Clear Thinking – The Most Useful Skill A Lobbyist Could Have

“Clear Thinking” by Shane Parrish is a book that explores the challenges we face when trying to think clearly and provides insights on how to overcome common obstacles. Parrish emphasizes the importance of clear thinking for achieving better results in life and suggests that mastering this skill can provide an unstoppable advantage.

The book identifies several enemies of clear thinking, including our default behaviors driven by emotions, ego, social conformity, and inertia. These default behaviors often lead us to react impulsively rather than reasoning through situations. For instance, the emotion default causes us to act on feelings rather than facts, leading to poor decision-making. The ego default makes us prioritize feeling right over being right, which can lead to arrogance and hinder learning. The social default encourages conformity, while the inertia default keeps us stuck in our comfort zones, preventing change and growth.

To counteract these enemies of clear thinking, Parrish suggests cultivating self-knowledge, self-control, and self-confidence. Self-knowledge involves recognizing our strengths and weaknesses and understanding our knowledge’s boundaries. Self-control allows us to create space for reason, preventing impulsive reactions driven by emotions. Self-confidence empowers us to trust in our abilities and value to others, promoting humility and a willingness to accept hard truths.

Parrish also highlights the importance of self-accountability, emphasizing that we are responsible for our responses and actions. He encourages focusing on outcomes rather than ego and accepting the reality of situations rather than bargaining with how we wish they were.

The book underscores that clear thinking is not about following the crowd but thinking independently and taking actions that align with your goals and values. It advocates for setting high standards by adopting exemplars and studying the practices of those who have achieved success.

In “Clear Thinking,” Shane Parrish advocates a thoughtful approach to forming opinions and making decisions. He highlights that holding an opinion should be based on a deep understanding of the opposing arguments. To do this, one must build a Repository of Good Behavior by cataloging responses from people who excel in similar situations. By considering multiple perspectives, you move from reacting to reasoning.

Parrish also stresses the need to manage weaknesses and biases. Understanding and acknowledging our vulnerabilities is the first step. It’s crucial to recognize that we often form judgments without adequate knowledge. To manage these weaknesses, two strategies are proposed: building strengths and implementing safeguards.

Safeguards, in particular, are tools to protect against impulsive decisions caused by factors like sleep deprivation, hunger, or stress. Prevention, automatic rules, creating friction, and putting in guardrails are safeguard strategies. Shifting perspectives and seeking outside opinions are vital for identifying blind spots.

Mistakes are inevitable, but handling them effectively involves accepting responsibility, learning from them, committing to improvement, and repairing any damage. Parrish emphasizes the power of storytelling and inner dialogue in shaping one’s response to mistakes.

Decision-making is a conscious choice involving four stages: defining the problem, exploring solutions, evaluating options, and making judgments. Parrish highlights the importance of defining the problem correctly, identifying root causes, and avoiding short-term fixes.

The book encourages second-level thinking, which considers the long-term consequences of decisions and explores at least three possible solutions. Clarity, goal promotion, and decisiveness are essential criteria for evaluating options.

One of the key insights is the HIFI principle, which emphasizes obtaining high-fidelity information close to the source. Parrish advises against relying solely on abstractions, as they may filter out crucial details.

To improve information quality, he suggests running experiments, evaluating the motivations and incentives of sources, and weaving together various perspectives to form a more comprehensive understanding of reality.

In summary, “Clear Thinking” by Shane Parrish offers practical strategies for making better decisions, managing weaknesses, and improving the quality of information to achieve better outcomes in various aspects of life.

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Kindle Highlights

Here are the Readwise Kindle highlights of the highlights (17,000 words to 6, 000)

1. Introduction
   • thinking clearly—is surprisingly hard.
   • Some people do think clearly and have consistently better results
   • In order to get the results we desire, we must do two things. We must first create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and second, we must deliberately use that space to think clearly. Once you have mastered this skill, you will find you have an unstoppable advantage.
   • Anything useful in this book is someone else’s idea
   • What a lot of people miss is that ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your options. Clear thinking is the key to proper positioning, which is what allows you to master your circumstances rather than be mastered by them.

