📚 Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish
🎯 Read This Book If
You want to understand how you can get what you want out of life by making better decisions.
🔑 Key Points
Defaults are invisible instincts that conspire against good judgement and cause us to react without reasoning, to live unconsciously rather than deliberately.
The key to getting what you want out of life is to identify how the world works, rather than how you want it to work, and align yourself with it.
Improving judgement is more about implementing rules and safeguards to help make our desired behaviour our new default behaviour.
🤔 Main Ideas
In order to get the results we desire, we must do two things: we must create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and we must deliberately use that space to think clearly.
We'll uncover the missing link between behavioural science and real-world results and turn ordinary moments into extraordinary results. If there is a tagline to my life, it is "Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out," and this book is a tribute to that belief.
Introduction: The Power of Clear Thinking in Ordinary Moments
What happens in ordinary moments determines your future. Ordinary moments often matter to our success more than the big decisions. Even when we get the big decisions directionally right, we're not guaranteed to get the results we want.
In most ordinary moments the situation thinks for us. Each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future. While these moments don't seem to matter much at the time, they compound into our current position. Our position determines our future.
The best in the world make consistently good decisions because they rarely find themselves forced into a decision. Anyone looks like a genius when they're in a good position, and even the smartest person looks like an idiot when they're in a bad one. The greatest aid to judgement is starting from a good position.
Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned. When you are well positioned, there are many paths to victory. If you are poorly positioned, there may be only one.
Clear thinking is the key to proper positioning, it allows you to master your circumstances rather than be mastered by them. Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. It all depends on whether you're thinking clearly.
Part 1. The Enemies of Clear Thinking
1.1 Thinking Badly–or Not Thinking At All?
Rationality is wasted if you don't know when to use it. People are often unaware circumstances are thinking for them. In the space between stimulus and response, we can either: consciously pause and apply reason to the situation, or cede control and execute a default behaviour. We don't realize our emotions are making us react in ways that create problems downstream.
Our first step in improving our outcomes is to train ourselves to identify the moments when judgement is called for in the first place, and pause to create space to think clearly. Mastery over the ordinary moments that make the future easier or harder is the critical ingredient to success and achieving your long-term goals.
There is a huge advantage in having more of your energy go toward achieving your goals instead of fixing your problems. Reacting without reasoning makes every situation worse. You have little hope of thinking clear if you can't manage your defaults.
If you're having trouble understanding why you sometimes react to situations in the worst possible way, the problem isn't your mind. Our biological tendencies are hardwired within us, and they served our prehistoric ancestors well, but tend to get in our way today.
Our biological instincts provide an automatic response without conscious processing. Evolution favoured stimulus-response shortcuts. Today, basic survival is no longer in question. The tendencies that once served us now often act as an anchor holding us in place, making things harder than they need to be.
While there are many such instincts, four stand out as the most prominent, distinctive, and dangerous: the emotional default, the ego default, the social default, and the inertia default.
People who master their defaults get the best real-world results. With the ability to think clearly in ordinary moments today, they consistently put themselves in a good position for tomorrow.
1.2 The Emotion Default
When we respond without reasoning, we're more likely to make mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight. When we respond emotionally, we often don't even realize that we're in a position that calls for thinking at all. When you are possessed by the moment, all the reasoning tools in the world won't help you.
In these moments, the action you're pushed toward rarely serves you. Emotions can multiply all of your progress by zero. It can all be undone in an instant. Emotions can make even the best of us into idiots, driving us away from clear thinking.
1.3 The Ego Default
Prompts us to promote and protect our self-image at all costs, and turns unearned knowledge into reckless confidence. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Our ego tempts us into thinking we're more than we are. It can turn confidence into overconfidence or even arrogance. We take risks that we may not understand.
Unlearned knowledge rushes us to judgement. We feel immune to bad luck. Confidence doesn't make bad outcomes any less likely or good outcomes more likely, it only blinds us to risk.
The ego grabs your unconscious, throws your long-term goals out the window, and sets you sailing toward destruction. It urges us to feel right at the expense of being right.
We mistake how we want the world to be with how it actually is. We channel inordinate amounts of energy to prove that we're right. We're less concerned with outcomes and more concerned with protecting our egos.
1.4 The Social Default
Inspires conformity, it coaxes us to fall in line with an idea or behaviour simply because other people do. Though the world we live in today is very different from the one we evolved from, we still look to others for how to behave. The social default encourages us to outsource our thoughts, beliefs, and outcomes to others.
