Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

by Shane Parrish

Why We Have Low Standards Most of the time when we accept substandard work from ourselves, it’s because we don’t really care about it.

When we accept substandard work from others, it’s for the same reason: we’re not all in. When you’re committed to excellence, you don’t let anyone on your team half-ass it.

We’ll never be exceptional at anything unless we raise our standards, both of ourselves and of what’s possible. For most of us, that sounds like a lot of work. We gravitate toward being soft and complacent. We’d rather coast. That’s fine. Just realize this: 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.

When you choose the right exemplars—people with standards higher than yours—you can transcend the standards you’ve inherited from parents, friends, and acquaintances. Your exemplars show you what your standards should be. As Peter Kaufman once told me, “No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others.”

Your Personal Board of Directors Put all of your exemplars on your “personal board of directors,” a concept that originates with author Jim Collins: Back in the early ’80s, I made Bill [Lazier] the honorary chairman of my personal board of directors. And when I chose members . . . they were not chosen for their success. They were chosen for their values and their character. . . . They’re the sorts of people I wouldn’t want to let down.[2] The exemplars on your personal board can be a mix of high accomplishment and high character. The only requirement is that they have a skill, attitude, or disposition you want to cultivate in yourself.

One of my exemplars is Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett. He raised my standard for holding an opinion. One night at dinner, he commented, “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.”

The phone in your pocket literally gives you access to the smartest people who’ve ever existed, alive or dead. Even if you don’t have direct contact with them, you can often listen to them talk in their own words—unfiltered!

You can choose among the greats of history: Richard Feynman, George Washington, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, Coco Chanel, Charlie Munger, Marie Curie, Marcus Aurelius. All of them are ready to accept your invitation to be on your personal board. All you need to do is collect the best of them together and unite them in your mind.

Your Repository of Good Behavior 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.

It’s not enough just to pick exemplars and assemble a personal board of directors. You also have to follow their example—not just once or twice, but again and again. Only then will you internalize the standards they embody, and become the kind of person you want to be.

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.

Bad habits are easy to acquire when there is a delay between action and consequence.

Whatever our weaknesses and whatever their origins, the defaults will handily take command of our lives if we don’t manage them. Moreover, we’re often unaware when they do.

We fail to see our own weaknesses for three main reasons. First, those flaws can be hard for us to detect because they’re part of the way we’re accustomed to thinking, feeling, and acting.

Second, seeing our flaws bruises our egos—especially when those flaws are behaviors that are deeply ingrained.

Third, we have a limited perspective. It is very hard to understand a system that we are a part of.

Protecting Yourself with Safeguards There are many inbuilt biological vulnerabilities that can impede good judgment: sleep deprivation, hunger, fatigue, emotion, distraction, stress from feeling rushed, and being in an unfamiliar environment are just some examples.

Safeguards are tools for protecting ourselves from ourselves—from weaknesses that we don’t have the strength to overcome.

Purging your home of all junk food is an example of one safeguarding strategy: increasing the amount of “friction” required to do something that’s contrary to your long-term goals.

Safeguard Strategy 1: Prevention The first kind of safeguard aims at preventing problems before they happen. One way to do this is to avoid decision-making in unfavorable conditions.

You can use the principles behind HALT as a safeguard for decision-making in general. If you have an important decision to make, ask yourself: “Am I hungry? Am I angry or otherwise emotional? Am I lonely or otherwise stressed by my circumstances, such as being in an unfamiliar environment or pressed for time? Am I tired, sleep-deprived, or physically fatigued?” If the answer is yes to any of these questions, avoid making the decision if you can. Wait for a more opportune time. Otherwise, your defaults will take over.

In my conversation with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, the godfather of cognitive biases and thinking errors, he revealed an unexpected way we can improve our judgment: replacing decisions with rules.

Why not bypass individual choices altogether and create an automatic behavior—a rule—that requires no decision-making in the moment and that gets no pushback from others? Why not set a rule that you order a social drink only when you actually feel like one, and never just to fit in with what the group is doing?

