Clear Thinking - Shane Parrish

• We must first create the space to reasonin our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and second, we must deliberately use that space to think clearly
• Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned.
• What a lot of people miss is that ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your options.
• It doesnt matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today.
• Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. It all depends on whether you're thinking clearly.
• Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets.
• "What were you thinking, you idiot?" The truth of the matter is, you weren't thinking. You were reacting.
• we are naturally prone to defend our territory
• Our identity is part of our territory too. When someone criticizes our work, status, or how we see ourselves, we instinctively shut down or defend ourselves.
• 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 confirm 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.
• People who master their defaults get the best real-world results.
• Anger at a rival prevents your from doing what's in your own best interest. Fear of losing an opportunity pushes you to cut thinking short and act impulsively.
• Emotions can multiply all of your progress by zero.
• his desire to defend his self-image ("I can do more than the job I'm in, but they won't give me more")
• He just wanted a role in line with how he saw himself.
• Our ego tempts us into thinking we're more than we are.
• Having your team depend on us for every decision makes us feel important and indispensable
• powerful
• we become a prisoner of the circumstances we created
• when you stop putting in 100 percent of what you are capable of because you feel underappreciated. The ego grabs your unconscious, throws your long-term goals out the window, and sets you sailing on a path toward destruction.
• quiet quitting
• I rearranged the world in such a way that I came out on top. I had unconsciously organized the world in a way where I could be above him and feel better about myself.
• Most people go through life assuming that they're right... and that people who don't see things their way are wrong. We mistake how we want the world to be with how it actually is.
• Professional clappers, called a claque, have been used since at least emperor Nero. ... Once a few people start clapping, our social default takes hold and we find ourselves clapping without knowing why.
• When everyone else is doing something, it's easy to rationalize doing it too.
• The onyl way to outperform if you're doing undifferentiated work is to work harder than everyone else.
• Within this paradigm, the ditchdigger who takes a week off to experiment and invent the shovel seems crazy.
• Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely.
• If you do what everyone else does, you'll get the same results that everyone else gets.
• If you want better-than-average results you'll have to think clearly. Thinking independently. break free of the social default.
• 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.
• The inertia default pushes us to maintain the status quo. Starting something is hard but so too is stopping something.
• Inertia keeps us in jobs we hate and in relationships that don't make us happy.
• One reason we resist change is that keeping things the way they are requires almost no effort.
• Joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behavior is an effective way to create an intentional environment
• Establishing rituals is the key to creating positive inertia.
• Rituals force the mind to focus on the next play, not the last one.
• Well, I have news for you. It's all your fault. (You're in charge of your own life)
• "Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be." - Jeff Bezos
• Dont blame the bus for being late. Buy a car.
• In fact, no one cares about your excuses at all, except you.
• Complaining does nothing to change the present situation you find yourself in. Things about how it wasnt your fault doesnt make anything better. The consequences are still yours to deal with. Always focus on the next move, the one that gets you closer or further from where you want to go.
• You can put energy into things you control or things you dont control. All the energy you put toward things you dont control comes out of the energy you can put toward the things you can.
• The path to being exceptional begins when you decide to be responsible for your actions no matter the situation.
• One of the most common mistakes people make is bargaining with how the world should work instead of accepting how it does work.
• Focusing on the next move, rather than how you got here in the first place, opens you up to a lot of possibilities.
• If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.
• youre refusing to accept something that already happened - and thats crazy
• yes its already happened. you cant argue with it
• You need self-confidence to think independently and to stand firm in the face of social pressure, ego, inertia, or emotion.
• self-confidence gives you the strength to acknowledge those deficiencies. This is how you learn humility.
• Confident people stay focused on completing the task at hand, even if it involves relying on the help of others to do so. Every successful task only further serves to deepen your trust in yourself, and thats how confidence is earned.
• Comes from how you talk to yourself
• That little voice should also remind you of the many hardships and challenges you've overcome in the past and the fact that you persevered.
• It's important to talk to yourself about the adversity you've faced, because past hardship is where you get the confidence to face future hardship.
