →Picked for you, from the Atlas
Ranked by shared learning paths, overlapping chips, and what you've saved.
Basics first (health/finances), then depth (mastery/impact), then altruism (widening circle).
A problem whose solution requires people to change their values, beliefs, or habits — not just apply expertise.
Holding a different — and correct — set of tools than everyone else.
Someone who incites others to take illegal or rash action, often to expose or discredit them.
Sun Tzu's ancient treatise on strategy, deception, and positioning.
Conflict between belligerents with very different resources and tactics.
Send the card, not just the link
A pre-rendered social card with the title, eyebrow, and URL. Copy the link, post it anywhere, or download the SVG for slides.
More definitions to follow
Every term in the Atlas connects to a dozen others. Pick any of these and see where it takes you.
I can't believe it; therefore it isn't true.
AI bolted onto existing workflows to look forward-leaning.
Cryptographic tracking of content origin.
Bad teams 'tank' for better draft positions.
Underestimating how common our positive traits and behaviors are.
We return to a baseline of well-being after gains or losses.
The act of preparing to teach exposes precisely where your understanding is shallow.
Necessary = required for X. Sufficient = enough on its own for X. Conflating them is a common error.
Sensing the highest future possibility and acting from it — the bottom of Scharmer's U.
Rare things feel more valuable, regardless of actual value.
Studying winners while ignoring identical losers.
Wish → Outcome → Obstacle → Plan. A goal-setting protocol from Oettingen.