Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

by Shane Parrish

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.

Decisions made through clear thinking will put you in increasingly better positions, and success will only compound from there.

When we react without reasoning, our position is weakened, and our options get increasingly worse.

“Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out,”

WHAT HAPPENS IN ORDINARY MOMENTS DETERMINES your future.

It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today.

Reacting without reasoning makes every situation worse.

People who master their defaults get the best real-world results.

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.

Unearned knowledge rushes us to judgment.

The social default inspires conformity. It coaxes us to fall in line with an idea or behavior simply because other people do. It embodies what the term “social pressure” refers to: wanting to belong to the crowd, fear of being an outsider, fear of being scorned, fear of disappointing other people.

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.

“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.”

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.

If you train yourself to consistently think, feel, and act in ways that further your most important goals—if, in other words, you build strength—then inertia becomes a nearly unstoppable force that unlocks your potential.

Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be. —JEFF BEZOS1

Solutions appear when you stop bargaining and start accepting the reality of the situation. That’s because focusing on the next move, rather than how you got here in the first place, opens you up to a lot of possibilities.

One effective question to ask yourself before you act is, “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”

There is always something you can do today to make the future easier, though, and the moment you stop complaining is the moment you start finding it.

The most important story is the one you tell yourself. While telling yourself a positive story doesn’t ensure a good outcome, telling yourself a negative story often guarantees a bad one.

No one begins life wanting to be a chronic victim, but the slow accumulation of responses that avoid responsibility makes it hard for people to see that’s what they’re becoming. Eventually, it’s just who they are.

Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you do control how you respond to everything. It’s a mindset that empowers you to act and not just react to whatever life throws at you. It transforms obstacles into opportunities for learning and growth. It means realizing that the way you respond to hardship matters more to your happiness than the hardship itself.

“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.”

A large part of achieving success is having the self-control to do whatever needs to be done, regardless of whether you feel like doing it at the moment. Emotional intensity is far less important in the long run than disciplined consistency.

It’s only human to have doubts about whether you are up to a given task. Even the most capable people have doubts about this from time to time. But those who have self-confidence never give in to feelings of despair or worthlessness.

More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence. But while confidence is often a byproduct of our accomplishments, it also comes from how you talk to yourself.

People who are confident aren’t afraid of facing reality because they know they can handle it.

The most important voice to listen to is the one that reminds you of all that you’ve accomplished in the past. And while you might not have done this particular thing before, you can figure it out.

Standards become habits, and habits become outcomes. Few people realize that exceptional outcomes are almost always achieved by people with higher-than-average standards.

We’ll never be exceptional at anything unless we raise our standards, both of ourselves and of what’s possible.

There is need, I insist, for someone against whom to measure our way of life; unless you have a ruler, you can’t straighten what is crooked.1

Look around, find the best examples you can of people with the attributes you want to cultivate—the people whose default behavior is your desired behavior, those who inspire you to raise the bar and make you want to be a better version of yourself. Your exemplars needn’t be alive. They can be either dead or fictional, as well. We can learn from both Atticus Finch and Warren Buffett, along with Genghis Khan and Batman. It’s up to you.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is they don’t want to learn from someone who has a character blemish or a worldview that doesn’t align with theirs.

“You never know who you touch. You never know how or when you’ll have an impact, or how important your example can be to someone else.”6

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

developing self-control empowers you to overcome emotion-driven behavior and avoid the regrets it produces.

It’s not enough to know about your biases and other blind spots. You have to take steps to manage them. If you don’t, the defaults will take control.

Stress, for instance, is a big contributor to bad decisions. 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.1

Nothing forces you to accept the ingrained behaviors and rules from your upbringing and life circumstances. You can decide to eliminate them at any time, and replace them with better ones.

Creating personal rules is a powerful technique for protecting yourself from your own weaknesses and limitations.

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.

It’s essential to keep your emotions in check. If you haven’t worked on building that strength, then there’s not much you can do. That’s why it’s important to practice continually.

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

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

Identify the root cause of the problem. Don’t be content with simply treating its symptoms.

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.

Any energy that’s channeled toward short-term solutions depletes energy that could be put into finding a long-term fix.