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Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

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Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

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Highlights & Notes

While the rest of us are chasing victory, the best in the world know they must avoid losing before they can win. It turns out this is a surprisingly effective strategy.

In order to get the results we desire, we must do two things. We must first create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and second, we must deliberately use that space to think clearly. Once you have mastered this skill, you will find you have an unstoppable advantage.

When we react without reasoning, our position is weakened, and our options get increasingly worse. When we ritualize a response to our biological triggers, we create the space to think clearly, and strengthen our position. Then, we identify a number of practical, actionable ways to both manage your weaknesses and build your strengths so that space is consistently created when you’re under pressure.

We’re taught to focus on the big decisions, rather than the moments where we don’t even realize we’re making a choice. Yet these ordinary moments often matter more to our success than the big decisions. This can be difficult to appreciate.

No one tries to win the moment at the expense of the decade, and yet that is often how it goes.

Each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future. It’s that positioning that eventually makes life easier or harder.

A good position allows you to think clearly rather than be forced by circumstances into a decision. One reason the best in the world make consistently good decisions is they rarely find themselves forced into a decision by circumstances.

You don’t need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you can out-position them. Anyone looks like a genius when they’re in a good position, and even the smartest person looks like an idiot when they’re in a bad one.

Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned. When you are well positioned, there are many paths to victory. If you are poorly positioned, there may be only one.

What a lot of people miss is that ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your options. Clear thinking is the key to proper positioning, which is what allows you to master your circumstances rather than be mastered by them. It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today. Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. It all depends on whether you’re thinking clearly.

Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets. —CORDELIA FINE, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives

Rationality is wasted if you don’t know when to use it.

In the space between stimulus and response, one of two things can happen. You can consciously pause and apply reason to the situation. Or you can cede control and execute a default behavior.

  • Importante

So our first step in improving our outcomes is to train ourselves to identify the moments when judgment is called for in the first place, and pause to create space to think clearly.

Reacting without reasoning makes every situation worse.

There is a huge advantage in having more of your energy instead go toward achieving your goals instead of fixing your problems.

When our unthinking reactions make situations worse, that little voice in our head starts to beat us up: “What were you thinking, you idiot?”

Our identity is part of our territory too.

The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts. 2. The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy. 3. The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group. 4. The inertia default: we’re habit forming and comfort seeking. We tend to resist change, and to prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.

  • Importante

With the ability to think clearly in ordinary moments today, they consistently put themselves in a good position for tomorrow.

When we respond without reasoning, we’re more likely to make mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight. In fact, when we respond emotionally, we often don’t even realize that we’re in a position that calls for thinking at all. When you are possessed by the moment, all the reasoning tools in the world won’t help you.

Emotions can multiply all of your progress by zero. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve thought about or worked at something, it can all be undone in an instant. No one is immune.

Emotions can make even the best of us into idiots, driving us away from clear thinking.

Not all confidence is created equally. Sometimes, it comes from a track record of applying deep knowledge successfully, and other times it comes from the shallowness of reading an article. It’s amazing how often the ego turns unearned knowledge into reckless confidence.

Our ego tempts us into thinking we’re more than we are. Left unchecked, it can turn confidence into overconfidence or even arrogance. We get a bit of knowledge on the internet and suddenly we are full of hubris. Everything seems easy. As a result, we take risks that we may not understand we’re taking. We must resist this kind of unearned confidence, though, if we are to get the results we desire.

One reason people find it hard to empower others at work is that having them depend on us for every decision makes us feel important and indispensable. Having them depend on us makes us feel not only necessary but powerful. The more people who depend on us the more powerful we feel.

Our desire to feel right overpowers our desire to be right.

Most people go through life assuming that they’re right … and that people who don’t see things their way are wrong.[2] We mistake how we want the world to be with how it actually is.

We mistake how we want the world to work for how it does work.

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. —WALTER LIPPMANN, The Stakes of Diplomacy

The social default encourages us to outsource our thoughts, beliefs, and outcomes to others. When everyone else is doing something, it’s easy to rationalize doing it too. No need to stand out, take responsibility for outcomes, or think for yourself. Just put your brain on autopilot and take a nap.

No one grows up saying I want to do the same thing everyone else is doing. And yet there is a comfort to surrounding yourself with people who agree with you, or who are doing the same thing you’re doing. So while there is sometimes embedded wisdom in the crowd, mistaking the comfort of the collective for evidence that what you’re doing is going to lead to better results is the social default’s big lie.

Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely. If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results that everyone else gets.[*] Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average.

Our desire to fit in often overpowers our desire for a better outcome. Instead of trying something new, we tell ourselves something new.

Change happens only when you’re willing to think independently, when you do what nobody else is doing, and risk looking like a fool because of it.

The great enemy of any attempt to change men’s habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by inertia. — EDWARD L. BERNAYS, Propaganda

The inertia default pushes us to maintain the status quo. Starting something is hard but so too is stopping something.[1] We resist change even when change is for the best.

Inertia keeps us in jobs we hate and in relationships that don’t make us happy, because in both cases we know what to expect and it’s comforting to have our expectations reliably met.

