Clear Thinking

If you want to develop good judgment, start by asking two questions: “What do I want in life? And is what I want actually worth wanting?”

Wisdom is turning your future hindsight into your current foresight.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to di

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly. —MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations

If you can’t simply explain your thinking to other people (or yourself), it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand things and need to dig deeper and gather more information.

“What did I know at the time I made the decision?” and, “Did the things I anticipated happening come about for the reasons I thought they would?”

safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision. Don’t rely on your memory after the fact. Trying to recall what you knew and thought at the time you made the decision is a fool’s game.

If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision—what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it—you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky. If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible.

You can only control the process you use to make the decision. It’s that process that determines whether a decision is good or bad. The quality of the outcome is a separate issue. Our tendency to equate the quality of our decision with the outcome is called resulting. Results are the most visible part of a decision. Because of that, we tend to use