Clear Thinking

Highlights

• In today’s world, basic survival is no longer in question. The very tendencies that once served us now often act as an anchor holding us in place, weakening our position, and making things harder than they need to be.

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• While there are many such instincts, four stand out to me as the most prominent, the most distinctive, and the most dangerous. These behaviors represent something akin to our brain’s default or factory settings.

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• The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts. The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy. The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group. The inertia default: we’re habit forming and comfort seeking. We tend to resist change, and to prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.

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• People who master their defaults get the best real-world results. It’s not that they don’t have a temper or an ego, they just know how to control both rather than be controlled by them. With the ability to think clearly in ordinary moments today, they consistently put themselves in a good position for tomorrow.

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• Emotions can multiply all of your progress by zero. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve thought about or worked at something, it can all be undone in an instant.

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• Later I’ll discuss more about how to combat the ego default. 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.

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

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• Too often, the people we ask for feedback are kind but not nice. Kind people will tell you things a nice person will not. A kind person will tell you that you have spinach on your teeth. A nice person won’t because it’s uncomfortable. A kind person will tell us what holds us back even when it’s uncomfortable. A nice person avoids giving us critical feedback because they’re worried about hurting out feelings.

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• Knowing just what it is that you know is among the most practical skills you can have. The size of what you know isn’t nearly as important as having a sense of your knowledge’s boundaries.

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• 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.”

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• A large part of achieving success is having the self-control to do whatever needs to be done, regardless of whether you feel like doing it at the moment. Emotional intensity is far less important in the long run than disciplined consistency. Inspiration and excitement might get you going, but persistence and routine are what keep you going until you reach your goals.

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• 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.

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• High standards are consistent across top performers. When you look at any athlete or team that performs on a level beyond what you can explain by luck or talent, you find a commitment to high standards.

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• When you’re committed to excellence, you don’t let anyone on your team half-ass it. You set the bar, you set it high, and you expect anyone working with you to work just as hard and level up to what you expect or above.

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• 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. As Montaigne put it, “I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them.”5

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• 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. —ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Chapter 1

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• In a quirk of psychology, people typically don’t argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules.

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• When you step back and think about it for a second, I was giving one of the most important things I wanted to do the worst of myself. Email, which I dread on the best of days, was getting my most energetic and creative self. Many of us do this with our partners too. By the time everything we need to do over the course of a long day is finished, we’re exhausted. And this is the time we give to our spouse, the most important person in our lives! 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.

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• To get on track with the report, I told my colleagues that until the report was submitted, I’d buy them all lunch if they caught me with my email open before 11:00 a.m. My being competitive and not wanting to buy them lunch created enough friction to keep me from checking it first thing in the morning. I’d work free from distraction all morning. In the afternoon, I’d do email, take calls, and attend or conduct meetings. It’s incredible how much I got done.

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• the first lens into an issue rarely reveals what the real problem is, so the real problem doesn’t get solved. What’s happening here? The social default prompts us to accept the first definition people agree on and move forward. Once someone states a problem, the team shifts into “solution” mode without considering whether the problem has even been correctly defined. This is what happens when you put a bunch of smart, type A people together and tell them to solve a problem. Most of the time, they end up missing the real problem and merely addressing a symptom of it.

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• 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.

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• These two principles follow the example of the best decision-makers: 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.

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• SAFEGUARD: Build a problem-solution firewall. Separate the problem-defining phase of the decision-making process from the problem-solving phase. A mentor of mine once taught me that the best way to avoid finding the perfect solution to the wrong problem at work, when time allows, is to hold two separate meetings: one to define the problem, and one to come up with the solution.

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• Short-term solutions might make sense in the moment, but they never win in the long term. You feel like you’re moving forward when you’re actually just going in circles. People gravitate toward them because finding a short-term fix signals to others that they’re doing something. That’s the social default at work. It fools people into mistaking action for progress, the loudest voice for the right one, and confidence for competence. Time eventually reveals short-term solutions to be Band-Aids that cover deeper problems. Don’t be fooled!

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• A lot of managers secretly enjoy being the bottleneck. They like the way it feels when their team is dependent on them. Don’t be fooled! This is the ego default at work, and it puts a ceiling on how far you will go. It tries to convince you that you’re the best; that you’re so smart, so skilled, so insightful that only you can make the decisions. In reality, you’re just getting in the way of the team performing at its best.

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• When it comes to getting information that’s relevant to the decision, remember this: THE TARGETING PRINCIPLE: Know what you’re looking for before you start sorting through the data.

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• When it comes to getting information that’s accurate, there are two principles you should know: the HiFi Principle and the HiEx Principle. The first will help you find the best intel possible from within any given situation, and the second will help you find the best intel possible from outside of it.

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• THE HIFI PRINCIPLE: Get high-fidelity (HiFi) information— information that’s close to the source and unfiltered by other people’s biases and interests.

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• Remember that children’s game, telephone:

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• The same thing happens when information travels through an organization. It goes through multiple filters, including individual levels of understanding, political interpretation, and biases. Details are abstracted from the original, and the signal is lost. The various incentives people have when they communicate information end up complicating things even further.

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• People want me to solve their problems for them. They send twenty pages of thoughts and say, “What should I do?”fn2 Remember: the goal isn’t to have someone tell you what to do; rather, it’s to learn how an expert thinks about the problem, which variables they consider relevant, and how those variables interact over time. If you present a problem, and an expert simply tells you what to do, they’re just giving you an abstraction. You might get the answer right, but you haven’t learned anything. And if things go wrong, which they inevitably will, you won’t have a clue as to why. You’re the line cook masquerading as the chef. If you ask them how they think about the problem, that’s when you start deepening your understanding.

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• THE ASAP PRINCIPLE: If the cost to undo the decision is low, make it as soon as possible.

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• Another sign that you’re in the grips of the ego default is that you insist on controlling how everything happens. 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. Poor leaders insist that everything must be done their way, which ultimately demoralizes their team and undermines both loyalty and creativity—exactly the opposite of commander’s intent.

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• When we succeed at something, we tend to attribute our success to our ability or effort. By contrast, when we fail at something, we tend to attribute our failure to external factors. Basically, heads I’m right. Tails, I’m not wrong. If you want to get better, you have to rewrite the faulty narratives.

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• Your ego works to distort your memories and convinces you of narratives that make you feel smarter or more knowledgeable than you really are. No one, we think, could make better decisions than the ones we’ve made ourselves. The only way to see clearly what you were thinking at the time you made the decision is to keep a record of your thoughts at the time you were making the decision.

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