Clear Thinking

As Peter Kaufman once told me, “No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others.”

There is need, I insist, for someone against whom to measure our way of life; unless you have a ruler, you can’t straighten what is crooked.[1]

Question 2: What do you know about this problem that I (or other people) don’t? What can you see based on your experience that someone without your experience can’t? What do you know that most people miss?

As Einstein is thought to have said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

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.

There is always something you can do in the moment today to better your position tomorrow.

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

“Whom else can I include in my life to help with everything beyond what my partner does well?”