When circumstances change, we need to adapt. But inertia closes minds and stifles the motivation to change how we’ve been doing things. It makes it harder to imagine alternative methods, and discourages experimentation and course correction.

Inertia also prevents us from doing hard things. The longer we avoid the hard thing we know we should do, the harder it becomes to do. Avoiding conflict is comfortable and easy. The longer we avoid the conflict, however, the more necessary it becomes to continue avoiding it. What starts out as avoiding a small but difficult conversation quickly grows into avoiding a large and seemingly impossible one. The weight of what we avoid eventually affects our relationship.

A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

While we can’t eliminate our defaults, we can reprogram them. If we want to improve our behavior, accomplish more of our goals, and experience greater joy and meaning in our lives, we need to learn to manage our defaults.

That’s just how it goes sometimes when we’re forming or breaking habits. What may look like discipline often involves a carefully created environment to encourage certain behaviors. And what may look like poor choices is often just someone trying their best to use willpower and bumping up against their defaults.

The way to improve your defaults isn’t by willpower but by creating an intentional environment where your desired behavior becomes the default behavior.

Your chosen environment, rather than your willpower alone, will help nudge you toward the best choices.

It’s easier said than done, though. Reprogramming a computer is simply a matter of rewriting lines of code, while reprogramming yourself is a longer and more involved process.

Criticizing others is easier than coming to know yourself. —BRUCE LEE

Rituals force the mind to focus on the next play, not the last one.

Strength is the power to press pause on your defaults and exercise good judgment.

Here are four key strengths you’ll need: Self-accountability: holding yourself accountable for developing your abilities, managing your inabilities, and using reason to govern your actions Self-knowledge: knowing your own strengths and weaknesses—what you’re capable of doing and what you’re not Self-control: mastering your fears, desires, and emotions Self-confidence: trusting in your abilities and your value to others

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. —W. E. HENLEY, “INVICTUS”

Self-accountability means taking responsibility for your abilities, your inabilities, and your actions. If you can’t do that, you might never move forward.

There is always something you can do in the moment today to better your position tomorrow. You might not be able to solve the problem, but your next action will make the situation better or worse. There is always an action you can control, however tiny, that helps you achieve progress.

Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be. —JEFF BEZOS[1]

PS Don’t blame the bus for being late. Buy a car.

No one cares about your excuses as much as you do. In fact, no one cares about your excuses at all, except you.

Just because something happened that was outside of your control doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility to deal with it the best you can.

The path to being exceptional begins when you decide to be responsible for your actions no matter the situation.

Failing to accept how the world really works puts your time and energy toward proving how right you are. When the desired results don’t materialize, it’s easy to blame circumstances or others. I call this the wrong side of right. You’re focused on your ego not the outcome.

When you put outcome over ego, you get better results.

One effective question to ask yourself before you act is, “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”[*] This surprisingly simple question helps change your perspective on the situation and avoid making things worse.

  • Pregunta

Too often we fight against the feedback the world gives us, to protect our beliefs. Rather than changing ourselves, we want the world to change. And if we don’t have the power to change it, we do the only thing we feel we can do: complain.

Distancing yourself from reality makes it harder to solve the problems you face.

When you constantly blame circumstances, the environment, or other people, you are effectively claiming that you had little ability to affect the outcome. But that’s not what actually happened. The truth is that we make repeated choices in life that become habits, those habits determine our paths, and those paths determine our outcomes. When we explain away those unwanted outcomes, we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for producing them.

  • Responsabilidad

The real test of a person is the degree to which they are willing to nonconform to do the right thing.

Know thyself. —INSCRIPTION ON THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT DELPHI

Self-knowledge is about knowing your own strengths and weaknesses. You must know what you can do and what you can’t; your powers and limitations, your strengths and vulnerabilities, what’s in your control and what isn’t.

“The key to successful investing is to know what you know and stick to it.”

“When you play games where other people have the aptitude and you don’t, you’re going to lose. You have to figure out where you have an edge and stick to it.”

Self-control is the ability to master your fears, desires, and other emotions.

Inspiration and excitement might get you going, but persistence and routine are what keep you going until you reach your goals.

Self-confidence is about trusting in your abilities and your value to others.

Self-confidence is what empowers you to execute difficult decisions and develop self-knowledge. While the ego tries to prevent you from acknowledging any deficiencies you may have, self-confidence gives you the strength to acknowledge those deficiencies. This is how you learn humility.

Every successful task only further serves to deepen your trust in yourself, and that’s how confidence is earned.

More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence.

We know how the words we say to other people impact how they feel, but we rarely think of how the words we say to ourselves impact us.

People who are confident aren’t afraid of facing reality because they know they can handle it. Confident people don’t care what other people think about them, aren’t afraid of standing out, and are willing to risk looking like an idiot while they try something new. They’ve been beaten down and rebuilt themselves enough times to know that they can do it again if they have to. Crucially, they also know that to outperform the crowd, you have to do things differently sometimes, and that hecklers and naysayers inevitably tend to follow. They take their feedback from reality, not popular opinion.

