The Supply-Side Mindset: Thriving in a Positive-Sum World
I have a friend named David Liu, a prominent M&A lawyer in Silicon Valley, who shared an interesting observation with me.
When a company is on the verge of being acquired, the instinctive reactions of owners and employees are vastly different. Owners often have a “blessing” mindset—they genuinely care for their employees and hope they can share in the acquisition dividend, even negotiating specific clauses in the contract to protect them. Employees, however, are often filled with defensiveness, suspecting that the owner hiring a lawyer is a move to “screw them over.”
We both reflected that people with higher social standing tend to interact with the world using positive-sum thinking, while those with lower social standing tend to lean toward zero-sum—even among those in high-tech Silicon Valley companies.
“Positive-sum” means an outcome where both parties benefit; it’s a win-win. “Zero-sum” means the sum of gains is zero: what you win is exactly what I lose.
The greatest mental friction for modern people is treating zero-sum as common sense and positive-sum as an ideal. In companies and organizations, people often spend more energy defending against what others might take from them than on creating value.
Weak players, who need cooperation the most, are often the first to view relationships as a life-or-death struggle. This isn’t just about experience; it’s Mindset," which I hope will give you a powerful alpha advantage. But first, you need to understand that we live in a world where the positive-sum is far greater than the zero-sum.
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Zero-sum is very intuitive.
Many who have read a bit of evolution but haven’t mastered it believe the world’s underlying logic is competition, or even slaughter. They see that animals must eat other creatures to survive—for you to live, others must die. Isn’t that zero-sum? Cooperation, truth, and beauty are seen as mere second-order effects, makeup for the civilized…
But if you look deeper into biological evolution [1], you’ll find that cooperation is far more prevalent than slaughter. Single-celled organisms becoming multi-cellular, the symbiosis and social division of labor—these are all upgrades in cooperation. Killing is a narrow means of energy acquisition; the bulk comes from photosynthesis and decomposition. Humans became the strongest species not because we are the best at killing, but because we are the best at cooperating.
Cooperation is not second-order; it is the main trunk of the underlying structure.
We notice slaughter particularly because our brain’s security module is primitive—highly sensitive to threats but slow to recognize opportunities. it makes it easier for you to remember stories of theft, betrayal, and being cheated than the boring but continuous positive-sum cooperations.
You could be playing a much bigger game, but you’ve locked yourself in an imaginary coliseum.
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Ancient people needed cooperation for hunting, gathering, and farming. The modern world has two massive positive-sum “buffs” thanks to the free market.
One is the replicability of information.
If you give me an apple, I have one more and you have one less—that’s zero-sum. But if you have a good story or a good idea and tell it to me, I gain it without you losing it. Copying information doesn’t cost you the information.
This is why the exchange of goods is fundamentally positive-sum. Suppose you have a secret to growing apples and can produce high-quality apples at a low cost. If I pay 10 yuan for a pound of your apples, that’s different from just sharing an apple.
I’m not buying a pile of atoms—the atoms just cycle through my body. I’m buying the arrangement of those atoms—information. I’m buying the “goodness” of your apple. I’m willing to pay 10 yuan because I believe the apple’s value is higher than 10 yuan; I couldn’t grow a pound of apples for 10 yuan myself.
And you must believe 10 yuan is more valuable than the apple to be willing to sell it. This is true because you grew it! You used a secret to grow many apples, and each apple’s “goodness” is a free copy of that secret.
Both of us are better off—a standard positive-sum game. This is the most fundamental principle of economics: as long as a trade is voluntary, it must be win-win and must increase the total wealth of society.
The second buff is division of labor and network effects.
If you’re good with wood and I’m good with iron, our individual value is limited, but together we can create advanced things like a hammer. This is a multiplicative relationship; value increases immediately. Specialization brings mastery, and mastery brings efficiency—this is where division of labor and comparative advantage come from.
Further, if someone creates a large market, especially an online one, the multiplicative effect is even greater. For every new seller and buyer, the network’s value increases.
The positive-sum game is one where joining is always a good thing. To join, we should study what value we can create rather than what value we can claim. If you’re in, the rewards follow. To take, one must first give.
I don’t ask what I can get; I ask what I can provide. That is the Supply-Side Mindset.
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Once you have a supply-side perspective, you’ll see many people mistakenly locking themselves into the demand side. Ask him why he’s applying to our company, and he says because he likes the pay and environment. Ask her view on marriage, and she lists requirements for a partner’s height, income, and emotional support. That’s not a plan; that’s a wish list.
To be invited into the game, you must have something to provide.
I asked GPT to give a hardcore definition of the Supply-Side Mindset:
“Treating oneself as a module that provides verifiable value, actively reducing collaboration friction, and embedding oneself into structures with long-term repeated games and network effects.”
In plain language: you need real skills, be easy to work with, and get into good circles. Three things:
- Value Production — You must actually solve problems, not just talk.
- Friction Reduction — Make it easier and cheaper for others to work with you.
- Network Access — What level of cooperation circles can you reach.
