The fruit of addiction to success is redefining yourself in terms of one activity. When you take that away, there's a deep loss of identity. To the striver, that addiction is success. It activates the same neurobiology and dopamine pathways as alcohol or drugs.

If you tried to achieve that purely through informal methods—where hallucination is a persistent risk—getting to the same level of consistent correctness would likely require a lot more research effort and resources.

The brain is definitely not doing computation in the purest sense. We are not crunching numbers in binary ones and zeros in our heads. A more important question is: what are your inputs, what output do you want, and how intelligently can the system get from one to the other?

Words like mistake, error and complication are not helpful. They carry visceral, emotive, weight which hampers learning and thus obscures what you may be able to take from an event. Over the past 20 years, we've moved away from that terminology towards the language of adverse events.

There's an entirely different category of knowledge, the utility of which isn't immediately apparent. This category is equally, if not more, crucial, especially for those aspiring to make creative or innovative strides.