Clear thinking by Shane Parrish

If you want to do smart things, do not do stupid things: You do not need to be a genius to get ahead in life, just by avoiding obvious mistakes for long enough you can generate superior results versus the vast majority.

This is true.

You can avoid doing stupid things by having a better position: Position is another word for the options you have available to you.

Better position = More options

Poor positions are those where your hand is forced, avoid them.

You will find yourself in inferior positions when there’s a lapse in your thinking.

Good news: Each moment is a chance to improve your position.

There are the responses that are hard wired into the primal parts of our brain, so they are in a sense “inbuilt weaknesses“. Useful once upon a time, today they often make things worse.

Stuff like hunger, thirst, fatigue, lack of sleep, strong emotion, distraction, stress, cognitive biases are examples of stuff that’ll make you act from your defaults, thus weaken your position.

As you can see these are very basic things that all of us go through, indeed our bodies and minds have not caught up to the sophistication of our modern world.

The author identifies four defaults:

Social default: You like to go with the crowd. Not rock the boat. This is all of us in at least one aspect of our lives. The goal is to know which aspects are worth following the crowd in, and the ones that are not.

Emotion default: You default to reacting emotionally to situations than rationally analysing them. Further, you are more likely to react emotionally if you are fatigued biologically/ mentally/ physiologically such as through uncomfortable temperature, lack of sleep, paid, hunger, unfamiliar environment and so on. Since we face such conditions several times a day, it is better to be on guard and double check if we’re taking critical and important decisions from the emotional default.

Inertia default: You resist change and prefer the familiar.

Ego default: You take any perceived or real slight to your identity or position in society very seriously and react to it negatively (often emotionally). You may be particularly susceptible to ego default if you place a lot of importance and spend a lot of time/energy/money into how you appear to society.

“… if you find yourself reading an article or two on a subject and thinking you’re an expert, if you always try to prove you’re right and have difficulty admitting mistakes, if you have a hard time saying “I don’t know,” or if you’re frequently envious of others or feel as though you’re never given the recognition you deserve—be on guard!“.

Not all defaults are because of inbuilt weaknesses

You can default to the four, um, defaults for reasons that are outside evolutionary biology.

These “acquired weaknesses” have biological underpinnings but can be exacerbated by the way you are raised.

These are things that are culturally and socially taught like doing less than you are capable of, delivering only the most basic level of performance, going with the crowd and not speaking out.

For inbuilt weaknesses: Develop safeguards

For acquired weaknesses: Develop safeguards + strength

Parrish feels we can only play defence with our inbuilt weaknesses (like hunger, pain, fatigue etc.), and not go on the offensive to eliminate them.

Prevention

Try not to land in situations where you know your are susceptible to your defaults: Basically try not to get too hungry/tired/scared/hurt and so on near the time you need to take important decisions. If you are taking important decisions all the time, then try not to get too hungry/tired/scared/hurt at all.

“Alcoholics Anonymous has a helpful safeguard for its members. They call it HALT—an acronym that stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. When you feel like having a drink, they say, ask yourself whether any of these conditions apply. If so, deal with the real problem—hunger, anger, loneliness, or fatigue—instead of reaching for a drink.“

Replace decisions with rules

Instead of deciding what to do in real time, have rules that you’ve carefully considered beforehand and abide by them when the particular situation presents itself. “In a quirk of psychology, people typically don’t argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are.“.

Make a diary with your personal rules, a few examples: “No-Meeting Wednesdays“, “No Processed Foods on Weekdays“, “No junk in the trunk” (your fridge is not allowed to have junk food), “Pay Myself First” (transfer a percentage of income to savings each month before spending), “No-Spend Week-End“, “Monthly Date Night“.

Create friction

Make it harder for you to do the things you do not want to do: Putting the cookie jar on a high shelf, putting the phone in another room before starting work etc. Rules work here too – you can have rules for habits you want to build and ones you want to drop.

