Which brings us to one of my core management beliefs: If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.

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.

1.4. The Social Default

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 result that everyone else gets. 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. If you want better-than-average results, though, you’ll have to think clearly and thinking clearly is thinking independently. Sometimes you have to break free of the social default and do something differently from those around you. Fair warning: it’s going to get uncomfortable.

Facing reality is hard. It’s much easier to blame things we have no control over than look for our own contributions.

Too often we fight against the feedback the world gives us, to protect our beliefs. Rather than changing ourselves, we want the world to change. And if we don’t have the power to change it, we do the only thing we feel we can do: complain.

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.

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.