Fear holds us back from taking risks and reaching our potential. While there is sometimes embedded wisdom in the crowd, mistaking the comfort of the collective for evidence that what you're doing is going to lead to better results is the social default's big lie. Success requires shamelessness. So too does failure.
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 results. Best practices aren't always the best. By definition, they're average.
Our desire to fit in often overpowers our desire for a better outcome. To be successful, it's not enough to do something different; you also need to be right. To do something different, you need to think different. Change happens only when you're willing to think independently, when you do what nobody else is doing, and risk looking like a fool because of it.
1.5 The Inertia Default
Pushes us to maintain the status quo. Starting something is hard but so is stopping something. Objects never change if they're left alone. They don't start moving on their own, nor do they stop moving till something stops them.
We resist change because keeping things the same requires little effort. The inertia default leverages our desire to stay in our comfort zone, relying on old standards even when they're no longer optimal. We also tend to resist change because doing something different might lead to worse results. There is an asymmetry to change – we take negative results to heart more than positive ones.
We like to think we're open-minded and willing to change our beliefs when the facts change, but history has shown otherwise. The automobile, airplane, radio, television and internet all faced initial skepticism. The zone of average, is the point where things are working well enough that we don't feel the need to make any changes.
Inertia also prevents us from doing hard things. The longer we avoid something we know we should do, the harder it becomes to do. Avoiding conflict is comfortable and easy. The weight of what we avoid eventually affects our relationship.
Inertia makes deviating from group norms difficult. Group dynamics end up favouring people who don't deviate. The influence of inertia isn't just troubling in our work and relationships, it can also be bad for our health. Inertia keeps us doing things that don't get us what we want. It operates in our subconscious until its effects are too hard to counter.
1.6 Default to Clarity
If we want to improve our behaviour, accomplish our goals, and experience greater joy in our lives, we need to learn to manage our defaults.
Think of your default patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting as algorithms you've been programmed to run in response to inputs from other people or environments. They've been programmed into you by evolution, culture, ritual, your parents, and your community. Some of them help move you closer to what you want; others move you further away.
People with the best defaults are typically the ones with the best environments. It's easier to align yourself with the right behaviour when everyone else is already doing it. Improve your defaults not by willpower but by creating an intentional environment where your desired behaviour becomes the default behaviour.
Your chosen environment, rather than your willpower alone, will help nudge you toward the best choices. Reprogramming yourself is a long and involved process.
Part 2. Building Strength
2.1 Self-Accountability
Take responsibility for your abilities, inabilities, and actions. Your honest judgements about yourself are more important than anyone else's. When you screw up, you should be strong enough to look in the mirror and say, "This was my fault. I need to do better."
You're in charge of your own life – and a larger part of your outcomes than you may think. People who lack self-accountability tend to run on autopilot, the opposite of commanding your own life. They try to blame other people, circumstances, or bad luck – nothing's ever their fault.
It's all your fault. There is always something you can do today to better your position tomorrow. There is always an action you can control, however tiny, that helps you achieve progress.
The energy we put into defending ourselves comes at the expense of moving on and doing what needs to be done. No one cares about your excuses, except you. A self-serving bias is a habit of evaluating things in ways that protects our self-image.
Just because something happened that was outside of your control doesn't mean it's not your responsibility to deal with it the best you can. Complaining does not change the present situation you find yourself in. Focus on the next move, the one that gets you closer to where you want to be. Your responsibility is to play the hand as best you can. The path to being exceptional begins when you decide to be responsible for your actions no matter the situation.
A common mistake people make is bargaining with how the world should work instead of accepting how it does work. Failing to accept this puts your time and energy toward proving how right you are. Solutions appear when you stop bargaining and start accepting the reality of the situation. When you put outcome over ego, you get better results.
Rather than changing ourselves, we want the world to change. 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, and the moment you stop complaining is the moment you start finding it.
Telling yourself a negative story often guarantees a bad one. Repeated choices become habits, those habits determine our paths, and those paths determine our outcomes. The things you choose not to do often matter as much as the things you choose to do. The real test of a person is the degree to which they are willing to nonconformist to do the right thing.
Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don't control everything, you do control how you respond. It means realizing that the way you respond to hardship matters more to your happiness than the hardship itself.
2.2 Self-Knowledge
Know your own strengths and weaknesses. Know that you have cognitive blind spots – that there are things you don't know, and you don't know you don't know them, "unknown unknowns".
Understanding what you do and don't know is the key to playing games you can win. The size of what you know isn't nearly as important as having a sense of your knowledge's boundaries.
