Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's partner for half a century at the investment company Berkshire Hathaway, said this in a 1995 talk at Harvard on why smart people misjudge. It sounds like modesty. It is a warning about your own payroll.

An age cohort is everyone born around the same years as you. Munger ranked himself near the top of his generation on this one subject, then admitted he had guessed low his whole life.

His example was FedEx. The night crew that sorted parcels kept running late, and no speech fixed it. Then the company paid the crew per shift instead of per hour, and the parcels moved on time.

Nobody changed. The arithmetic did.

Your business runs on the same arithmetic, whether you wrote it down or not.

The salesperson paid on revenue gives discounts you would never approve. The agency billed by the hour has no reason to finish in fewer hours. The supplier paid on delivery ships on time and skips the quality check nobody pays for.

None of them is cheating. Each one is doing what the deal rewards.

The hardest deal to read is the one you struck with yourself. If a full calendar feels like progress, you will fill the calendar. If a fast reply feels like work, the inbox wins every morning, and the project that would change your year gets the hour before bed.

So today: write down three people whose work touches your revenue, you included. Beside each name, write what they are paid or praised for. Beside that, write what you want from them.

Where the two columns disagree, the first column wins. It has won every day so far.

If the best reader of incentives in a generation guessed low, assume you did too.