Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

Unearned knowledge rushes us to judgment.

Not all confidence is created equally. Sometimes, it comes from a track record of applying deep knowledge successfully, and other times it comes from the shallowness of reading an article. It’s amazing how often the ego turns unearned knowledge into reckless confidence.

The most powerful story in the world is the one you tell yourself. That inner voice has the power to move you forward or anchor you to the past. Choose wisely.

There are three problems with covering up mistakes. The first is that you can’t learn if you ignore your mistakes. The second is that hiding them becomes a habit. The third is that the cover-up makes a bad situation worse.

If you got some results you didn’t want, the world is telling you at least one of two things: (a) you were unlucky; (b) your ideas about how things work were wrong. If you were unlucky, trying again with the same approach should lead to a different outcome. When you repeatedly don’t get the outcomes you want, though, the world is telling you to upd

Changing your perspective changes what you see. Shifting your frame of reference is a powerful safeguard against blind spots.

Checklists, for instance, offer a simple way to override your defaults.

By the time everything we need to do over the course of a long day is finished, we’re exhausted. And this is the time we give to our spouse, the most important person in our lives! 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

The dopamine hit of something new prevents many of us from working on our priorities.