It's not enough to know where you have an edge; you also have to know when you are operating outside of it. If you don't know your vulnerabilities, your defaults will exploit them to gain control of your circumstances.
2.3 Self-Control
The ability to master your fears, desires, and emotions. We evolved to respond quickly to immediate environmental threats and opportunities. We can't eliminate these physiological reactions or what triggers them. We can only manage how we respond to them.
Those who take command of their lives experience ups and downs like everybody else; they just don't allow them to determine the direction of their life. Create space for reason instead of blindly following instincts. You can react when they prompt you, or think clearly and consider whether they're worth following.
Self-control empowers you to keep emotion in check. Emotional intensity is less important in the long run than disciplined consistency. Successful people have the self-control to keep going. It's not always exciting, but they still show up.
2.4 Self-Confidence
Trust in your abilities and your value to others. Understand that not all results are immediate, and focus on what it takes to earn them eventually. Self-confidence empowers resilience in the aftermath of negative feedback, and adaptability in the face of change. A healthy sense of self-confidence will see you through whatever challenges come your way.
Self-confidence gives you the strength to acknowledge the deficiencies you may have. Confident people stay focused on completing the task at hand, even if it involves relying on the help of others.
More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence. That little voice in your head may whisper its doubts, but it should also remind you of the hardships and challenges you've overcome in the past and the fact that you preserved. While you might not have done this particular thing before, you can figure it out.
We know that words we say to other people impact how they feel, but we rarely think of how the words we say impact us. People who are confident aren't afraid of facing reality because they know they can handle it. 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. The quicker you stop denying inconvenient truths and start responding to difficult realities, the better. Needing to wait for the right moment to do a hard thing is just an excuse, there is no perfect moment. Reality isn't a popularity contest.
When you can't see a problem from multiple views, you have blind spots, which can lead to trouble. Admitting you're wrong isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. Acknowledge the things we cannot control and focus our efforts to manage what we can. Facing reality demands acknowledging our mistakes and failures, learning from them, and moving forward.
Self-confidence is the strength to focus on what's right instead of who's right. Self-confidence is what it takes to be on the right side of right. Outcome over ego.
2.5 Strength in Action
Self-accountability, self-knowledge, self-control, and self-confidence are essential to exercising good judgement. Never say yes to something important without thinking it over for a day. Automatic rules for common situations get results.
All four of these strengths are necessary for resisting the influence of the social default. Once you have them all working together, you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish.
2.6 Setting the Standards
Build your strengths by raising the standards to which you hold yourself. Our surroundings influence us. Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people. We unconsciously become what we're near. The changes are too gradual to notice until they're too large to address.
Standards become habits, and habits become outcomes. Successful people have the highest standards, not only for others but for themselves. High standards are consistent across top performers.
Master-level work requires near fanatical standards, so masters show us what our standards should be. We'll never be exceptional at anything unless we raise our standards, both of ourselves and of what's possible. If you do what everyone else does, you can expect the same results that everyone else gets. If you want different results, you need to raise the bar.
2.7 Exemplars + Practice
There are two components to building strength by raising the bar: choose the right exemplars, and practice imitating them in certain ways
If you don't curate the people in your life, the people who end up surrounding you will be there by chance and not by choice. Controlling your environment means intentionally adding exemplars into the mix. Show me your role models and I'll show you your future. When you choose the right exemplars–you can transcend the standards you've inherited.
Their example helps us navigate the world, becoming our North Star. They've done the heavy lifting. They've already paid for the lessons, so you don't have to. Find the best examples of people whose default behaviour is your desired behaviour, those who inspire you to raise the bar and make you a better version of yourself.
The only person you're competing with is who you were yesterday. Victory is being a little better today. Build a database of situations and responses. It helps create space for reason in your life. Instead of reacting, and simply copying those around you, think, "Here's what the outliers do."
Your baseline response moves from good to great. Everything you do has the power to change someone's life for the better. Imitating your exemplars involves creating space in the moment to exercise reason and evaluate your thoughts, feelings, and courses of action. Practice until it becomes second nature.
Part 3. Managing Weakness
3.1 Knowing Your Weaknesses
We all have weaknesses, many of which stem from our biology. Some of our weaknesses are instead acquired through habit, and stay with us through inertia. Bad habits are easy to acquire when there is a delay between action and consequence.
The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated. While good choices repeated make time your friend, bad ones make it your enemy. The defaults will handily take command of our lives if we don't manage them. Two ways to manage your weaknesses: build your strengths, and implement safeguards.
