#177 Shane Parrish: A Glimpse Into Clear Thinking
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Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish, and you're listening to a special episode of The Knowledge Project. This episode is special because it's about my new book that came out today called Clear Thinking, Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Outcomes.

As you know, this podcast is all about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. And true to form, the book is a compendium of practical lessons and insights that I've learned over the years from others and put into practice. The idea for Clear Thinking started with a simple question. Why do the world's most successful individuals have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time? It

It turns out that it's not luck, it's positioning. They are rarely backed into a corner by circumstances and you don't have to be either. One of the key insights is that you don't need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you can out position them. 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 most effective way to enhance your decision making is by starting from a position of strength.

With a proven framework and practical strategies, clear thinking is your roadmap to navigating any situation with poise and intelligence. Today, I'm going to share five insights from the book that I think you'll enjoy. It's time to listen and learn.

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The first insight is that your position determines your future. The greatest aid to judgment is starting from a good position. This is such a key insight. We often think about making the best decision possible in the moment and forget about whether we're operating from a position of strength or weakness when the moment arises.

Let me give you a practical example so you can see what I mean. One of my kids got a really poor grade on a test one day. As he handed it to me, he looked at me, shrugged his shoulders and said, I did my best. And I knew that wasn't the moment to have a conversation with him about what it means to do your best. So I waited a little bit. Later on that night, we talked about what it meant to do your best. What he meant was that when the paper, the test was in front of him, he focused on the questions and answered them to the best of his ability.

What he didn't understand is that doing your best is often about the position you put yourself in before you take the test. Putting yourself in a good position for the test means sleeping well, eating a healthy breakfast, not arguing with your brother, and of course, studying in the days leading up to the test. All the things that you control. He hadn't done any of that.

And by not doing the things in his control, he put himself in a worse position. It's like he chose to play life on hard mode. And we do the same thing. We put ourselves in poor positions when we don't exercise, we don't sleep, we don't invest in our relationship with our partners, when we don't prepare for the meeting, when we take on too much debt.

and countless other ways. It's hard to appreciate that over the long run, the average person who constantly puts themselves in a good position beats the genius who finds themselves in a poor position. What looks like talent is often good positioning. And the best way to put yourself in a good position is with good preparation. A good position allows you to think clearly rather than be forced by circumstances into a decision.

One reason the best in the world make consistently good decisions is they rarely find themselves forced into a decision by circumstances. They almost always operate from a position of strength.

The second insight I want to share is that you can turn desired behavior into default behavior. Listen, eventually everyone loses the battle with willpower. Sometimes it's really hard to do the things we want to do. So we can use safeguards to change our behavior. One type of practical safeguard we talk about in the book is automatic rules. We've been taught our whole life to follow rules, but we've never been taught how to use rules to our advantage. Let's say you want to lose weight and you've decided to skip desserts for a while.

Whenever you're faced with a situation where you have to say no to dessert, you're relying on your willpower. Your friends and your colleagues will convince you that it's a celebration to join them just this once, or you can start tomorrow. The social pressure is real, and it makes it hard to do the things that you want to do. But there's a way around this. Your best self can create automatic rules for these situations before you face them. Your rule can be...

I don't eat dessert. And when your friends say, let's have dessert, all you have to say is, I don't eat dessert. It's a rule. And they'll suddenly apply a lot less pressure to you. All you have to do is follow the automatic rule, rules you've been following your whole life, and you can turn your desired behavior into default behavior. You can also use rules to do more of the things that you want to do. It's not just about avoiding bad things. It's about doing good things. Let's say you want to stay healthy, but going to the gym three to four times a week is a grind.

One of the reasons it's a grind is that you start to negotiate with yourself. I don't know about you, but that little voice in my head starts to say, hey, you're pretty tired today. You didn't sleep well last night. Let's skip the gym today and we'll do extra tomorrow. And you say, yeah, let's do extra tomorrow. But of course, when tomorrow comes around, you don't do extra. In fact, that little voice is back. Now it's got a victory and it's even louder than before.

The way around this negotiation with yourself is to work out every day. The conversation in your head goes from, should I work out today to when and how do I fit this in? That doesn't mean that you're going to go to the gym for an hour every day. It might mean that you reduce the scope or duration of your workout. Might mean you just go in and do some squats and then come home.

What it does mean is that you're going every day. The conversation changes from should I go to how do I fit this in? I've shared this bit of wisdom with several friends who've used it to dramatically change their health. It's a simple principle, simply applied, that creates a life-changing result.