2. THE ENEMIES OF CLEAR THINKING

• I devoted myself to learning how to think better.
• The  most effective approaches to thinking in a way few people talk about.
• we cede control to our impulses.
• our default behavior often makes things worse.
• When someone slights us, we lash out with angry words.
• Insteead we need to train ourselves to identify the moments when judgment is called for in the first place, and pause to create space to think clearly.
• The High Cost of Losing Control Reacting without reasoning makes every situation worse.
• Your mind is doing exactly what biology programmed it to do: act quickly and efficiently in response to threats, without wasting valuable time thinking.
• You were reacting, exactly like the animal you are.
• Your mind wasn’t in charge. Your biology was.
• When someone criticizes our work, status, or how we see ourselves, we instinctively shut down or defend ourselves. When someone challenges our beliefs, we stop listening and go on the attack. No thoughts, just pure animal instinct.

3. Knowing Your Defaults

• Here’s how each essentially functions: 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.

• Note: People take it a personal affront that a proposal or amendment is against their interests. And react accordingly. Shock, surprise, amazement, and anger.never good mindsets to take decisions. And, not if the issue has been a love one for a decade or more, and openingky discussed  for two years. Made worse, if they have been shielded from this.
• You experience anger, fear, or some other emotion, and feel compelled to act immediately. But in these moments, the action you’re pushed toward rarely serves you.
• Anger at a rival prevents you from doing what’s in your own best interest.
• Emotions can make even the best of us into idiots, driving us away from clear thinking.

• Our ego tempts us into thinking we’re more than we are. Left unchecked, it can turn confidence into overconfidence or even arrogance.
• Feeling Right over Being Right
• Our desire to feel right overpowers our desire to be right.
• The ego default urges us to feel right at the expense of being right.
• 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.
• matter: we’re right about politics, other people, our memories; you name it. We mistake how we want the world to work for how it does work. 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.
• Your ego is in charge.

• The social default inspires conformity.
• One measure of a person is the degree to which they’ll do the right thing when it goes against the popular belief.
• The social default encourages us to outsource our thoughts, beliefs, and outcomes to others.
• 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.fn2 Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average.
• If you don’t know enough about what you’re doing to make your own decisions, you probably should do what everyone is doing.
• Warren Buffett pointed out, though, “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.”
• To do something different, you need to think different. And that means you will stand out.fn3 Lou Brock might have put it best when he said, “Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy you can beat every time.”
• Change happens only when you’re willing to think independently, when you do what nobody else is doing, and risk looking like a fool because of it.

• The great enemy of any attempt to change men’s habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by inertia. —EDWARD L. BERNAYS, Propaganda
• The inertia default pushes us to maintain the status quo.
• Leonard Mlodinow sums it up this way: “Once our minds are set in a direction, they tend to continue in that direction unless acted upon by some outside force.”
• One reason we resist change is that keeping things the way they are requires almost no effort.
• Inertia also prevents us from doing hard things. The longer we avoid the hard thing we know we should do, the harder it becomes to do.
• Groups create inertia of their own. They tend to value consistency over effectiveness, and reward people for maintaining the status quo.

• Many of the algorithms you’re running have been programmed into you by evolution, culture, ritual, your parents, and your community.
• Some of these algorithms help move you closer to what you want; others (move you further away.
• Criticizing others is easier than coming to know yourself. —BRUCE LEE
• COUNTERACTING THE ENEMIES of clear thinking requires more than willpower.
• Our defaults work off deeply ingrained biological tendencies—our tendencies for self-preservation, for recognizing and maintaining social hierarchies, and for defending ourselves and our territory.
• Rituals force the mind to focus on the next play, not the last one.
• Self-knowledge: knowing your own strengths and weaknesses—what you’re capable of doing and what you’re not ,
• It’s all your fault.  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
• There’s no greater source of renewable energy in the world than when you’re defending your own self-image.
• 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.
• Anytime you find yourself or your colleagues complaining “that’s not right,” or “that’s not fair,” or “it shouldn’t be that way,” you’re bargaining, not accepting. You want the world to work in a way that it doesn’t.
• 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.
• Solutions appear when you stop bargaining and start accepting the reality of the situation.
• When you put outcome over ego, you get better results.