• your breath is a powerful tool that helps you calm your mind.
• we rarely think of how the words we say to ourselves impact us.
• people who are confident arent afraid of facing reality because they know they can handle it. Confident people dont care what other people think about them, arent afraid of standing out, and are willing to risk looking like an idiot while they try something new.
• they also know that to outperform the crows, you have to do things differently sometimes.
• Self-confidence is also the strength to accept hard truths. 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 responsing to dificult realities, the better.
• The quicker you accept reality, the quicker you can deal with the implications.
• Most of the time, needing to wait for the right moment to do a hard thing is just an excuse: a way to raionalize putting off what needs to be done. There is no perfect moment. There's only the desire to continue waiting for one.
• People with self-confidence are honest about their own motivations, actions, and results. They recognize when the voice in their head might be ignoring reality. They also listen to the feedback the world gives them, instead of shopping around for other opinions.
• The groups we surround ourselves which encourage us to think the prolem is with the world and not with us. We think we are right and everyone else is wrong, denying reality at the expense of the energy and focus we need to adapt and improve.
• And we continue wondering, deep down, why we aren't getting the results we want. We wonder why some people get better results than we do, and what they're doing differently.
• The most valuable people are the ones with the ability to quickly change their minds. They were focused on outcome over ego.
• They're too focused on proving they're right instead of being right.
• Admitting you're wrong isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength.
• It takes courage to tell yourself something is not working. It takes courage to accept feedback that bruises your self-image.
• She spent a lot of time and effort defending herself.
• Many people feel the same way: they think they'll be worthless if they're not right.
• I had my identity wrapped up in being right.
• i didnt care about getting the credit; I cared about getting the results.
• Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people.
• We unconsciously become what we're near
• Champions behave like champions before they're champions. They have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.
• "Is this your best work?"? ... if not ... come back ... "Okay, now I'll read it."
• We are territorial about how we see ourselves and tend to dismiss information that challenges our self-image.
• We are practically experts about where our colleagues and friends are weak. It's hard to accept, however, that others might see us just as clearly in kind.
• Purging your home of all junk food is a safeguard.
• Safeguarding strategy: increasing the amount of "friction" required to do something thats contrary to your long-term goals.
• Improve our judgement: replacing decisions with rules.
• Every day, you have to choose to work out or to skip dessert
• making all these choices requires a lot of sustained effort.
• 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?
• "I don't drink soda at all."
• people typically dont argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules.
• "never say yes to a request on the phone."
• I find it hard to go to the gym three days a week, so my rule is I go every day.
• The biggest mistake people make typically isn't their initial mistake. It's the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it.
• Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
• Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work, not the starting point.
• Purely negative criteria aren't decisive: they dont narrow the field of optoins down to one
• When you're clear on what's important, evaluating options becomes easier.
• A lot of managers secretly enjoy being the bottleneck.
• ego default at work: 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, youre just getting in the way of the team performing at its best.
• There is only one most imporant thing in every project, goal, and company. If you have two or more most important things, you're not thinking clearly. This is an important aspect of leadership and problem-solving in general: You have to pick one criterion above all the others and communicate it in a way that your people can understand so they can make decisions on their own.
• If you want to know whether people will pay for something, try to sell it before you even create it.
• Evalute peoples motivations and incentives
• If you absolutely must rely on someone elses information and opinions, you have a responsibility to think about the lens through which they view the situation.
• It helps to think of each persons perspective as a lens onto the world. When you put their glasses on, you see what they see.
• Withhold your own judgement as long as possible.
• When you're gathering information, your job is to see the world through other people's eyes
• Just ask questions, keep your thoughts to yourself, and remain curious about other perspectives.
• Experts love sharing what they've learned when they know it'll make a difference
• Poker players know it. They can play their hand perfectly and still lose. Nothing is guaranteed. All you can do is play the hand you're dealt as best as you can.
• Comparison is the thief of joy.
• In my 89 years, I've learned that happiness is a choice - not a condition.