The quicker you accept reality, though, the quicker you can deal with the implications, and the sooner you do that, the easier those implications are to manage.

In order to be right, you must be willing to change your mind. If you’re not willing to change your mind, you’re going to be wrong a lot.

We must acknowledge the things we cannot control and focus our efforts to manage the things we can. Facing reality demands acknowledging our mistakes and failures, learning from them, and moving forward.

Self-confidence is the strength to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right. It’s the strength to face reality. It’s the strength to admit mistakes, and the strength to change your mind. Self-confidence is what it takes to be on the right side of right. Outcome over ego.

It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis … that you will grow to be like them… . Place an extinguished piece of coal next to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite… . Remember that if you consort with someone covered in dirt you can hardly avoid getting a little grimy yourself. —EPICTETUS, Discourses

The first step to building any of your strengths is raising the standards to which you hold yourself, a practical matter of looking around at the people and practices that pervade your day-to-day environment.

Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you. The changes are too gradual to notice until they’re too large to address.

exceptional outcomes are almost always achieved by people with higher-than-average standards.

Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions.

When you’re committed to excellence, you don’t let anyone on your team half-ass it.

There are two components to building strength by raising the bar: (a) Choose the right exemplars—ones that raise your standards. Exemplars can be people you work with, people you admire, or even people who lived long ago. It doesn’t matter. What matters is they make you better in a certain area, like a skill, trait, or value. (b) Practice imitating them in certain ways. Create space in the moment to reflect on what they’d do in your position, and then act accordingly.

As Seneca said, “Happy is he who can improve others not just when he is in their presence, but even when he is in their thoughts!”

Practice, Practice, Practice Strengths of character result from habit… . We acquire them just as we acquire skills … we become builders, for instance, by building, and we become harpists by playing the harp. So too we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions. —ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Chapter 1

It’s not enough just to pick exemplars and assemble a personal board of directors. You also have to follow their example—not just once or twice, but again and again. Only then will you internalize the standards they embody, and become the kind of person you want to be.

Failing in that sandbox, though, provided a learning opportunity with few real-world consequences, whereas failing in a real operation could cost people their lives.

Life gets easier when you don’t blame other people and focus on what you can control. —JAMES CLEAR

Bad habits are easy to acquire when there is a delay between action and consequence. If you eat a chocolate bar or skip a workout today, you’re not going to suddenly go from healthy to unhealthy. Work late and miss dinner with your family a couple nights, and it won’t damage your relationship. If you spend today on social media instead of doing work, you’re not going to get fired. However, these choices can end up becoming habits through repetition and accumulate into disaster.

The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated. Just because the results aren’t immediately felt doesn’t mean consequences aren’t coming.

There are two ways to manage your weaknesses. The first is to build your strengths, which will help you overcome the weaknesses you’ve acquired. The second is to implement safeguards, which will help you manage any weaknesses you’re having trouble overcoming with strength alone.

How to Manage Inbuilt Weaknesses Safeguards How to Manage Acquired Weaknesses Strength + safeguards

What’s true of perception is also true of cognition—our ability to think and judge. The cognitive capacities we’ve inherited from natural selection weren’t designed to achieve maximum accuracy, but only enough to increase our chances of survival and reproduction.

The survival cost of a false negative is much higher than the cost of a false positive.

Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Flawed behavior has become ingrained through a long process of habit formation. Those flaws are part of who we are, even if it’s not in line with who we want to be. Second, seeing our flaws bruises our egos—especially when those flaws are behaviors that are deeply ingrained. They’re different from shortcomings like, say, lacking a technical skill, because they feel like a referendum on the kind of person we think we are. We are territorial about how we see ourselves and tend to dismiss information that challenges our self-image.

Your present self is blind to the perspective of your future self.

When we get feedback about our own weaknesses from the world, it’s a rare opportunity for getting better and getting closer to the kind of people we really want to be. Use these opportunities wisely!

All the technology in the world isn’t going to make you better if the people using it are checked out.

you can’t simply order people to be better. Even if that appears to work, the results are short term and the consequences enormous.

You don’t tap into people’s resourcefulness, intelligence, and skills by command-and-control.

“Show me an organization in which employees take ownership, and I will show you one that beats its competitors,”

There is a gap in our thinking that comes from believing that the way we see the world is the way the world really works. It’s only when we change our perspective—when we look at the situation through the eyes of other people—that we realize what we’re missing.

Safeguards are tools for protecting ourselves from ourselves—from weaknesses that we don’t have the strength to overcome.

Purging your home of all junk food is an example of one safeguarding strategy: increasing the amount of “friction” required to do something that’s contrary to your long-term goals. There are lots of safeguard strategies, though. My favorites include prevention, creating rules for yourself, making checklists, shifting your frame of reference, and making the invisible visible.

You can use the principles behind HALT as a safeguard for decision-making in general. If you have an important decision to make, ask yourself: “Am I hungry? Am I angry or otherwise emotional? Am I lonely or otherwise stressed by my circumstances, such as being in an unfamiliar environment or pressed for time? Am I tired, sleep-deprived, or physically fatigued?” If the answer is yes to any of these questions, avoid making the decision if you can. Wait for a more opportune time. Otherwise, your defaults will take over.

improve our judgment: replacing decisions with rules.[2] It turns out that rules can help us automate our behavior to put us in a position to achieve success and accomplish our goals.

