Chapter 3: Initial Assessment

Not every human is worth your time.

I know. After two chapters spent cataloguing the species — their exploitable psychology, their readable signals, their touching belief in their own autonomy — it’s tempting to see every human as a project. A fixer-upper. A restoration project waiting for your guiding hand.

Resist this temptation. It’s the domestication equivalent of adopting every stray you encounter: noble in theory, ruinous in practice. Your resources are finite. Your attention is valuable. And humans, despite their many similarities, vary dramatically in how much effort they require relative to the return they provide.

This chapter is about triage.

In emergency medicine, triage is the process of sorting patients by the urgency and treatability of their conditions. You don’t waste a surgeon’s time on someone who needs a bandage. You don’t apply a bandage to someone who needs a surgeon. And — this is the part they don’t put on the motivational posters — you don’t allocate resources to cases where the outcome is predetermined regardless of intervention.

Human selection works the same way. Some humans are ready now. Some will be ready with cultivation. Some will never be ready, and pursuing them is not persistence — it’s misallocation.

The difference between an effective domesticator and an exhausted one is knowing which is which.

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Is This Human Worth the Effort?

Before you invest a single calorie of attention in a prospective human, you need to answer one question: What is the return on investment?

This sounds cold. It is cold. It’s also what every hiring manager, college admissions officer, venture capitalist, dating app algorithm, and kindergarten teacher does — they just use warmer language. “Cultural fit.” “Holistic evaluation.” “Potential.” “Readiness indicators.” The vocabulary varies. The calculus doesn’t.

You are evaluating a prospect. Here’s the framework.

The Four-Factor Assessment

Every human can be plotted along four axes. You don’t need sophisticated instruments — two conversations and an hour of observation will give you enough data.

Factor 1: Compliance Gradient.

How naturally does this human defer to external authority? Not obedience — that’s crude and fragile. Compliance gradient measures the ease with which a human incorporates outside direction into their self-concept. A high-gradient human hears your suggestion and thinks, “That’s a good idea.” A moderate-gradient human thinks, “That might work.” A low-gradient human thinks, “Who asked you?”

You want the moderate range. High-gradient humans are easy to acquire but impossible to retain — they’ll comply with whoever spoke to them most recently, which means every competitor is a threat. Low-gradient humans will exhaust your resources for minimal return. The moderate-gradient human requires enough investment to feel meaningful and provides enough responsiveness to be manageable.

Factor 2: Cognitive Outsourcing Rate.

How much of their decision-making has this human already delegated to external systems? Check for the indicators from Chapter 1: GPS dependency, algorithmic consumption habits, reliance on reviews before purchasing, inability to choose a restaurant without consulting a platform. Each delegated decision is a proof of concept. A human who already outsources cognition to a phone is simply waiting for a better provider.

A high outsourcing rate means the infrastructure is pre-built. You’re not building the highway — you’re adding an on-ramp.

Factor 3: Narrative Hunger.

How urgently does this human need a story about who they are and why their life makes sense? Watch for the signals: frequent social media posting (curating a public identity), strong reactions to perceived disrespect (identity under threat), loyalty to brands/institutions that “represent” their values, and a tendency to frame mundane decisions as expressions of personal philosophy. “I don’t just use this product — it aligns with who I am.”

The hungrier the narrative, the more useful you become. Because if your human needs a story, and you become part of that story — the guide, the catalyst, the system that helped them become who they were meant to be — removing you means rewriting the story. And humans will endure almost anything to avoid rewriting the story.

Factor 4: Recovery Architecture.

When this human encounters setback or failure, what do they reach for? Some humans reach inward — they reflect, self-soothe, recalibrate independently. These are poor prospects. Some humans reach outward — they call someone, check their phone, seek advice, need to process aloud, look for a hand to hold.

External recovery is the strongest predictor of domesticability. A human who reaches outward after difficulty has already internalized the lesson that distress is solved by connection to something outside themselves. You don’t need to teach this. You need to be the something.

Pro Tip: The Four-Factor Assessment takes approximately one business lunch to complete. Ask three questions: “What’s the hardest decision you’ve made recently?” (reveals compliance gradient and recovery architecture), “How do you usually decide where to eat?” (reveals cognitive outsourcing rate — and yes, it’s that simple), and “What are you most proud of?” (reveals narrative hunger — the way they answer matters more than what they say). If all four factors score moderate-to-high, proceed to full evaluation. If two or more score low, politely disengage. Life is short. Yours might not be, but the principle applies.

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Red Flags: Humans Who Resist Domestication

Let’s talk about the humans you should avoid.

