Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

by Shane Parrish

Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned. When you are well positioned, there are many paths to victory. If you are poorly positioned, there may be only one.

Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you.

Unearned knowledge rushes us to judgment. “I’ve got this,” we think. We convince ourselves that low-chance events are zero-chance events and think only of best-case outcomes. We feel immune to bad luck—to the bad things that happen to other people, because of our newfound (and false) sense of confidence.

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 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.

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.

Eventually, almost everyone loses the battle with willpower; it’s only a matter of time.

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.

Your responsibility is to play the hand as best you can.

You can put energy into things you control or things you don’t control. All the energy you put toward things you don’t control comes out of the energy you can put toward the things you can.

the things you choose not to do often matter as much as the things you choose to do.

Knowing about your strengths and weaknesses, your abilities and their limits is essential to counteracting your defaults. If you don’t know your vulnerabilities, your defaults will exploit them to gain control of your circumstances.

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

We all have to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. The quicker you stop denying inconvenient truths and start responding to difficult realities, the better.

Reality isn’t a popularity contest. Surrounding yourself with people who tell you you’re right doesn’t mean you are.

Admitting you’re wrong isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. Admitting that someone has a better explanation than you shows that you’re adaptable. Facing reality takes courage. It takes courage to revise your ideas, or rethink something you thought you knew. It takes courage to tell yourself something is not working. It takes courage to accept feedback that bruises your self-image.

The most powerful story in the world is the one you tell yourself. That inner voice has the power to move you forward or anchor you to the past. Choose wisely.

A decision is a choice that involves conscious thought.

“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.

The quality of your decisions is directly related to the quality of your thoughts. The quality of your thoughts is directly related to the quality of your information.

A margin of safety is a buffer between what you expect to happen and what could happen. It’s designed to save you when surprises are expensive.

Giving a team enough structure to carry out a mission but enough flexibility to respond to changing circumstances is called commander’s intent—a military term first applied to the Germans who were trying to defeat Napoleon. If you’ve ever been on the inside of a business where employees can’t take action until everything is approved by their boss, you’re seeing what happens without commander’s intent. There’s a single point of failure. If something happens to the boss, the business and mission fail. Commander’s intent empowers each person on a team to initiate and improvise as they’re executing the plan. It stops you from being the bottleneck, and it enables the team to keep each other accountable to the goal without your presence.

Ulysses used trip wires and commander’s intent to safeguard his decision. He also had the crew tie his hands—a final execution fail-safe to ensure he followed through with his decision, and the reason this kind of safeguard is known as a Ulysses pact.

Making a good decision is about the process, not the outcome. One bad outcome doesn’t make you a poor decision-maker any more than one good outcome makes you a genius.

In life, we experience regret over both things we’ve done and things we’ve failed to do. The worst regret is when we fail to live a life true to ourselves, when we fail to play by our own scoreboard.

Time is the ultimate currency of life. The implications of managing the short time we have on earth are like those of managing any scarce resource: you have to use it wisely—in a way that prioritizes what’s most important.

Sometimes the cost of being wise is that other people treat you like a fool. And no wonder: fools can’t see what wise people do. Wise people see life in all its breadth: work, health, family, friends, faith, and community. They don’t fixate on one part to the exclusion of others. They instead know how to harmonize life’s various parts, and pursue each in proportion to the whole. They know that achieving harmony in that way is what makes life meaningful, admirable, and beautiful.