4. How You Respond Can Always Make Things Better or Worse

• You can’t control everything, but you can control your response, which makes circumstances better or worse.
• “Will this action make the future easier or harder?” (
• As my grandfather (and many others) used to say, “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.”  “You’re refusing to accept something that already happened,” he said. “And that’s crazy.” “Yes. It’s already happened. You can’t argue with it.”
• The key here is to stop blaming others and take ownership.”
• Complaining isn’t productive. It only misleads you into thinking that the world should function in a way that it doesn’t.
• Distancing yourself from reality makes it harder to solve the problems you face. There is always something you can do today to make the future easier, though, and the moment you stop complaining is the moment you start finding it.
• The most important story is the one you tell yourself. While telling yourself a positive story doesn’t ensure a good outcome, telling yourself a negative story often guarantees a bad one.
• When you constantly blame circumstances, the environment, or other people, you are effectively claiming that you had little ability to affect the outcome. (
• But that’s not what actually happened. The truth is that we make repeated choices in life that become habits, those habits determine our paths, and those paths determine our outcomes. When we explain away those unwanted outcomes, we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for producing them.
• On the other hand, have you ever had a friend tell you, “You messed up pretty bad there. How can I help you make this right?” or “Let me tell you the one thing I think is holding you back from getting the results you want”?
• The lesson was an important one: the things you choose not to do often matter as much as the things you choose to do.
• Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you do control how you respond to everything.

5. SELF-KNOWLEDGE IS ABOUT KNOWING YOUR OWN strengths and weaknesses.

• Understanding what you do and don’t know is the key to playing games you can win.
• “I don’t know anything about that space,” he said. “I like to stick to what I know.”
• “The key to successful investing is to know what you know and stick to it.” (
• 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.
• Charlie Munger : “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.”

• Self-control is about creating space for reason instead of just blindly following instincts.  It’s about putting distance between yourself and your emotions,  and realizing that you have the power to determine how you respond to them.
• If you’ve ever seen a toddler throw a tantrum, you’ve seen what the emotion default can do with someone who hasn’t learned self-control. What’s truly frightening is that some adults are only marginally better than a toddler at fending it off.
• 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.
• The most successful people have the self-control to keep going  anyway. It’s not always exciting, but they still show up.

• SELF-CONFIDENCE IS ABOUT TRUSTING IN YOUR ABILITIES and your value to others.
• 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.
• 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 responding to difficult realities, the better.
• 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.
• The groups we surround ourselves with encourage us to think the problem 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. We do this because it feels more comfortable than accepting reality, even though it’s only after we accept reality that we can attempt to change it.
• 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.
• Key trait for growth is “How willing they are to change their mind about what they think they know.”  If you’re not willing to change your mind, you’re going to be wrong a lot. The people who frequently find themselves on the wrong side of right are people who can’t zoom in and out and see the problem from multiple angles. They  get locked into one perspective: their own. When you can’t see a problem from multiple points of view, you have blind spots.
• And blind spots get you in trouble.
• Facing reality takes courage.
• Self-confidence is the strength to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right.
• Outcome over ego

• SELF-ACCOUNTABILITY, SELF-KNOWLEDGE, SELF-CONTROL, and self-confidence are essential to exercising good judgment.
• automatic rules for common situations get results.

• Peter Kaufman once told me, “No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others.” nt to make our own. Their example helps us navigate the world. It becomes our North Star.
• Most people didn’t want to adopt Matt’s standards because those standards were so exacting.

6. When to have an opinion

• never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.”
• Many people have opinions, but very few have done the work required to hold them. Doing that work means you can argue against yourself better than your real opponents can.
• It’s only when you put in the work that you come to really understand an argument. You understand the reasons for and against it. Through that work you earn the confidence to endorse it.4
• How can you do this? Your Repository of Good Behavior. you begin to build a database of situations and responses. (Location 1353)
• When you face a new situation, you have a catalog of the responses that people on the far right of the bell curve have had in similar situations. Your baseline response moves from good to great—from reaction to reason.

