Sitemap

Member-only story

The 9-Second Rule: How Top Performers Create Success While Everyone Else Is Still Planning

7 min readMay 23, 2025
Photo by Tim Bogdanov on Unsplash

What if everything we have been taught about achievement is fundamentally wrong?

After a decade studying the world’s top performers — from Nobel Prize winners to billionaire founders to Olympic gold medalists — I have discovered something they all understand that most people miss:

Success isn’t built in hours, days, or months. It’s built in seconds.

I call it The 9-Second Rule. And it’s about to change how you approach every area of your life.

1. The neuroscience discovery that invalidates most productivity systems

When I studied peak performers, I have made a revolutionary discovery:

The brain makes decisive commitment decisions in just 9 seconds.

After that? The rational mind creates elaborate justifications for what was actually decided instantly.

This explains why Jeff Bezos, worth $200+ billion, says:

“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”

--

--

Fahri Karakas
Fahri Karakas

Written by Fahri Karakas

Associate Professor in Business & Leadership at University of East Anglia. Passionate about doodling, imagination, and creativity. Author of Self-Making Studio.

No responses yet