Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish: Summary & Notes

Summary

I’m a huge fan of Farnam Street and Shane’s work, which is perhaps why I was a little disappointed by this book. I didn’t think it was quite as clear or as actionable as it could have been.

That said, it is still a useful book for framing the biases which affect how we think, and how to make better decisions. In fact, I think the section on decision-making is the most useful part of the book, though there are lots of tidbits throughout that are useful.

In short, clear thinking and decision-making is about understanding the forces that affect how we think, and implementing processes and safeguards to help us default to the right path.

Notes

• The best in the world try and ensure they are always in a good position. It is much easier to think clearly and make the right decision when you are in a good position.
• Time is the friend of someone in a good position, and the enemy of someone in a bad position.
• We have natural instincts that prevent us from thinking clearly, like when we are criticized or challenged.
• There are four defaults that influence how we think:
• 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.
• A good example of the ego default is when someone stops putting in 100% at the workplace because they feel underappreciated.
• The social default is what causes us to fear taking risk. “If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results that everyone else gets.”
• There are four key strengths you need to think clearly:
• 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
• Your next action will always make a situation better or worse. So ask yourself: “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”
• The things you choose not to do often matter as much as the things you choose to do. How much are you willing to nonconform to do the right thing?
• A large part of achieving success is having the discipline to do what needs to be done, regardless of whether you feel like doing it in the moment.
• Self-confidence is the ability to focus on what is right, rather than who is right.
• “Leaving this job illustrates the four strengths in action. I had the self-confidence that I could figure out what came next without needing to know all the details, the self-knowledge to know that I valued time over money, the self-control to get up the next day without missing a beat, and the self-accountability to set a higher standard for performance than I ever had before.”
• Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people.
• Working with a master firsthand is the best way to ensure excellence; their excellence demands your best.
• Choose exemplars in your life who embody the attributes you want to cultivate. Put these people on your “personal board of directors.” Then as you learn about them, build a repository of how they would respond to various situations. This can be your reference on how to act.
• You need to consciously practice imitating your exemplars to really internalize their standards.
• “The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated.”
• There are two ways to manage your weaknesses:
• Build your strengths to overcome weaknesses you’ve acquired
• Implement safeguards to manage any remaining weaknesses
• Avoid making decisions in unfavorable conditions. Use the Alcoholics Anonymous HALT rule: don’t make decisions when Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.
• Create automatic rules to prevent bad behavior.
• Envision a film crew following you around all day to prevent poor choices.
• Add friction to bad behavior to prevent it. Set up your environment and your schedule so that the default behavior is the right one.
• Aim to gain other frames of reference. Ask other people how they see things, summarize, and then ask what else you missed.
• Exceptional people learn from their mistakes and do better as a result.
• To handle mistakes effectively: (1) accept responsibility, (2) learn from the mistake, (3) commit to doing better, and (4) repair the damage as best you can.
• Decisions are choices that involve conscious thought.
• There are four steps in a decision-making process: defining the problem, exploring possible solutions, evaluating the options, and then making the judgment and executing the best option.
• The first principle of decision-making is that the decider needs to define the problem. 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.
• The most critical step in making a decision is getting the problem right.
• Take responsibility for defining the problem, and don’t use jargon to describe or explain it.
• Identify the root cause of the problem, not the symptoms.
• To identify the root cause, ask yourself: “What would need to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?”
• To ensure you allocate the right time to defining the problem, hold two separate meetings: one to define the problem and one to look for solutions.
• To evaluate whether you’re addressing the root cause with your solution, ask yourself: “Will this solve the problem permanently, or will the problem return in the future?”
• To come up with solutions, imagine different possible futures.
• Some solution exploration tools:
• Imagine how things will go wrong and how you’ll overcome them if they do (the pre-mortem). And then ask: “And then what?” to consider second-order effects.
• Force yourself to come up with more than 2 solutions.
• Take each of the options you’re considering and ask: “What would I do if that were not possible?”
• Try and find ways to combine options, instead of having to choose one.
• Think about the opportunity cost, what you’re giving up when choosing 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?
• Once it’s time to choose, ensure you have specific criteria in mind. Then, compare each and think about if you had to choose only one, which would be more important. Rank all your criteria like this.
• Now apply them to the options you have. When considering each, make sure you have information about each option that is high-fidelity (close to the source and unfiltered) and high-expertise (from people with a lot of knowledge and/or experience). Look for people who recently solved a similar problem. You could also run an experiment to get more data.
• When making a decision, consider how consequential they are, and how reversible they are.
• If they are low-consequence, high-reversibility, make them fast. If they are high-consequence, low-reversibility, make them slow (as late as possible).
• Stop gathering information when the information is no longer useful, you first lose an opportunity, or you find out something that makes the choice obvious.
• You don’t always have to choose the perfect solution to make progress. You can eliminate the worst options and keep moving forward.
• Next up is execution. Before executing a decision, 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?
• Note: if you have two or more “most important things” or goals, you’re not being clear enough.
• Finally, you need to learn from your decisions. Make sure you document throughout the process so you can examine it later. Then, when you evaluate your decision, focus on the process, and not the outcome.
• In the end, good decision-making comes down to two things: 1) Knowing how to get what you want and 2) Knowing what’s worth wanting
• Good decisions 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.
• The quality of what you pursue determines the quality of your life.
• Karl Pillemer, author of 30 Lessons for Living, interviewed elderly Americans and came up with a list of the most important things in life:
• 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.
• The list of things they said weren’t important:
• 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.
• The biggest regret people had? Worrying about things that never happened: “Worrying wastes your life,” one respondent said.
• 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.
• If this were your final year of life, would you be living the same way you are today?
• 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?”
• The key to getting what you want out of life is to identify how the world works and to align yourself with it.