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there is no correlation between happiness levels and conventional markers of success.
If you’ve learned anything from this book I hope it’s that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and everyone has an important role to play in life. Nature made everything and everyone for a purpose. The courage that’s needed the most isn’t the kind that drives you to prevail over others, but the kind that allows you to be true to your truest self, no matter what other people want you to be.
Manage yourself and orchestrate others to get what you want. Your greatest challenge will be having your thoughtful higher-level you manage your emotional lower-level you. The best way to do that is to consciously develop habits that will make doing the things that are good for you habitual.
The person in charge is the shaper-conductor who doesn’t “do” (e.g., doesn’t play an instrument, though he or she knows a lot about instruments) as much as visualize the outcome and sees to it that each member of the orchestra helps achieve it. The conductor makes sure each member of the orchestra knows what he or she is good at and what they’re not good at, and what their responsibilities are.
This new deputy brought on other layers of support, including a project manager who was less engaged with the concepts and much more focused on the details of specific tasks and deadlines.
It was only by looking hard at the complete “Lego set” required to achieve our goal—and then going out and finding the missing pieces—that we were able to do it.
Some decisions you should make yourself and some you should delegate to someone more believable. Using self-knowledge to know which are which is the key to success—no matter what it is you are trying to do.
A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink,
“A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight” by Robert Lee Hotz from The Wall Street Journal.
Massachusetts General Hospital found physical changes in the brain after an eight-week meditation course. Researchers identified increased activity in parts of the brain associated with learning, memory, self-awareness, compassion, and introspection, as well as decreased activity in the amygdala.
On the MBTI scale, this continuum is described as “Judging” vs. “Perceiving” though I prefer to use “Planning” as judging has other connotations. In MBTI language, judging does not mean judgmental and perceiving does not mean perceptive.
most of the processes that go into everyday decision making are subconscious and more complex than is widely understood.
That’s why it always pays to be radically open-minded and seek out believable others as you do your learning. Many people have emotional trouble doing this and block the learning that could help them make better decisions. Remind yourself that it’s never harmful to at least hear an opposing point of view.
This involves playing different scenarios through time to visualize how to get an outcome consistent with what you want.
first pitfall of bad decision making, which is to subconsciously make the decision first and then cherry-pick the data that supports it.
being able to synthesize accurately and knowing how to navigate levels.
Synthesis is the process of converting a lot of data into an accurate picture. The quality of your synthesis will determine the quality of your decision making.
To synthesize well, you must 1) synthesize the situation at hand, 2) synthesize the situation through time, and 3) navigate levels effectively.
Find out who is responsible for whatever you are seeking to understand and then ask them.
Don’t believe everything you hear. Opinions are a dime a dozen and nearly everyone will share theirs with you. Many will state them as if they are facts. Don’t mistake opinions for facts.
Everything looks bigger up close. In all aspects of life, what’s happening today seems like a much bigger deal than it will appear in retrospect. That’s why it helps to step back to gain perspective and sometimes defer a decision until some time passes.
New is overvalued relative to great. For example, when choosing which movie to watch or what book to read, are you drawn to proven classics or the newest big thing? In my opinion...
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A dot is just one piece of data from one moment in time; keep that in perspective as you synthesize.
To see how the dots connect through time you must collect, analyze, and sort different types of information, which isn’t easy.
The chart below plots just the type X dots, which you can see are improving.
🔥
synthesizing through time is only partially innate; even if you’re not good at it, you can get better through practice.
Keep in mind both the rates of change and the levels of things, and the relationships between them.
Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.
80/20 Rule states that you get 80 percent of the value out of something from 20 percent of the information or effort.
Be an imperfectionist. Perfectionists spend too much time on little differences at the margins at the expense of the important things. There are typically just five to ten important factors to consider when making a decision.
Navigate levels effectively.
We are constantly seeing things at different levels and navigating between them, whether we know it or not, whether we do it well or not, and whether our objects are physical things, ideas, or goals. For example, you can navigate levels to move from your values to what you do to realize them on a day-to-day basis.
To observe how well you do this in your own life, pay attention to your conversations. We tend to move between levels when we talk.
Use the terms “above the line” and “below the line” to establish which level a conversation is on. An above-the-line conversation addresses the main points and a below-the-line conversation focuses on the sub-points. When a line of reasoning is jumbled and confusing, it’s often because the speaker has gotten caught up in below-the-line details without connecting them back to the major points.
only going below the line when it’s necessary to illustrate something about o...
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Remember that decisions need to be made at the appropriate level, but they should also be...
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Like synthesizing in general, some people are naturally better at this than others, but anyone can learn to do this to one degree or another.
1. Remember that multiple levels exist for all subjects. 2. Be aware on what level you’re examining a given subject. 3. Consciously navigate levels rather than see subjects as undifferentiated piles of facts that can be browsed randomly. 4. Diagram the flow of your thought processes using the outline template shown on the previous page.
Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.
As Carl Jung put it, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Raising the probability of being right is valuable no matter what your probability of being right already is.
(you can almost always improve your odds of being right by doing things that will give you more information).
The expected value gain from raising the probability of being right from 51 percent to 85 percent (i.e., by 34 percentage points) is seventeen times more than raising the odds of being right from 49 percent (which is probably wrong) to 51 percent (which is only a little more likely to be right). Think of the probability as a measure of how often you’re likely to be wrong.
That’s why it pays to stress-test your thinking, even when you’re pretty sure you’re right.
Knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing what bets are probably worth making.
The best choices are the ones that have more pros than cons, not those that don’t have any cons at all.
Prioritize by weighing the value of additional information against the cost of not deciding.
Just as you need to constantly sort the big from the small when you are synthesizing what’s going on, you need to constantly evaluate the marginal benefit of gathering more information against the marginal cost of waiting to decide.
All of your “must-dos” must be above the bar before you do your “like-to-dos.”
Chances are you won’t have time to deal with the unimportant things, which is better than not having time to deal with the important things.