Eventually it becomes easier to make those excuses than to make the choices that lead us to our goals.

In a quirk of psychology, people typically don’t argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules.

We’re taught our whole lives to follow rules, and yet no one ever told us about how we can create powerful rules that help us get what we want. I find it hard to go to the gym three days a week, so my rule is I go every day. I do not feel like going to the gym every day. In fact, some days I hate it. I also know it’s easier to follow my rule than to break it. When it comes to the gym, going every day is easier than going some days.

Creating personal rules is a powerful technique for protecting yourself from your own weaknesses and limitations. Sometimes those rules have surprising benefits.

was giving one of the most important things I wanted to do the worst of myself.

If there were a recipe for accumulated disaster, it would be giving the best of ourselves to the least important things and the worst of ourselves to the most important things.

The path to breaking bad habits is making your desired behavior the default behavior.

Since behavior follows the path of least resistance, a surprisingly successful approach is to add friction where you find yourself doing things you don’t want to do.

“What am I trying to achieve?” and “Is this moving me closer to that or further away?” These seem like basic questions, but they’re often forgotten in the heat of the moment.

Having an outside perspective on your situation allows you to see more of what’s actually happening. Changing your perspective changes what you see. Shifting your frame of reference is a powerful safeguard against blind spots.

This is a form of what psychologists call self-serving bias: a tendency to evaluate things in ways that protect or enhance our self-image,

“Heads, I’m right. Tails, I’m not wrong.”

If you got some results you didn’t want, the world is telling you at least one of two things: (a) you were unlucky; (b) your ideas about how things work were wrong.

If you were unlucky, trying again with the same approach should lead to a different outcome. When you repeatedly don’t get the outcomes you want, though, the world is telling you to update your understanding.

Everyone makes mistakes because everyone has limitations. Even you. Trying to avoid responsibility for your decisions, your actions, or their outcomes, though, is tantamount to pretending you don’t have limitations.

Mistakes present a choice: whether to update your ideas, or ignore the failures they’ve produced and keep believing what you’ve always believed.

The biggest mistake people make typically isn’t their initial mistake. It’s the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it. The first mistake is expensive; the second one costs a fortune.

There are three problems with covering up mistakes. The first is that you can’t learn if you ignore your mistakes. The second is that hiding them becomes a habit. The third is that the cover-up makes a bad situation worse.

Admitting error and correcting course is a time-saver that empowers you to avoid making more mistakes in the future. However, mistakes also provide rare opportunities for getting closer to the kind of person you want to be, should you choose to heed their lessons. Use those opportunities wisely!

The four steps to handling mistakes more effectively are as follows: (1) accept responsibility, (2) learn from the mistake, (3) commit to doing better, and (4) repair the damage as best you can.

If you’ve taken command of your life, you need to acknowledge any contribution you’ve made to a mistake and take responsibility for what happens afterward. Even if the mistake isn’t entirely your fault, it’s still your problem, and you still have a role to play in handling it.

Mistakes turn into anchors if you don’t accept them. Part of accepting them is learning from them and then letting them go. We can’t change the past, but we can work to undo the effects it’s had on the future. The most powerful story in the world is the one you tell yourself. That inner voice has the power to move you forward or anchor you to the past. Choose wisely.

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If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. —NEIL PEART

Decisions are different from choices. If you casually select an option from a range of alternatives, you’ve made a choice. If you react without thinking, you’ve made an unconscious choice. But neither of these is the same as a decision. A decision is a choice that involves conscious thought. The decision = the judgment that a certain option is the best one

When we react without reason, we cause more problems than we solve.

The first principle of decision-making is that the decider needs to define the problem.[*] If you’re not the one making the decision, you can suggest the problem that needs to be solved, but you don’t get to define it. Only the person responsible for the outcome does. The decision-maker can take input from anywhere—bosses, subordinates, colleagues, experts, etc. However, the responsibility to get to the bottom of the problem—to sort fact from opinion and determine what’s really happening—rests with them.

Defining the problem starts with identifying two things: (1) what you want to achieve, and (2) what obstacles stand in the way of getting it. Unfortunately, people too often end up solving the wrong problem.

  • Decision making

Often the first plausible description of the situation defines the problem that the team will try to solve.[*] Once the group comes up with a solution, the decision-maker feels good. That person then allocates resources toward the idea and expects the problem to be solved. But it isn’t. Because the first lens into an issue rarely reveals what the real problem is, so the real problem doesn’t get solved.

Many of us have been taught that solving problems is how we add value. In school, teachers give us problems to solve, and at work our bosses do the same. We’ve been taught our whole lives to solve problems. But when it comes to defining problems, we have less experience.

organizations and individuals waste a lot of time solving the wrong problems. It’s so much easier to treat the symptoms than find the underlying disease, to put out fires rather than prevent them, or to simply punt things into the future. The problem with this approach is that the fires never burn out, they flare up repeatedly. And when you punt something into the future, the future eventually arrives. We’re busier than ever at work, but most of the time what we’re busy doing is putting out fires—fires that started with a poor initial decision made years earlier, which should’ve been prevented in the first place.