Some of our weaknesses are the limitations on what we can know, our blind spots. Many of our biases work us toward behaviours that promoted survival and reproduction. Our biggest blind spot tends to be knowing our own weaknesses. We fail to see our weaknesses for three main reasons: those flaws can be hard for us to detect, seeing our flaws bruises our egos, and we have a limited perspective
Perspective and human nature make it hard to see our own flaws, and yet see the flaws in others. When we get feedback about our own weaknesses, it's a rare opportunity for getting better and getting closer to the kind of people we really want to be.
A gap in our thinking that comes from believing that the way we see the world is the way it really works. It's only when we look at the situation through the eyes of other people that we realize what we're missing.
3.2 Protecting Yourself with Safeguards
Safeguards are tools for protecting ourselves from weaknesses that we don't have the strength to overcome. Increasing the amount of "friction" required to do something that's contrary to your long-term goals.
Prevention: aims at preventing problems before they happen. Avoid decision-making in unfavourable conditions. Wait for a more opportune time.
Automatic Rules for Success: create new behaviours that help you get what you want, by replacing decisions with rules. Rules help us automate our behaviour to accomplish our goals.
Create Friction: if there were a recipe for accumulated disaster, it would be giving the best of ourselves to the least important things and the worst of ourselves to the most important things.
Putting in Guardrails: formulate operating procedures for yourself because you know from experience when your defaults tend to override your decision-making.
Shifting Your Perspective: having an outside perspective on your situation allows you to see more of what's actually happening.
3.3 How to Handle Mistakes
Mistakes are an unavoidable part of life. Part of taking command of our lives is managing those mistakes before they do happen.
When things don't work out, we default to blaming the world rather than ourselves. When we succeed, we tend to attribute it to our own ability or effort. When we fail, we tend to attribute it to external factors. Many people don't want to hear that they're wrong. To see whether your thinking is wrong, you need to make it visible. People tend to ignore what the world is trying to tell them.
Everyone makes mistakes because everyone has limitations. Something that sets exceptional people apart is how they handle mistakes and whether they learn from them and do better as a result. Mistakes present a choice: whether to update your ideas, or ignore the failures they've produced.
The biggest mistake typically isn't the initial mistake. It's the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it. The first mistake is expensive; the second one costs a fortune. There's are three problems with covering up mistakes: you can't learn if you ignore your mistakes, hiding mistakes become a habit, and the cover-up makes a bad situation worse
The four steps to handling mistakes more effectively are:
Accept responsibility
Learn from the mistake
Commit to doing better
Repair the damage as best you can
We can't change the past, but we can work to undo the effects it can have on the future. The most powerful story is the one you tell yourself. That inner voice has the power to move you forward or anchor you to the past.
Part 4. Decisions: Clear Thinking in Action
4.1 Define the Problem
The decider needs to define the problem. Defining the problem starts with identifying two things: what you want to achieve, and what obstacles stand in the way of getting it. We've been taught to solve problems, but when it comes to defining problems, we have less experience. We seldom have all the information. The result: we waste time solving the wrong problems.
The way we define a problem shapes everyone's perspective about it and determines the solutions. The most critical step is to get the problem right. When you understand a problem, the solution seems obvious. Two principles to follow: the definition principle, and the root cause principle.
When identifying a root cause of a problem, ask yourself, "What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?" The way you define a problem changes what you see. There are two ways to safeguard this stage of the decision process against our defaults: create a firewall, and use time to your advantage.
Energy that's channeled toward short-term solutions depletes energy that could be put towards a long-term fix. When the same problem returns, people end up exhausted and discouraged because they never seem to make real progress. Extinguish the fire today so it can't burn you tomorrow.
4.2 Explore Possible Solutions
Imagining different possible futures – different ways the world could turn out. We all face difficult problems. Only by dealing with reality can we secure the outcomes we want. The worst thing we can do with a difficult problem is hoping it will disappear or a solution will just present itself. We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, just as our present was shaped by choices we made in the past.
The hardest setbacks to deal with are the ones we're not prepared for and don't expect. Many people think they're bad problem solvers when in fact they're bad problem anticipators. Bad things happen, no one is immune. People who think about what's likely to go wrong and determine the actions they can take are more likely to succeed when things don't go according to plan.
Inside us all, there is a competition between our today self and our future self. Each of these personalities offers a different perspective on problems. You can't solve a problem optimally unless you consider not just whether it meets your short-term objectives but whether it also meets your long-term objectives.