The way I did this was to imagine a film crew following me around documenting how successful I was.[*] Regardless of whether I was a success or not, how would I act to show someone I deserved my success? What would I want them to see? What am I doing that I would want them not to see because I’m embarrassed or ashamed?

Safeguard Strategy 3: Creating Friction Another safeguarding strategy is to increase the amount of effort it takes to do things that are contrary to your goals.

If there were a recipe for accumulated disaster, it would be giving the best of ourselves to the least important things and the worst of ourselves to the most important things.

Safeguard Strategy 4: Putting in Guardrails Another safeguarding strategy is to formulate operating procedures for yourself because you know from hard experience when your defaults tend to override your decision-making.

Questions like these are the guardrails that will keep you on the road to success.

Safeguard Strategy 5: Shifting Your Perspective Each of us sees things only from a particular point of view. Nobody can possibly see everything. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t shift the way we see things in any given situation.

whenever he discussed something with anyone at work, he would start by offering his impressions of how the other person saw things. Then he would ask, “What did I miss?” Asking this question is a clever move. It implies that he’s open to correction and gives the other person a chance to correct him. One of the deepest-rooted human instincts is to correct other people, so by asking this question, he makes it easy for the other person to engage with him. Then, if the other person does in fact correct him, it reveals to him which factors are most important to that person.

One thing that sets exceptional people apart from the crowd is how they handle mistakes and whether they learn from them and do better as a result. Mistakes present a choice: whether to update your ideas, or ignore the failures they’ve produced and keep believing what you’ve always believed.

The four steps to handling mistakes more effectively are as follows: (1) accept responsibility, (2) learn from the mistake, (3) commit to doing better, and (4) repair the damage as best you can.

Decisions are different from choices. If you casually select an option from a range of alternatives, you’ve made a choice. If you react without thinking, you’ve made an unconscious choice. But neither of these is the same as a decision. A decision is a choice that involves conscious thought. The decision = the judgment that a certain option is the best one

The best decision-makers know that the way we define a problem shapes everyone’s perspective about it and determines the solutions. The most critical step in any decision-making process is to get the problem right.

the definition principle: Take responsibility for defining the problem. Don’t let someone define it for you. Do the work to understand it. Don’t use jargon to describe or explain it. the root cause principle: Identify the root cause of the problem. Don’t be content with simply treating its symptoms.

A handy tool for identifying the root cause of a problem is to ask yourself, “What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?”

safeguard: Build a problem-solution firewall. Separate the problem-defining phase of the decision-making process from the problem-solving phase.

People go fast in operational environments. If you insert too much process into decisions, you miss the expiring windows of opportunity. But fast-paced environments are a feast for defaults. You need to slow down—but not too much—and use a combination of judgment, principles, and safeguards to make sure you’re getting to the best answer possible and thinking clearly.

tip: Remember that writing out the problem makes the invisible visible. Write down what you think the problem is, and then look at it the next day. If you find yourself using jargon in your description, it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand the problem. And if you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t be making a decision about it.

safeguard: Use the test of time. Test whether you’re addressing the root cause of a problem, rather than merely treating a symptom, by asking yourself whether it will stand the test of time. Will this solution fix the problem permanently, or will the problem return in the future? If it seems like the latter, then chances are you’re only treating a symptom.

The worst thing we can do with a difficult problem is resort to magical thinking—putting our heads in the sand and hoping the problem will disappear on its own or that a solution will present itself to us.

The future is not like the weather. It doesn’t just happen to us. We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, just as our present situation was shaped by choices we made in the past.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

Imagining what could go wrong doesn’t make you pessimistic. It makes you prepared.

The bottom line: people who think about what’s likely to go wrong and determine the actions they can take are more likely to succeed when things don’t go according to plan.

As Frederic Maitland purportedly once wrote, “Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work, not the starting point.”

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.

There are two safeguards against binary thinking. The first is this: 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?”

Here’s the second safeguard against binary thinking: 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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”