Creating Intentional Environments and Taking Responsibility
- Joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behavior is an effective way to create an intentional environment. If you want to read more, join a book club. If you want to run more, join a running club. If you want to exercise more, hire a trainer.
- The path to being exceptional begins when you decide to be responsible for your actions no matter the situation. Exceptional people know they can’t change the hand they’ve been dealt, and don’t waste time wishing for a better one.
- Failing to accept how the world really works puts your time and energy toward proving how right you are. When the desired results don’t materialize, it’s easy to blame circumstances or others. This is the wrong side of right - you’re focused on your ego not the outcome.
Emotional Management and Self-Control
- Some people are like corks bobbing around in the waves of an emotional sea. Their actions are in thrall to their emotions. Other people decide to take command of their life. They seize the helm, decide where they want to go, and steer the ship in that direction despite the waves.
- Emotional intensity is far less important in the long run than disciplined consistency. Inspiration and excitement might get you going, but persistence and routine are what keep you going until you reach your goals.
Building Confidence and Accepting Reality
- Most dreams die from a lack of confidence, not competence.
- People who are confident aren’t afraid of facing reality because they know they can handle it. Confident people don’t care what other people think about them, aren’t afraid of standing out, and are willing to risk looking like an idiot while they try something new.
- They’ve been beaten down and rebuilt themselves enough times to know that they can do it again if they have to.
- Self-confidence is also the strength to accept hard truths. We all have to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be.
Avoiding Echo Chambers and Following Examples
- 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!
- It’s not enough just to pick exemplars and assemble a personal board of directors. You also have to follow their example—not just once or twice, but again and again.
- Imitating your exemplars involves creating space in the moment to exercise reason and evaluate your thoughts, feelings, and possible courses of action.
- The path to breaking bad habits is making your desired behavior the default behavior.
- In a quirk of psychology, people typically don’t argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules.
Perspective and Learning from Mistakes
- Having an outside perspective on your situation allows you to see more of what’s actually happening. Changing your perspective changes what you see.
- If you got some results you didn’t want, the world is telling you at least one of two things: (a) you were unlucky; (b) your ideas about how things work were wrong.
- Everyone makes mistakes because everyone has limitations. One thing that sets exceptional people apart from the crowd is how they handle mistakes and whether they learn from them.
Self-Talk and Problem Definition
- The most powerful story in the world is the one you tell yourself. That inner voice has the power to move you forward or anchor you to the past. Choose wisely.
- People go fast in operational environments. Probing and asking deeper questions slows down the process just enough to dramatically improve your chances of solving the right problem.
- Writing out the problem makes the invisible visible. If you find yourself using jargon in your description, it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand the problem.
Anticipate Failure and Avoid Binary Thinking
- Binary thinking is when you consider only two options to a problem. The best decision-makers know this is limiting, and see binary thinking as a sign that we don’t fully understand a problem.
- The best decision-makers anticipate and make contingency plans.
“Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure.”
- Inside us all, there is a competition between our today self and our future self. Our future self sees the benefits or consequences of the accumulation of our seemingly insignificant choices.
- Problem-solving novices try to reduce a decision to just two options because it creates the false sense that they’ve gotten to the problem’s essence. Masters see the simplicity hiding in the complexity.
- Binary framing is as comfortable as it is passive. Even if we don’t choose the third option, forcing ourselves to develop it helps us understand the problem better.
- The targeting principle: Know what you’re looking for before you start sorting through the data.
- Most information is irrelevant. Knowing what to ignore—separating the signal from the noise—is the key to not wasting valuable time.
- How many of us value wealth and status more than happiness—the external more than the internal—and give little thought to how we pursue them.
- The ancient Greeks had a word for the wisdom of knowing how to order your life to achieve the best results: phronesis.
Safety Margins and Fail-Safes
- For a margin of safety, if you want to feel financially secure even if you lose your job, save enough to live for double the time it would take to gain employment again.
- Implementing fail-safes will help ensure that your decision is executed according to plan.
- One sign that you’ve failed to empower your team is that you can’t be away from the office for a week without things falling apart.
- The margin of safety is often sufficient when it can absorb double the worst-case scenario.
- Predicting the future is harder than it seems. You need a margin of safety most at the very moment you start to think you don’t.
Experimentation and Option Preservation
- Performing small, low-risk experiments on multiple options keeps your options open before you commit the bulk of your resources.
- Preserving options carries a cost and can make you feel like you’re missing out. This is the social default at work.
Decision Deliberation and Emotional Checking
- Make major decisions and then sleep on them before telling anyone.
- Write a note explaining why you made a decision before going to bed, then read it in the morning to double-check your thinking.
- Living with a decision on your own allows you to check it with your emotions. Does this decision feel good in your bones?
Execution Planning and Empowerment
- There are three kinds of execution fail-safes: setting trip wires, empowering others to make decisions, and tying your hands.
- Set up trip wires to determine in advance what you’ll do when you hit a specific quantifiable time, amount, or circumstance.
- Commander’s intent has four components: formulate, communicate, interpret, and implement.
Process Focus and Overcoming Ego
- The process principle: When you evaluate a decision, focus on the process you used to make the decision and not the outcome.
- Self-serving bias gets in the way of learning from your decisions and improving your process. Our ego default wants us to think that we’re smarter than we are.
Wisdom, Time, and Life Perspective
- All good decisions are effective, but not all effective decisions are good. The worst regret is when we fail to live a life true to ourselves.
- Wisdom requires keeping the defaults in check, creating space for reason and reflection, and using principles and safeguards for effective decisions.
- Time is the ultimate currency of life. You have to use it wisely—in a way that prioritizes what’s most important.
- Evaluating your life through the lens of your death makes what matters most become clear.
Implementation and Gradual Improvement
- Improving your judgment is less about accumulating tools to enhance your rationality and more about implementing safeguards that make the desired path the path of least resistance.
- Managing your defaults requires more than willpower. It requires habits, rules, environment, and safeguards that render the invisible visible.
- The small improvements you make in judgment won’t be felt until they are too large to ignore. Gradually, you’ll notice less time fixing problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place.