Binary thinking is when you consider only two options, this type of thinking is limiting. We can always move forward, putting ourselves in a better position to get more of what we want. Limiting ourselves to binary thinking before fully understanding a problem is a dangerous simplification that creates blind spots.
Thinking better isn't about filling your brain with answers to questions you've seen before. It's about looking beyond the things that are obvious and seeing the things that are hidden from view.
Many people focus solely on what they stand to gain and forget to factor in what they stand to loser. Thinking through opportunity costs is one of the most effective things you can do. There are two principles concerning opportunity costs: the opportunity cost principle, and the 3-lens principle.
4.3 Evaluate the Options
You need to evaluate and pick the option most likely to make the future easier. Two components here: your criteria for evaluating the options, and how you apply them. When you understand the problem, the criteria should be apparent.
If you're struggling to determine specific criteria, you either don't really understand the problem, or the general features that criteria are supposed to have. Those features include: clarity, goal promotion, and decisiveness. Not all criteria are equal. When you're clear on what's important, evaluating options becomes easier. Be clear about what values are used when making decisions.
When you start comparing things and thinking how much you'll pay for them – whether in time, money, collective brain power – you gain clarity about what matters most to you. When you don't know what's important, you miss what's relevant and spend time on what's irrelevant. Most information is irrelevant. People who can quickly distinguish what matters from what doesn't gain a huge advantage.
The quality of your decisions are directly related to the quality of your thoughts, which are directly related to the quality of your information. Information is food for the mind. What you put in today shapes your solutions for tomorrow. Higher quality inputs lead to higher quality outputs.
Real knowledge is earned. You can't make good decisions with bad information. The person closest to the problem often has the most accurate information. Other people's abstractions are often limited in their usefulness. Any information from a secondhand source has likely been filtered through their interests. Whenever possible, learn something, see something, or do something yourself.
Consider how each person stands to benefit from the information they give you, and weave those perspectives together. Keep an open mind, withhold judgement for as long as possible. Your job is to see the world through other people's eyes. Our goal is not just to gather information, but to gather information relevant to our decision. The questions you ask help to determine the quality of the information you get.
Experts can increase the accuracy of your information and decrease the time it takes to get it. One expert's opinion can be more helpful than the thoughts of hundreds of amateurs. The goal isn't to have someone tell you what to do, it's to learn how an expert thinks about the problem, which variables they consider relevant, and how those variables interact over time.
Many of us learn about a subject not by reading original research or listening to the expert for hours, but by reading something intended to be highly transmissible. The person with the real expertise is often not the person who made the subject popular.
4.4 Do it!
If you want results, you need action. One reason we fail to take action is that we're scared to deal with the consequences. Our ego conspires with the social default and the inertia fault to weaken our resolve and keep us from doing what we need to do. Another reason is that we're afraid of being wrong.
The more a decision affects what matters to you, the more consequential it is. The harder or more costly it is to undo a decision's effects, the less reversible it is. We can represent different kinds of decisions in term of their degree of consequence and reversibility.
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. Defaults can transform caution into an excuse not to act if you don't resist them.
Confidence increases faster than accuracy. If you're facing a highly consequential and irreversible decision, and you're waiting as long as possible to make up your mind, the time to decide is when you start losing opportunities.
4.5 Martin of Safety
If it remains unclear which path is best, the next best step is to eliminate paths that lead to outcomes you don't want. Avoiding the worst outcomes keeps you moving forward. It's easier to plan for things that could go wrong in advance when you're calm and open-minded than it is to respond when things are going wrong.
A margin of safety is a buffer between what you expect to happen and what could happen. It might seem like a waste in years when nothing happens, but it shows its real value in years when something does.
Even when you do know what you're doing and you make the best decision at the time, things can change. We know that there are events that we're guaranteed to experience and that we can prepare for them, even if we don't know when it'll be. The worst outcomes in history have always surprised people at the time. Things are great until they're not. You need a margin of safety most at the very moment you start to think you don't.
Performing small, low-risk experiments on multiple options keeps your options open before you commit. Successful people all looked short-term stupid on a number of occasions, when they were keeping their options open and waiting for the right time to act.
There are three kind of execution fail-safes you should know: setting trip wires, empowering others to make decisions, and tying your hands. By thinking through your options, and recommitting to courses of action, you free up space to tackle other problems.
4.6 Learn from Your Decisions
The quality of your decisions determines how far you go and how fast you get there. Great decision-makers have mastered the ability to learn from their mistakes and from their successes.
