Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

by Shane Parrish

Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned. When you are well positioned, there are many paths to victory. If you are poorly positioned, there may be only one. You can think of this a bit like playing Tetris. When you play well, you have many options for where to put the next piece. When you play poorly, you need just the right piece.

Reacting without reasoning makes every situation worse.

All the time and energy you spend fixing your unforced errors comes at the expense of moving toward the outcomes you want. There is a huge advantage in having more of your energy instead go toward achieving your goals instead of fixing your problems. The person who learns how to think clearly ultimately applies more of their overall effort toward the outcomes they want than the person who doesn’t.

1. The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts. 2. The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy. 3. The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group. 4. 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.

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. 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. The weight of what we avoid eventually affects our relationship.

Self-accountability means taking responsibility for your abilities, your inabilities, and your actions. If you can’t do that, you might never move forward.

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.

While no one chooses difficult circumstances, adversity provides opportunity. It allows us to test ourselves, and see who we’ve become.

When circumstances are easy, it’s hard to distinguish ordinary people from extraordinary ones, or to see the extraordinary within ourselves. As the Roman slave Publilius Syrus once said, “Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.”[*]

Exceptional people know they can’t change the hand they’ve been dealt, and don’t waste time wishing for a better one. They focus instead on how they’re going to play the cards they have to achieve the best result. They don’t hide behind others. The best people rise to the challenge—whatever it is. They choose to live up to their best self-image instead of surrendering to their defaults.

The key here is to stop blaming others and take ownership.”

When you constantly blame circumstances, the environment, or other people, you are effectively claiming that you had little ability to affect the outcome.

No successful person wants to work with a chronic victim. The only people who want to work with victims are other victims.

Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you do control how you respond to everything.