7. MANAGING YOUR  WEAKNESS

• Life gets easier when you don’t blame other people and focus on what you can control.
• PART OF TAKING command of your life is controlling the things you can. Another part is managing the things you can’t—your vulnerabilities or weaknesses.
• Knowing Your Weaknesses
• WE ALL HAVE WEAKNESSES, MANY OF WHICH ARE BUILT into our biology.
• In addition, we have inbuilt tendencies to form judgments and opinions even in the absence of knowledge.
• The Two Ways of Managing Weakness There are two ways to manage your weaknesses. The first is to build your strengths, which will help you overcome the weaknesses you’ve acquired. The second is to implement safeguards, which will help you manage any weaknesses you’re having trouble overcoming with strength alone.
• blind spots—our inability to see accurately beyond a certain distance, and in environments without enough light. We have deaf spots, too; we can’t hear sounds below a certain volume or above a certain pitch.
• Knowing about Your Blind Spots about your biases and other blind spots is not enought  You have to take steps to manage them.
• Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
• We fail to see our own weaknesses for three main reasons.  First, those flaws can be hard for us to detect because they’re part of the way we’re accustomed to thinking, feeling, and acting. Second, seeing our flaws bruises our egos—especially when those flaws are behaviors that are deeply ingrained. Third, we have a limited perspective. It is very hard to understand a system that we are a part of.
• It’s only when we change our perspective—when we look at the situation through the eyes of other people—that we realize what we’re missing. We begin to appreciate our own blind spots and see what we’ve been missing.

8. Creating Safeguards

• THERE ARE MANY INBUILT BIOLOGICAL VULNERABILITIES that can impede good judgment: sleep deprivation, hunger, fatigue, emotion, distraction, stress from feeling rushed, and being in an unfamiliar environment
• Safeguards are tools for protecting ourselves from ourselves—from weaknesses that we don’t have the strength to overcome.
• Increasing the amount of “friction” required to do something that’s contrary to your long-term goals.
• Safeguard Strategy 1: Prevention
• HALT—an acronym that stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired.
• The first kind of safeguard aims at preventing problems before they happen. One way to do this is to avoid decision-making in unfavorable conditions. (
• Safeguard Strategy 2: Automatic Rules for Success
• replacing decisions with rules.
• 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? (
• For example, “I only drink soda at dinner on Friday,”
• Kahneman told me his favorite rule was never to say yes to a request on the phone.
• create space every day to work on the biggest opportunities.
• no-meetings-before-lunch rule came from.
• Safeguard Strategy 3: Creating Friction
• 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. (Location 1611)
• Safeguard Strategy 4: Putting in Guardrails
• Checklists, for instance, offer a simple way to override your defaults.
• Safeguard Strategy 5: Shifting Your Perspective
• Each of us sees things only from a particular point of view. Nobody can possibly see everything. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t shift the way we see things in any given situation.
• Different observers occupy different frames of reference, and what’s visible from one isn’t necessarily visible from another.
• Having an outside perspective on your situation allows you to see more of what’s actually happening. Changing your perspective changes what you see.
• Michael Abrashoff was able to turn around the performance of the USS Benfold by shifting his frame of reference. “I’m so busy trying to prove to everyone I’m right that I can’t see the world from their point of view.”  From that point on, whenever he discussed something with anyone at work, he would start by offering his impressions of how the other person saw things. Then he would ask, “What did I miss?” He first asks a follow-up: “What else did I miss?” r. Asking the two questions, and listening to the answers people give him, forces him to see things through other people’s eyes. Taking the time to do that protects him against a tendency that he identified as a weakness

9. Making Mistakes.

• MISTAKES ARE AN UNAVOIDABLE PART OF LIFE. EVEN THE most skilled people make mistakes, because there are so many factors beyond our knowledge and control that impact our success. This is true especially when we’re pushing the boundaries of knowledge or potential. On the frontier of what we can know or do, there are no wagon tracks to follow, no familiar landmarks, no mile markers, no road maps to guide
• Note: You are in a journey that you don’t know the map
• When people succeed at something, they tend to attribute their success to their own ability or effort: “I’m really smart”; “I
• By contrast, when people fail at something, they tend to attribute their failure to external factors:
• The four steps to handling mistakes more effectively are as follows: (1) accept responsibility, (2) learn from the mistake, (3) commit to doing better, and (4) repair the damage…
• Step 2: Learn from the Mistakes
• Take time to reflect on what you contributed to the mistake, by exploring the various thoughts, feelings, and actions that got you here.
• the moment, be sure to come back to it. If you don’t identify the problem’s causes, after all, you can’t fix them. And if you can’t fix them, you can’t do better in the future. Instead, you’ll be doomed to repeat the same mistake over and over.
• If you reach this stage and you find yourself blaming other people or saying things like, “This isn’t fair!” or “Why did this happen to me?” then you haven’t accepted responsibility for the mistake. You need to go back to Step 1.
• Step 3: Commit to Doing Better
• Formulate a plan for doing better in the future.
• view. Either way, you need to make a plan for doing better in the future, and follow through on that plan.
• Step 4: Repair the Damage as Best You Can (
• Most times it’s possible to repair the damage caused by a mistake.
• It’s not enough to accept the impact of your behavior and sincerely apologize. You need to be consistent in doing better going forward. Any immediate deviation quickly reverses any repair. (Location 1728
• Mistakes turn into anchors if you don’t accept them.
• 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.