When you evaluate a decision, focus on the process and not the outcome. The quality of a single decision isn't determined by the quality of the outcome. Evaluating decisions based on the outcome fails to distinguish luck from skill and control.
Making a good decision is about the process, not the outcome. A bad process can never produce a good decision. Getting the right result for the wrong reasons isn't a function of smarts or skills, but just blind luck. Luck won't give you an edge. Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision.
Part 5. Wanting What Matters
5.1 Dickens's Hidden Lesson
A life lived according to someone else's scoreboard is not a life worth living. The key to a successful life is good company and meaningful relationships. The quality of what you pursue determines the quality of your life.
We tell ourselves that the next level is enough, but it never is. "Happy-when" people are those who think they'll be happy when something happens. Happiness, however, isn't conditional. Happy-when people are never actually happy.
While we're busy running on the treadmill chasing after things that won't make us happy, we're not pursuing the things that really matter. We end up chasing praise and recognition from people who don't matter at the expense of people who do.
What seemed like the most important thing in the world at the time, seems silly in hindsight. Wisdom requires knowing which things are worth wanting, which things really matter. Knowing what to want is the most important thing.
5.2 The Happiness Experts
Life is short. Time is the ultimate currency of life. Happiness is a choice – not a condition. All the decisions that make up your career and personal life ultimately add up to an overall decision to be happy.
You can decide what to pursue in life, what's a priority to you, to channel your time, energy, and other resources toward things that really matter in the end. Start thinking about the shortness of life, and it will help you see what really matters.
5.3 Memento Mori
Shifting our perspective to the end of life can help us gain insight into what really matters. It can help us become wiser. We regret the things we didn't do more than the things we did.
Looking at life this way reveals that our current direction isn't fully aligned with where we want to end up. When you get clear on what really matters, you can start asking yourself, "Am I making the right use of my limited time?", or, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"
What we think of as defining moments, promotions or a new house, matter less to life satisfaction than the accumulation of tiny moments that didn't seem to matter at the time. In the end, everyday moments matter more than big prizes. Tiny delights over big bright lights.
5.4 Life Lessons from Death
Evaluating your life through the lens of your death is raw, powerful, and a bit scary. What matters becomes clear. We see where we are and where we want to go. Without that clarity, we lack wisdom and waste the present on things that don't matter.
When you know the destination, how to get there becomes clearer. When you imagine your older self and what you want your life to look like, you stop thinking about the small things that encourage you to be reactive instead of proactive. Wisdom is turning your future hindsight into your current foresight. What seems to matter in the moment rarely matters in life, yet what matters in life always matters in the moment.
Good judgement is about being effective at achieving what matters – not what matters in the moment, but what matters in life. Wise people know what real wealth consists of, and they devote themselves to securing it – no matter what the crowd might think or say.
Wise people see life in all its breadth: work, health, family, friends, faith, and community. They know how to harmonize life's various parts and pursue each. They know that achieving harmony is what makes life meaningful, admirable, and beautiful.
Conclusion – The Value of Clear Thinking
Good judgement is expensive, but poor judgement will cost you a fortune. There are invisible instincts that conspire against good judgement. Your defaults encourage you to react without reasoning – to live unconsciously rather than deliberately.
Most errors in judgement happen when we don't know we're supposed to be exercising judgement. The key to getting what you want out of life is to identify how the world works and to align yourself with it.
Improving judgement is less about accumulating tools to enhance your rationality and more about implementing safeguards that make the desired oath the path of least resistance. Defaults operate in our subconscious, overriding them requires pulling your subconscious in the right direction through: habits, rules, and environment.
You'll spend less of your time fixing problems that shouldn't exist in the first place, that various parts of your life blending together harmoniously, and you'll experience less stress and anxiety but more job. Good judgement can't be taught, but it can be learned.
🧠 Final Thoughts
I think we're all guilty of selling ourselves short at one time or another. This process usually begins from our own thoughts. We believe that we can't, so we don't, in most cases we never even try. It shows us the negative power of thinking.
On the flip side of that, we might underestimate the power that positive, or clear thinking, can have on our lives. By empowering our thinking, and understanding that we have more control over our lives than we might think, it puts us in a better position to optimize our lives.
By understanding what's important to us, and using our thinking to help us work towards those things, we can create more positive, impactful, and meaningful lives. Not only for ourselves, but for those closest to us.
❤️ Liked This? Check These Out
Principles (Life & Work) by Ray Dalio
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Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal
All ideas, quotes, and illustrations are borrowed or based on Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish. To learn more, visit fs.blog/clear/.