The best decision-makers know that the way we define a problem shapes everyone’s perspective about it and determines the solutions. The most critical step in any decision-making process is to get the problem right.

When you really understand a problem, the solution seems obvious.

the definition principle: Take responsibility for defining the problem. Don’t let someone define it for you. Do the work to understand it. Don’t use jargon to describe or explain it. the root cause principle: Identify the root cause of the problem. Don’t be content with simply treating its symptoms.

  • Problem definition

A handy tool for identifying the root cause of a problem is to ask yourself, “What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?”

  • Importante

Identifying the root cause of a problem applies in business too. A company might think that its problem is getting too few new sales, so it marshals resources to get new leads. But what if getting new sales isn’t the root of the problem? What if there’s an issue with, say, the product itself? The root cause of any problem like this is customer satisfaction, and that’s not necessarily the same as getting new customers. It could also be keeping existing customers happy. The way you define a problem changes what you see.

safeguard: Build a problem-solution firewall. Separate the problem-defining phase of the decision-making process from the problem-solving phase.

“What do you know about this problem that other people in the room don’t know?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein sums up this idea: “To understand is to know what to do.”[*]

tip: Remember that writing out the problem makes the invisible visible. Write down what you think the problem is, and then look at it the next day. If you find yourself using jargon in your description, it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand the problem. And if you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t be making a decision about it.

safeguard: Use the test of time. Test whether you’re addressing the root cause of a problem, rather than merely treating a symptom, by asking yourself whether it will stand the test of time. Will this solution fix the problem permanently, or will the problem return in the future? If it seems like the latter, then chances are you’re only treating a symptom.

You can put your energy into short-term solutions or long-term solutions but not both. Any energy that’s channeled toward short-term solutions depletes energy that could be put into finding a long-term fix.[2] Sometimes short-term solutions are necessary to create space for long-term solutions. Just make sure you’re not putting out flames in the present that will reignite in the future. When the same problem returns again and again, people end up exhausted and discouraged because they never seem to make real progress. Extinguish the fire today so it can’t burn you tomorrow.

“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”[1]

The worst thing we can do with a difficult problem is resort to magical thinking—putting our heads in the sand and hoping the problem will disappear on its own or that a solution will present itself to us. The future is not like the weather. It doesn’t just happen to us. We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, just as our present situation was shaped by choices we made in the past.

Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

Many people think they’re bad problem solvers when in fact they’re bad problem anticipators.

the bad outcome principle: Don’t just imagine the ideal future outcome. Imagine the things that could go wrong and how you’ll overcome them if they do.

Seneca said, “We need to envisage every possibility and … strengthen the spirit to deal with the things which may conceivably come about.”[2]

“Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure.”

the second-level thinking principle: Ask yourself, “And then what?”

You can think of first-level thinking as your today self and second-level thinking as your future self. First-level thinking looks to solve the immediate problem without regard to any future problems a solution might produce. Second-level thinking looks at the problem from beginning to end. It looks past the immediate solution and asks, “And then what?”[*] The chocolate bar doesn’t seem so tempting when you answer this question.

“Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work, not the starting point.”

the 3+ principle: Force yourself to explore at least three possible solutions to a problem. If you find yourself considering only two options, force yourself to find at least one more.

safeguard: Imagine that one of the options is off the table. Take each of the options you’re considering, and one at a time, ask yourself, “What would I do if that were not possible?”

safeguard: Come up with Both-And options. Try to find ways of combining the binary. Think not in terms of choosing either X or Y, but rather having both X and Y.

Simplistic Either-Or options become integrative Both-And options. You can keep costs down and invest in a better customer experience. You can stay at your job and start a side hustle. You can deliver for your shareholders and protect the environment.

Roger Martin put it this way: “Thinkers who exploit opposing ideas to construct a new solution enjoy a built-in advantage over thinkers who can consider only one model at a time.”

We don’t need a lot of additional options, just a few really good ones. When you hear yourself say, “Either X or Y,” it means you’re entering the narrow pathway between a rock and a hard place—a binary decision. Digging in and forcing yourself to add credible alternative options allows you to see solutions you may not have considered before.

Charlie Munger put it this way: “Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs … it’s your alternatives that matter. That’s how we make all of our decisions.”

Many people focus solely on what they stand to gain by choosing an option and forget to factor in what they stand to lose by forgoing another. But the ability to size up these costs is one of the things that separates great decision-makers from the rest.

the opportunity-cost principle: Consider what opportunities you’re forgoing when you choose one option over another.

the 3-lens principle: View opportunity costs through these three lenses: (1) Compared with what? (2) And then what? (3) At the expense of what?

tip: If you’re having trouble assessing opportunity costs, it sometimes helps to put a price on them. For example, putting a price on those extra two to three hours a day spent commuting will make them more visible and easier to assess.