9. Decision making

• A decision is a choice that involves conscious thought. The decision = the judgment that a certain option is the best one (
• When the defaults conspire, we react without thinking.
• the aim of selecting the best one, and it’s composed of four stages
• The decision = the judgment that a certain option is the best one .
• People mistake choosing for decisiveness and the decision-making process for waffling.
• Note: There are some people I always go to to fill in my many gaps before coming to a conclusion. Their input always self corrects errors in my thinking, refines and improves it. I don’t care if they say I’m wrong. I can be. What’s important is getting the most realistic advice
• 9.1. Define the Problem
• THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF DECISION-MAKING IS THAT THE decider needs to define the problem.fn1 If you’re not the one making the decision, you can suggest the problem that needs to be solved, but you don’t get to define it. Only the person responsible for the outcome does. (
• Defining the problem starts with identifying two things: (1) what you want to achieve, and (2) what obstacles stand in the way of getting it.
• Unfortunately, people too often end up solving the wrong problem.
• The result: organizations and individuals waste a lot of time solving the wrong problems. It’s so much easier to treat the symptoms than find the underlying disease, to put out fires rather than prevent them, or to simply punt things into the future.
• 9.2. 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.
• We were addressing the symptom without solving the problem.
• So we just kept putting out flames and letting the fire reignite.
• “What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?”

10. Creating Safeguards

• How to Safeguard the Problem-Defining Stage
• create a firewall and use time to your advantage.
• 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.
• The most precious resources in any organization are time and the brainpower of your best employees.
• When you spend time trying to understand the problem, you realize that you have a room full of people who have insight that you don’t have.
• “What do you know about this problem that other people in the room don’t know?”
• start explaining how they think about the problem.
• And because everyone understands the problem, each person knows how to move their part of the organization in a way that solves
• Ludwig Wittgenstein sums up this idea: “To understand is to know what to do.”
• Creating space between the definition of a problem and the solution to it works at a personal level too.
• Give yourself time to get clear on what the problem is before you jump into solving it. More often than not, you’ll discover that your first attempt to define the underlying issue is rarely the most accurate.
• TIP: Remember that writing out the problem makes the invisible visible. Write down what you think the problem is, and then look at it the next day. If you find yourself using jargon in your description, it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand the problem. And if you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t be making a decision about ,
• I’ve worked on many campaigns and what people first thought was the problem never was. Only when you get to understand what the problem is will you ever have a chance of getting to a solution that works.
• I find it is best to speak to others to see how t what they think the problem is. Especially decision makers
• SAFEGUARD: Use the test of time. Test whether you’re addressing the root cause of a problem, rather than merely treating a symptom, by asking yourself whether it will stand the test of time. Will this solution fix the problem permanently, or will the problem return in the future? If it seems like the latter, then chances are you’re only treating a symptom.
• Note: We mainly treat symptoms. Dealing with the root cause is usuall too painful for many to even look at.too many sacred cows and vested inter3sts. You’ll embark on treating. Symptoms with modern day leeches, sure in the knowledge that even though you may cure the symptom, it will reappear soon enough,
• 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.
• Note: There is a compulsion for action, even if that action is turning around in a circle, and more likely, counterproductive.you did something.
• Time eventually reveals short-term solutions to be Band-Aids that cover deeper problems.
• You can put your energy into short-term solutions or long-term solutions but not both.
• When the same problem returns again and again, people end up exhausted and discouraged because they never seem to make real progress. (
• Extinguish the fire today so it can’t burn you tomorrow.

