Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

by Shane Parrish

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.

We’re taught to focus on the big decisions, rather than the moments where we don’t even realize we’re making a choice. Yet these ordinary moments often matter more to our success than the big decisions. This can be difficult to appreciate.

Each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future. It’s that positioning that eventually makes life easier or harder.

A good position allows you to think clearly rather than be forced by circumstances into a decision. One reason the best in the world make consistently good decisions is they rarely find themselves forced into a decision by circumstances.

You don’t need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you can out-position them. Anyone looks like a genius when

they’re in a good position, and even the smartest person looks like an idiot wh...

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.

It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today. Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. It all depends on whether you’re thinking clearly.

Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets. —CORDELIA FINE, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives

In the space between stimulus and response, one of two things can happen. You can consciously pause and apply reason to the situation. Or you can cede control and execute a default behavior.

So our first step in improving our outcomes is to train ourselves to identify the moments when judgment is called for in the first place, and pause to create space to think clearly.

This training takes a lot of time and effort, because it involves counterbalancing our hardwired biological defaults evolved over many centuries. But mastery over the ordinary moments that make the future easier or harder is not only possible, it’s the critical ingredient to success and achieving your long-term goals.

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.

For instance, like all animals, we are naturally prone to defend our territory.[2]

Our identity is part of our territory too. 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. 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.

Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely. If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results that everyone else gets.[*] Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average.

As legendary investor Warren Buffett pointed out, though, “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.”

Change happens only when you’re willing to think independently, when you do what nobody else is doing, and risk looking like a fool because of it. Once you realize you’ve been doing what everyone else is doing—and only because they’re already doing it—it’s time to try something new.

As the famous quote often falsely attributed to Charles Darwin goes, “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.”[3]

The way to improve your defaults isn’t by willpower but by creating an intentional environment where your desired behavior becomes the default behavior.

Joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behavior is an effective way to create an intentional environment. If you want to read more, join a book club. If you want to run more, join a running club. If you want to exercise more, hire a trainer. Your chosen environment, rather than your willpower alone, will help nudge you toward the best choices. It’s easier said than done, though. Reprogramming a computer is simply a matter of rewriting lines of code, while reprogramming yourself is a longer and more involved process. It’s this process that I describe in the chapters that follow.

Establishing rituals is the key to creating positive inertia. Rituals focus the mind on something other than the moment. They can be as simple as taking a quick pause before responding to someone’s point of contention at work. One of my old mentors used to tell me, “When someone slights you in a meeting, take a deep breath before you speak and watch how often you change what you’re about to say.”

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.

External rewards are nice, but they’re optional; you don’t need them to do your best. Your honest judgments about yourself are more important than anyone else’s. And when you screw up, you should be strong enough to look in the mirror and say, “This was my fault. I need to do better.” While you may never have asked for it, you’re in charge of your own life—and a larger part of your outcomes than you may think.

People who lack self-accountability tend to run on autopilot. This is the exact opposite of commanding your own life. These people constantly succumb to external pressure: seeking rewards, avoiding punishments, and measuring themselves against other people’s scoreboards. They’re followers, not leaders. They don’t take responsibility for their mistakes. Instead, they always try to blame other people, circumstances, or bad luck—nothing’s ever their fault.

One effective question to ask yourself before you act is, “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”[*] This surprisingly simple question helps change your perspective on the situation and avoid making things worse.

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

Self-knowledge isn’t limited just to hard skills, though. It’s also about knowing when you’re vulnerable to your defaults—the kinds of situations where circumstances do the thinking for you. Maybe you’re prone to being overly emotional—to sadness, anger, or intrusive self-defeating thoughts.

If you don’t know your vulnerabilities, your defaults will exploit them to gain control of your circumstances.

while confidence is often a byproduct of our accomplishments, it also comes from how you talk to yourself.

That little voice in your head may whisper its doubts, but it should also remind you of the many hardships and challenges you’ve overcome in the past and the fact that you persevered. No matter who you are, you’ve given that little voice many positive moments to speak of. You learned to walk, despite falling down thousands of times. Maybe you failed a test at first, but then figured out what went wrong, and nailed it the next time. Perhaps you were fired, but moved on and ended up in a better position as a result. Maybe your relationship ended or your business failed or you were scared the first time you put on skis—whatever it was, you overcame it, moved past it, and you’re stronger as a result. It’s important to talk to yourself about the adversity you’ve faced, because past hardship is where you get the confidence to face future hardship.

The most important voice to listen to is the one that reminds you of all that you’ve accomplished in the past. And

To protect yourself from the influence of the social default, you decide to implement a safeguard. You form a rule for yourself: never say yes to something important without thinking it over for a day.

The first step to building any of your strengths is raising the standards to which you hold yourself, a practical matter of looking around at the people and practices that pervade your day-to-day environment.

Working with a master firsthand is the best education; it’s the surest way of raising the bar. Their excellence demands your excellence. But most of us aren’t lucky enough to have that opportunity. Still, not all is lost. If you don’t have the chance to work with a master directly, you can still surround yourself with people who have higher standards by reading about them and their work.

There are two components to building strength by raising the bar: (a) Choose the right exemplars—ones that raise your standards. Exemplars can be people you work with, people you admire, or even people who lived long ago. It doesn’t matter. What matters is they make you better in a certain area, like a skill, trait, or value. (b) Practice imitating them in certain ways. Create space in the moment to reflect on what they’d do in your position, and then act accordingly.

controlling your environment just means intentionally adding exemplars into the mix.

One way of creating space for reason in your thinking is to ask yourself what your exemplars would do if they were in your position. It’s the natural next step. Once

It’s important to engage in this thoughtful exercise often. You have to keep doing it until you acquire a new pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Keep practicing until the pattern becomes

second nature: an element of who you are, rather than just who you want to be.

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

Checklists, for instance, offer a simple way to override your defaults. Pilots

the bad outcome principle: Don’t just imagine the ideal future outcome. Imagine the things that could go wrong and how you’ll overcome them if they do.

the second-level thinking principle: Ask yourself, “And then what?”

You can’t solve a problem optimally unless you consider not just whether it meets your short-term objectives but whether it meets your long-term objectives as well. A failure to think of second-order consequences leads us unknowingly to make bad decisions.

the 3+ principle: Force yourself to explore at least three possible solutions to a problem. If you find yourself considering only two options, force yourself to find at least one more.

safeguard: Imagine that one of the options is off the table. Take each of the options you’re considering, and one at a time, ask yourself, “What would I do if that were not possible?”

safeguard: Come up with Both-And options. Try to find ways of combining the binary. Think not in terms of choosing either X or Y, but rather having both X and Y.

untaught. The key is learning to live with the uncomfortable tension between opposing ideas long enough to see that there’s a solution that combines the best elements of both. And that’s what integrative thinking is all about.