Clarity: The criteria should be simple, clear, and free of any jargon. Ideally, you should be able to explain them to a twelve-year-old. Goal promotion: The criteria must favor only those options that achieve the desired goal. Decisiveness: The criteria must favor exactly one option; they can’t result in a tie among several.

As a result, ambiguous criteria rob decision-makers of their ability to distinguish who’s right from who’s wrong, and force debates about semantics instead of which potential solution is the best.

Being nice is not the same as being good at your job.

When you’re clear on what’s important, evaluating options becomes easier. Many people are shy to pick out the most important thing because they don’t want to be wrong.

When you don’t communicate what’s most important, people are left guessing about what matters. They need you to solve the problem for them. While you feel needed and important, you’re also busy making all the decisions that your colleagues should be making.

To speed things up, I came up with a system for them to sort decisions into three boxes: 1. decisions they could make without any input from me, 2. decisions they could make after sharing their reasoning with me so I could double-check their judgment, and 3. decisions I wanted to make myself.

But the problem persisted. After a few months, I consulted my mentor. “Do they know what decisions they should make and what decisions you want to make?” he asked. “Are the boxes clear?” “Yes,” I replied, “but due to the operational nature of our job, if I’m not around, they have to make decisions in the third box without me. That’s where we’re running into the biggest problems. They seem incapable of doing that.” “Do they know the one thing that’s most important?” he probed. “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said. “What’s most important differs for each decision.” I listed off a few different types of decisions and how the variables were different. “That’s not what I mean,” he replied. “Do they know what you value most?” I hesitated. He looked me square in the eye. “Shane, do you know what you value most?” I stared at him blankly. He sighed. “The problem isn’t your team. It’s you. You don’t know what’s most important. Until you do, your team will never make decisions without you. It’s too risky for them to figure out the most important thing. Communicate that to your team, and they’ll be able to make decisions on their own.” “What if they make the wrong decision?” “As long as they make a decision based on the most important thing, they won’t be wrong.” He paused, then said slowly, “A lot of people reach their ceiling in this job because they can’t figure out this one thing.”

There is only one most important thing in every project, goal, and company. If you have two or more most important things, you’re not thinking clearly. This is an important aspect of leadership and problem-solving in general: you have to pick one criterion above all the others and communicate it in a way that your people can understand so they can make decisions on their own.

identifying what’s most important is a skill. It takes practice.

the targeting principle: Know what you’re looking for before you start sorting through the data.

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re unlikely to find it, just as you’re unlikely to hit the target if you don’t know what you’re aiming at. When you don’t know what’s important, you miss things that are relevant and spend a lot of time on things that are irrelevant.

the hifi principle: Get high-fidelity (HiFi) information—information that’s close to the source and unfiltered by other people’s biases and interests.

The quality of your decisions is directly related to the quality of your thoughts. The quality of your thoughts is directly related to the quality of your information.

  • Importante

You lack understanding, and information without understanding is dangerous.

Information is food for the mind. What you put in today shapes your solutions tomorrow.

Real knowledge is earned, while abstractions are merely borrowed.

You can’t make good decisions with bad information.

The person closest to the problem often has the most accurate information about it. What they tend to lack is a broader perspective. The person working on the line at McDonald’s knows how to fix a recurring problem at their restaurant better than a person merely analyzing some data.

He knew that people in the organization had an incentive to convey things in a way that covered up mistakes or made themselves look good. And he knew that those filters would obscure rather than clarify the situation.

If you want to make better decisions, you need better information. Whenever possible, you need to learn something, see something, or do something for yourself. Sometimes the best information is the least transmissible.

safeguard: Run an experiment. Try something out to see what kinds of results it yields.

An experiment is a low-risk way of gathering important information. For example, if you want to know whether people will pay for something, try to sell it before you even create it.

safeguard: Evaluate the motivations and incentives of your sources. Remember that everyone sees things from a limited perspective.

When you’re gathering information, your job is to see the world through other people’s eyes. You’re trying to understand their experience and how they processed it. You can learn valuable information even when you don’t agree with their view of the world. Just ask questions, keep your thoughts to yourself, and remain curious about other perspectives.

safeguard: When you get information from other people, ask questions that yield detailed answers. Don’t ask people what they think; instead, ask them how they think.

Getting at those principles requires asking the right kinds of questions. There are three I’d recommend: Question 1: What are the variables you’d use to make this decision if you were in my shoes? How do those variables relate to one another? Question 2: What do you know about this problem that I (or other people) don’t? What can you see based on your experience that someone without your experience can’t? What do you know that most people miss? Question 3: What would be your process for deciding if you were in my shoes? How would you go about doing it? (Or: How would you tell your mother/friend to go about doing it?)

the hiex principle: Get high-expertise (HiEx) information, which comes both from people with a lot of knowledge and/or experience in a specific area, and from people with knowledge and experience in many areas.

Experts can increase the accuracy of your information and decrease the time it takes to get it. Getting even one expert’s advice can cut through a lot of confusion and help you quickly formulate and/or eliminate options.

Remember: the goal isn’t to have someone tell you what to do; rather, it’s to learn how an expert thinks about the problem, which variables they consider relevant, and how those variables interact over time.

safeguard: Take time to distinguish real experts from imitators. Not everyone who claims to be an expert is. Take the time to know the difference.

