[Success] The Guy Who Charged a ₩10,000 Coffee to the Corporate Card and Asked for ₩2,000 Back in Cash

The Situation

My wife’s company gives employees a ₩10,000 coffee allowance as a perk.
Today, my wife (who works in HR) was standing right there when she overheard a coworker ask the cafe owner, “Could I put ₩10,000 on the card and get ₩2,000 back in cash?”

A Few Thoughts

Hearing this, I quietly arrived at a definition: this type of person is “someone who could never succeed, even if the heavens and earth turned upside down.”
Penny wise, pound foolish. It’s not just about being lucky or talented — it’s that the fundamental operating system they use to approach life and work is wired differently.
Which made me wonder the opposite: is there such a thing as “someone who can’t help but succeed, even if the sky splits in two”?
And if so, what traits would that kind of person have?

1. They make the optimal, economically rational choice in real life.

Research on the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory shows that in a one-shot game, betraying the other player can pay off — but in environments where interactions repeat indefinitely, like a career, a strategy of “mutual cooperation and keeping trust intact” delivers overwhelmingly higher returns.

(They grasp, statistically, that reputation is capital that compounds inside a system, and they invest in building trust over the long term.)

2. They’re good at calculating Risk vs. Return.

Successful people tend to calculate expected value — the concept that behavioral economics and statistics keep coming back to — quite accurately.
Expected value of an action = reward × probability
People who fail bet on actions with a negative expected value.

(e.g., even if pocketing ₩2,000 has a high probability of success, once you factor in the fallout if caught, the expected value is negative — the cost is your lost reputation × the value of your job (tens of millions of won or more).)

People who succeed pour themselves into structures where failure costs little but success pays off exponentially.

(e.g., learning new skills, building automated systems, networking.)

3. They feel Future Value >>> Present Value

Think of Stanford’s famous marshmallow experiment, or the “hyperbolic discounting” model from behavioral economics.

= They’re capable of feeling a future reward as something larger than a present one.

People who fail: their time discount rate is extremely steep. ₩2,000 right now >> ₩10,000,000 three years from now (raises, promotions, and so on).
People who succeed: future reward >>> present pain or temptation.

4. They believe every cause traces back to “me” = self-improvement

According to psychologist Angela Duckworth’s research, people who achieve at the highest level have tremendous grit and an exceptionally strong internal locus of control.
People who fail: they look outside themselves for the cause of an outcome.

(They mistake exploiting a loophole — squeezing ₩2,000, snacks, or the corporate card out of the system — for personal “skill.”)

People who succeed: they look strictly inward for the cause of an outcome.

(They focus on improving the quality of their work, their technical expertise, and their ability to solve problems.)

In the end, successful people are the ones running the

”optimized decision-making algorithm” most likely to deliver the biggest wins.

Successful people aren’t fools missing out on the present.

So what? I’m already putting in the haaard work for future value — so let me keep at it, and push a little further.