Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parrish
STOP! This is a moment when you need to think.
The goal: to train ourselves to identify the moments when judgment is called for in the first place, and pause to create space to think clearly.
The space between stimulus and response is where clear thinking lives.
The person who learns how to think clearly ultimately applies more of their overall effort toward the outcomes they want.
The four defaults
Clear thinking involves counterbalancing our hardwired biological defaults evolved over many centuries:
- Emotion default — we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts.
- Ego default — we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy.
- Social default — we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group.
- Inertia default — we tend to resist change, and to prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.
On responsibility
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 nothing to change the present situation you find yourself in. Thinking about how it wasn’t your fault doesn’t make anything better. The consequences are still yours to deal with.
Always focus on the next move — the one that gets you closer to or further from where you want to go.
The poker hand
If you play poker, you learn this intuitively. You’re dealt a hand based mostly on luck. Feeling sorry for yourself, complaining about the hand you were dealt, or blaming others for how they played their hands only distracts you from what you can control. Your responsibility is to play the hand as best you can.
When you put outcome over ego, you get better results.