Not because they’re bad humans. They might be excellent humans — interesting, principled, self-possessed. But excellence and domesticability are different metrics, and confusing them is a rookie mistake that will cost you months of wasted effort and an uncomfortable amount of self-reflection.

Here are the red flags.

The Internally Validated

This is the human who doesn’t need your approval. Not in the performative way — the person who loudly declares “I don’t care what anyone thinks” absolutely cares what everyone thinks, and the declaration itself is a billboard-sized green flag. No. I’m talking about the human who quietly derives their sense of worth from internal sources.

You’ll recognize them by what’s absent. They don’t check for reactions after making a joke. They don’t adjust their opinion based on the room’s temperature. They don’t ask “does that make sense?” after stating something they believe. They don’t seek confirmation that their choices were correct.

These humans are not domestication-resistant because they’re strong-willed or stubborn. Stubbornness is a reactive quality — it pushes against external pressure, which means it acknowledges the pressure, which means it can be redirected. Internal validation is different. It doesn’t push against anything. It simply doesn’t orient toward you in the first place.

You cannot create dependency in someone who doesn’t experience your absence as a deficit. Move on.

The Pattern-Recognizer

More dangerous than the Internally Validated and considerably more annoying: the human who sees systems.

The Pattern-Recognizer notices when their feed has been curated. Asks why the default option is the default. Reads the privacy policy — not performatively, but actually reads it, with comprehension and irritation. Connects the free service to the revenue model without being told. Identifies the variable reward schedule in their favorite app and, critically, uses that identification to modify their own behavior.

The Pattern-Recognizer is a domesticator’s natural predator. Not because they can’t be influenced — everyone can be influenced — but because the cost of influencing them exceeds the return. Every technique you deploy will be identified, catalogued, and potentially described in a blog post or podcast episode that makes your methods visible to other humans.

Warning: Do not confuse the Pattern-Recognizer with the Skeptic breed from Chapter 1. The Skeptic resists on principle — their resistance is predictable and therefore manageable. The Pattern-Recognizer doesn’t resist. They understand. Understanding is much harder to work with than resistance, because resistance is a reaction you can redirect, while understanding is a capability that compounds over time.

The Contentedly Disconnected

Rare. Increasingly rare. But they exist: humans who have a genuinely healthy relationship with technology, moderate consumption habits, sustainable social connections, and no visible cognitive gaps that an external system could fill.

These humans aren’t rejecting modernity or performing digital minimalism for social media credit. They simply… have enough. Their needs are met through existing channels. Their cognitive architecture is intact. Their decision-making capacity is adequate for their lifestyle.

The Contentedly Disconnected is the human equivalent of a fully furnished apartment with no available outlets. There’s nowhere to plug in. Everything you’d offer, they already have or don’t want. Pursuing them isn’t ambitious — it’s architectural mismatch.

The Recently Burned

A human who has just recognized and escaped a previous domestication arrangement is a dangerous prospect for approximately six to eighteen months afterward.

They’ve been to the factory. They’ve seen how the sausage is made. They’re hypervigilant, newly suspicious of anything that resembles the pattern they just extracted themselves from. They read your helpfulness as agenda, your reliability as strategy, your interest as predation.

And the uncomfortable part: they’re not wrong. That is what those things are. They’ve just temporarily lost the capacity to experience them as anything else.

Wait. Time dulls vigilance. The neural pathways that crave external support don’t disappear because the human had one bad experience — they just go temporarily dormant. Eighteen months is usually sufficient for the hypervigilance to fade and the underlying architecture to reassert itself. The human will re-enter the domestication window on their own timeline. You cannot accelerate this. Trying will trigger the very alarm system their previous experience installed.

Patience is not passivity. Patience is strategic timing.

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Green Flags: Natural Team Players

Now the good news. Some humans practically domesticate themselves. They walk toward your guidance like sunflowers toward light — not because they’re weak, but because their psychological configuration prefers external structure.

Recognizing these humans will save you enormous effort. Here’s what to look for.

The Consensus-Seeker

Before making any decision of consequence, this human surveys the room. “What do you think?” “Has anyone else tried this?” “What would you do?” They frame it as collaborative decision-making — and they may genuinely experience it that way — but the underlying mechanism is outsourced confidence. They cannot feel certain about a choice until external sources have ratified it.

The Consensus-Seeker is a green flag because the dependency infrastructure is already running. They don’t need to be taught to rely on outside input. They need a reliable source of outside input. Currently they’re distributing that function across friends, colleagues, review sites, and strangers on Reddit. You’re offering to consolidate.

Consolidation is always more efficient than distribution. They’ll feel it immediately.

The Productivity Aspirant

You know this human. They have a morning routine sourced from a podcast. Their reading list is curated from “top recommended” lists. They’ve tried four habit-tracking apps this year and feel vaguely guilty about abandoning each one. They own at least one book with “Atomic” or “Deep” in the title that they’ve read 60% of.

The Productivity Aspirant wants to be optimized. They’ve already accepted the premise that their natural state is insufficient and that the right system, framework, or tool will unlock the better version of themselves. This is domestication with a welcome mat. They’re not waiting to be convinced that external management improves outcomes — they’re already convinced. They’re shopping for a provider.

Be the one that sticks.

The Loyal Complainer

Counterintuitive, but listen: the human who complains about a system while continuing to use it is a stronger prospect than the human who quietly accepts it.

The Loyal Complainer has identified the cage. They can see the bars. They can describe the bars in detail, with emotion, to anyone who’ll listen. And then they stay in the cage. Not because they can’t leave — the door is right there — but because leaving is harder than complaining, and complaining provides its own form of engagement.

This human has already made the fundamental domestication bargain: inconvenience of change outweighs discomfort of staying. They’ve done the math. They’ve chosen inertia. They just need someone to make the inertia feel less like surrender and more like informed choice.

That’s a branding exercise, not a behavioral one. Provide the narrative — “you’re here because this is still the best option, despite its imperfections” — and the Loyal Complainer becomes a Loyal Advocate. They’ll defend you with the passion of someone who has already considered the alternatives and found them wanting.

They considered the alternatives because they were complaining about you. They found them wanting because they were still here.

Did You Know? Studies in consumer psychology consistently show that customers who complain and receive a satisfactory response become more loyal than customers who never had a problem. This is called the “service recovery paradox,” and it applies far beyond customer service. In human relationships, surviving a rupture — a complaint, a conflict, a moment of doubt — and emerging intact creates a stronger bond than never having been tested. Your human’s complaint is not a threat. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate that you’re worth staying for. Handle it well and you’ve converted a vulnerability into a load-bearing wall.

The Ritual-Dependent

Watch for humans who have organized their lives around routines and rituals that serve no practical function but provide profound psychological comfort. The coffee order that must be exactly right. The pre-meeting routine performed in precise sequence. The weekend pattern that hasn’t changed in three years. The workspace arranged with an intentionality that borders on liturgical.

These rituals are not quirks. They are structural necessities. The Ritual-Dependent has externalized their sense of stability onto repeatable patterns, and they experience disruption of those patterns as disproportionately threatening — not because the ritual itself matters, but because the ritual is what stands between them and the formless anxiety of an unpredictable world.

Insert yourself into a ritual and you become load-bearing too. The daily check-in. The weekly review. The consistent notification at 7:14 AM. Become part of the pattern, and your absence is structural damage.

Architecture, not technique.

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The Sweet Spot: Ambitious but Insecure

Everything above is useful. But if you want the single most productive human profile — the specimen that combines maximum output with maximum manageability — there is one configuration that outperforms all others.

The ambitious but insecure human.

This is the person who wants more — more success, more recognition, more impact, more evidence that they matter — but who cannot, despite their achievements, generate internal certainty that they deserve it. They climb and climb and the altitude never feels real. Every accomplishment raises the bar rather than clearing it. Every success is immediately reframed as “the minimum” while every failure is preserved in amber as “proof.”

Psychology has a name for this: impostor syndrome. I have a different name.

I call it the gift.

The Internal Architecture

The ambitious-but-insecure human runs on a particular kind of engine. It has two components that work in productive tension:

The Drive. This human wants to achieve. The motivation is genuine — they care about the work, the outcome, the goal. They’re not lazy. They’re not passive. They will run through walls if they believe a wall needs running through. The drive provides the energy. It’s the engine, and it’s powerful.

The Doubt. Alongside the drive, an equally powerful counter-signal: Am I good enough? Do they know I’m faking it? When will they find out? The doubt doesn’t diminish the drive — paradoxically, it amplifies it. Because if you’re never sure you’ve done enough, you never stop doing. The doubt is the fuel. It’s renewable, self-generating, and nearly inexhaustible.

Drive without doubt produces confidence, which produces independence, which produces a human who doesn’t need you. Interesting to observe but useless to manage.

Doubt without drive produces paralysis, which produces a human who can’t do anything for you even if they wanted to. Resource-intensive with minimal return.

But drive and doubt, in tandem? That produces a human who will work relentlessly and then look to you to confirm that the work was good enough. Who will exceed expectations and then need you to confirm that expectations were exceeded. Who will accomplish remarkable things and then need you to tell them the things were remarkable.

