IDEAS / POST
Are you creating something of value, or just ‘hacking a test’?
What Paul Graham’s “The Lesson to Unlearn” teaches us about how to create value instead of just performing competence
Jacob Beckerman, CEO of Macro, recently pointed me to Paul Graham’s essay “The Lesson to Unlearn.” It’s a brilliant diagnosis of how school trains us to win by hacking bad tests, and how that thinking carries into how we build companies, products, and strategies.
Graham’s thesis: we are conditioned from an early age to optimize our learning outperform in proxies like grades, awards, visibility, and stakeholder praise, instead of outcomes that matter… like learning deeply, or building a company with true value.
This isn’t just a personal development insight. It’s a strategic blind spot for many leaders and teams.
Here’s how this plays out in the wild
Startups obsess over getting funding, instead of solving painful customer problems.
Brand builders chase impressions and awards instead of revenue and retention (ummmm, I’ve done this on more occasions than I’d like to admit. The entire ad industry is built on it).
Internal teams pitch transformation projects designed to win board approval, not make the company better.
This mindset is deeply embedded. It’s not laziness. It’s learned behavior.
Remember when it dawned on you that you’d ace a medieval history course not by learning medieval history, but digging into the bits our prof belaboured? Cherry pick the vanity metrics… and ignore the real point of learning.
If this wrongheaded and ultimately counterproductive tic isn’t surfaced and unlearned, it creates a gravitational pull toward busywork disguised as progress.
Graham offers a particularly telling example from his time at Y Combinator
Young founders would constantly ask: How do we get VCs to invest in us? What’s the trick?
And Graham would tell them something that should have been obvious: Be a good investment. Build something people want. Make the product great.
But instead of focusing on improving their product or solving real user problems, they’d gravitate to superficial hacks:
- How to time their launch for maximum exposure to investors (always on a Tuesday),
- Which influential people they should try to get introductions to,
- How to craft a pitch deck that hit all the right buzzwords.
These are all relics of bad-test thinking. A belief that there’s a trick to winning, a shortcut, a cheat code. That if they could just hit the right formula, they’d get the grade. But building a startup, like building any great business, isn’t about tricking the test. It’s about doing good work.
That simplicity is radical. And it’s exactly the pivot I help clients make.
At the heart of every high-performing company, product, or brand is something elegantly simple: a core idea, a point of view, a thing that it does uncommonly well and with undeniable usefulness. But more often than not, teams bury that essence under layers of well-intentioned optics, process, and second-guessing – hacks to quick success.
My work is about cutting through that complication. Helping leaders return to the real engine of value in their business. Not the metrics they’ve been told to chase, or the formats they’ve been trained to deliver, but the substance that makes their company singular and attractive.
As an advisor, I see my role as helping clients
- Recognize when they’re optimizing for a hackable test (investor sentiment, internal KPIs, perception management).
- Reorient toward unhackable measures of value: user behavior, economic outcomes, strategic asymmetry.
- Say no to performative work, even if it looks right.
The shift is powerful. When clients stop trying to pass a test and start trying to build something real, energy floods back into the work. Decisions get clearer. Teams move faster. Outcomes improve.
So if you’re in a position of leadership, ask yourself
Where in your organization are you optimizing for a test rather than the actual goal – building a better company?
If this hits close to home, I’d love to hear how you’re unlearning bad-test thinking, or helping others do it.
I also offer Open Office Hours, a free service for founders with $1M+ in revenue who want to:
- Dig into a real strategic challenge
- Pressure-test their thinking
- See if there’s a strong personal fit between us.
No sales pitch, no fluff. Just a chance to get sharper, together.