Clear thinking Book Highlights

Bhavik Kasundra · January 21, 2024

MentalModels

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.
1. The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group.
2. 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.
master of patience and discipline. With his defaults under control, he never reacts without reasoning, and when he does react, it’s ruthlessly effective.
When you are possessed by the moment, all the reasoning tools in the world won’t help you.
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.
If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results that everyone else gets.[*] Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average.
The very same force that encouraged them to start was now preventing them from stopping. They were only able to kick their habit when they changed their environment
They had to find new friends whose default behavior was their desired behavior.
The way to improve your defaults isn’t by willpower but by creating an intentional environment where your desired behavior becomes the default behavior. Joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behavior is an effective way to create an intentional environment.
Inertia is a double-edged sword. We saw earlier that inertia is a tendency to maintain the status quo
“When someone slights you in a meeting, take a deep breath before you speak and watch how often you change what you’re about to say.”
Rituals force the mind to focus on the next play, not the last one.
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
People who lack self-accountability tend to run on autopilot. This is the exact opposite of commanding your own life. These people constantly succumb to external pressure: seeking rewards, avoiding punishments, and measuring themselves against other people’s scoreboards. They’re followers, not leaders. They don’t take responsibility for their mistakes. Instead, they always try to blame other people, circumstances, or bad luck—nothing’s ever their fault.
the things you choose not to do often matter as much as the things you choose to do. The real test of a person is the degree to which they are willing to nonconform to do the right thing.
passive person—the kind of person whose behavior is dictated by the people and events around him.
No successful person wants to work with a chronic victim. The only people who want to work with victims are other victims.
If you pay attention to chronic victims, you’ll notice how fragile they are—how dependent their attitudes and feelings are on things they don’t control. When things go their way, they’re happy; when things don’t, they’re defensive, passive-aggressive, and occasionally aggressive-aggressive.
Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you do control how you respond to everything
best path is often just to accept things and move on.
Self-knowledge is about knowing your own strengths and weaknesses. You must know what you can do and what you can’t; your powers and limitations, your strengths and vulnerabilities, what’s in your control and what isn’t. You know what you know, and what you don’t know. And you know, moreover, that you have cognitive blind spots—that there are things you don’t know, and you don’t know you don’t know them
The key to successful investing is to know what you know and stick to it.”
If you don’t know your vulnerabilities, your defaults will exploit them to gain control of your circumstances.
Self-control is the ability to master your fears, desires, and other emotions.
Mammals like us evolved to respond quickly to immediate environmental threats and opportunities—fear in response to a threat, enjoyment in response to a social-bonding experience, sadness in response to a loss
Self-control is about creating space for reason instead of just blindly following instincts. It’s about being able to view and manage your emotions as if they were inanimate objects
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.
Anyone can maintain excitement for a few minutes, but the longer a project takes, the fewer the people who can maintain their excitement for it. 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.
While the ego tries to prevent you from acknowledging any deficiencies you may have, self-confidence gives you the strength to acknowledge those deficiencies.
More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence.
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.
Surrounding yourself with people who tell you you’re right doesn’t mean you are. And once you dive into the warm water of group acceptance, it’s hard to get back out. The social default strikes again!
How willing they are to change their mind about what they think they know.” The most valuable people, he continued, weren’t the ones with the best initial ideas, but the ones with the ability to quickly change their minds
When you can’t see a problem from multiple points of view, you have blind spots. And blind spots get you in trouble.
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.
When everything is on your shoulders and the cost of being wrong is high, I told her, you tend to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right. The more I’d given up wanting to be right, the better the outcomes I had. I didn’t care about getting the credit; I cared about getting the results.
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.
The first step to building any of your strengths is raising the standards to which you hold yourself, a practical matter of looking around at the people and practices that pervade your day-to-day environment.
Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you. The changes are too gradual to notice until they’re too large to address.
exceptional outcomes are almost always achieved by people with higher-than-average standards. The most successful people have the highest standards, not only for others but for themselves.
Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions
The best leaders expect more from people; they hold them to the same standards they hold themselves—a higher standard than most would otherwise know is possible.
I decided to adopt Kissinger’s approach. I simply replied to the email with “Is this your best work?”
master communicator wouldn’t accept a ponderous, rambling email. A master programmer wouldn’t accept ugly code. Neither of them would accept unclear explanations as understanding.
Working with a master firsthand is the best education; it’s the surest way of raising the bar. Their excellence demands your excellence.
Working with a master firsthand is the best education; it’s the surest way of raising the bar. Their excellence demands your excellence.
If you don’t have the chance to work with a master directly, you can still surround yourself with people who have higher standards by reading about them and their work.
if you don’t curate the people in your life, the people who end up surrounding you will be there by chance and not by choice. That group includes your parents, your friends, your family, your coworkers.
controlling your environment just means intentionally adding exemplars into the mix.
Show me your role models and I’ll show you your future.
Put all of your exemplars on your “personal board of directors,” a concept that originates with author Jim Collins:
Put all of your exemplars on your “personal board of directors,” a concept that originates with author Jim Collins:
I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.”
We are, for instance, vulnerable to being hungry, thirsty, fatigued, sleep deprived, emotional, distracted, or stressed. All of these conditions can push us toward reacting instead of thinking clearly, and blind us to the deciding moments of our lives.
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.
Refusing to start something because of fear
It’s not enough to know about your biases and other blind spots. You have to take steps to manage them. If you don’t, the defaults will take control.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”[1]
From the start, Abrashoff knew you can’t simply order people to be better. Even if that appears to work, the results are short term and the consequences enormous
You don’t tap into people’s resourcefulness, intelligence, and skills by command-and-control.
“Show me an organization in which employees take ownership, and I will show you one that beats its competitors,”
prevention, creating rules for yourself, making checklists, shifting your frame of reference, and making the invisible visible.
When it comes to your health, just like many other elements of your life, environment determines behavior.
We all know something we could do to improve our odds of success. And we all know something we can stop doing that would also improve our odds of success.
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.
formulate operating procedures for yourself because you know from hard experience when your defaults tend to override your decision-making.
avoiding making important decisions under unfavorable conditions.
Shifting your frame of reference and seeing things from my perspective would give you crucial information and enable you to take steps to avoid a catastrophe.
Shifting your frame of reference and seeing things from my perspective would give you crucial information and enable you to take steps to avoid a catastrophe.
“I’m so busy trying to prove to everyone I’m right that I can’t see the world from their point of view.”
What did I miss?”
One thing that sets exceptional people apart from the crowd is how they handle mistakes and whether they learn from them and do better as a result.
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 as best you can.
When mistakes happen, the emotion default works hard to usurp control over the situation. It will take over if you let it. This is the opposite of taking command, leaving your life’s direction up to an emotional whim. It’s essential to keep your emotions in check. (Cultivating habit of Keeping emotions in check)
Mistakes turn into anchors if you don’t accept them. Part of accepting them is learning from them and then letting them go
Decisions are different from choices. If you casually select an option from a range of alternatives, you’ve made a choice. If you react without thinking, you’ve made an unconscious choice. But neither of these is the same as a decision. A decision is a choice that involves conscious thought.
inertia of past choices carrying us through the present moment without exploring our options.
If you can’t keep those in check—if you’re easily swayed by emotion, if you can’t adapt to change, if you value being right more than doing what’s best—then all the tools in the world aren’t going to help you. The defaults will overwhelm you, rout your decision-making process, and seize control of your life.
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.
way we define a problem shapes everyone’s perspective about it and determines the solutions.
defining the problem is a chance to take in lots of relevant information. Only by talking to the experts, seeking the opinions of others, hearing their different perspectives, and sorting out what’s real from what’s not can the decision-maker understand the real problem
People go fast in operational environments. If you insert too much process into decisions, you miss the expiring windows of opportunity.
