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“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”
thinking about a problem from an inverse perspective can unlock new solutions and strategies.
The concept of inverse thinking can help you with the challenge of making good decisions. The inverse of being right more is being wrong less.
Start looking for unforced errors around you and you will see them everywhere.
When arguing from first principles, you are deliberately starting from scratch. You are explicitly avoiding the potential trap of conventional wisdom, which could turn out to be wrong. Even if you end up in agreement with conventional wisdom, by taking the first-principles approach, you will gain a much deeper understanding of the subject at hand.
Unfortunately, people often make the mistake of doing way too much work before testing assumptions in the real world.
It’s as if you booked an entire vacation assuming your family could join you, only to finally ask them and they say they can’t come. Then you have to go back and change everything, but all this work could have been avoided by a simple communication up front.
we recommend doing as little work as possible before getting that real-world feedback.
Ockham’s razor helps here. It advises that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. When you encounter competing explanations that plausibly explain a set of data equally well, you probably want to choose the simplest one to investigate first.
Framing refers to the way you present a situation or explanation.
You can be nudged in a direction by a subtle word choice or other environmental cues.
You get anchored to the first piece of framing information you encounter. This tendency is commonly exploited by businesses when making offers.
Because of availability bias, you’re likely to click on things you’re already familiar with, and so Google, Facebook, and many other companies tend to show you more of what they think you already know and like. Since there are only so many items they can show you—only so many links on page one of the search results—they therefore filter out links they think you are unlikely to click on, such as opposing viewpoints, effectively placing you in a bubble.
It’s easy to focus solely on what is put in front of you. It’s much harder to seek out an objective frame of reference, but that is what you need to do in order to be wrong less.
MRI asks you to approach a situation from a perspective of respect. You remain open to other interpretations and withhold judgment until necessary.
A truly effective leader, however, needs to be able to see the shades of gray inherent in a situation in order to make wise decisions as to how to proceed.
The essence of thinking gray is this: don’t form an opinion about an important matter until you’ve heard all the relevant facts and arguments, or until circumstances force you to form an opinion without recourse to all the facts (which happens occasionally, but much less frequently than one might imagine).
tyranny of small decisions, where a series of small, individually rational decisions ultimately leads to a system-wide negative consequence, or tyranny. It’s death by a thousand cuts.
externalities, which are consequences, good or bad, that affect an entity without its consent, imposed from an external source.
Over the next few days, look out for externalities. When you see or hear about someone or some organization taking an action, think about people not directly related to the action who might experience benefit or harm from it.
moral hazard, is where you take on more risk, or hazard, once you have information that encourages you to believe you are more protected.
When you try to incentivize behavior by setting a measurable target, people focus primarily on achieving that measure, often in ways you didn’t intend. Most importantly, their focus on the measure may not correlate to the behavior you hoped to promote.
don’t disturb something that is going to create a lot more trouble than it is worth.
you need to think about the long-term consequences of short-term decisions. For any decision, ask yourself: What kind of debt am I incurring by doing this?
The more choices, the more chance you have for regret later.
Meal planning and even some meal prep on the weekend can help keep you from making unhealthy choices when you are overwhelmed later in the week.
“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”
all the context-switching that occurs when multitasking is wasted time and effort. Extra mental overhead is also required to keep track of multiple activities at once. Therefore, you should try to avoid multitasking on any consequential activity.
Every choice you make has a cost: the value of the best alternative opportunity you didn’t choose. As a rule, you want to choose the option with the lowest opportunity cost.
people really, really value instant gratification over delayed gratification, and this preference plays a central role in procrastination, along with other areas of life where people struggle with self-control, such as dieting, addiction, etc.
You can use the default effect to your personal advantage by making default commitments toward your long-term goals. A simple example is scheduling recurring time right into your calendar, such as an hour a week to look for a new job, deep-clean your living space, or work on a side project.
By putting deep-work blocks of time into your calendar, you can prevent yourself by default from booking this time with meetings since it is already committed.
“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
Inertia can increase the longer you hold on to your beliefs.
avoid locking yourself into rigid long-term strategies, as circumstances can rapidly change.
Sometimes a person or department will try to preserve an inefficient process, even when a new idea or technology comes around that can make things easier.
Say no often so you can say yes when you might make some new meaningful connections.
You must continually put energy back into systems to maintain their desired orderly states. If you never put energy into straightening up your workspace, it will get ever messier. The same is true for relationships. To keep the same level of trust with people, you need to keep building on it.
