Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

The way to improve your defaults isn’t by willpower but by creating an intentional environment where your desired behavior becomes the default behavior.

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 knowle

if you find yourself biting your tongue in group situations, if you find yourself or your team resisting change or continuing to do something in one way simply because that’s how you’ve always done it in the past—be on your guard! The inertia default is likely at work.

Avoiding conflict is comfortable and easy. The longer we avoid the conflict, however, the more necessary it becomes to continue avoiding it. What starts out as avoiding a small but difficult conversation quickly grows into avoiding a large and seemingly impossible one. The weight of what we avoid eventually affects our relationship.

Inertia also prevents us from doing hard things. The longer we avoid the hard thing we know we should do, the harder it becomes to do.

public statements can create inertia. Putting something on the record establishes expectations along with social pressure to meet those expectations. When new information challenges one of our statements, we might instinctively dismiss it and emphasize the old information that supported it. We want to be consistent with what we said. Changing our m

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.”3 Even though it’s a misquotation, it’s not useless just because it’s not Darwin.

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. Of course, they rarely do.

Another reason we tend to push back against change is that doing something different might lead to worse results. There is an asymmetry to change—we take negative results to heart more than positive ones. Worse results make us stand out for the wrong reasons. Why risk looking like an idiot when you can remain average? We’d rather be average than ri