You can put your energy into short-term solutions or long-term solutions but not both. Any energy that’s channeled toward short-term solutions depletes energy that could be put into finding a long-term fix.[
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to los
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.
to prepare for the inevitable ups and downs of life. The point isn’t to worry about problems; it’s to fortify and prepare for them.
Don’t just imagine the ideal future outcome. Imagine the things that could go wrong and how you’ll overcome them if they do.
“Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work, not the starting point.”
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.
What could you do to make going to work every day more enjoyable, despite the problem with your coworker? What could you do to remain at your job and still move closer to your goals? What could you do to give yourself more options in the future so you’re not stuck feeling powerless?
We can always do something to move forward, putting ourselves in a better position to get more of what we want and less of what we don’t. If we can’t leave our job, we can at least improve it. If we can’t stay, we can prepare to leave. Reframing the problem shows us the next step.
Rather than grappling with seemingly opposed binary options, combine them. Simplistic Either-Or options become integrative Both-And options.
You can stay at your job and start a side hustle.
“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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
You can both apply for jobs and go to school in the evenings to acquire a new skill. You can both start a creative project and do more at your current job to give you the creative outlet you need.
Whom else can I include in my life to help with everything beyond what my partner does well?
The real world is full of trade-offs, some of which are obvious, and others that are hidden. Opportunity costs are the hidden trade-offs that decision-makers often have trouble assessing.
the real value to thinking through opportunity costs is to understand the indirect hidden costs.
opportunity cost, return on investment (ROI), and likelihood of the desired outcome,
If you find yourself struggling to determine specific criteria, it’s a sign either that you don’t really understand the problem, or that you don’t understand the general features that criteria are supposed to have
There might be a hundred variables, but they are not equally important. When you’re clear on what’s important, evaluating options becomes easier.
When you don’t communicate what’s most important, people are left guessing about what matters. They need you to solve the problem for them. While you feel needed and important, you’re also busy making all the decisions that your colleagues should be making
There is only one most important 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. This is true leadership.
Reading a summary might be faster than reading a full document, but it misses a lot of details—details that weren’t relevant to the person summarizing the information, but that might be relevant to you.
History shows that the greatest thinkers all used information that they collected personally. They earned their knowledge the hard way either in the trenches of experience or through careful study of exemplar
Even one expert’s opinion can be more helpful than the thoughts and guesses of dozens or hundreds of amateurs. But how do you recruit one to work with you?
Helping others achieve their goals is one of the things that make life and work meaningful. To put it in perspective, think of a time in your life when someone asked you for help on something you excel at, and you came through for them.
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
Show that you have skin in the game: When you reach out to an expert, make them aware of the time, energy, and money you’ve already invested in the problem. Let them know you’ve done the work and that you’re stuck
Imitators are less concerned with being great and more concerned with looking great
They understand that their understanding has boundaries, and they’re able to tell you when they’re approaching the limits of their circle of competence.
Keep that in mind when you’re in the market for an expert: the person with real expertise is often not the person who made the subject popular.
Most decisions require an art that balances speed and accuracy. When you move too slowly on small decisions, you waste time and energy, no matter how accurate you may be. When you go too fast, you miss crucial information, make assumptions, overlook the basics, rush to judgment, and often solve the wrong problem. When things are hectic, however—even when speed matters—you need to slow down, just a little.
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.
Diversification is protection against ignorance.
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.
You can’t use the historical worst case as your baseline. Engineers don’t rely just on the historical use of current bridges. You have to really stretch your imagination to explore and anticipate what could potentially go wrong.
If the cost of failure is high, and outcomes are more consequential, you want a large margin of safety. For instance, if you’re worried about losing your job, and you’re in a sector or economy that’s volatile, you’ll want to increase the length of time you can take care of yourself while unemployed.

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