I will never forget the physical sensation of fighting through mud.
Years ago, my company was in a state of violent hyper-growth. If you looked at us from the outside, we were an unstoppable machine. Revenue was spiking. Headcount was swelling. We were breaking records.
But inside? Every single day felt suffocating.
As a CEO, there comes a dark moment when you realize you are fighting a two-front war.
The first is the external battle. You are fighting competitors, market shifts, haters, and algorithm changes. But that is the game. That is what you signed up for. It’s actually fun.
The second is the internal battle. And this one feels like a betrayal. You are fighting with your own team. These are the people on your payroll who are supposed to carry the shield for you. Instead, you wake up, look at your phone, and instantly dread opening your own Slack channels. You realize you are spending more time playing adult daycare, managing bruised egos, and untangling office politics than you are actually closing deals and growing the empire.
We had more people than ever, but somehow, we were getting less done. Every time I wanted a simple project executed, it felt like I was wading through waist-deep mud. I couldn’t understand it.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had hit the ceiling of complexity.
When you scale, it is no longer just you working with your people. It is your people working with their people. Every new layer of management creates distance from the core vision. Every layer creates a drag on your speed.
One afternoon, completely exhausted by how slow a major initiative was moving, I pulled my director into a meeting.
“Why is this taking so long?” I demanded.
“We can get it done faster,” he told me, “but we need to pay our people more.”
“More?” I shot back. “We are already paying above the market rate.”
“Yeah, but if you want them to take on more responsibility and move with urgency, we need to bump their comp. Money buys speed.”
I was desperate. I was tired of the mud. I thought, Fine. If cash is the ultimate lubricant for this machine, I will flood the engine.
I approved the raises.
For about sixty days, there was a sudden burst of energy. Things moved faster. The team seemed dialed in. I thought I had solved the problem.
Then, the high wore off. The mud returned, thicker than before. The initiatives slowed to a crawl. The problems didn’t just pile up – they multiplied.
And then, the dam broke.
A massive wave of angry complaints started rolling in from our customers. They were furious. They weren’t getting replies. The noise got so loud it breached the walls of my office and landed directly on my desk.
I bypassed the managers and dug directly into the customer support systems myself to find out what was going on.
What I found made my blood run cold.
My main customer service rep had 1,000+ unanswered emails just sitting in the company inbox. Gathering dust.
Those weren’t just messages. Those were furious buyers. Those were pending credit card chargebacks. That was shattered trust and people ready to rip our brand apart online. And he was just sitting there, watching the house burn down.
I hauled him into my office immediately. I was ready to tear him apart. But when he sat down, he just looked defeated. He was a nice guy. He was kind. He never caused trouble.
“Why aren’t you answering the emails?” I asked him, trying to keep my voice level. “That is literally your only job.”
He looked at the floor. He couldn’t even give me a straight answer at first. The silence in the room was deafening.
“I don’t understand,” I pushed. “What is going on in your head?”
“I’m sorry, Dan,” he finally whispered. “I just… freeze.”
Freeze?
“It’s so overwhelming,” he confessed, looking up at me with genuine panic in his eyes. “I look at the inbox, and I just don’t know how to handle the pressure. So I just don’t handle it.”
I let him go on the spot. Now, on top of all the fires I was fighting as the CEO, I was personally doing customer support.
It took me years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in mistakes, to understand exactly why that happened. And why the “pay them more to work faster” strategy is a complete delusion.
Paying incompetent people more money is literally lighting cash on fire.
Paying someone who doesn’t have the deep psychological profile for the job more money does not magically give them the capacity to do the job. It just gives you a more expensive, equally broken system.
Here is the unvarnished truth about human capital, and how I completely rewired my empire to never feel that mud again:
1. The Metric of Chaos: Emotional Control
I don’t guess when I hire anymore. I run every single candidate through OAD.ai, a behavioral mapping system. And the single most critical trait I look at is Emotional Control.
Anyone with low emotional control is a hostage to their environment. They have low EQ. They are the drama queens. When the pressure gets turned up, their brain shuts down. They freeze.
I will never hire anyone for a key role with an Emotional Control score lower than a 5 out of 10.
