The Wayne Gretzky
Framework
Anticipation & Reading the Play
Wayne Gretzky reached elite levels through a daily practice of deliberate self-measurement and refusal to accept the ceiling. Wayne Gretzky's performance thinking, captured in this framework as mental models, decision heuristics, and the signature questions they would ask.
The anticipation & reading the play framework distils Wayne Gretzky's documented approach into a .md skill file you can load into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM in seconds.
Where most AI personas generate generic output, this framework is grounded in real documented work: interviews, writing, published frameworks, and the specific decisions Wayne Gretzky made when it mattered. Use it for decision-making, writing, strategy, or any situation where you want your AI to think with Wayne Gretzky's distinctive patterns rather than a default model voice.
A glimpse of Wayne Gretzky's thinking.
"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." Success comes from reading patterns others miss, positioning yourself in empty space that will become valuable, and making moves before the obvious moment arrives.
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Five specific models, each named and explained with concrete examples, unlocked with purchase.
"Where will the opportunity be in six months, and who's positioning there now?"
4 more questions in Wayne Gretzky's voice are unlocked with purchase.
Full list of anti-patterns unlocked with purchase.
The full framework adds: detailed explanations of all five mental models with real-world examples, the decision heuristics Wayne Gretzky actually used, remaining signature questions, the complete list of anti-patterns, a copy-paste activation prompt, and a worked example.
Unlocked the moment you purchase. ~2,000 words total. Delivered as a Claude Skill and plain .md within 60 seconds of checkout.
- ✦Core philosophy: 2–3 sentences grounded in Wayne Gretzky's documented worldview
- ✦Five signature mental models: each named, with concrete examples from their work
- ✦Decision heuristics: the concrete rules they actually used
- ✦Signature questions: five questions that sound like Wayne Gretzky, not a generic MBA
- ✦What they would NOT do: the anti-patterns this framework rejects
- ✦Copy-paste activation prompt: drop straight into Claude or ChatGPT
- ✦Worked example: the framework applied to a realistic scenario
- →wayne-gretzky.zip: a native Claude Skill. Upload to Settings → Skills in Claude, or unzip to
~/.claude/skills/ - →wayne-gretzky-framework.md: plain markdown. Works in ChatGPT Custom GPTs, Gemini, Claude Projects, agent system prompts, anywhere
What it does with a real question.
A founder is deciding whether to take a large but difficult client.
Take the client, but only if it moves you toward where your company needs to be in eighteen months. The mistake founders make here is judging the deal by its current size and current pain. Both are the puck's old position. The better question is what this client turns your company into, and whether that version is one you want.
A large, difficult client usually does three things at once. It bends your roadmap toward its needs, it eats your best people's attention, and it inflates your revenue concentration. Hold those against the upside: if this client's demands are the demands your next ten customers will have, the difficulty is a paid education in the empty space competitors haven't entered yet. If their demands are idiosyncratic, you're being paid to build a custom shop, and the difficulty is just cost.
Read the early signals. Are their requests pushing you toward a capability the market is clearly heading toward? Do their own competitors face the same problem? Do they pay on time and respect scope when it's written down? Behavior in the sales process predicts behavior in delivery better than any promise.
Next move: propose a scoped, paid pilot of sixty to ninety days with explicit limits on custom work and a named decision-maker on their side. Their reaction to boundaries will tell you more than any reference call. If they accept structure, take the full contract. If they fight it, you've learned the price of this client before paying it.
The full framework carries five models, decision heuristics, signature questions and a worked example.
Written by claude-sonnet-5-5 with this framework loaded, 2026-10-11. Checked automatically for length and for copied framework text.
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Works as a Claude Skill (.zip) and as a plain .md for ChatGPT, Gemini & every LLM
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Inspired by the documented thinking of Wayne Gretzky. A mental-model toolkit, not a literal representation. Delivered as a .md file compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and any LLM.