Establish guardrails

Help avoid silly mistakes: They can be physical like setting up a screen time limit on your devices, daily spending limit on your credit card, or processes like following checklists, maker-checker approach, pointing and calling.

Shift your perspective

Allows for nuanced analysis: Use the six thinking hats approach or something similar. Explain people what you’ve understood of a problem and then ask them “what did I miss?“.

Curate your environment

“The people with the best defaults are typically the ones with the best environment.“.

Very reminiscent of Atomic Habits, if you want to change your habits then changing your environment will be a good idea. Will power is not enough BTW.

Carefully curate your rituals

They help us disconnect from the immediacy of the moment and get space between stimulus and response. This space allows us to limit the effects of the four defaults. Like taking a deep breath before responding to each email, calling your mother before buying anything more than 5% of your net worth.

Cultivate self-accountability and set standards for yourself

Take responsibility for what you could and could not do, and genuinely try to do a better job next time. Expect a certain level of performance from yourself in every area of your life (not necessarily the best level of performance, but a certain level that you can look yourself in the mirror with), and in some areas, the most critical ones, expect nothing but the best.

There are definitely things that are out of out control, (and these often make for a great story) – like getting a fever on the day of your exam, or getting hit by a drunk driver while coming back from office etc. Shit happens, it will happen to you as well, don’t be so surprised by it (at least not as much you used to).

Ownership mindset

But because something is not your fault does not mean it is not your responsibility. How you respond in the seconds, minutes, hours and days of shit happening is what separates the exceptions from the average. Something bad happened, sure, but are you going to help the coming future or hamper it? We have a responsibility to contribute to a better future whichever way we define it. Parrish wants us to ask ourselves often, but especially during trying times when we are likely to resort to our defaults: Will this action make the future easier or harder?

Check if you have too much of a victim mindset and if you do, just know that you can complain as much as you want but complaining ≠ solution.

Raise your bar by surrounding yourself with those who operate at a higher level in the field you want to excel at. Surrounding does not just mean physically surrounding yourself with champions of the field (that will be, in fact, very hard when you start out as a nobody) – It also means consuming their content (or the kind of content they consume), having the schedule/rituals/habits they have, having the standards they have. This way your choices increase beyond the living and real to the dead and fictional as well.

You can put all of your exemplars, people whose default behaviour is your desired behaviour, in your “personal board of directors” – And then model your thoughts, behaviours and actions against the standards and principles set by them (Parrish calls this the “repository of good behaviour“). You can imagine them watching you and it becomes easier to hold yourself to a higher standard. You can ask yourself what they’d have done in your position.

Know yourself

Know what you can do and what you cannot do. Know what you know and what you do not know. Know that you have blind spots, and then work to uncover them. Stick to what you can do and know, make it your differentiator most of the time (70%), while experimenting and expanding into what you cannot do and do not know (30%).

Know what parts of your psyche are more likely to trip you when manipulated by intelligent nefarious people. Know what you cannot do and know everything. Be humble, or be humbled.

Practice self-control

It is “creating space for reason instead of just blindly following instincts. It’s about being able to view and manage your emotions as if they were inanimate objects—things that don’t have the power to determine what you do unless you let them.“.

The emotion default will have you think that you are your emotions and that there is no distance between them and you. This is not true. You aren’t your emotions, you’re just their witness. Instead of saying “I am angry”, say “I am experiencing anger right now” and see how your perspective changes.

Nurture the plant of self-confidence, but remove the weed of over-confidence

The former is about getting to what is right, the latter is about proving who is right (you). “Outcome over ego“.

When facing a challenging and uncertain situation, remind yourself of the challenges and uncertainties you’ve already overcome, “… past hardship is where you get the confidence to face future hardship.“. The story you tell yourself shapes the experience you have.