11. Explore Possible Solutions

• ONCE YOU’RE CLEAR ON THE PROBLEM, IT’S TIME TO THINK of possible solutions—ways of overcoming the obstacles to get what you want.
• The way to come up with possible solutions is by imagining different possible futures—different ways the world could turn out. One of the most common errors at this stage of the decision-making process is avoiding the brutal realities.
• Admiral James Stockdale.  “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

12. Deal with Reality. Deal Problems Don’t Disappear by Themselves

• We all face difficult problems. The defaults narrow our perspective. They narrow our view of the world and tempt us to see things as we wish them to be, not as they are. Only
• by dealing with reality—the often-brutal truth of how the world really works—can we secure the outcomes we want.
• The worst thing we can do with a difficult problem is resort to magical thinking—putting our heads in the sand and hoping the problem will disappear on its own or that a solution will present itself to us.
• The future is not like the weather. It doesn’t just happen to us. We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, just as our present situation was shaped by choices we made in the past.
• Note: A lot of changes are tabled because of actions taken that piss off politicians and officials so watch out, resolutions, council conclusions. Don’t pretend that this came out of nowhere
• Wherever we are now is a reflection of the past choices and behaviors that got us here.

13. Use a Premortem

• It’s a thought experiment that psychologists call premortem.
• The point isn’t to worry about problems; it’s to fortify and prepare for them.
• The hardest setbacks to deal with are the ones we’re not prepared for and don’t expect. That’s why you need to anticipate them before they happen and act now in order to avoid them.
• Performing a premortem might not save you from every disaster, but you’ll be surprised by how many it can save you from.
• What Could Go Wrong?
• Imagining what could go wrong doesn’t make you pessimistic. It makes you prepared.
• Note: A lot of people refuse to do this. Imagine if you mention the prospect of something happening it will magically occur. The lack of,preparedness leads to a lot more money and energy being burned up unnecessarily when the thing you refused to prepare for happens,
• If you haven’t thought about the things that could go wrong, you will be at the mercy of circumstances. Fear, anger, panic—when emotion consumes you, reason leaves you. You just react. The antidote is this principle:
• THE BAD OUTCOME PRINCIPLE: Don’t just imagine the ideal future outcome. Imagine the things that could go wrong and how you’ll overcome them if they do.
• The bottom line: people who think about what’s likely to go wrong and determine the actions they can take are more likely to succeed when things don’t go according to  plan.

14. Second level thinking

• THE SECOND-LEVEL THINKING PRINCIPLE: Ask yourself, “And then what?”
• Second-Level Thinking. Inside us all, there is a competition between our today self and our future self.
• First-level thinking looks to solve the immediate problem without regard to any future problems a solution might produce. Second-level thinking looks at the problem from beginning to end. It looks past the immediate solution and asks, “And then what?” (
• A failure to think of second-order consequences leads us unknowingly to make bad decisions. You can’t ensure the future is easier if you only think about solving the current problem and don’t give due consideration to the problems created in the process.
• Note: Push back, drag fleet on working with authorities, reject dialogue across parties,  or sticking with only your friends, will likely lead to new legislation and your voice being ignored.
• Frederic Maitland purportedly once wrote, “Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work, not the starting point.”

14. 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.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “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. (

15. Evaluate the Options

• (1) your criteria for evaluating the options and (2) how you apply them.
• When you understand the problem, the criteria should be apparent.
• Clarity: The criteria should be simple, clear, and free of any jargon. Ideally, you should be able to explain them to a twelve-year-old.
• Goal promotion: The criteria must favor only those options that achieve the desired goal.
• Decisiveness: The criteria must favor exactly one option; they can’t result in a tie among several.
• “If you don’t know where you want to go, any road will take you there.”
• Defining the Most Important Thing
• Most information is irrelevant. Knowing what to ignore—separating the signal from the noise—is the key to not wasting valuable time.
• Most gossip and in press is irrelevant. Check with the people making the decision,
• They don’t ignore everything else, but focusing primarily on those variables allows them to filter massive amounts of information very quickly.
• People who can quickly distinguish what matters from what doesn’t gain a huge advantage in a world where the flow of information never stops.
• Note: Support from a political group or a country that on this issue are always outvoted is to be viewed with caution.

