Clear Thinking

Highlights

• When we are passive-aggressive with a colleague at work, our relationship becomes worse. And while these moments don’t seem to matter much at the time, they compound into our current position. And our position determines our future.
  • Tags: [[thinking]] [[career]]
• One reason the best in the world make consistently good decisions is they rarely find themselves forced into a decision by circumstances.
  • Tags: [[decision-making]] [[favorite]]
  • Note: The best way to make good decisions is to maintain optionality, i.e., never be in a situation where you can only make one kind of decision.
• 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.
  • Tags: [[decision-making]]
• The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts.
• The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy.
• The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group.
• 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.
• In fact, when we respond emotionally, we often don’t even realize that we’re in a position that calls for thinking at all.
• 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.
  • Tags: [[organization-design]] [[psychology]] [[leadership]]
• Our desire to feel right overpowers our desire to be right.
• Survival inside the tribe was hard but survival outside the tribe was impossible. Because we needed the group, our individual interests became secondary to the group interests.
• If you don’t know enough about what you’re doing to make your own decisions, you probably should do what everyone is doing. If you want better-than-average results, though, you’ll have to think clearly.
  • Tags: [[best-practices]] [[decision-making]] [[favorite]]
• “The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.”
  • Tags: [[thinking]]
• The people executing established practices say they want new ideas, but they just don’t want the bad ones. And because they so want to avoid the bad ones, they never deviate enough to find new good ones.
  • Tags: [[decision-making]] [[strategy]] [[innovation]]
• The “zone of average” is a dangerous place when it comes to inertia. It’s the point where things are working well enough that we don’t feel the need to make any changes.
  • Tags: [[favorite]] [[decision-making]] [[career]]
• For instance, public statements can create inertia. Putting something on the record establishes expectations along with social pressure to meet those expectations.
• Groups create inertia of their own. They tend to value consistency over effectiveness, and reward people for maintaining the status quo.
• The way to improve your defaults isn’t by willpower but by creating an intentional environment where your desired behavior becomes the default behavior.
• The person who can take a step back for a second, center themselves, and get out of the moment will outperform the person who can’t.
• When people’s actions have outcomes that don’t line up with how they see themselves, they tend to insulate their egos by blaming other people or unfavorable circumstances.
• Always focus on the next move, the one that gets you closer or further from where you want to go.
• You can put energy into things you control or things you don’t control. All the energy you put toward things you don’t control comes out of the energy you can put toward the things you can.
  • Tags: [[favorite]] [[personal-growth]]
• The lesson was an important one: the things you choose not to do often matter as much as the things you choose to do. The real test of a person is the degree to which they are willing to nonconform to do the right thing.
• “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.”
  • Tags: [[career]] [[thinking]] [[decision-making]] [[favorite]]
• Knowing about your strengths and weaknesses, your abilities and their limits is essential to counteracting your defaults. If you don’t know your vulnerabilities, your defaults will exploit them to gain control of your circumstances.
• Self-control is about creating space for reason instead of just blindly following instincts.
• Confidence without humility is generally the same thing as overconfidence—a weakness, not a strength.
• It’s important to talk to yourself about the adversity you’ve faced, because past hardship is where you get the confidence to face future hardship.
  • Tags: [[favorite]] [[personal-growth]] [[thinking]] [[decision-making]]
• When everything is on your shoulders and the cost of being wrong is high, I told her, you tend to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right.
  • Tags: [[thinking]] [[decision-making]]
• 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.
  • Tags: [[thinking]] [[decision-making]] [[favorite]]
• Standards become habits, and habits become outcomes.
  • Tags: [[favorite]] [[productivity]]
• Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions.fn1
• “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.”
• The only person you’re competing with is the person you were yesterday. Victory is being a little better today.
• Some studies have shown that stress short-circuits the deliberation process—it undermines the systematic evaluation of alternatives that’s needed for effective decision-making.
• The way I did this was to imagine a film crew following me around documenting how successful I was.fn4 Regardless of whether I was a success or not, how would I act to show someone I deserved my success? What would I want them to see? What am I doing that I would want them not to see because I’m embarrassed or ashamed?
• 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.
• One thing that sets exceptional people apart from the crowd is how they handle mistakes and whether they learn from them and do better as a result.
  • Tags: [[productivity]] [[personal-growth]]
• 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.
• A decision is a choice that involves conscious thought.
  • Tags: [[thinking]] [[decision-making]]
• Part of what makes slowing down and reasoning through a problem difficult is that, to the outside observer, it might look like inaction. But inaction is a choice.
• When the stakes are low, inaction hurts you more than speed. Sometimes it’s better just to make a quick choice and not spend time deliberating.
• One way to keep meetings short and avoid the signaling that comes from repeating information that everyone knows is simply asking everyone, “What do you know about this problem that other people in the room don’t know?”
• 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.”
• 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.
  • Tags: [[decision-making]]
• “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
• If you haven’t thought about the things that could go wrong, you will be at the mercy of circumstances.
• Don’t just imagine the ideal future outcome. Imagine the things that could go wrong and how you’ll overcome them if they do.
  • Tags: [[decision-making]] [[thinking]]
• “Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure.”
• Our future self often wants us to make different choices than our today self wants to make.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• 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.
  • Tags: [[decision-making]] [[thinking]]
• 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?”
• 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.
• Consider what opportunities you’re forgoing when you choose one option over another.
• View opportunity costs through these three lenses: (1) Compared with what? (2) And then what? (3) At the expense of what?
  • Tags: [[decision-making]]
• A lot of managers secretly enjoy being the bottleneck. They like the way it feels when their team is dependent on them. Don’t be fooled! This is the ego default at work, and it puts a ceiling on how far you will go.
  • Tags: [[career]] [[leadership]] [[management]]
• You can’t be healthy if you feed yourself junk food every day, and you can’t make good decisions if you’re consuming low-quality information.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]] [[thinking]]
• 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.
• The more a decision affects what matters to you—either in the short term or the long term—the more consequential it is.
  • Tags: [[decision-making]]
• “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.”
• Anyone who has held on to a failing job, relationship, or investment too long knows that information gathering reaches a point of diminishing returns—at some point the cost of getting more information is exceeded by the cost of losing time or opportunity.
• 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.
  • Tags: [[thinking]] [[decision-making]]
• there’s always a moment when you simply know at a core level exactly what to do.
  • Tags: [[decision-making]]
• Things are great until they’re not. If things are good, a margin of safety seems like a waste. When things go wrong, though, you can’t live without it. You need a margin of safety most at the very moment you start to think you don’t.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• Preserving options carries a cost and can make you feel like you’re missing out. It’s hard watching others take action sometimes, even when those actions don’t make sense for you. Don’t be fooled! This is the social default at work. It tempts you to feel like it’s okay to fail so long as you’re part of the crowd.
• IF YOU’RE A KNOWLEDGE WORKER, YOU PRODUCE DECISIONS.1 That’s your job. The quality of your decisions eventually determines how far you go and how fast you get there.
  • Tags: [[decision-making]] [[productivity]]
• When you evaluate a decision, focus on the process you used to make the decision and not the outcome.
  • Tags: [[decision-making]] [[personal-growth]]
• 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.
• Evaluating decisions—ours or others’—based on the outcome (or how we feel about the outcome) fails to distinguish luck from skill and control.
• Making a good decision is about the process, not the outcome. One bad outcome doesn’t make you a poor decision-maker any more than one good outcome makes you a genius.
• 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.
• Wisdom is turning your future hindsight into your current foresight. What seems to matter in the moment rarely matters in life, yet what matters in life always matters in the moment.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]] [[favorite]]