Luck won't give you an edge.
INTRODUCTION
This short read is an incredible distillation of tons of information, ideas and models around the topic of how to “think clearly” and what advantages come from that.
It’s definitely worth the read for anyone - but especially those in positions of leadership.
There were so many key insights and useful frameworks condensed into a few hundred pages that it’s hard to provide just a few key takeaways - but I’ve tried.
FUTURENATIVE - THINK BETTER. BUILD BETTER.
I very occasionally send out an email recapping some thoughts, learnings and ideas typically centred around a thesis & approach I call being “FUTURENATIVE”.
In short, the thesis states: FUTURENATIVE individuals and organization find a unique way to leverage apparent tensions and blend both discovery & execution work, in order to unlock massive impact.
You can sign up here to learn more:
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- While the rest of us are chasing victory, the best in the world know they must avoid losing before they can win
- 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. Once you have mastered this skill, you will find you have an unstoppable advantage.
- All the successful execution in the world is worthless if it's not in service of the right outcome, but how do you decide what that is?
- What happens in ordinary moments determines your future. We’re taught to focus on the big decisions, rather than the moments where we don't even realize were making a choice. Yet these ordinary moments often matter more to our success than the big decisions.
- Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned.
- What a lot of people miss is that ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your options.
- These behaviors represent something akin to our brain's default or factory settings. They're behavioral programs written into our DNA by natural selection that our brains will automatically execute when triggered unless we stop and take the time to think,
- The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts.
- The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy.
- The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group.
- The inertia default: we're habit forming and comfort seeking. We tend to resist change, and to prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.
- The social rewards for going with the crowd are felt long before the benefits of going against it are gained.
- 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 that everyone else gets. Best practices aren't always the best. By definition, they're average. If you don't know enough about what you're doing to make your own decisions, you probably should do what everyone is doing. If you want better-than-average results, though, you'll have to think clearly. And thinking clearly is thinking independently.
- Most people are chasing complexity. They learn the basics enough to be average, then look for the secret, shortcut, or hidden knowledge. Mastering the basics is the key to being ruthlessly effective. The basics might seem simple but that doesn't mean they're simplistic. The best in the world probably don't have some secret shortcut or hidden knowledge. They merely understand the fundamentals better than others.
- The "zone of average" is a dangerous place when it comes to inertia. It's the point where things are working well enough that we don't feel the need to make any changes. We hope things will magically improve.
- As the famous quote often falsely attributed to Charles Darwin goes, "It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change."'
- The person who can take a step back for a second, center themselves, and get out of the moment will outperform the person who can't.
- The most important story is the one you tell yourself. While telling yourself a positive story doesn't ensure a good outcome, telling yourself a negative story often guarantees a bad one.
- The truth is that we make repeated choices in life that become habits, those habits determine our paths, and those paths determine our outcomes.
- The lesson was an important one: the things you choose not to do often matter as much as the things you choose to do.
There are no hard edges between defaults; they often bleed into one another.
"When you play games where other people have the aptitude and you don't, you're going to lose. You have to figure out where you have an edge and stick to it." -
- More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence.
- As Peter Kaufman once told me, "No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others." People at the far right of the bell curve (the positive outliers) can teach you tips, tricks, and insights that might otherwise take a lifetime to learn.
- The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated. Just because the results aren't immediately felt doesn't mean consequences aren't coming.
- 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.
- "What am I trying to achieve?" and "Is this moving me closer to that or further away?" These seem like basic questions, but they're often forgotten in the heat of the moment.
- One thing that sets exceptional people apart from the crowd is how they handle mistakes and whether they learn from them and do better as a result.
- The first mistake is expensive; the second one costs a fortune.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. - Neil Peart NEIL
- the decision-making process is composed of four stages: defining the problem, exploring possible solutions, evaluating the options, and finally making the judgment and executing the best option.
- When you really understand a problem, the solution seems obvious.
- A handy tool for identifying the root cause of a problem is to ask yourself, "What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein sums up this idea: "To understand is to know what to do”.
- convert the hindsight of tomorrow into the foresight of today.
- 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.