But rules are not the only practical and easy way to do more of what you want and less of what you don't. There's a host of other examples in the book, like joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behaviors. If you want to read more, join a book club. If you want to run more, join a running club. Your chosen environment rather than your willpower alone will help nudge you towards the best choices. The third insight that I want to share is that if you do what everyone else does, you will get the same results everyone else gets.

The social rewards for going with the crowd are felt long before the benefits of going against it are gained. One measure of a person is the degree to which they'll do the right thing when it goes against popular belief. However, it's easy to overestimate our willingness to diverge from the crowd and underestimate our biological instinct to fit in.

Fear holds us back from taking risks and reaching our potential. No one grows up saying, I want to do the same thing everyone else does. And yet there's comfort to surrounding yourself with people who agree with you or doing the same thing that you're doing.

While there is sometimes embedded wisdom in the crowd, mistaking the comfort of the collective for evidence that what you're doing will lead to better results is nothing more than a convenient lie. The only way to outperform if you're doing undifferentiated work is to work harder than everyone else.

Imagine a team of ditch diggers working with their hands. A slight variation in the amount of soil moved per hour is barely perceptible. Your work is indistinguishable from the person next to you. The only way to move more dirt is to dig for longer.

Within this paradigm, the ditch digger who takes a week off to experiment and invent the shovel seems crazy. Not only do they look like a fool for taking a risk, but their cumulative production falls behind for every day they're not digging. So only when the shovel comes along do others see its advantages. Success requires shamelessness. So too does failure.

Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely. The key is to create positive deviation.

The fourth insight is outcome over ego. Our desire to feel right overpowers our desire to be right. The ego urges us to feel right at the expense of being right. Few things feel better than being right. So much so that we will unconsciously rearrange the world so that we are right and somebody else is wrong. A great example of this happened just the other day with a friend of mine. Over coffee, he shared an idea that he had at work to solve a problem.

Now, the problem and the details of that aren't really important. What's important is the idea would have worked. It would have solved the problem. Another thing to note is that it was his idea. The complicating factor here is that it wasn't the best idea and he was having a hard time letting that go. He was spending a lot of time and energy trying to prove how right he was...

because he was putting his ego over the outcome. And when you try to prove how right you are, you ignore all the evidence to the contrary. Most people go through life assuming that they're right. And the people who don't see things their way are wrong. We mistake how we want the world to work with how it actually does work. The subject doesn't matter. We're right about politics. We're right about other people. We're right about our memories. You name it. We mistake how we want the world to work for how it does work. Of course, we can't be right about everything all the time.

Everyone makes mistakes or misremembers some things, but we still want to feel right all the time and ideally get other people to reinforce that feeling. Hence, we channel inordinate amounts of energy to proving to others and ourselves that we're right. When this happens, we're less concerned with outcomes and more concerned with protecting our ego.

The way to move around this is to switch your feelings to the outcome. I encapsulated this with a saying, outcome over ego. It's a healthy reminder that you need to focus on the outcome and not how you feel. The final insight I want to share today is that while it might not be your fault, it is your responsibility. Self-accountability means taking responsibility for your abilities, your inabilities, and your actions. If you can't do that, you might never move forward.

You might not have someone in your life who holds you accountable, but that doesn't matter. You can hold yourself accountable. Others might not expect more from you, but you can expect more from yourself. External rewards are nice, but they're optional. You don't need them to do your best.

Your honest judgments about yourself are more important than anyone else's. And 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. And while you may not have asked for it, you're in charge of your own life and a larger part of your outcomes than you think.

People who lack self-accountability tend to run on autopilot. This is the exact opposite of commanding your own life. These people constantly succumb to the external pressure, seeking rewards, avoiding punishments, and measuring themselves against other people's scoreboards. They're followers, not leaders.

They don't take responsibility for their mistakes. Instead, they always try to blame other people, circumstances, or bad luck. Nothing is ever their fault. Well, I have news for you. It might not be your fault, but it's your responsibility. There's always something you can do in the moment today to better your position tomorrow. You might not be able to solve the problem, but your next action will make the situation better or worse. There's always an action you control, however tiny, that helps you achieve progress.

Those are the five insights I wanted to share with you today. The book is full of hundreds of other practical, timeless insights.

Clear thinking will reshape the way you think and give you the tools and strategies to achieve lasting success. I appreciate you listening to this. I appreciate all your support over the years. If you want to help me, you can go order the book. I think it'll help you too. You can find a link in the show notes or learn more about the book at fs.blog slash clear. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, thanks for listening and learning with us.

For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog slash podcast, or just Google The Knowledge Project. Until next time.