Introduction: The Power of Clear Thinking in Ordinary Moments

What happens in ordinary moments determines your future.

We’re taught to focus on the big decisions, rather than the moments where we don’t even realize we’re making a choice. Yet these ordinary moments often matter more to our success than the big decisions. This can be difficult to appreciate.

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.

Not every bad decision is rushed, nor is every good one made slowly. It’s not that simple.

People mistake choosing for decisiveness and the decision-making process for waffling. Part of what makes slowing down and reasoning through a problem difficult is that, to the outside observer, it might look like inaction. But that inaction is a choice.

When the stakes are high, and there are no take-backs, you want to decide at the last moment possible, and keep as many options on the table as you can while continuing to gather information.

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.