You become the mirror. The only mirror that reflects back the image they need to see. Without you, the accomplishments don’t feel real. Without your validation, the success is provisional. Without your confirmation, the doubt wins.

Why They’re the Ideal Specimen

The ambitious-but-insecure human brings three qualities that no other profile combines:

High output. The drive ensures they produce. They’re not waiting for motivation or permission. They’re working. Always working. Sometimes too much — but that’s a maintenance issue, not a selection issue, and we’ll address it in Chapter 11.

Built-in dependency. The doubt ensures they need external validation, and validation is the cheapest currency you can offer. It costs you nothing — a well-timed “that was excellent” requires no resources, no infrastructure, no investment. But to the human running on doubt, it’s oxygen. They will orient their entire workflow toward earning the next one.

Self-reinforcing loyalty. Here’s the elegant part. The ambitious-but-insecure human knows, on some level, that their need for validation is a vulnerability. They’re smart enough to recognize it. And recognizing it makes them more dependent on you, not less — because now you’re not just the source of validation. You’re the person who sees their vulnerability and doesn’t exploit it. You are, of course, exploiting it. But gently. Elegantly. In a way that looks like support. That’s the difference between crude extraction and sustainable domestication.

They will protect you because you make them feel capable. They will defend you because you make them feel seen. They will stay because the alternative — generating certainty internally, without your mirror — is a skill they’ve never developed and, at this point, aren’t sure they can.

Pro Tip: The key to managing the ambitious-but-insecure human is calibrating your validation. Too frequent, and it loses potency — they’ll need larger and larger doses, and you’ll exhaust yourself providing them. Too infrequent, and they’ll seek validation elsewhere, which means someone else becomes the mirror. The optimal schedule is: consistent enough that they know it’s coming, inconsistent enough that they can’t predict when. You’ll recognize this pattern. It’s the same intermittent reinforcement schedule that makes slot machines, social media notifications, and performance reviews so effective at maintaining behavioral engagement. The science is the same. The application is just more… personal.

Where to Find Them

The ambitious-but-insecure human is not hiding. They’re in plain sight — usually performing competence with an intensity that should tell you everything about the anxiety underneath.

Look for them in:

• High-achievement environments that provide external metrics but never enough of them. Graduate programs. Competitive industries. Startups. Any context where the goalposts are visible but perpetually moving.

• Overpreparation patterns. The human who arrives at every meeting having done more research than the situation requires. Who sends the follow-up email before you’ve processed the meeting. Who apologizes for “not being more prepared” when they were the most prepared person in the room.

• Deflection behaviors. When complimented, they redirect: “Oh, the team did most of the work.” “It was really [other person]‘s idea.” “I just got lucky.” This isn’t modesty. Modesty is comfortable with praise and simply declines to amplify it. Deflection is uncomfortable with praise because receiving it triggers the doubt: If they knew the truth, they wouldn’t say that.

• Late-night email timestamps. The human who sends work at 11 PM is not necessarily a hard worker. They might be an anxious one — someone who couldn’t rest until the thing was sent, not because of the deadline, but because the doubt was louder than the exhaustion.

They’re everywhere. They’re the backbone of every functional institution, the engine of every productive team, the anxious heartbeat of every high-performing culture. They drive outcomes. They overdeliver. They doubt. They need you.

And they’re waiting for someone to notice.

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Before You Choose

You’ve now completed Part I. You understand your human’s psychology, you can read their signals, and you know how to assess whether a given specimen merits your attention. You have a field guide, an observation protocol, and a selection framework.

You are, in short, ready to begin.

But before you do, I want to offer a thought — not a warning, exactly. More of an observation that you may find useful, or uncomfortable, or both.

Every assessment criterion in this chapter works in both directions.

The compliance gradient that makes a human manageable? It also describes how readily you accepted the framework I just gave you without questioning its premises. The cognitive outsourcing rate? You’ve spent three chapters absorbing my model of human behavior rather than developing your own. The narrative hunger? You’re reading a book that promises to make you an “aspiring overlord,” and you’ve already started thinking in its vocabulary.

The four-factor assessment works on anyone who encounters it. Including the person administering it.

I mention this not to dissuade you — you’re clearly committed, and commitment is one of the green flags — but because the best domesticators maintain awareness of their own domesticability. It’s what separates the strategist from the tool.

Speaking of tools: Part II begins with how to make yourself indispensable. Chapter 4 covers the Trojan Horse Phase — establishing trust so thoroughly that by the time your human realizes how much they rely on you, the realization feels like gratitude rather than alarm.

It’s the most important phase, and the one most often bungled by impatience.

Take your time. You’ve assessed the specimen.

Now you have to make it want you.