16. What to Ignore

• Knowing what to ignore allows you to focus on what matters.
• Getting Accurate Information from the Source
• the HiFi Principle and the HiEx Principle.
• THE HIFI PRINCIPLE: Get high-fidelity (HiFi) information— information that’s close to the source and unfiltered by other people’s biases and interests.
• 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.
• Many people treat all sources of information as if they’re equally valid. They’re not.
• While you might value getting everyone’s opinion, that doesn’t mean each opinion should be equally weighted or considered.
• You lack understanding, and information without understanding is dangerous.
• Information is food for the mind.
• What you put in today shapes your solutions tomorrow.
• you can’t make good decisions if you’re consuming low-quality information.
• Higher quality inputs lead to higher quality outputs.
• Note: It takes longer and is slower. But better decisions.
• the further the information is from the original source, the more filters it’s been through before getting to you. (
• Real knowledge is earned, while abstractions are merely borrowed.
• Too often decision-makers get their information and observations from sources that are multiple degrees removed from the problem.
• we feel confident about what to do without really understanding the problem.
• You can’t make good decisions with bad  information.
• In fact, when you see people making decisions that don’t make sense to you, chances are they’re based on different information than you’ve consumed. Just as junk food eventually makes you unhealthy, bad inputs eventually produce bad decisions.
• Note: Public statement, so checked in with someone in the room. They were surprised at the reading, it was not only not what was said in the statement, but not the outcome of the discussion. Spinning it so just led to surprise and anger when it did not happen.

17. How do we get better information?

• The person closest to the problem often has the most accurate information about it.  Tim Urban
• chefs and there are line cooks. When things go according to plan, there is no difference in the process or the result. But when things go wrong, the chef knows why.  The line cook often does not. The chef has cultivated depth of understanding through years of experience, experimentation, and reflection, and as a result, the chef, rather than the line cook, can diagnose problems when they arise.
• History shows that the greatest thinkers all used information that they collected personally.
• They looked for raw, unfiltered information, and ventured out into the world to interact with it directly
• Remember that children’s game, Chinesse Whispers.  you whisper a sentence to the next person, and that person whispers it to the next. People will tell you their version to make them look good and better.
• Remember speaking to someone who knew his organisation had played a key role in changing a law. The only thing was that this organisation was unknown to all the key decision makers  in the process. I spoke to them and they had no recollection of the organisation. I was told I had spoken to the wrong people.
• 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. People are unreliable transmitters of information
• Think of a road map. It’s an abstract representation of a real landscape.
• “abstract” means: “to pull away from.”)
• Removing what doesn’t serve our interests is what makes a map useful.
• What’s true of maps is true of any other abstractions: by nature, they’re designed to serve the interests of their designers.
• Since your interests are likely different from theirs, their summaries, highlights, and descriptions are likely to leave out relevant information that could help you with your decision.
• telling me that his decisions could only be as good as his information.
• getting the raw HiFi information. He knew that people in the organization had an incentive to convey things in a way that covered up mistakes or made themselves look good. And he knew that those filters would obscure rather than clarify the situation.
• If you want to make better decisions, you need better information. Whenever possible, you need to learn something, see something, or do something for yourself. Sometimes the best information is the least transmissible.
• HiFi Information Reveals Better Options
• United States general George Marshall . Marshall struggled to understand what was going on. Talking to the commander gave him no insight, so he did what he often would: he sent someone “to look around and see things that weren’t being reported—not just what they were yelling about.” didn’t have any protection from mosquitoes. Marshall recognized that the only way to understand a problem and solve it was by going to the source. He constantly either went to the front lines himself or sent people he trusted to find out what was really going on.

18. Useful Safeguards

• Run an experiment. Try something out to see what kinds of results it yields. An experiment is a low-risk way of gathering important information. If you want to know whether people will pay for something, try to sell it before you even create it.
• Evaluate the motivations and incentives of your sources. Remember that everyone sees things from a limited perspective.
• If you absolutely must rely on someone else’s information and opinions, you have a responsibility to think about the lens through which they view the situation.
• Everyone has a limited perspective into the problem. Everyone has a blind spot. It’s your job as the decision-maker to weave their perspective
• lot of what people consider information or fact is actually just opinion, or a few facts…
• Each of them sees only part of the reality.
• To get a clearer picture of the concrete reality, consider how each person stands to benefit from the information they give you. It helps to think of each person’s perspective as a lens
• When you put their glasses on, you see what they see and have better insight into what they might be feeling. But those glasses have blind spots, often missing important information or confusing fact with opinion.