Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

by Shane Parrish

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 when they’re in a bad one.

It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today.

“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.”

“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]

We witness how, say, people label a politician a “flip-flopper” instead of “intelligent” when they change their position in response to the facts, and our fear of the social implications of changing our minds continues to grow.

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.

Building strength is about domesticating the wild horses of our nature—training and harnessing them to improve our lives. It’s about turning the headwinds of our biology into tailwinds that carry us reliably toward our most cherished goals. Here are four key strengths you’ll need: Self-accountability: holding yourself accountable for developing your abilities, managing your inabilities, and using reason to govern your actions Self-knowledge: knowing your own strengths and weaknesses—what you’re capable of doing and what you’re not Self-control: mastering your fears, desires, and emotions Self-confidence: trusting in your abilities and your value to others

There’s no greater source of renewable energy in the world than when you’re defending your own self-image.

“Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.”[*]

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.

Failing to accept how the world really works puts your time and energy toward proving how right you are. When the desired results don’t materialize, it’s easy to blame circumstances or others. I call this the wrong side of right. You’re focused on your ego not 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.

Confidence vs. Ego Self-confidence is what empowers you to execute difficult decisions and develop self-knowledge. While the ego tries to prevent you from acknowledging any deficiencies you may have, self-confidence gives you the strength to acknowledge those deficiencies. This is how you learn humility.

You can quickly and easily be surrounded by people who share the same delusions. That doesn’t make them true. Reality isn’t a popularity contest. Surrounding yourself with people who tell you you’re right doesn’t mean you are.

Our surroundings influence us—both our physical environment and the people around us. Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people. It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.

Choose someone whose life and speech pleases you, and who displays outwardly the same character he has. Present him to yourself always as your guardian or exemplar. There is need, I insist, for someone against whom to measure our way of life; unless you have a ruler, you can’t straighten what is crooked.[1]

“I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them.”[5]

As Seneca said, “Happy is he who can improve others not just when he is in their presence, but even when he is in their thoughts!”[7]

Likewise, ask yourself, “How would I pitch this idea to my personal board of directors? What kinds of factors would they care about? What kinds of factors would they dismiss as irrelevant?”

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.

The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated. Just because the results aren’t immediately felt doesn’t mean consequences aren’t coming.

Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”[1]

“Show me an organization in which employees take ownership, and I will show you one that beats its competitors,” says Abrashoff. “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]

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.

Limiting ourselves to binary thinking before fully understanding a problem is a dangerous simplification that creates blind spots. False dualities prevent you from seeing alternative paths and other information that might change your mind. On the other hand, taking away one of two clear options forces you to reframe the problem and get unstuck.

Improving our thinking isn’t just about having the answers to questions we’ve encountered before. It’s not about memorizing a set of predetermined actions. It’s not about relying on others to do the thinking for us. It’s about delving deeper, beyond the surface level, and uncovering what lies hidden from our view.

the targeting principle: Know what you’re looking for before you start sorting through the data.

the alap principle: If the cost to undo a decision is high, make it as late as possible.

the stop, flop, know principle: Stop gathering more information and execute your decision when either you Stop gathering useful information, you First Lose an OPportunity (FLOP), or you come to Know something that makes it evident what option you should choose.

In the final round, they were still only 17 percent accurate. The thirty-five additional pieces of information did, however, move their confidence level to 34 percent. All of the extra information made them no more accurate but a lot more confident. Confidence increases faster than accuracy. “The trouble with too much information,” Robinson told me, “is you can’t reason with it.” It only feeds confirmation bias. We ignore additional information that doesn’t agree with our assessment, and gain confidence from additional information that does.

If the worst-case outcomes never come to pass, the margin of safety will appear like a waste. The minute you convince yourself you could have done better without a margin of safety is exactly when you need it most.

Good leaders determine what needs to get done and set the parameters for getting there. They don’t care whether something gets done differently from how they themselves would’ve done it. As long as it advances to the objective within the limits they’ve set, they’re satisfied.

Making a good decision is about the process, not the outcome.

The quality of what you pursue determines the quality of your life. We think things like money, status, and power will make us happy, but they won’t. The moment we get them, we’re not satisfied. We just want more. The psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell coined a term for this phenomenon: the hedonic treadmill.[1] Who hasn’t taken a run on it?

Running on the hedonic treadmill only turns us into what I call “happy-when” people—those who think they’ll be happy when something happens. For example, we’ll be happy when we get the credit we deserve, or happy when we make a bit more money, or happy when we find that special someone. Happiness, however, isn’t conditional.

Happy-when people are never actually happy. The moment they get what they think they want—the “when” part of the conditional—having that thing becomes the new norm, and they automatically want more.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this ingredient: phronesis—the wisdom of knowing how to order your life to achieve the best results.

“Worrying wastes your life,”

“In my 89 years, I’ve learned that happiness is a choice—not a condition.”

The more we age, the more we come to see things the way Marcus Aurelius did: “When you are distressed by an external thing, it’s not the thing itself that troubles you, but only your judgment of it. And you can wipe this out at a moment’s notice.”[2] This insight has dramatic implications. It places happiness on a continuum with other decisions we’ve talked about.

Evaluating your life through the lens of your death is raw, powerful, and perhaps a bit scary. What matters most becomes clear. We become aware of the gap between who we are and who we want to be. We see where we are and where we want to go. Without that clarity, we lack wisdom and waste the present on things that don’t matter.