But do not delude yourself. Honesty about the situation is required to stay on the healthy side of confidence. Be honest with yourself and surround yourself with people who are honest with you. Two people may view the same reality very differently, that is fine, but you must view reality in just one way at a time – a split in how you tell yourself the situation is and how you really feel the situation is, is a sure way to expend energy unnecessarily, feel like an imposter to yourself and be sadder than you need to. Have the courage to tell it like it is.

When you make mistakes: Own up to them and focus on the fix.

Accept responsibility: Even if it is only partly your fault (by your understanding). Hard to do, the emotional and ego default will attack right away. So practice with small mistakes so that the larger ones are easier to accept responsibility for.

Learn from the mistake: Make a journal entry for each mistake you make where you analyse how it could have been avoided and what changes need to be made for the future to avoid repeating the mistake, make a plan and put it into action. Tag or organise the journal entries for easier recall later.

Commit to doing better: Part of the previous point.

Repair the damage best you can: Some situations are beyond repair, but do the best you can to not make a bad situation worse.

A choice = Do something, do nothing, do with planning, do with reckless abandon, do whatever, anything goes – Basically just by existing you’re making choices.

A decision = Choice + Conscious thought

The decision may not be the right one but it has to be a conscious, considered one.

This is important, because our defaults can make decisions for us, but they will not count as conscious or considered.

Most important step, get the problem correctly defined.

Have the following rules:

• The one(s) who is/are ultimately responsible for solving the problem are allowed to define it, others can offer suggestions but only the responsible party can define what is trying to be done.
• Define the problem at the root cause not just its symptoms. “What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?”.

• The problem thus defined must be as much as possible free of jargon.
• Have separate times for defining and solving the problem. Make this clear with participants to the problem defining phase. Ask “What do you know about this problem that other people in the room don’t know?”.

Be absolutely honest about the situation and hence the options available to you. Stockdale Paradox.

Do a pre-mortem of the problem which means imagining in detail all that can go wrong and how you will overcome them if they do.

Do not do binary solutions, make a rule to put at least 3 potential solutions on the table (“3+ principle“).

Focus on long term solutions that have the potential to be a permanent fix. Use second level thinking to figure out if this is so. Ask: And then what?

Also, you can try coming up with “both and” solutions where you try to have the best of both worlds (integrative thinking).

“One area where we tend to be pretty good at integrative thinking is vacation planning … You can apply the same thinking to other areas of your life, including your career.“.

Think in terms of opportunity costs, that is, what opportunities and options (money, time, resources) you are forgoing in one option over the other. “3-LENS PRINCIPLE: View opportunity costs through these three lenses: (1) Compared with what? (2) And then what? (3) At the expense of what?“.

For this, first you need to have the right criteria for evaluation.

Criteria must be:

• Clear and unambiguous – Jargon laden criteria are no-go.
• Decisive and not result in tied options – Define more relevant criteria if you have to. If they it does not help you to narrow down the options as relevant to the problem, it is not a criteria, “… in many cases, purely negative criteria aren’t decisive: they don’t narrow the field of options down to one.“.
• Promote the option that solves the problem best – Criteria that so not directly link to solving the problem are no-go.
• Weighted – Not all criteria are equally important in solving the problem, because not all parts of the problem are equally important/urgent to solve. “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.“.
  • You can use the paired comparison method to figure out the most important problem to solve as well as criteria to evaluate the problem with, forced by this exercise you may also find yourself defining even more fundamental problems/criteria that address both the higher level problems/criteria that you were torn between prioritising.

Information that you’ll use to feed the criteria must be:

Relevant and you must know what makes for relevant information before you start evaluating options – “Most information is irrelevant. Knowing what to ignore—separating the signal from the noise—is the key to not wasting valuable time.“.

Accurate

• Focus on getting high fidelity (HiFi) information i.e. info that is from or as close to the source and unfiltered (also, unsummarised). Other sources of information are not as valid or valuable. This is hard work because Parrish literally wants you to get into the weeds and get information from where it originates, and usually this is at the bottom or the lowest levels of the organisation. But he makes a good point: “As information travels up an organization, it tends to lose quality and nuance.“, and your decisions can only be as good as your information. If the decision you are about to take based on some information is important and irreversible, the leg work would be useful.
• Focus on getting high expertise (HiEx) information i.e. information from experts and those with recent experience. Useful when you do not have access to HiFi information. This information will differ from HiFi information because it will be less contextual to the problem you are trying to solve.

