This blog post is a quick summary of the book “Clear Thinking” written by Shane Parrish

Context

Did an impulse purchase of this book a few weeks ago. Post a 2.5 week hectic sprint on a POC, took a day off and went for a massive long walk and clocked 17 km. One of the things that I picked up in the last few years and read-walking. I have managed to read this book almost cover to cover, while happily walking. The book was a welcome break from all the POC related thoughts that were occupying my mind. I liked the book as it 1) reinforced some of the things that I had come across in other books 2) created a few mental models to help one think effectively

The central premise of the book is that we become effective thinkers and effective decision makers based on the position we strive to put ourselves in. If one is operating from a position of strength, one is never forces in to taking a bad decision. One can evaluate the options and take a decision accordingly. Think Tetris. When you play well and you have managed to position oneself strongly, it does not matter what piece comes up - one can always make sure that the game continues.

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 mastered by them.

Defaults

The first part of the book talks about the four defaults arising out of our biological makeup; these often give rise to ineffective decisions

  • Emotional Default: We tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts
    • Think of Sonny Corleone in the movie, God Father
  • Ego Default: We tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy
    • Think of Fredo Corleone in the movie, God Father
    • Are you trying to feel right or be right ?
    • If you drop your ego, you can accomplish a lot many things
  • Social Default: We tend to confirm to the norms of our larger social group
    • Best practices aren’t best. They are just an average
    • Lemmings rarely create history
  • Inertia Default: We are habit forming and comfort seeking. We tend to resit change, and to prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.
    • Are you doubling down on losses?
    • Are you updating opinions based on changed facts?

The only way to outperform if you’re doing undifferentiated work is to work harder than everyone else. Imagine a team of ditch-diggers working with their hands. A slight variation in the amount of soil moved per hour is barely perceptible. Your work is indistinguishable from that of the person next to you. The only way to move more dirt is to dig for longer. Within this paradigm, the ditch-digger who takes a week off to experiment and invent the shovel seems crazy. Not only do they look like a fool for taking a risk, but their cumulative production falls behind for every day they are not digging. Only when the shovel comes along do others see its advantage. Success requires shamelessness. So too does failure. Doing something different means you might under-perform, 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.

Building Strengths

We cannot rely on will power to overcome the default behavior. Often it fails and we unnecessarily blame ourselves. The best way to resist defaults is to build strengths in following four areas

  • Self-accountability: holding yourself accountable for developing your abilities, managing your inabilities, and using reason to govern your actions
    • Watch your behavior or tendency to act out as a victim, when situations don’t go your way
    • Focus on whether your action contributes to the next step
  • 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
    • Inspiration and excitement are good to start but you need persistence and routine to reach the goal
  • Self-confidence: trusting in your abilities and your value to others

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.

Building the above strengths would need to raise your standards with which you look at your work. Whatever be the task, are you churning out the best that you can ? Let’s say the ask is to build a quick prototype to showcase something. The following are some of the questions that I would consider so that the task of building a prototype becomes a great learning experience as well as creates high quality demo:

  • Can I build it with a programming language that I have never used ? Idea being it will help you get skills in an another language ?
  • If I am using R, what new libraries can I use ?
  • Can I use modules so that I can create reusable components for the app?
  • Can I think of a better way of structuring the app ?
  • Can I come up with better paper sketches before creating the app ?
  • What components can I reuse from my previous apps?
  • Is there a way I can create a few chart types that I have never created in any app ?
  • What would be the optimal layout of the app, given a diverse audience for the app ?
  • How can I host the app efficiently ? Should I look at a few cloud providers and evaluate specific tools ?
  • Can I refactor the code so that it is more readable to me in the future ?
  • Can I built the same app in 1 hour, 4 hours and 8 hours ? Each time bound task will give me a different type of skillset

Another way to raise your standards is to recruit a personal board of directors. This recruitment is of course virtual. You can imagine that some of the best people in the world that you emulate, are sitting a board of directors for your life.

The exemplars on your personal board can be a mix of high accomplishment and high character. The only requirement is that they have a skill, attitude, or disposition you want to cultivate in yourself. They don’t have to be perfect. All people have flaws, and your personal board will be no different. But everyone is better than us at something. Our job is to figure out what that something is and learn from it while ignoring the rest.

