Reward is a Lie — You Don’t Deserve Anything

(Why Consequences Rule the Universe — and How to Hack Them in Your Favour)

Jun 30, 2025

Sharing time and dissecting ideas with smart people sharpens your thinking in ways solitude never could.

The idea for this piece came after a long, thought-provoking conversation with the author of The Uplifting Publication. We went deep into books, beliefs, and bold ideas — the kind of dialogue that bends your mental wiring in real-time.

By the end of the day, we were knee-deep in a Lagos bookshop (thanks to the plug I introduced him to 😂), hauling away stacks like knowledge hoarders. He even gifted me a book — which, if you know me, means he basically handed me a grenade for my brain and just like that, this post was born.

“Wealth is a consequence, not a reward.”
— Richard Templar, Rule #7, The Rules of Wealth
“People are not driven by past causes alone; they pursue self-selected ends.”
— Alfred Adler (as popularised in The Courage to Be Disliked)

The Bedtime Story We Outgrew

Most of us were raised on a charming fiction:

Be good → Receive something.
Work hard → Earn promotion.
Love purely → Be loved back.

It’s comforting, tidy, and as reliable as a Disney sequel. But somewhere between playground and payroll the penny drops: life isn’t a vending machine; it’s a physics experiment. Tilt the inputs, torque the variables, and something happens — but that “something” isn’t polite enough to ask whether we deserved strawberry or salt.

We cling to the reward narrative because it keeps chaos at bay. Yet chaos doesn’t care. Outcomes emerge from causes, full stop. Morality may guide our choices, but the universe pays dividends in consequence, not gold stars.

Richard Templar’s Brutal Clarity

Richard Templar’s Rule #7 lands like a slap with silk gloves:

“Wealth is a consequence, not a reward.”

Translation: money doesn’t arrive as a thank-you card for being noble, long-suffering, or even brilliant. It’s simply the by-product of behaviours, skills, timing, and leverage consistently applied in a system called “the economy.”

Templar’s stubborn neutrality strips wealth of its halo. Got rich? Great. Your strategy, risk tolerance, network, or luck produced that financial mass. It wasn’t cosmic applause. Lost your shirt? Same logic, reversed polarity.

His rule isn’t cruel; it’s liberating. If riches are consequential, not ceremonial, then you can model, test, and replicate them. The reward narrative, by contrast, whispers that success is an award ceremony — dress nicely and wait to be called on stage.

Adler, Teleology, and the Myth of Deservedness

The Courage to Be Disliked — a conversational digest of Viennese psychologist Alfred Adler. Two big takeaways matter here:

Cause-and-effect still rules, but
Our goals (teleology) shape current action more than past injuries.

Adler claims we aren’t puppets of childhood trauma; we choose present strategies to achieve subconscious aims (“avoid embarrassment,” “secure belonging,” etc.). Yet this choosing happens within a causal matrix. Purposes are still causes, just future-oriented ones.

What dies under Adler’s microscope is deservedness. If we select behaviours toward a goal, then outcomes are self-engineered. No karma points, no cosmic scoreboard. Just self-directed causality.

The Just-World Fallacy: How Santa Survived into Adulthood

Psychologists call it the just-world hypothesis — the unshakeable faith that good things happen to good people and vice versa. It’s a cognitive comfort blanket; chaos offends our sense of narrative neatness.

Yet history is a highlight reel of inconvenient counterexamples:

Florence Nightingale died rich; Mahatma Gandhi died with wire-rim spectacles and a loincloth.
Some lazy trust-fund kid is in Malibu wasting daddy’s money; your grandmother worked 60-hour weeks and pinched pennies.
You dropped cash on a promising stock the exact morning the founder was indicted.

If reward were hard-wired, these glitches wouldn’t pass quality control. They persist because outcomes obey physics, not fairness.

Consequence-Thinking vs Reward-Thinking

Let’s pit the two mindsets in a steel-cage match.

One mindset waits; the other engineers.

6. System Design: Turning Life into Code

Imagine life as pseudocode:

If  (Skill × Opportunity × Network)  > Threshold
    then Wealth += Delta

You can tweak any variable: upskill, expand network, hunt new markets. Execute loop. Measure. Debug. Pure consequence.

Entrepreneurs already think this way (some unconsciously). Investors do. Athletes do. Nature does. The reward crowd calls it “cold.” The consequence crowd calls it “Tuesday.”

Luck, Privilege, and the Dice You Can Load

Let’s not fantasize causality into Silicon-Valley hustle porn. Variables outside our control matter: birthplace, skin tone, visa stamp, and timing. Randomness is real.

However, and this may come as a surprise, even randomness exhibits statistical behaviour. You can’t command lightning, yet you can:

Increase surface area for serendipity (events, DMs, prototypes).
Diversify attempts (multiple bets mean more rolls).
Exploit asymmetry (limit downside, maximise upside).

Think of it as loading the dice. Never fair, but fairer.

Spiritual Contracts: Faith without Fairy Dust

Religions promise reward, yet invariably tie it to clauses:

Tithe → Open windows of heaven.
Ask in faith → Receive.
Good sowing → Good reaping.

That’s not reward; that’s conditionality. A covenant. A righteous version of if-then. Even grace, theologians note, requires acceptance (an input).

So believers can still honour faith and embrace consequence-thinking: divine law as the ultimate causal framework.

Calling reward a lie isn’t nihilism; it’s realism sharpened into empowerment. When you abandon the fairy tale, you inherit responsibility, which is terrifying until you realise it’s also a superpower.

Stop waiting to be crowned. Code the consequence.

Reward-thinkers queue. Consequence-thinkers build the ride.