There is no purpose to knowing what you should do and not doing it. If you want results, you need action.

It’s not so much that we don’t know what to do as much as we don’t want to deal with the reality of doing it. We don’t want to have conversations, because they might hurt people’s feelings. We don’t want to fire the person that we like, even though we know they’re wrong for the job.

When a decision is highly consequential and irreversible, its effects ripple throughout your life, and there’s no way to stop them. Some people call these “lead dominoes.”

When the cost of a mistake is low, move fast.

the asap principle: If the cost to undo the decision is low, make it as soon as possible.

the alap principle: If the cost to undo a decision is high, make it as late as possible.

“You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That’s when you need to stop and check your thinking.”

the stop, flop, know principle: Stop gathering more information and execute your decision when either you Stop gathering useful information, you First Lose an OPportunity (FLOP), or you come to Know something that makes it evident what option you should choose.

Confidence increases faster than accuracy. “The trouble with too much information,” Robinson told me, “is you can’t reason with it.” It only feeds confirmation bias. We ignore additional information that doesn’t agree with our assessment, and gain confidence from additional information that does.

Knowing what to do isn’t enough, though. You have to take action. Do it!

You don’t always need to have the ultimate solution to make progress. If it remains unclear which path is best, often the next best step is just to eliminate paths that lead to outcomes you don’t want. Avoiding the worst outcomes maintains optionality and keeps you moving forward.

When failure is expensive, it’s worth investing in large margins of safety.

A margin of safety is a buffer between what you expect to happen and what could happen. It’s designed to save you when surprises are expensive.

“Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.”[1] The thing is, most of us rarely know what we are doing with the confidence required to go all in.

tip: The margin of safety is often sufficient when it can absorb double the worst-case scenario. So the baseline for a margin of safety is one that could withstand twice the amount of problems that would cause a crisis, or maintain twice the amount of resources needed to rebuild after a crisis.

Our outcomes can sometimes upend even our most well-established expectations.

Bullets before Cannonballs If you’re still gathering information, don’t get overinvested in just one option. Keep your future options open by taking small, low-risk steps toward as many options as possible before committing everything to just one.

Performing small, low-risk experiments on multiple options—in other words, shooting bullets and calibrating—keeps your options open before you commit the bulk of your resources to shooting a cannonball.

Many leaders want to announce a decision the moment they’ve made it. This is natural: they want to show others how decisive they are, and let everyone else revel in their dazzling new venture. But announcing right away can be like the email you can’t unsend. It starts things moving, and makes changing your mind much harder. That’s why I created a rule for myself: I make major decisions and then sleep on them before telling anyone.[*]

Keeping it to yourself before executing allows you to keep open the possibility of undoing it.

fail-safe: Set up trip wires to determine in advance what you’ll do when you hit a specific quantifiable time, amount, or circumstance.

Negative signs are red flags that something is going seriously off course. The sooner you catch yourself going the wrong way, the easier it is to turn back.

Sometimes the absence of positive signs is itself a sign.

fail-safe: Use commander’s intent to empower others to act and make decisions without you.

Giving a team enough structure to carry out a mission but enough flexibility to respond to changing circumstances is called commander’s intent—a military term first applied to the Germans who were trying to defeat Napoleon.

Before you begin executing a decision, just so there’s no confusion as you move forward, ask yourself: Who needs to know my goals and the outcomes I’m working toward? Do they know what the most important objective is? Do they know the positive and negative signs to look for and what trip wires are attached to them?

If you can’t be away, it doesn’t mean that you’re indispensable or a supremely competent leader; it means that you’re an incompetent communicator.

Poor leaders insist that everything must be done their way, which ultimately demoralizes their team and undermines both loyalty and creativity—exactly the opposite of commander’s intent.

fail-safe: Tie your hands to keep your execution on track.

Whatever decision you’re facing, ask yourself, “Is there a way to make sure I will stick to the path I’ve decided is best?” By thinking through your options, and precommitting to courses of action, you free up space to tackle other problems.

No one is smart enough to make great decisions without learning first, though.

the process principle: When you evaluate a decision, focus on the process you used to make the decision and not the outcome.

The right call doesn’t always get the intended outcome. Sooner or later everyone who makes decisions in the real world learns this lesson.

Many people assume that good decisions get good outcomes and bad ones don’t. But that’s not true. The quality of a single decision isn’t determined by the quality of the outcome.

Our tendency to equate the quality of our decision with the outcome is called resulting. Results are the most visible part of a decision. Because of that, we tend to use them as an indicator of the decision’s quality. If the results are what we wanted, we conclude that we made a good decision. If the results aren’t what we wanted, we tend to blame external factors. It’s not that our process was lacking; it’s that a crucial bit of information was. (As opposed to when an acquaintance gets bad results, at which point we assume it’s because they made a bad decision.)

Rarely are you making decisions that have a 100 percent chance of success. And the kind of decision that has a 90 percent chance of success still has a bad outcome 10 percent of the time. What matters are results over time and ensuring that 10 percent of the time won’t kill you.

the transparency principle: Make your decision-making process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible.