Choosing the right exemplars helps create a repository of “good behavior.” As you read what people have written, as you talk to them, as you learn from their experiences, as you learn from your own experiences, you begin to build a database of situations and responses. Building this database is one of the most important things you’ll ever do because it helps create space for reason in your life. Instead of reacting, and simply copying those around you, you think, “Here’s what the outliers do.”

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.

Your board can pull you in the right direction despite your instincts.

Managing Weaknesses

We have inbuilt weaknesses such as hunger, thirst, fatigue, sleep deprivation, emotion, distraction, stress, limitations in perspective and cognitive biases. We also have acquired weaknesses such as acting on emotional impulse, doing less than you are capable of, refusing to start something because of fear, seeing only your own point of view and coasting on your talent without hard work.

The author offers the following safeguards to work with our weaknesses

  • Prevention
  • Automatic rules for success
  • Creating friction
  • Putting in Guardrails
  • Shifting your perspective

Decision making

The author takes a pretty commonsense approach and talks about the following way of thinking about decisions

I was skeptical about reading this section. Wasn’t sure whether there would be anything worthwhile learning. To my surprise I could relate to some of the behaviors mentioned in “Defining the Problem” chapter. We often do not spend time in defining a problem correctly and most of us jump to offering solutions and then subsequently start working on a solution. We want to “DO” something about it. Fair enough as the world around seems to pay us for doing something. In my recent project experience, there were 5 teams that were supposed to collaborate and get work done. In one specific instance we spent about an hour debating on the solutions to an ill-defined problem. In the end nothing came out it and I had to crunch out a solution based on redefining the problem that then took me 4 hours to get it done. This last minute work did cost me some heart ache. Could have been easily avoided if we had thought about the problem a bit more. The suggestion that we should have a firewall between problem definition and problem solving phase was super relatable.

Out of the remaining chapters in this section, the following are some of the points that resonated with me

  • Stop, flow, know principle - Stop gathering more information and execute your decision when either you Stop gathering useful information, you First Lose an Opportunity(FLOP), or you come to Know something that makes it evident what option you should choose
  • More Reversible decisions - ASAP, Less Reversible decisions - ALAP(As Late as Possible)
  • 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.
  • Premortem
  • Don’t equate quality of your decision with the outcome of the decision
  • Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision. Don’t rely on your memory after the fact. Trying to recall what you knew and thought at the time you made the decision is a fool’s game

Wanting What Matters

One can develop all aspects of decision making to get to something, but ultimately what matters is knowing what’s worth wanting.

The author make a distinction between effective decisions and good decisions.

Decisions that bring immediate results, like closing a sale or filling a vacancy, may be effective, but they don’t necessarily lead to the things that truly matter in life, like trust, love, and health. Good decisions, on the other hand, align with your long-term goals and values, and ultimately bring you the satisfaction and fulfillment that you truly desire in business, relationships, and life. Effective decisions get you the first outcome, while good ones get you the ultimate outcome. All good decisions are effective, but not all effective decisions are good.

Some of the key questions to reflect on a daily basis so that we get to pursue something that’s worth wanting are

  • Are you living according to someone else’s scorecard ?
  • The quality of what you pursue determines the quality of your life. What elements of the thing that you pursue makes you happy ?
  • Running on the hedonic treadmill only turns us into “happy-when” people—those who think they’ll be happy when something happens. Are you one of them ?
  • Try to work towards having the wisdom of knowing how to order your life to achieve the best results. The ancient Greeks had a word for this ingredient, phronesis
  • Happiness is a choice-not a condition. So, are you choosing on a regular basis ?

What we think of as defining moments, like promotions or a new house, matter less to life satisfaction than the accumulation of tiny moments that didn’t seem to matter at the time. In the end, everyday moments matter more than big prizes. Tiny delights over big bright lights.

Takeaway

The book is a reminder of the way we decide and what we can do it to be make it effective. We are all deciding some thing or the other every moment, every day, every month, every year. But how do we know whether our decision quality is good ? This book gives some great pointers in helping us evaluate our decision quality. Well worth my time going over the book.