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. Once you have mastered this skill, you will find you have an unstoppable advantage.

What a lot of people miss is that ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your options. Clear thinking is the key to proper positioning, which is what allows you to master your circumstances rather than be mastered by them.

Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. It all depends on whether you’re thinking clearly.

When someone criticizes our work, status, or how we see ourselves, we instinctively shut down or defend ourselves. When someone challenges our beliefs, we stop listening and go on the attack. No thoughts, just pure animal instinct.

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.

It’s amazing how often the ego turns unearned knowledge into reckless confidence.

Unearned knowledge rushes us to judgment. “I’ve got this,” we think. We convince ourselves that low-chance events are zero-chance events and think only of best-case outcomes. We feel immune to bad luck—to the bad things that happen to other people, because of our newfound (and false) sense of confidence.

The more people who depend on us the more powerful we feel. However, this position is often self-defeating. Slowly and then all at once we become a prisoner of the circumstances we created; more and more effort is needed to stay in the same place, and we approach the ceiling of brute force.

Few things feel better than being right—so much so that we will unconsciously rearrange the world into arbitrary hierarchies to maintain our beliefs and feel better about ourselves.

if you find yourself exerting energy to fit in with a crowd, if you’re frequently fearful of disappointing other people, if you’re afraid of being an outsider, or if the threat of scorn fills you with dread, then beware!

The physicist Leonard Mlodinow sums it up this way: “Once our minds are set in a direction, they tend to continue in that direction unless acted upon by some outside force.”

The “zone of average” is a dangerous place when it comes to inertia. It’s the point where things are working well enough that we don’t feel the need to make any changes. We hope things will magically improve. Of course, they rarely do.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Avoiding conflict is comfortable and easy. The longer we avoid the conflict, however, the more necessary it becomes to continue avoiding it. What starts out as avoiding a small but difficult conversation quickly grows into avoiding a large and seemingly impossible one.

Criticizing others is easier than coming to know yourself. —BRUCE LEE

Strength is the power to press pause on your defaults and exercise good judgment. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in the world, or how unfair things may seem. It doesn’t matter that you feel embarrassed, threatened, or angry. The person who can take a step back for a second, center themselves, and get out of the moment will outperform the person who can’t.

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

No one cares about your excuses as much as you do. In fact, no one cares about your excuses at all, except you.

Always focus on the next move, the one that gets you closer or further from where you want to go. If you play poker, you learn this intuitively. You’re dealt a hand based mostly on luck. Feeling sorry for yourself, complaining about the hand you were dealt, or blaming others for how they played their hands only distracts you from what you can control. Your responsibility is to play the hand as best you can.

When you put outcome over ego, you get better results.

“If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.”

Complaining isn’t productive. It only misleads you into thinking that the world should function in a way that it doesn’t. Distancing yourself from reality makes it harder to solve the problems you face. 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.

While telling yourself a positive story doesn’t ensure a good outcome, telling yourself a negative story often guarantees a bad one.

No successful person wants to work with a chronic victim. The only people who want to work with victims are other victims. If you pay attention to chronic victims, you’ll notice how fragile they are—how dependent their attitudes and feelings are on things they don’t control.

“The key to successful investing is to know what you know and stick to it.”

It’s not enough to know where you have an edge; you also have to know when you are operating outside of 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.

Inspiration and excitement might get you going, but persistence and routine are what keep you going until you reach your goals.

More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence.

People who are confident aren’t afraid of facing reality because they know they can handle it. Confident people don’t care what other people think about them, aren’t afraid of standing out, and are willing to risk looking like an idiot while they try something new. They’ve been beaten down and rebuilt themselves enough times to know that they can do it again if they have to. Crucially, they also know that to outperform the crowd, you have to do things differently sometimes, and that hecklers and naysayers inevitably tend to follow. They take their feedback from reality, not popular opinion.

“If you could pick one trait that would predict how someone would turn out, what would it be?” “That’s easy,” he said. “How willing they are to change their mind about what they think they know.”

By contrast, he said, the people most likely to fail were those obsessed with minute details that supported their point of view. “They’re too focused on proving they’re right instead of being right,” he said.

Self-confidence is the strength to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right. It’s the strength to face reality. It’s the strength to admit mistakes, and the strength to change your mind. Self-confidence is what it takes to be on the right side of right. Outcome over ego.

The most successful people have the highest standards, not only for others but for themselves.

Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions.

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

The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated.

good choices repeated make time your friend, bad ones make it your enemy.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”[1]

“Show me an organization in which employees take ownership, and I will show you one that beats its competitors,”

no calls or meetings until lunch so I could spend time working on the most important opportunity. This is where my no-meetings-before-lunch rule came from.

Creating personal rules is a powerful technique for protecting yourself from your own weaknesses and limitations. Sometimes those rules have surprising benefits.

The problem was that he couldn’t relate to other people because he hadn’t even made any effort to see things through their eyes.

If you got some results you didn’t want, the world is telling you at least one of two things: (a) you were unlucky; (b) your ideas about how things work were wrong.

If you were unlucky, trying again with the same approach should lead to a different outcome. When you repeatedly don’t get the outcomes you want, though, the world is telling you to update your understanding.

Relying on memory won’t work because the ego distorts information to make us look better than we actually were.