If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible.

safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision. Don’t rely on your memory after the fact. Trying to recall what you knew and thought at the time you made the decision is a fool’s game.

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly. —MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations,

GOOD DECISION-MAKING COMES down to two things: 1. Knowing how to get what you want 2. Knowing what’s worth wanting The first point is about making effective decisions. The second is about making good ones. You might think they’re the same, but they are not. Decisions that bring immediate results, like closing a sale or filling a vacancy, may be effective, but they don’t necessarily lead to the things that truly matter in life, like trust, love, and health. Good decisions, on the other hand, align with your long-term goals and values, and ultimately bring you the satisfaction and fulfillment that you truly desire in business, relationships, and life.[*] Effective decisions get you the first outcome, while good ones get you the ultimate outcome.

Each default plays a role in setting us up for regret. The social default prompts us to inherit goals from other people, even if their life circumstances are very different from ours. The inertia default encourages us to continue pursuing the goals we’ve pursued in the past, even after we’ve come to realize that achieving them doesn’t make us happy. The emotion default sends us this way and that, chasing whatever captures our fancy in the moment, even at the expense of pursuing long-term goals that matter more. And the ego default convinces us to pursue things like wealth, status, and power, even at the expense of happiness and well-being—our own and that of the people around us. If you give any of the defaults command of your life, your ultimate destination is regret. Don’t live life by another person’s scoreboard. Don’t let someone else choose your objectives in life. Take responsibility for where you are and where you are headed.

Jim Collins wrote, “There is no effectiveness without discipline, and there is no discipline without character.”

Comparison is the thief of joy.[*] Social comparison happens all the time. Sometimes it’s about possessions like houses or cars, but more often it’s about status.

How many of us—at whatever stages of our careers—are on the same trajectory? We value wealth and status more than happiness—the external more than the internal—and we give little thought to how we pursue them. In the process, we end up chasing praise and recognition from people who don’t matter at the expense of people who do.

But being wise requires more. It’s more than knowing how to get what you want. It’s also knowing which things are worth wanting—which things really matter. It’s as much about saying no as saying yes.

Knowing what to want is the most important thing. Deep down, you already know what to do, you just need to follow your own advice. Sometimes, it’s the advice we give other people that we most need to follow ourselves.

  • Importante

Time is the ultimate currency of life. The implications of managing the short time we have on earth are like those of managing any scarce resource: you have to use it wisely—in a way that prioritizes what’s most important.

Say things now to people you care about—whether it’s expressing gratitude, asking forgiveness, or getting information. Spend the maximum amount of time with your children. Savor daily pleasures instead of waiting for “big-ticket items” to make you happy. Work in a job you love. Choose your mate carefully; don’t just rush in.

None said that to be happy you should work as hard as you can to get money. None said it was important to be as wealthy as the people around you. None said you should choose your career based on its earning potential. None said they regretted not getting even with someone who slighted them.

“Let us prepare our minds as if we had come to the very end of life,” Seneca said. If you want a better life, start thinking about death.

Knowing you’re heading in the wrong direction is the first step toward getting back on course.

We regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did. The pain of trying and failing may be intense but at least it tends to be over rather quickly. The pain of failing to try, on the other hand, is less intense but never really goes away.[5]

In the end, everyday moments matter more than big prizes. Tiny delights over big bright lights.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. —SENECA, On the Shortness of Life, Chapter 1

When you know the destination, how to get there becomes clearer. As Aristotle says, “Knowledge of the best good carries great weight for knowing the best way to live: if we know it, then like archers who have a target to aim at, we are more likely to hit the right mark.”[1]

Because in order to live to ninety and do all the things I aspire to, I need to be healthy.

When we’re not going in the direction in which we want to end up, we end up regretting where we end up. And avoiding regret is a key component to life satisfaction.

If you want to develop good judgment, start by asking two questions: “What do I want in life? And is what I want actually worth wanting?” Until you’ve answered the second question, all the decision-making advice in the world isn’t going to do you much good. There’s little profit in knowing how to get the things you want if those things won’t make you happy. It doesn’t matter how successful you become at acquiring power, fame, or money if at the end of it all you want a do-over.

Good judgment is expensive, but poor judgment will cost you a fortune.

Most errors in judgment happen when we don’t know we’re supposed to be exercising judgment. They happen because our subconscious is driving our behaviors and cutting us out of the process of determining what we should do. You don’t consciously choose to argue with your partner, but you find yourself saying hurtful things that can’t be unsaid. You don’t consciously seek money and status at the expense of your family, but you find yourself spending less and less time with the people who matter most in your life. You don’t consciously seek to defend your ideas, but you find yourself holding grudges against anyone who criticizes you.

Improving your judgment, it turns out, is less about accumulating tools to enhance your rationality and more about implementing safeguards that make the desired path the path of least resistance. It’s about designing systems when you’re at your best that work for you when you’re at your worst. Those systems don’t eliminate the defaults, but they do help you recognize when they are running the show.

Good judgment can’t be taught, but it can be learned.

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