Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

by Shane Parrish

Pillemer asked one of his interviewees for help understanding the source of her happiness. She thought about it and answered, “In my 89 years, I’ve learned that happiness is a choice—not a condition.”

Steve Jobs put the idea this way: Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose.[1]

Jobs had a daily ritual. Every morning he would look in the mirror and ask himself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”[3] Whenever the answer was no too many days in a row, he said, he knew he needed to change something.

We regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did. The pain of trying and failing may be intense but at least it tends to be over rather quickly. The pain of failing to try, on the other hand, is less intense but never really goes away.[5]

Wisdom is turning your future hindsight into your current foresight. What seems to matter in the moment rarely matters in life, yet what matters in life always matters in the moment.[4]

Most errors in judgment happen when we don’t know we’re supposed to be exercising judgment.

The key to getting what you want out of life is to identify how the world works and to align yourself with it.

Improving your judgment, it turns out, is less about accumulating tools to enhance your rationality and more about implementing safeguards that make the desired path the path of least resistance.

*Most people are chasing complexity. They learn the basics enough to be average, then look for the secret, shortcut, or hidden knowledge. Mastering the basics is the key to being ruthlessly effective. The basics might seem simple but that doesn’t mean they’re simplistic.