Personally, I am a 10 out of 10 in logic. My wife Jennie also has extremely high emotional control. It is the exact reason we almost never fight. It doesn’t mean we are emotionless robots; it just means we don’t wear our emotions on our sleeves. We don’t let chaos dictate our actions. In business, logic scales. Emotion breaks.
2. The Smokescreen of Incompetence
When an employee’s role outgrows their capabilities, they will almost never come to you and say, “Dan, this is too hard for me.” Human ego does not allow that.
Instead, they will create a smokescreen.
You will assign them a task that requires exactly 3 steps. Suddenly, they expand it into 10 steps.
For example, you ask a manager for a simple, weekly KPI report. It should take 20 minutes to pull the numbers. Instead, they schedule three “alignment” meetings. They form a committee. They tell you they need to research a new $500/month SaaS tool to track the data properly. Two weeks go by, and you still don’t have the damn numbers.
They didn’t do this because they are proactive. They did this to buy time. They blame the software, the timeline, or other departments. They intentionally weaponize complexity to mask their own incompetence.
Worse, the truly toxic ones will intentionally stir up drama with other employees. They will manufacture a crisis just to distract you. They give you a people problem to solve so you stop looking at their performance problem.
3. The Motivation Myth
CEOs ask me all the time: “Dan, how do I motivate my people?”
My answer always shocks them: You don’t. You can’t.
There are two types of people in the world: Extrinsically motivated and Intrinsically motivated.
Extrinsic people are driven by titles, status, money, and social pressure. (These are the people who go to the gym just to take a selfie so they look good to others).
Intrinsic people are just driven. They do a phenomenal job because it is who they are. It is tied to their personal standard of excellence. (These are the people who go to the gym because they demand greatness from themselves).
Intrinsic drive is shaped by a person’s upbringing, their parents, and their early environment. It is almost impossible to teach an adult. Stop trying to motivate people. Just hire intrinsically motivated people.
4. The Unconventional Filters
Because of these brutal lessons, I developed two highly unconventional, almost ruthless filters for hiring executives and key operators.
Filter 1: The Pet Test
I am famous in my companies for saying, “People with pets can’t be too bad.”
Almost all of my executives and business partners have dogs or cats. I actively look for it. Why? Because to care for an animal, you must have a baseline level of empathy. You must have patience. You have to be externally focused. It is an incredibly fast way to filter out self-centered psychopaths who only care about themselves.
Filter 2: The Spouse Test
If I am hiring an executive, a high-level manager, or even a crucial mid-level operator, I want to take them to dinner. And I want them to bring their spouse. I want to meet the husband, the wife, the boyfriend, or the girlfriend.
Who a person chooses to bind their life to reveals their true judgment and character faster than any polished resume.
I watch the dynamic at the table like a hawk.
Are they loving, caring, and highly intelligent? Are they a true partner who respects the ambition and the grind?
Or are they an entitled, high-maintenance, plastic-surgery-obsessed gold digger? (I am not joking. I have sat across the table from them).
Do they treat the waiter like absolute garbage while sipping a $200 glass of wine? (Because if they disrespect the staff at a restaurant, it is only a matter of time before that toxicity infects your company culture).
Do they constantly interrupt the candidate? Do they belittle their ideas in front of others? Do they complain about how many hours their partner works? Do they act like an anchor keeping this leader grounded, or a parasite just draining their energy and their wallet?
Think about it logically: If a candidate allows themselves to be disrespected, manipulated, or emotionally drained in their own home, how on earth can you expect them to hold the line in a multi-million dollar boardroom negotiation?
You can’t.
If a candidate’s home life is a chaotic, dramatic mess, it is an absolute guarantee that they will bring that exact same energy into your company.
Stop fighting through the mud. Stop throwing money at a broken psychological profile.
Your business is supposed to be a fortress. But every time you rely on a gut feeling or an inflated salary to fix a people problem, you are injecting chaos directly into your foundation.
You cannot scale chaos. You can only scale Certainty.
Stop guessing who is running your empire.
Stay Certain,
Dan Lok
Certainty Capitalist™
