Clear Thinking

There’s a famous quote from Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

fail-safe: Tie your hands to keep your execution on track.

One reason the best in the world make consistently good decisions is they rarely find themselves forced into a decision by circumstances.

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?

Confidence doesn’t make bad outcomes any less likely or good outcomes more likely, it only blinds us to risk. The ego also makes us more concerned with maintaining or improving our perceived position in a social hierarchy than with extending our knowledge or skills.

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

The bottom line: people who think about what’s likely to go wrong and determine the actions they can take are more likely to succeed when things don’t go according to plan.

the hifi principle: Get high-fidelity (HiFi) information—information that’s close to the source and unfiltered by other people’s biases and interests.

The second thing we did was change the conversation he was having inside his head. We know how the words we say to other people impact how they feel, but we rarely think of how the words we say to ourselves impact us. I asked him to list off some of the things he’d already done that he had feared before doing them.