Note that the supply-side mindset isn’t about unconditional giving or people-pleasing. Healthy cooperation is reciprocal, with boundaries and rules… but the starting point is wanting to join the cooperation.
Value production and network access are easy to understand, but friction reduction deserves special attention: there’s an art to being “cooperatable.” Let’s look at two interesting studies.
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Behavioral scientist Jon Levy published a new book in 2025 called Team Intelligence [2], where he introduced the concept of “glue employees.”
Glue employees are those who, despite not having much formal power, use their emotional intelligence, coordination skills, and trust networks to keep team information flowing, conflicts manageable, and cooperation smooth, thereby amplifying others’ output.
Think of people around you: when a newcomer arrives and there’s no training, she’s the one who sends the documentation and walks them through the process. When departments clash, she translates their languages and clarifies the issues. When a project is about to blow up and everyone’s stressed, she organizes the debrief and realigns everyone’s goals.
From a zero-sum perspective, this work is hard to write into a KPI. Yet, research shows these people determine the speed of information flow and the team’s psychological safety. Glue employees might not have flashy individual performance, but they are the key to team performance.
You might say, “I still need performance; I don’t want to be a silent glue employee.” That’s why you need to ensure your value is verifiable. Make your collaboration costs explicit—write them into processes and checklists; seek formal authorization so these tasks become clear roles; and share your experience so the organization knows “you’re the one keeping the system from crashing.”
The supply-side mindset requires engineering “good person” behaviors.
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The second study comes from Norway in 2025 [3]. Two sociologists used big data to find that children of immigrants or immigrants living in Norway who changed their foreign-sounding names to mainstream Norwegian names saw their annual income rise by an average of 30%.
Nothing else changed—just the name. Imagine a girl born into a Muslim family named Fatima. She has great language skills, education, and internships, but her resumes are ignored. One day she changes her name to Kari—a typical Norwegian name—and suddenly she’s receiving interview invites and lands a job at a major company with a much higher salary.
It turns out people don’t reject you because they see you’re Muslim in an interview—once in the room, labels matter less. The labels act as a silent filter before that.
Previous US research [4] also found that immigrants who adopt “white” names get 50% more interview invites. By changing a name, you become slightly easier to cooperate with. Your name isn’t your “self”; it’s your “API interface.” Changing it isn’t denying your origin; it’s making yourself compatible with the system.
Improving your image, dressing well, speaking standard Mandarin, or mastering a foreign language all have the same effect. You need a better cooperation interface.
Make your appearance predictable, your response time fast, and ensure your deliveries are easy to accept, documented, and reviewable. Output content that minimizes the mental cost for the other party. Being “easy to work with” rather than “high maintenance” is the standard of a good cooperation interface.
Low friction equals reliability. Reliability isn’t a personality trait; it’s an engineering capability.
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Some might ask: if I only focus on supply, what about competition? Many things in life are zero-sum games! Here is a crucial realization.
The essence of modern competition is not fighting for resources, but fighting for “cooperation eligibility.”
You want to get into top universities, top firms like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, or the best startup teams. It sounds like fighting for a spot (zero-sum), but you’re actually striving to enter a higher-level cooperation network. You study and build your resume not to step on others, but to prove to that higher system that you are qualified to be their teammate.
Competition isn’t a line; it’s a matching process. Winning or losing just tells you which level of cooperation you’re matched with. You should optimize not “how to step on others,” but “how to make others realize they can’t do without my supply in the next evaluation.”
The US-China trade war isn’t about territory; it’s about market access and supply chain security—opportunities to sell products to consumers.
In modern society, the greatest punishment is being removed from the cooperation list.
This is why, if you want to enter the high-stakes game, you must value your reputation. Reputation is the discounted future cooperation value others see in you. Once labeled as “unreliable,” “greedy,” or “emotionally unstable,” you face social demotion… and you’ll be stuck in low-trust, high-friction, zero-sum games.
The audience of this match might be your teammate in the next. So even if you don’t win this time, act like a graceful professional.
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I asked GPT to organize 10 application scenarios comparing the supply-side mindset and zero-sum thinking at the end of the post; you can practice with them. I believe we should not only have a supply-side mindset but also cultivate an aversion to zero-sum games.
Whenever you see a zero-sum game, a group of people fighting over something, ask: is this thing dead, or can it be redesigned? If I step out of the “fight” narrative, what can I supply? Can I make the pie bigger?
Zero-sum players live in the resentment of “what people owe me,” while supply-side players live in the action of “how I can fill this gap.”
This isn’t a moral choice; it’s a survival strategy. In this highly interconnected, information-replicable, and complementary modern society, “being needed” is a safer state than “owning.”
As we often say in Elite Daily Lesson: being depended upon is the best treatment the world can give you.
Notes: [1] See Elite Daily Lesson Season 5 for a new perspective on evolution. [2] Levy, Jon. Team Intelligence. 2025. [3] Umblijs & Hermansen. Can A New Name Open Closed Doors? 2025. [4] Bertrand & Mullainathan. Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? 2004.