Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

by Shane Parrish

One reason people find it hard to empower others at work is that having them depend on us for every decision makes us feel important and indispensable. Having them depend on us makes us feel not only necessary but powerful. 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.[*] It’s only a matter of time until things break.

For the time being, keep in mind how to recognize it when it rears its head. If you find yourself expending tremendous energy on how you are seen, if you often feel your pride being wounded, if you find yourself reading an article or two on a subject and thinking you’re an expert, if you always try to prove you’re right and have difficulty admitting mistakes, if you have a hard time saying “I don’t know,” or if you’re frequently envious of others or feel as though you’re never given the recognition you deserve—be on guard! Your ego is in charge.

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.

a popular way of stating Newton’s first law of motion—the law of inertia—is this: “A body in motion tends to stay in motion, and a body at rest tends to stay at rest.”

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.

You unconsciously adopt the habits of the people you spend time with, and those people make it easier or harder for you to achieve progress toward what you want to achieve. The more time you spend with people, the more likely you start to think and act as they do.

And what may look like poor choices is often just someone trying their best to use willpower and bumping up against their defaults. The people with the best defaults are typically the ones with the best environment. Sometimes it’s part of a deliberate strategy, and sometimes it’s just plain luck. Either way, it’s easier to align yourself with the right behavior when everyone else is already doing it.

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, ra...

The path to being exceptional begins when you decide to be responsible for your actions no matter the situation. 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.

If I couldn’t learn self-accountability, I wasn’t going to go very far.

Too often we fight against the feedback the world gives us, to protect our beliefs. Rather than changing ourselves, we want the world to change. And if we don’t have the power to change it, we do the only thing we feel we can do: complain.

When you constantly blame circumstances, the environment, or other people, you are effectively claiming that you had little ability to affect the outcome. But that’s not what actually happened. The truth is that we make repeated choices in life that become habits, those habits determine our paths, and those paths determine our outcomes. When we explain away those unwanted outcomes, we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for producing them.

There are points in the process of becoming a chronic victim when people realize they’re lying to themselves. They realize the story they’re telling themselves isn’t quite true. They know they’re responsible. But facing reality and taking responsibility is hard. It’s uncomfortable. It’s so much easier to hide and to blame other people, circumstances, or luck.

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. When things go their way, they’re happy; when things don’t, they’re defensive, passive-aggressive, and occasionally aggressive-aggressive. If their spouse is in a bad mood, they’re in a bad mood too. If they hit traffic on the way to work, they bring their anger and frustration to work with them. If a project they’re leading isn’t on track, they blame someone on their team.

At dinner one night, Charlie Munger elaborated on the same idea my real estate investor friend had put forth. He said, “When you play games where other people have the aptitude and you don’t, you’re going to lose. You have to figure out where you have an edge and stick to it.”

You need self-confidence to think independently and to stand firm in the face of social pressure, ego, inertia, or emotion. You need it to understand that not all results are immediate, and to focus on doing what it takes to earn them eventually.

“That’s easy,” he said. “How willing they are to change their mind about what they think they know.”

It wasn’t until I began running a business that I realized how wrong I’d been. When everything is on your shoulders and the cost of being wrong is high, I told her, you tend to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right. The more I’d given up wanting to be right, the better the outcomes I had. I didn’t care about getting the credit; I cared about getting the results.

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.

Without self-knowledge, I never would have known what made me happy. Without self-confidence, I never would have left. Without self-accountability and self-control, I probably would have known what to work on, but I would have filled my days with easy busywork instead of the activities that moved me forward.

It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis . . . that you will grow to be like them. . . . Place an extinguished piece of coal next to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite. . . . Remember that if you consort with someone covered in dirt you can hardly avoid getting a little grimy yourself. —EPICTETUS, Discourses

if you do what everyone else does, you can expect the same results that everyone else gets. If you want different results, you need to raise the bar.

“No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others.”

Look around, find the best examples you can of people with the attributes you want to cultivate—the people whose default behavior is your desired behavior, those who inspire you to raise the bar and make you want to be a better version of yourself. Your exemplars needn’t be alive. They can be either dead or fictional, as well. We can learn from both Atticus Finch and Warren Buffett, along with Genghis Khan and Batman. It’s up to you.

Talk about raising the bar! Many people have opinions, but very few have done the work required to hold them. Doing that work means you can argue against yourself better than your real opponents can. It forces you to challenge your beliefs because you have to argue from both sides. It’s only when you put in the work that you come to really understand an argument. You understand the reasons for and against it. Through that work you earn the confidence to endorse it.[4]

Choosing the right exemplars helps create a repository of “good behavior.” As you read what people have written, as you talk to them, as you learn from their experiences, as you learn from your own experiences, you begin to build a database of situations and responses. Building this database is one of the most important things you’ll ever do because it helps create space for reason in your life. Instead of reacting, and simply copying those around you, you think, “Here’s what the outliers do.”

A final note on exemplars: just as other people serve on your personal board of directors, you serve on other people’s boards. Denzel Washington reminds us of this point: “You never know who you touch. You never know how or when you’ll have an impact, or how important your example can be to someone else.”[6]

Strengths of character result from habit. . . . We acquire them just as we acquire skills . . . we become builders, for instance, by building, and we become harpists by playing the harp. So too we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.

If you imagine your exemplars watching you, you’d tend to do all the things you know they’d want you to do and avoid the things you know would get in the way. 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.

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

PART OF TAKING command of your life is controlling the things you can. Another part is managing the things you can’t—your vulnerabilities or weaknesses.

From the start, Abrashoff knew you can’t simply order people to be better. Even if that appears to work, the results are short term and the consequences enormous. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a ship or running a manufacturing company. You don’t tap into people’s resourcefulness, intelligence, and skills by command-and-control.

“Captains need to see the ship from the crew’s perspective. They need to make it easy and rewarding for crew members to express themselves and their ideas.”[3]

There is a gap in our thinking that comes from believing that the way we see the world is the way the world really works. It’s only when we change our perspective—when we look at the situation through the eyes of other people—that we realize what we’re missing. We begin to appreciate our own blind spots and see what we’ve been missing.