By: Andrew Carter
Most people pick a lane and stay in it. Andres Kuusk has spent his entire life doing the opposite, and it turns out that’s exactly the point.
He’s a seven-time World Pentamind Champion, which means he didn’t just master one game. He had to perform at the highest level across multiple strategic disciplines simultaneously. Before him, the benchmark he eventually surpassed was held by Demis Hassabis, the chess prodigy turned neuroscientist turned founder of DeepMind, now one of the most consequential figures in the history of artificial intelligence.
What Andres finds interesting about that isn’t the record. It’s what the record reveals. Both of them built their success on the same underlying ability: understanding complex systems, moving fluidly across very different domains, and asking the same questions no matter what game they happened to be playing.
That insight eventually became the foundation of Unlocking the Success Puzzle.
Stop Trusting Your Gut. Start Understanding It.
One of the more provocative arguments in the book is that instincts, the thing most successful cultures tell people to follow unconditionally, are often the hidden source of their worst decisions.
Andres isn’t anti-instinct. He’s precise about what instincts actually are. They’re pattern-recognition systems built from previous experience. Sometimes those patterns are accurate and useful. Sometimes they’re outdated, incomplete, or shaped by environments that no longer exist.
The human brain evolved primarily for survival, not for optimal decision-making in modern life. Discomfort gets registered as danger even when it isn’t. Uncertainty feels threatening even when it’s actually an open door. A person preparing to launch a business, make a career pivot, or have a difficult conversation is running survival software in a situation that doesn’t require it.
The skill Andres wants readers to develop is the ability to pause and ask one question: is this instinct pointing toward genuine danger, or just toward discomfort? That distinction, he says, changes a surprising number of life decisions. Not by silencing instinct but by learning to read it more accurately.
The Card Game Nobody Wins by Wishing for Better Cards
One of the most useful reframes in the book is deceptively simple. Every person starts with a different hand. Some hands are stronger. Some are genuinely difficult. That’s real, and Andres doesn’t pretend otherwise.
But the question that actually matters isn’t whether the hand is fair. It’s whether you’re making the best decisions available from your current position.
Strong card players don’t waste energy wishing they’d been dealt something different. They focus entirely on extracting maximum value from what they actually have. And critically, they know how to recognize when the odds have shifted enough in their favor to move forward aggressively rather than waiting for perfect conditions that may never arrive.
That framing redirects attention away from things a person can’t control and toward the decisions they can make right now. It sounds straightforward. Most people still spend enormous amounts of energy negotiating with reality rather than working with it. The hand matters, Andres says. But how you play it matters far more.
The Same Rules Work for Organizations Too
Andres has spent years advising financial institutions and credit bureaus on strategy and risk management, and one of the things that experience reinforced is that organizations suffer from the same cognitive distortions as individuals.
Companies become overconfident after stretches of success. They get attached to assumptions that nobody thinks to challenge. They optimize for short-term optics instead of decision quality. They avoid information that makes the current strategy uncomfortable to defend.
Organizations have psychology. That’s easy to forget when you’re inside one.
The ten rules in the book scale from individual decision-making to team and organizational thinking with less adjustment than you’d expect. Thinking in sequences is as critical for strategic planning as it is for personal choices. Questioning assumptions is as valuable in a boardroom as it is in someone’s career. Curiosity is as much a competitive advantage for a company as it is for a person. The principles don’t shrink when they meet scale. They expand.
What Versatility Actually Teaches You About Leadership
The Pentamind Championship is built on a philosophy that cuts against most conventional thinking about expertise. It doesn’t reward the deepest specialist. It rewards the strongest all-round performer across multiple disciplines. To win it, you have to learn new systems quickly, recognize patterns in unfamiliar environments, and make sound decisions under pressure in situations where your previous experience doesn’t fully apply.
Andres spent years building exactly that muscle. And what he found when he moved into senior leadership and strategic advisory work was that the ability to transfer knowledge across domains turned out to be one of the most valuable things a leader can have.
Specialization creates real value. He’s not arguing against it. But at the level where the hardest decisions get made, leaders are constantly solving problems they’ve never encountered before. The ones who adapt fastest aren’t always the ones who know the most. They’re the ones who know how to learn quickly and how to apply thinking from one domain to the unexpected demands of another.
That’s what the Pentamind taught him. And it’s what he’s trying to pass on through the book.
The most important lessons, he keeps coming back to this, aren’t domain-specific. They’re transferable. Whether the game is played on a board, in a business, or in a life, the underlying questions stay remarkably similar.
Why do some decisions consistently outperform others? How do small advantages accumulate over time? What hidden assumptions are shaping the outcome?
Ask those questions well, and almost everything else gets easier.
If the way Andres thinks about decisions, distortions, and what actually separates high performers from everyone else resonates with you, his book Unlocking the Success Puzzle: Ten Practical Rules to Achieve Your Goals is available on Amazon. It lays out ten rules within a single framework for understanding why capable people win or fall short.