- Josh Wolfe likes to say, "Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure."
- THE SECOND-LEVEL THINKING PRINCIPLE: Ask yourself, "And then what?"
- As Frederic Maitland purportedly once wrote, "Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work, not the starting point."
- THE 3+ PRINCIPLE: Force yourself to explore at least three possible solutions to a problem. If you find yourself considering only two options, force yourself to find at least one more.
- Roger Martin put it this way: "Thinkers who exploit opposing ideas to construct a new solution enjoy a built-in advantage over thinkers who can consider only one model at a time."
- Thinking better is all about looking beyond the things that are obvious and seeing the things that are hidden from view. The real world is full of trade-offs, some of which are obvious, and others that are hidden. Opportunity costs are the hidden trade-offs that decision-makers often have trouble assessing. The ability to size up hidden trade-offs is part of what separates great decision-makers from the rest.
- Charlie Munger put it this way: "Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs ... it's your alternatives that matter. That's how we make all of our decisions."
- THE OPPORTUNITY-COST PRINCIPLE: Consider what opportunities you're forgoing when you choose one option over another.
- 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?
- There is only one most important thing in every project, goal, and company. If you have two or more most important things, you're not thinking clearly. This is an important aspect of leadership and problem-solving in general: you have to pick one criterion above all the others and communicate it in a way that your people can understand so they can make decisions on their own. This is true leadership. If I tell you the most important thing is serving the customer, you know how to make decisions without me.
- The quality of your decisions is directly related to the quality of your thoughts. The quality of your thoughts is directly related to the quality of your information. Information is food for the mind. What you put in today shapes your solutions tomorrow.
- In the restaurant business, there are chefs and there are line cooks. Both can follow a recipe. When things go according to plan, there is no difference in the process or the result. But when things go wrong, the chef knows why. The line cook often does not.
- Remember: the questions you ask help to determine the quality of the information you get. p. 175
- 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 don't know the limits of their expertise. Experts know what they know, and also know what they don't know.
- When the cost of a mistake is low, move fast
- Remember to factor the cost of analysis into your decisions. This is something many people fail to do. Most decisions require an art that balances speed and accuracy. […] At some point the cost of getting more information is exceeded by the cost of losing time or opportunity.
- If it remains unclear which path is best, often the next best step is just to eliminate paths that lead to outcomes you don't want.
- Keep your future options open by taking small, low-risk steps toward as many options as possible before committing everything to just one. “shooting bullets before cannonballs”
- if you walk around like you've already made the decision, you start to filter all new information through the lens of having already made the decision.
- The world's best Sherpas know that the most dangerous. part of summiting Mount Everest isn't reaching the peak; it's the descent. So much energy is spent getting to the top that even if climbers are running out of strength or oxygen, they keep pushing themselves to the summit. They spend so much of their resources getting there, they neglect to account for the ordeal of getting back. Lost in "summit fever" they forget that the most important thing isn't making it to the top, but making it home. You can't win, after all, if you don't survive.
- Great decision-makers have mastered the ability to learn both from their mistakes and from their successes. It's that ability that sets them apart. It enables them to repeat their successes and avoid repeating their failures.
- Many people assume that good decisions get good outcomes and bad ones don't. But that's not true. The quality of a single decision isn't determined by the quality of the outcome.
- Luck won't give you an edge.
- In life, we experience regret over both things we've done and things we've failed to do.
- But being wise requires more. It's more than knowing how to get what you want. It's also knowing which things are worth wanting-which things really matter.
- Jobs had a daily ritual. Every morning he would look in the mirror and ask himself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"s Whenever the answer was no too many days in a row, he said, he knew he needed to change something.
- Good judgement is expensive, but poor judgement will cost you a fortune.
FUTURENATIVE - THINK BETTER. BUILD BETTER.
I very occasionally send out an email recapping some thoughts, learnings and ideas typically centred around a thesis & approach I call being “FUTURENATIVE”.
In short, the thesis states: FUTURENATIVE individuals and organization find a unique way to leverage apparent tensions and blend both discovery & execution work, in order to unlock massive impact.
You can sign up here to learn more:
