Clear Thinking

By Shane Parrish

• Archive - [1]
• St. Joseph Public Library - [2]

Practical Advice

• In the OSE Fellowship, the Apprentices curate Admissible Information Sources List

Notes

• Good judgment can’t be taught, but it can be learned.
• 202 Improving your judgment, it turns out, is less about accumulating tools to enhance your rationality and more about implementing safeguards that make the desired path the path of least resistance
• It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

—SENECA, On the Shortness of Life, Chapter 1

• If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”[3] Whenever the answer was no too many days in a row, he said, he knew he needed to change something.
• Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose.[1]
• 192 “Let us prepare our minds as if we had come to the very end of life,” Seneca said. If you want a better life, start thinking about death.
• If there were a way of viewing things from the perspective of our elders, we might have the insight to live better lives—to see in the way the experts do what really matters and what doesn’t. In fact, there’s an ancient technique for doing precisely this: start thinking about the shortness of life, and it will help you see what really matters.
• Knowing what to want is the most important thing.
• 188 phronesis—the wisdom of knowing how to order your life to achieve the best results.
• Psychologist Slovic study - All of the extra information made them no more accurate but a lot more conf i dent.
• the stop, fl op, 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.
• 156 - nice graph of ASAP vs ALAP
• 154 the alap principle: If the cost to undo a decision is high, make it as late as possible.

Experts v imitators:

• Imitators can’t answer questions at a deeper level. Specif i c knowledge is earned, not learned, so imitators don’t fully understand the ideas they’re talking about.[*] Their knowledge is shallow. As a result, when you ask about details, or fi rst principles or nonstandard cases, they don’t have good answers.

• Imitators can’t adapt their vocabulary. They can explain things using only the vocabulary they were taught, which is often full of jargon. Because they don’t fully understand the ideas behind the vocabulary, they can’t adapt the way they talk about those ideas to express them more clearly to their audience. • Imitators get frustrated when you say you don’t understand. That frustration is a result of being overly concerned with the appearance of expertise—which they might not be able to maintain if they have to really get into the weeds with an explanation. Real experts have earned their expertise and are excited about trying to share what they know. They aren’t frustrated by your lack of understanding; they instead love your genuine curiosity about something they care about. • Experts can tell you all the ways they’ve failed. They know and accept that some form of failure is often part of the learning process. Imitators, however, are less likely to own up to mistakes because they’re afraid it will tarnish the image they’re trying to project. • Imitators don’t know the limits of their expertise. Experts know what they know, and also know what they don’t know. They understand that their understanding has boundaries, and they’re able to tell you when they’re approaching the limits of their circle of competence. Imitators can’t. They can’t tell when they’re crossing the boundary into things they don’t understand

• Keep that in mind when you’re in the market for an expert: the person with real expertise is often not the person who made the subject popular
• 147 So let’s talk about how to approach an expert in a way that will set your request apart and get people excited to help you. Here are f i ve tips:
• 144 the hiex principle: Get high-expertise (HiEx) information, which comes both from people with a lot of knowledge and/or experience in a specif i c area, and from people with knowledge and experience in many areas
• safeguard: When you get information from other people, ask questions that yield detailed answers. Don’t ask people what they think; instead, ask them how they think.
• the hif i principle: Get high-f i delity (HiFi) information—information that’s close to the source and unf i ltered by other people’s biases and interests.
• Einstein -“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
• the 3-lens principle: View opportunity costs through these three lenses:

(1) Compared with what? (2) And then what? (3) At the expense of what?

• Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, refers to this technique as integrative thinking.[5] Rather than grappling with seemingly opposed binary options, combine them. Simplistic Either-Or options become integrative Both-And options. You can keep costs down and invest in a better customer experience.
• the 3+ principle: Force yourself to explore at least three possible solutions to a problem. If you fi nd yourself considering only two options, force yourself to fi nd at least one more.
• the second-level thinking principle: Ask yourself, “And then what?”
• 114 the 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.

• 77 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.
• Man can do what he wills, but not will what he wills - here's my thought on it - [3]
• You don’t need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you can out-position them.
• If there is a tagline to my life, it is “Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out,”
• the question of what your goals are in the first place - start with that for OSE, not last
• In order to get the results we desire, we must do two things. We must first create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and second, we must deliberately use that space to think clearly.
• While the rest of us are chasing victory, the best in the world know they must avoid losing before they can win. It turns out this is a surprisingly effective strategy.