Clear Thinking

Your Personal Board of Directors Put all of your exemplars on your “personal board of directors,” a concept that originates with author Jim Collins: Back in the early ’80s, I made Bill [Lazier] the honorary chairman of my personal board of directors. And when I chose members . . . they were not chosen for their success. They were chosen for their v

When the cost of a mistake is low, move fast.

The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts. 2. The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy. 3. The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group. 4. The inertia default: we’re habit forming and comfort se

Creating personal rules is a powerful technique for protecting yourself from your own weaknesses and limitations. Sometimes those rules have surprising benefits.

Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you do control how you respond to everything. It’s a mindset that empowers you to act and not just react to whatever life throws at you. It transforms obstacles into opportunities for learning and growth. It means realizing that the way you respond to ha

Whatever decision you’re facing, ask yourself, “Is there a way to make sure I will stick to the path I’ve decided is best?” By thinking through your options, and precommitting to courses of action, you free up space to tackle other problems. Even if we’re waiting as long as possible to decide, we now know exactly what to focus on and do when the ti

Success requires shamelessness. So too does failure. 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.

The people executing established practices say they want new ideas, but they just don’t want the bad ones. And because they so want to avoid the bad ones, they never deviate enough to find new good ones.

Obviously, we all want good outcomes, but as we’ve seen, good decisions can have bad outcomes, and bad decisions can have good ones. Evaluating decisions—ours or others’—based on the outcome (or how we feel about the outcome) fails to distinguish luck from skill and control. Because of that, engaging in resulting doesn’t help us get better. The res

Knowing what to ignore allows you to focus on what matters. Follow the example of the best investors and know the variables that matter for evaluating the options before you start sorting through information.