Categorise actions basis the degree of their reversibility and consequence. Naturally, the ones that are of consequence and cannot be reversed will need to be made very carefully (ALAP: as late as possible), while the ones with little consequence and easy reversibility should be made with little prior work since you’ll expend more energy and resources in the analysis than you’d just by doing and undoing until you know what works (ASAP: as soon as possible). You can make a 2×2 matrix with high and low consequence/reversibility as the axes.

“When the stakes are high, and there are no take-backs, you want to decide at the last moment possible, and keep as many options on the table as you can while continuing to gather information.“. Preserving your options when it comes to hard to reverse and highly consequential decisions is generally a good strategy.

But also remember “Defaults can transform caution into an excuse not to act if you don’t resist them.“.

So, how late is too late?

Stop, Flop, Know – Stop is when useful information stops coming in. Flop is when you lose your first opportunity because of inaction. Know is when some event tells you the right course (which can be a flop itself).

Another one I might add, though not mentioned in the book, is the 40-70 rule, which says that we should not take a decision until we have enough information for a 40% chance of success, nor should we wait to take a decision if we have information to guarantee a 70% or more chance of success.

Even so, many of your decisions will fail, hence you need a margin of safety: Like insurance, pointless and wasteful until the day you need it. Generally, a margin of safety to counteract 2x of the worst case scenario should be a good place to start. You can then increase or decrease it basis you experience, expertise and confidence.

Another related point is to perform small, low risk, easy to reverse, not very consequential experiments before committing to a large, irreversible and consequential decision: “Thinking about medical school? Shadow a doctor or a resident for a day. Take the MCAT and see what you score, or apply to colleges and see where you’re accepted. Thinking about a new career? Try doing it freelance a few nights per week first. Thinking about launching a new product? See if people are willing to pay for it before you build it.“.

“Live with a decision before announcing it” – Have to quote this verbatim, it is powerful and precise.

Parrish makes an interesting point that once we commit in our mind to a decision even though we haven’t announced it, the mind treats it as already physically manifest and starts imagining life accordingly. This reveals concerns and nuances that may not have been open to you previously, allowing you to hit the brakes and recalibrate if needed.

Trip wires: Bad situations that you avoid by planing in advance an exit strategy when you see signs of danger. Includes both the absence of positive signs and the presence of negative ones. “If this happens then we abort the mission, no matter what”.

Commander’s intent: Is a description by the boss of the situation(s)/outcome(s) where they’d call the mission a success. Since the boss cannot be everywhere every time this allows the workers to think like the boss and take the right call.

When evaluating a decision, focus on the process more and the outcome less.

If the process was robust and you still got a bad outcome, it probably means that you thought the process was robust when it actually wasn’t. See if this is the case and improve next time. And if you lost because of dumb bad luck, don’t get discouraged and trust the process.

Write down your thought process before or at the time of taking the decision, this will help during the analysis phase, do not rely on memory.

Make your thought process clear for all to see, this should allow for constructive feedback during and after the decision making.

Till this point you should’ve learned a thing or two about improving your decision making, but what to put this skill in service of?

“The worst regret is when we fail to live a life true to ourselves, when we fail to play by our own scoreboard.“. And this is bound to happen if you give the four regrets command of your life. You’ll get very good at taking effective decisions to wrong ends.

All the techniques from the book can be used in service of that which is worth wanting.

But how do you know what is worth wanting?

Memento mori would be a good place to start, imagine if the next week is going to be your last, how would you like to spend it and with whom?

The answer is how you should try and spend your life.

But alas, this is not a fool proof method and it is possible to come up with answers that still do not reflect your true desire.