Clear Thinking- Shane Parrish

Preface

That night I started asking myself questions that I’d continue exploring for the next decade. How can we get better at reasoning? Why do people make bad decisions? Why do some people consistently get better results than others who have the same information? How can I be right more often, and decrease the probability of a bad outcome when lives are on the line?

Even when we get the big decisions directionally right, we’re not guaranteed to get the results we want.

We don’t think of ordinary moments as decisions. No one taps us on the shoulder as we react to a comment by a coworker to tell us that we’re about to pour gasoline or water onto this flame.

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.

It doesn’t 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.

Knowing how to use these tools depends on keeping your defaults in check so you can reason. If you can’t, you’ll just react with one of your defaults. While you might get the outcomes you desire for a while, it's only a matter of time before lack of thinking catches up to you. It’s only after you’ve mastered the defaults that the tools I describe become useful.

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-making process, and seize control of your life.

Many of us have a hard time learning from our decisions. One reason is that our thinking and decision-making process is often invisible to us. We inadvertently conceal from ourselves the steps we took to reach our final decision. Once that decision gets made, we don’t stop to reflect, but just move forward. And when we look back at our decision later, our ego manipulates our memories. We confuse what we know now with what we knew at the time we made the decision. And we see the outcomes and read them back into our intentions: “Oh, I meant to do that.”

If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision— what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it— you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky. If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. The following safeguard can help:

Safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision.