How To Become A Clear Thinker - Shane Parrish - #714

Shane Parrish is the Founder of Farnam Street, an ex-Canadian Intelligence Agency Operative and an author. Our lives are mediated by our thoughts. The more accurately we can make decisions, the better and happier our existence will be. Therefore it makes sense to spend some time learning how to think more clearly and frameworks to keep us rational. Expect to learn if its truly possible to think independently, what it takes to become a clear thinker, the most common pitfalls holding you back from seeing the world accurately, how to build more strength in your mind, how to better manage your weaknesses, strategies to become an effective decision maker, the biggest lies that people follow when they focus in life and much more… Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Timestamps: (00:00) Can Humans Think Independently? (02:16) Easy Mode Vs Hard Mode (06:47) Are We Moving Beyond Mental Models? (12:03) The Enemies to Clear Thinking (16:07) Why Tactics Are Better than Models (19:53) Shane’s Tactics for Success (27:01) How to Become a Stronger Thinker (32:16) Overcoming the Fear of Risk (41:17) How to Triage Your Priorities (47:15) Society’s Lies About What You Should Want (54:29) Where to Find Shane Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: This Is How To Master Your Life - David Goggins - #577: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠⁠ How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs - Dr Jordan Peterson - #712: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠⁠ The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman - #700: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that it's possible to truly think independently?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I do, but I think you have to rewind a little bit and set the circumstances for what creates independent thought. It's not just the idea that you need to have that's different. And independent thinking for it to be valuable has to be divergent thinking. So it has to be advantageous divergence. You have to go against the crowd and you have to be right. It's not enough to just go against the crowd. So what sets us up to be able to think independently is a really interesting question. And a lot of it is your ability to withstand pain. Can I look like an idiot in the moment to become better in the end? Am I, can I financially do that? Can I mentally do that? There's a whole, can I emotionally do that?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  There's a whole bunch that goes into that that people don't think about. Am I in a position where failure is going to make a huge difference in my life on this particular thing? And if I am, that makes it harder to think independently. This is why a lot of people who work for big organizations tend to just go with the flow and say what they need to say, whether they are doing that consciously or unconsciously. It's because, hey, if I stand out, if I'm the tall poppy and I lose my job, well, I'm in financial trouble. So it'd be interesting to see an organization, we see some of this in tech, actually, where people have enough money that they could lose their jobs. And it wouldn't financially sort of determine the rest of their life.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  And those people are able to speak up more about what they think is right and what they think they should do. And I would imagine that it's a really good scenario to create that psychological safety to, where you feel like you're not going to be punished to think independently. And so if you think of Clear Thinking, the book that I wrote, I sort of, there's three overarching themes to it. One is how you position yourself determines whether you're playing on easy mode or hard mode. How do you manage the urges? This is two. How do you manage the urges that get other people into trouble, including the social default? And three, how do you think independently? And I think you need the first two in order to think independently. It's sort of like the natural follow on to the first two.

• 2:15Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about easy mode and hard mode then. People use this on the internet all the time, but I think your conception is a little bit different.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was thinking about this. My son really solidified it for me. He came home and he he's a teenager and for any of you who have teenagers, this story will make sense, but I think it perfectly encapsulates what I mean by easier hard mode. And he hands me this exam and you know, he's got a really bad grade on it. And he just sort of looks at me, shrugs his shoulders, says, I did my best. And for anybody who's played sports like me during high school, you know, that's not the moment to talk to them. Most people quit sports on the car ride on the way home. They don't quit because their performance on the field sucked. They quit because of the conversation with their parents or their friends' parents in the car ride on the way home. So I was like, I'm gonna let this dissipate,

• 3:06Speaker 01

  right? He's emotional right now. Let's let it go. I was quite emotional too. I was like, what happened here? Later on that night, I walk up to him and I'm like, hey, talk to me about this. You said you did your best. What does it mean to do your best? I was like, go through it in detail. He's like, well, you know, I I sat down at 10 and I read over all the questions and I checked how many points were each question allocated my time appropriately and I answered them the best I could. I did my best. I was like, wow, you think of this like adults think of this. This is really interesting. So you think that that point forward from the point that you sat down, that's the point where things

• 3:47Speaker 01

  matter. I was like, let's rewind 96 hours here. Did you study? Not really. I crammed the night before. Did you sleep well? No, I was up late studying. Did you eat a healthy breakfast? No, I didn't because I got up late. Did you fight with your brother? Yes. Why did you fight with your brother? Well, because I got up late. So then all of a sudden, we were in the bathroom at the same time and you know, I didn't sleep. So my temper got the best of me and we started, you know, shouting at each other. I'm like, okay. So you chose to play on hard mode. That doesn't mean you don't get a test, but what are the things you could have done to put that on easy mode? Well, you could have studied every night for four nights leading up to the

• 4:31Speaker 01

  test. You could have eaten healthy. You could have gotten a good sleep. These are all things within your control and those things determine whether you're playing on easy mode or hard mode. And if we think of that sort of in life, we can think of it in positioning, right? Do you have low debt? Do you have high debt? Are you exposed to variable interest rates? Have you maxed out sort of the amount of money to your paycheck? Are you spending it all every week? Are you investing in your relationships with your partner, your kids, your employees, your customers? Are you sleeping well? Are you eating healthy? All these things position you to put you in a position to manage these sort of things that come along in life and they come along to anybody. It doesn't matter if you have the best idea in the world from a

• 5:16Speaker 01

  stock market perspective. If you have no money in your bank account to take advantage of it, you might as well not have that idea. And you know, if you sleep and you eat healthy and you invest in your relationships, well, the inevitable emotional ups and downs, the inevitable anger that people go through, the highs and lows, you're in a much better position, a much stronger position to go through those. Think, imagine there's a patch of grass between you and your partner. And if you water that grass every day, what's going to happen when a spark lands on it? It's just going to go out. But if you don't water that grass every day, it's going to dry out. And then what happens? All of a sudden, you have a fire between the two of you. And then you have to take all this time and energy and try to fix that fire if you can. And all that

• 5:59Speaker 01

  time and energy comes at the expense of furthering your relationship, doing the things you want to be doing, working on the things you want to be working on. And we don't think about it like that.

• 6:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So in some ways, could you replace the word positioning with preparation? It seems like a large amount of it is preparation.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Sort of preparation to me implies that you know what's going to happen. Whereas positioning is I am prepared for multiple possible futures because I'm not trying to predict the future. So when I use the word positioning, I'm being a bit more vague because I want to account for things that I can't anticipate. Whereas preparation, if I know I want a promotion in six months and I know that job is coming open, well, now I can prepare. And that is a form of positioning, but it's not the only form of positioning.

• 6:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So I think when we When I first started this podcast, 2018, I got introed to fs.blog, I think that year, and started reading a lot of the stuff that you were writing about. And I think there was a period, at least in my life, and I know in a lot of my other friends' lives, where we believed if we could just rote recite the top 91 mental models from fs.blog, that all of our problems in life would be fixed, that it was just simply a matter of knowing the definitions and we'd integrate them somewhere down the line. And your first two books were, first few books, actually, a series of books, were kind of about breaking down these thinking

• 7:29Chris Williamson?

  tools. It seems to me that, at least in my life, and perhaps in yours as well, there's this pivot or maturity or kind of like ascendance from just looking at rules and the thermodynamics of how our mind works into something kind of more integrated and holistic. And it's to do with how does this fit into the various vicissitudes of life? And what are the urges that get in our way? They don't fit, you know, being angry doesn't fit within a mental model. It's like you're just angry, or you're upset, or you're hungry, or you're tired, or you're whatever. Have you noticed this in yourself, this sort of development over time from a

• 8:10Chris Williamson?

  more kind of disparate to a much more integrated viewpoint when it comes to thinking tools?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Well, I love the word that you just used there, integrated, because that's how I think of it. And I think of, we wrote a series of books through Farnam Street called The Great Mental Models. And the idea was to take the 101 that you would have learned in most university introductory classes and put it out there for people easily accessible, easily digestible, and in more plain language than you would hear in university. How do you use those ideas? And how do you think, right? The first book of that was General Thinking Tools, which is like, what are the the tools that we can use to sort of think through problems in a three dimensional way? And I think that those are important lenses into a particular situation.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  If you think of decision making specifically, the source of all problems in decision making is blind spots. And if you can put these lenses onto a situation, you reduce your blind spots. You're never going to eliminate your blind spots, but you'll reduce them. And that is one part of life, right? So eliminating these blind spots. Another part of life is dealing with our emotional self and dealing with social situations and dealing with anger. And these things inevitably happen to us. And we can't change the fact that they're going to happen, but we can change how we respond. And all the mental models in the world aren't going to give you confidence. And all the mental models in the world, they might help you see something, but they could

• 9:40Speaker 01

  also create this paralysis where, you know, you you sort of look at a situation, you overanalyze it and you don't actually take action. And so I don't want people to think that that is the be all and end all. It's one component in a mosaic that leads to the overall image. And that component can shrink or expand depending on the problem at hand and and probably a particular moment in your life. But it's still an important component. It never goes to zero. And I sort of think of work life balance that way, too. I don't think of it in terms of balance. I think of it as what are the integrations that I need in life? And what size do they need to take right now?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  And if you think of it in terms of a mosaic, well, you can have your relationship, you can have your work, you can have your health, you can have all these things, and they can never go to zero, but it might mean that you're prioritizing different things at different points in time. Like with my kids, I, you know, I went up to them, I'm like, hey, we're launching a book. It's going to be really busy for a few months and then it's going to go back to normal. But for a few months, work is going to take a bigger shape and bigger form than it has in the previous few months. And then afterwards, it's going to shrink back down to where it was before. And I think it also gives us a language to think about the inevitable ups and downs and flows of life. Sometimes things are more important. Doesn't mean that our partner is not the most important thing, or our kids aren't the most important thing. But sometimes we just got to buckle down and do what we're supposed to do at work.

• 11:07Chris Williamson?

  I need a mental model or a meme to remind me that things don't last forever. Like I've got this, it's kind of like short termism, I suppose. You know, you're in a period of heavy work like that. And it takes more effort than it probably should for me to remind myself, this isn't forever. This is just going to happen for a little bit of time and it's periodized. And then we can get out of that on the other side. And I know that you're unhappy because you're not spending enough time in the gym or your diet's been all over the place or your sleep's been all over the place. Or you're feeling a little bit more stressed or you're a little bit more worried about the future. It's like, this isn't going to happen forever. But there is such a myopia around what is now is what will continue to be.

• 11:52Chris Williamson?

  And God, this is going to be my life. So definitely taking that sort of broader holistic, longer term view and looking to integrate things. I think makes a hell of a lot of sense. When it comes to clear thinking, you've broken down, broken down a bunch of enemies of clear thinking. And I think it's a nice conception because in order for us to think clearly, we first need to get past the things that stop us from thinking clearly. It's all well and good having, as you said, all of the tools in the world. And I'm going to do my decisions in this way. And I've got the mental models. But if there's something that stops you from being able to access that state, it's game over. You've multiplied by zero. So what are the main enemies of clear thinking?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so before I get to the enemies, just to backtrack one little step here, we're animals, right? And so we tend to exhibit the same thing that animals get, which is we're instinctive and we're responsive. And the question becomes, what are the scenarios that lead us to think less, to react more, to react without reasoning? And do those scenarios get us in trouble? And sort of the four that I came up with in the book are we're emotional, we're ego driven, social and ritual or inertia. And I think, you know, a great example of social for, I think emotion and ego sort of, people understand what they mean, but what do I mean by social situations? Well, not only group think, but I mean, we don't want to disappoint other people, right?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  In part because we are animalistic. And one of the, the biological tendencies of animals is that we're self preserving. And so the ability to get along with other people, the ability to say yes, the ability to. Try and be liked, or at least not hated by our tribe is really important to us. It's literally ingrained in our biology. So we end up saying yes to things that we don't want to say yes to. And I got this, this sort of dawned on me through two people. One, Peter Kaufman, who has been a great friend and given me a lot of ideas that appear in the book. But I was in Daniel Kahneman's penthouse in New York and he answered the phone. And at the end of the call, he said to the person, my rule is I don't say yes on the phone.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  I'll have to get back to you tomorrow. And he hung up the phone and I was like, whoa, what is this? Your rule? What are you talking about here? And he's like, well, I found I'm a pleaser. I really end up saying yes to things that I don't want to do. And I was like, I think we're all sort of like that to varying degrees, some more than others. But yeah, we all end up saying, yeah, I'll have a coffee with you in six months, but I wouldn't do it today or tomorrow. Right? And then six months rolls around, you're wondering why your calendar has this in it. And you're like, oh God, I don't want to do this. I don't, I don't even like this person. Why did I say yes to this? So, so we all end up in these social situations and you're not thinking in that moment. Right? You're just saying yes, because your instinctive desire to please somebody. So here's an example of an ordinary moment.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  And the subtitle of the book is turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. So here's an example of an ordinary moment. You end up saying yes to something you don't want to do. And it ends up having this cost on you, not only in time, but mental threads. You got to keep track of rescheduling all of these things. And so I was like, what do you mean by rules? And he's like, well, the rule, I just used a rule. He's like, we've been taught our whole life to follow rules. So I thought, well, I'll just create a rule. And if I tell people my rule, they don't argue with it. And I was like, Daniel, like this is, I know you've won a Nobel laureate, a Nobel prize, but dude, this is probably.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  The most profound thing you've ever really done in a practical way. This is like, and I'm like, what other rules do you have? He's like, not enough. He's like, oh, my God, this is the most powerful thing in the world. So he created a rule to take away these defaults and rewire his brain in these moments. So his unconscious response, he doesn't even have to consciously process it, is now the one that he wants. So he turned his desired behavior into his default behavior with a rule and gets around a social situation that generally causes us to do things we don't want to do. I think that's incredibly powerful.

• 16:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, one of the problems that you have is, and I certainly know, noticed this from my time learning and listening to people on your podcast and everything over the last few years. All of these concepts are fantastic, but when it comes down to tactically, how this grows corn for me, like, how does this actually show up in my life? For instance, is it your rule about always pay invoices as soon as possible? Is that your one? Yes. So that rule that you wrote in your newsletter three years ago, four years ago, maybe something like that.

• 16:37Chris Williamson?

  Absolute game. Not that I wasn't doing it already. I think I kind of intuited that if you pay people as quickly as possible, your partners, your contractors will always prioritize your work because they know that they're going to get paid straight away. And you've got to pay them eventually in any case, so why not pay them as soon as the invoice comes in? And that as a rule is so good. I don't know whether it, it's not got the same kind of like keystone change as something like Kahneman talked about, but those tactical justifications for things are such huge game changers. So my favorite one that I use is whenever I think about a friend, I always text them and tell them.

• 17:18Chris Williamson?

  Whenever I'm thinking about a friend, if some memory pops up from a business partner from back in the day, or someone that I saw a couple of months ago, or someone that I saw yesterday, I'll just text them, "Hey, man, thinking about you. Hope everything's good." Or, "Dude, just remembering that time that we did X, Y, and Z, like sending my best." That has been the best trigger for keeping on top of friendships and for making other people in my life that I care about feel good because they know that I think of them. And you're already thinking about them, so why not tell them? Like, that's just, it's a free gift that you can give them. So that's another trigger of mine that I've used from not saying yes on the phone, paying invoices immediately, texting friends when you think about them.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, the last thing the world needs is another book on thinking that's just intellectual masturbation. It has to be practical and applicable in real life, and it has to help people in scenarios that are difficult to be able to help them. So in the book, there's a lot of safeguards and a lot of rules around. Here are things that you can implement. The tricky part is, I'm giving you examples, but you really have to take, what are the desired behaviors I have? And how do I create defaults around these desired behaviors? And that's sort of what the book lays out. But, I mean, I can't create that map for you. I can give you practical ones that work on thousands of people or work with thousands of people, but the best ones are going to be very specific to you.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Like, the most powerful one to me is work out every day. My rule is I work out every day. The duration can change, the scope can change, the fact that I sweat does not change. I might be in a hotel room and just doing, you know, a couple hundred pushups and situps. And that's my workout for the day because that's all I can fit in because I'm traveling and there's a lot going on. But I used to do this thing where I was like, I'm going to work out three days a week. And then, you know, I'd wake up and I'd be like, I'm tired, I'm busy, I got a lot going on today. I'll work out at the end of the day. Five o'clock comes around, six o'clock, you're like, man, I don't feel like working out. And then you lie to yourself. This little voice in your head comes in, it's like, oh, we'll make up for it, we'll do extra tomorrow.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  And so tomorrow never comes. It just doesn't work that way. Tomorrow is where dreams die. I went to the gym and I was like, you have my fob. Give me my stats for the past year. I want to know every time I swiped in. Cause I was trying to go three days a week. Turns out I was going about one and a half days a week and I was like, yeah, exactly. Right. So I'm lying to myself. And then I created this rule where I'm like, I'm just going to sweat every day. Uh, and I've, I think I've only missed one or two days since then. It's been a few years. I feel healthier.

• 19:53Chris Williamson?

  Give me some of the other safeguards. Give me some of, if you were to create your like highest leverage tactical implementations, what do you think would make that criteria?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  This is where it becomes dependent, right? So for me, the most impactful ones are specific to me. So no meetings before 12. I don't take meetings any morning. Why do I do that? It's because the most valuable time of my day is the morning. And you know, I'm not going to argue about morning people or night people. The most valuable time for me is, is the morning. And I never want to be in a position where I have to search for time to work on the most valuable thing. So I just block off every day. Every day I have a block of time from whenever I leave the house, whenever I get up, whenever the kids go to school till 12 o'clock and that time is sacred. It doesn't mean that it never gets interrupted, but it's incredibly rare that that time gets interrupted.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Why do I do that? That allows me to work on the most important opportunity at hand. It allows me to learn and develop and make myself more valuable in the future. And it allows me to just, you know, I need a break today. I need to go for a walk. I just don't need to do anything. And I don't feel guilty about any of those things. Uh, I invest in an index fund every month. That's a rule too. And it's just a no brainer. It's like the, you know, we know how to get rich. You save more money than you make and you invest it, you dollar cost average it into an index fund and you wait a hell of a long period of time. And a lack of patience changes the outcome for most people because they get bored of that and they think they're smarter than that. And so then they start going all in on different investments or they start doing all these things.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  So you devise these rules that help you avoid the things. That you want to avoid. And I'll give you an example for organizations because these aren't sort of just for you as an individual. So organizations have problems. They need to solve these problems. What is one of the most common reasons we don't solve problems? We go to these meetings with people and we work with smart people. They're all type A people. They all want to demonstrate value. That's how it works. We go to a meeting, we're like, what's the problem and how do we solve it? And somebody throws out a problem definition? And you know, it sounds reasonable and it sounds accurate. And then what do people do? They jump in, they start solving this problem. Nobody's actually paused and been like, hey,

• 22:11Speaker 01

  is this the actual problem? And now all of a sudden, we're running, we're running to solve this, this problem that, you know, it's probably close to the problem, but not the real problem. And that causes a lot of stress and anxiety and lost time, but it causes it later. We don't see it in the moment because solving the wrong problem, it just keeps cropping up, causes a whole bunch of miscommunication, causes people to be frustrated. Those are all problems in the future to solve. For right now, we're just solving this problem. We all feel good. We all feel reinforced. But what can we do differently that'll lead to a better outcome or more likely to lead to a better outcome? We can break the problem

• 22:51Speaker 01

  definition from the problem solution meetings into, it doesn't mean you take more time. You can have a half hour problem definition meeting. You can have a half hour problem solution meeting. But what you really want to do is make sure you're solving the right problem. So that's a safeguard that you can implement at work. We're going to break these meetings into, ideally you have a night in between them, but you don't even need to do that. You can have one in the morning, one in the afternoon, if you need to solve it for whatever reason on the same day. I used to work in operations. We used to separate them by a day all the time unless there was an urgent situation where we actually needed to do something in the next few minutes. In that case, those are very esoteric, specific

• 23:31Speaker 01

  decisions. Another safeguard you can put in place is that committees don't make decisions, people do. Somebody has to sign their name to the decision.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  That one thing, single-handedly, will change a lot in your organization.

• 23:48Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Because the person, the person who has to sign their name to a decision takes the process a lot more seriously than the person who is part of a group. What happens in groups, in practice, right? In the real world, what happens when groups make decisions? Well, if the decision is correct, everybody takes credit for it. And if the decision is wrong, everybody tried to talk them out of that. So there's no, there's no advantages, there's no accountability, there's no responsibility. It's just a big mess. Everybody's always right, all the time, regardless of outcome. You need people to sign their name to a decision because the person who signs their name to the decision also has to be the person that comes up with the problem. Now, all of a sudden, I care. I'm putting my name on this.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Literally, I would have people sign their name to decisions. I, Joe, you know, whatever, or Jane, whatever, decide that. I want you to say it. I want you to say it out loud because I want you to care and I want you to put your pride and your reputation and I want you behind this. And if you're not behind it, I want to know you're not behind it. Why aren't you behind it? What's going on here? I want some insight. And I think that this, single-handedly, changes. If you look at all the organizations that we think of as dysfunctional, they're all decisions by committee. And if you look at all the organizations that we think of as successful, or, or at

• 25:11Speaker 01

  least, uh, doing above average, I can almost guarantee you, when you drill into it, people are making decisions, individuals are making decisions.

• 25:25Chris Williamson?

  One of my friends, uh, has an idea about, everybody needs to own a process. So there is something end to end and there is somebody that is accountable for making sure that the way that this gets finished, it's on that one person. And, uh, it, it feels like exactly the same here, that, you know, a particular piece of content goes out and there's a mistake that's been made and, oh, well, you know, like, is it the editor or is it the strategist? Or is it the, the producer or is it the, the fact checking guy? Like, you know, all the way down, people hide in groups. And, uh, yeah, having that accountability, having that increase in accountability is a big difference.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  No, I was just gonna say, think about another example of like where that would make a big difference is. If you work for a large organization, you have to fill out these forms to justify expenses or these forms to justify travel. And you find these forms tedious, asking for information that it already has, or you have to fill out the same information multiple times. Imagine how different that would be if somebody's name was on that form. If somebody had pride in that form. If somebody took ownership over that form. All of a sudden, everything would be streamlined. You would just ask the things that you need to ask. You would get in and out as quickly as possible and you would not try to interrupt the working time of the person filling out the form. You get away with all of that stuff.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  You get away with all this bullshit because there's nobody's names on this form. Nobody is accountable for this form. It's some department somewhere and most people don't even know which department it is.

• 26:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay. So people need to build more strength in their thinking. What are the component parts of how people should become stronger thinkers?

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think the real thing you need to do is get out there in the world, learn by doing, develop all of the ideas of what can I do to put myself in a position to play on easy mode? But the most important thing is a little chapter in the book on confidence and actually doing things. It's one thing to think you know about something. It's one thing to chat about it. And a lot of the world is filled with people who lack the confidence to take action. And so we just sit there analyzing over and over again, or expecting to have the confidence to get to the outcome instead of the confidence of the next step. And it's really important that we focus confidence around next step confidence. What does that mean?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  I don't need the confidence to get to the end goal. I need the confidence to take the next step. And that action will create momentum and that momentum will create its own confidence.

• 28:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, trying to create confidence without any degree of evidence is asking for delusion.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  The other things we can do to build strength are sort of knowing ourself, right? We have to understand where we're strong or where we're weak. Most people try to fix their weaknesses. I think you should just amplify your strengths. If you're an adult, you want to be a little bit well-rounded, but you really want to be really, really good at a couple of things that other people can't be really good at. And you have to be accountable to yourself about your mistakes, learning from your mistakes, accountable about your actions, your responses, the things that you do. That's where we start, starts from a foundation of it doesn't matter where I am today. It doesn't matter where I am on this grid. I am in charge of my trajectory. It might not be my fault where I am. It could be pure luck.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  It could be, you know, I was born into a bad house or a bad situation or a bad country. It doesn't matter. It's your responsibility to take control of that trajectory at some point. And that point is today. And what are the things that I can do? The little things that I can do to position myself for tomorrow?

• 29:19Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you talk about self-control? You know, discipline and doing hard things and resilience, kind of buzzwords that get thrown around an awful lot. What does self-control mean in the clear thinking framework?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Well, the idea around self-control is you sort of opt out of these emotions that get other people into trouble. And you can do that in a variety of ways. One, like, let's consider you're angry. Well, I can recognize that I'm angry and not respond. And on a good day, I might be able to do that 20% of the time. Now, if I'm positioned to play on easy mode, I got sleep, I'm eating healthy, I'm exercising. Well, I can probably recognize that I'm angry like 40% of the time now, but what do I do with the rest of the 60% of the time? How do I avoid these situations? Well, if I know somebody makes me angry, self-control is also not about control in the moment. It's like, I don't want to hang out with this person.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  I'm not going to put myself in that situation to begin with. Why would I tempt myself? So self-control is about designing your environment in a lot of ways. And your environment is not just your physical environment, it's your mental environment. The information you consume, the people that you're around, you create these sort of rules, which are a form of artificial environment that sort of put you on the right path. And I think that those are really things that we can do that are tangible, that make it a lot easier. You can also set rules. I don't send emails past nine because I've noticed in the past, all the emails I send past nine, you know, I've had a couple of glasses of wine, maybe they're a little more liberal than I want. And, you know, that's a form.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  But that's a form of like how we can deal with this. Or, you know, if you have an iPhone, you can sort of set it, you know, if you find yourself lost in this world of Instagram, hopefully not TikTok, that thing is like imported fentanyl, I think.

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  Digital fentanyl.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want to say anything too bad. I used to work for an intelligence agency and that is one app that I will not even allow in my house. And you can read into that what you want, but it is definitely digital fentanyl. You know, and you can set time limits on things. So, you know, I, part of being accountable and being responsible and taking ownership is not necessarily in the moment. I can do that in the moment when I'm strong to prevent me from doing something I don't want to do in a moment where I'm weak. So on a, I wake up, you know, I decide in that moment, I don't want to use Instagram or I want to use Instagram less, or I want to use my phone less. Well, I can set a timer

• 31:59Speaker 01

  on Apple for all these apps and I can change the password. I can give it to somebody else. I can set this environment up in a moment where I feel strong, so that in a moment where I'm weak, it changes my desired behavior to the default behavior.

• 32:15Chris Williamson?

  What have you come to learn about how people can cope with risk? You know, the fear about making a decision, the concern about, is this going to be right? And oh my God, what happens if, if this goes a different way? And I've done the preparation, but sometimes even doing a lot of preparation can make you feel like you've got a greater sense of concern of all of the different ways that this could go wrong. What have you come to learn about coping with risk?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  I think the biggest thing that people don't understand is what they're afraid of. A lot of people are afraid of failure and just as many people are actually afraid of success.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that's true, afraid of success? Cause I, I hear this, I hear this gets said a lot and I'm never actually too sure what people mean when they say that. So what do you mean?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Sure, let's look at two examples. Uh, one, my parents, uh, they wanted to quit smoking. They tried for years to quit smoking and they weren't successful because quitting smoking meant changing their friends. So yeah, they wanted to quit, but they didn't want to change their friends. And so success meant they had to change their friend group. Consider somebody who wants to go to the gym and get in shape. Another example, success means I'm not drinking with my friends anymore. I have FOMO. Success means I'm going to feel left out. Success means I'm going to have to change my friends probably.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  That's an interesting, that's an interesting conception. So it's not necessarily that people have a problem with the actual success itself, but that downstream from that success, there are externalities that they don't like the idea of having to deal with.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're not even conscious. My parents weren't conscious of the fact that they weren't thinking, oh, you know, to actually quit smoking, we need to change our friends. They're thinking, you know, willpower will take care of this for me. I can hang around people who smoke and choose not to smoke. But eventually everybody loses the battle with willpower. So if you want to go somewhere, you're going to have to change your friend group. If you want a promotion, well, a lot of people don't necessarily, what holds them back from going for that promotion, even though they want it. And what, it's subconscious. So I'm not saying it's a conscious conversation with your mind is like, now I'm going to be different from my peers. And we all know that we want people to be successful, but we don't want them to be that much more successful than us. Everything is relative to us. This is how individuals think.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, I'm rooting for you, Chris, but I only want you to be, you know, 5% better than me. Cause the minute you're 6% better than me, well, fuck you, like, you know? And we can't be friends anymore. And these thoughts really hold people back in a lot of ways and failure is another one, right? We, we don't want.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  To do something different than the crowd because we don't want to stand out. And then you have to dive into, why don't I want to stand out? Is it because I'm emotionally not capable of handling? What people are going to say about me? Is it because I'm financially not capable of losing my job? What's really holding me back from taking this risk? And you really have to start asking yourself these deeper questions about what is holding me back? And is that a valid reason not to do this thing that I want to do? And I think, you know, I, I know a lot of people who work for organizations. I have a friend who, who just, you know, implemented this thing at work. And they don't do themselves any favor, right? He saved his company about $20 million a year.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  And expenses through, through something he did. And he took a big risk by doing it and they gave him like a $2,000 bonus. It's like, so I was talking to him and he's like, there's an asymmetry to these successes too. Inside organizations where, you know, if I'm wrong, I would have lost my job. I'm right, I saved them a ton of money and my reward was like two grand. And that to me explains why things rarely change without a crisis. The new manager comes in, recognizes everything has been dysfunctional before. And all of a sudden, yeah, I'm going to change it, but they just change it like maybe 5%. You know, it's enough to say they're doing something different, but not enough to actually create a different result.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  And that's why things stay the same. There's an asymmetry to it.

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's that Rory Sutherland insight about? No one gets fired for hiring McKinsey. Where, you know, people will happily fail in very boring and normal ways, but much more fear succeeding in adventurous and different ways. Because if you just follow the blueprint, well, we follow the blueprint. It's like, yo, dude, the blueprint failed the last four Black Fridays in a row. It's like, yeah, no, but you know, it worked.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  This time.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This time, the same thing is going to have a different outcome.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  And uh, But what's the most powerful algorithm we've ever seen in the world? It is literally evolution and evolution is blindly trying things over and over again. And doubling down on what works and then blindly trying things over and over again, with failure being part of the process. Failure is okay. You just have to be mentally resilient to it, financially resilient to it, to put yourself in a position where you can take these risks that you want to take. And I think for a lot of people, it's not financial. I think for a lot of people, they don't want to put their thoughts out in public. They don't want people criticizing them. They don't. And why is that? Are they not capable of handling that? And, you know, you and I, I mean, we probably both get hate mail. And, you know, the first few times

• 37:57Speaker 01

  you get that, it really hits you. And then eventually, you sort of build up this muscle to it a little bit. And you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, I've heard that one before. Yeah, I've heard that one before. You know, come up with something.

• 38:08Chris Williamson?

  That's actually a good point. If it's a novel, if it's a novel insult on the internet, it's like, oh, wow. Like, at least that was, at least that was new. But yeah, you are right. One of the interesting things is you, in some regards, you see how, how much mono thinking there is across an entire culture. That being said, maybe that, maybe everyone is picking up on the same thing. And you actually are a dick, or you can't pronounce the word fragile, or you are like, do you know what I mean? Like, there is one thing everyone's able to see. But no, I don't disagree, man, like.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  And then think about success, just going back to the group for a second. If I'm in a group, and, you know, we're all slightly overweight and lazy, and you start going to the gym and losing weight and start taking up a side hustle. Well, how does that make me feel about myself now? And it makes me feel really bad about myself, because I'm seeing all the things that I could do, and all the things that maybe at some level I want to do, but all the things that I'm not doing. And you're reminding me of those things.

• 39:09Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar? I imagine you must have spent an awful lot of time on the incel and black pill forums. That must be where all of your best ideas come from. But if you do ever stumble upon these, there's something called ascending. And ascending is moving out of the world of the incelosphere and into one where interactions with a woman mostly, and maybe sex, and maybe a relationship become possible for you. And ascending in most of the black pill communities is very, very heavily discouraged. And, for instance, you might think it would be, a girl gave me her number today, and I posted it in the incel forum. But it's something so small, like.

• 39:54Chris Williamson?

  The barista at Starbucks's eyes lingered on me for slightly longer than I thought. Maybe this suggested that she was interested in me. Even that tiny little glimmer would be seen as the early stages of ascending, right? Like stage zero ascension. That's very, very heavily discouraged. And one of the reasons that I think this is the case is if everybody agrees to wallow in their own self pity and despondency and the lack of ability to change their situation, no other person in the community is given the potential of hope. And that means that no one has to face the fact that maybe I could do something to change this.

• 40:36Chris Williamson?

  If everybody is completely locked in to this behaviorally genetic determinism world of you are a dead end and nothing is ever going to change about this, you, there's a degree of comfort to that, right? Because things can't change. They couldn't change. They're never going to change. This is the way that they are. But as soon as you see somebody that potentially lays out the option to change this, oh God, well, maybe, maybe that means that I could, could change too. And as soon as you posit an ideal, you begin to compare yourself to that ideal and almost always you find yourself lacking.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you create a contrast.

• 41:15Chris Williamson?

  Correct, correct. What about, so like triaging priorities and, and working out what we actually want to want in life, allocating their time, prioritizing, everyone has more things that they can do. Do I want to start up that pottery side business? Or do I want to get in really good shape and compete in CrossFit? Or do I want to start a family or move to a new country or whatever? How do you think, or what are the tools that you've come to use when prioritizing and triaging what you can do in life and then implementing that into your time management? What have you relied on there?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  A couple of things, the example I use in the book is who got what society told them to want? Who wanted to be the most respected, wealthiest, you know, well-known person in their community? All things that we want, you listen to that and you're like, yeah, I want that. And it was Ebenezer Scrooge. And what did Scrooge want at the end? He wanted a do-over. And I think that that's an important lesson for all of us. And Scrooge is a fictional character, but I've met many billionaires who I think feel the same way. And I think that's, that's one reason philanthropy becomes such a large part of a lot of people's lives,

• 42:33Speaker 01

  at least publicly, is almost to repent for some of these, the way that they've acquired their wealth. And so I think about a couple of things. One being, do a thought experiment, close your eyes. You can do it as you're listening right now, not if you're driving though. And please don't close your eyes if you're driving. And imagine you're 95 and you're on your last night, you're in the hospital and you're in a coma, but you can hear what everybody around you is saying and everybody's gathered to sort of wish you a do. And what are they saying about you? Are they saying the things that you want them to be saying about you? And that tells people about your behavior.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Cause they're not going to be talking about your work priorities or your Twitter followers or your bank account or anything like that. They're going to be talking about, did you show up? Were you a good person? Were you the biggest fan? Were you supportive? Were you win-win? Did you love them? Did you respect them? And are you living your life in a way that makes people want to say that about you? And do you want to? And I'm not advocating that that is the only approach to life. Just be conscious about how you're living life. I've seen too many people wake up at the end of their work life and try to develop relationships with people they thought were their friends, only to discover. They were transactions. And why were they transactions? Because the way they got to the top was mutually exclusive from relationships of meaning.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  It was sharp elbows. It was stepping over people. It was dog eat dog. And if you're consciously doing that, you're pursuing that to get to this end. And that's the end you want to get to. Great. But I think there's a better approach, which is can I get to that end and be win win? Can I get to that end and build people up? Can I get to that end and be the type of person that I want my kids to see me as? And a lot of people think you can't do that. And maybe you can't just be conscious about how you're playing the game. And then in terms of

• 44:35Speaker 01

  I think the point of that is to make sure that what you want in the end is worth wanting in the first place.

• 44:41Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Well, that's the what do you want to want thing, right?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's one thing to get what you want, but it's another thing totally to want what's worth getting. And that that's sort of the end to the book, because I think that summarizes a lot of why we're trying to think clearly to begin with. It's like, do you, do you want to get to this destination? Here's the path you're on. Think about it. Evaluate it. Like, is that where you really want to go? And then I think on a work front, you know, society just tells us to say yes to everything, going back to that social default. We want to be the person who's busy. We want to be the person who talks about 10 projects. We want to be the person who who takes on everything and overcomes the world. And the reality is you can probably only handle two or three priorities.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  You need to cut everything else. And it sounds really harsh, but you, you know, in order to go further and go faster, you really just have to do less. And we live in a world where doing less allows you to do a little bit more quality in what you are doing. And we live in a leveraged world where that little bit of difference and more quality creates a huge distribution in outcomes. It creates massively nonlinear outcomes. If you can be 1% better at the thing that you're really good at to begin with, it's going to be disproportionately rewarded in the world that we live in for most people.

• 46:13Chris Williamson?

  One of my friends says it's narcissistic to believe that you can do two things and beat a person who's just doing one.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Totally. And even if you think about it, like if you're starting from a higher base, could be luck, could be innate skill, could be talent, and they're starting from a lower base, they're still eventually going to pass you. You can't compete with somebody who's all in on one thing. And this is why being all in on one thing is so successful. And there's certain things where you sort of have to be all in on it in order to be successful. But you can't sort of go online and be like, oh, I'm gonna half write a book, or, you know, I'm gonna half ass this side project, and I'm gonna go compete with Shopify. No, like, if you want to do this thing, you have to burn the bridges, you have to go all in, you have to sink the ship, you have to like, you land on the beach, and your only path out is success.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  And you can't accept failure. And that doesn't mean that you won't fail, but it means you're really going to enjoy the ride.

• 47:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What are, what are some of the other myths that you think society tells people about what they should want in life? You know, if we're talking about not just being able to get the thing that you want, but to want the thing that you can get, and to actually work out what's worth wanting, what do you wish, if you could strike through a bunch of things that people typically think that they want, what would they be?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Well, just, I just eliminate everything that digital fentanyl tells us to want, right? So, like, your car doesn't matter, the size of your house doesn't matter, traveling on private airplanes doesn't matter. I mean, Jeff Bezos uses the same fucking iPhone that you do. What's different between you and him is his ability to leverage it. And I think we have all of this stuff within our, we have all the things we want right in front of us. And we need to be driven to go after things because individually that might make us unhappy to go after that new car, to go after that house, to go after these things. But collectively, it actually moves the world forward. This is how we get innovation. This is how we get failure.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  This is how we learn. This is how we progress. Flip side is, everybody wants the outcome. Man, you gotta want the process. It's the process that's worth wanting. The process of how do I make money and how do I build this business? You know, how do I do this? That's what I want to be focused on. How do I get better at this? How do I make a better ad? How do I make a better email? How do I create a better thought? How do I become more useful? How do I treat my customers better? How do I serve them better? How do I get my food 1% better? How do I make sure my bathrooms in my restaurant are always clean? These are the things that you need to be driven to do. These are the things that make a difference.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  And they're actually the things that end up making you happy at the end of the day. You have to make money as a business because that's going to enable you to do all these things. But if your goal is to buy a new car, buy a new house, or do all these things, you're never going to be happy because you're going to get a new house and then your reference point's going to change and you're going to start comparing yourself to people with bigger houses. Now you're going to want a bigger house and it might drive you to do these things and you might be successful at them, but you're not going to be happy. You really have to enjoy the ride, enjoy the process.

• 49:44Chris Williamson?

  I wrote in my newsletter today, something that might relate to this. So I'll read it to you now. "Dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the happiness of pursuit." And that's Robert Sapolsky. "So true. So much of life and enjoyment is about the anticipation of things coming. In fact, the anticipation is often actually more enjoyable than the experience." Tim Ferriss used to book week-long holidays years and years in advance so he could get as much enjoyment out of the anticipation as possible. This puts a new perspective on it's not the journey, it's the destination. There actually is no destination. Each arrival at a destination simply marks the beginning of another journey. Toward the next destination. Morgan Housel told me that when he went on holiday recently, after months of planning and organizing to get there,

• 50:28Chris Williamson?

  he finally arrived and one of his first thoughts was, wow, we should totally come back here next year. It would be great if we could come back here next year. So literally during the supposed enjoyment of the destination, Morgan was already captured by the allure of the next journey. How absolutely tragic and hilarious.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of wisdom in that. You know, we're just caught up in not the right thing. And changing your focal point, we talked about next step confidence. And that's sort of the same thing, if you think about it, just applied differently here, which is the next step is how do I get better at the process? How do I become a better person? How do I become more useful? How do I? The next step is not sort of the ultimate things that those lead to. I mean, all of that will take care of itself if you love the process.

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. One of the, I can't remember if it's you.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember if it's you or Ryan Holiday who said something about, if you get bored with the process, you negatively affect your trajectory. I feel like that was you.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know all the things I've said, but that sounds like something I would say.

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, where are we? Let me find it.

• 51:42Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to be able to pull it up pretty quickly. It was you. Congratulations. You actually did, you actually did say it. But yeah, I think the most scalable way to keep on doing anything is to actually enjoy the things you're doing. And one of the most reliable ways to hate the thing you're doing is to pile tons and tons of other things on top of it. Like there's fewer more enjoyable experiences than only having a small number of things to focus on and getting really good at them. And there are fewer more unenjoyable experiences than trying to spin a shit ton of plates and not getting better at any of them.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  I think most people are in the latter category. They're not the former. We talked about this before we started recording about consistency. I think a large part of what creates golfs and outcomes or differences in outcomes between people is their ability to be consistent. The professional can do it on the days they don't feel like it, whereas the amateur only does it on the days where they feel like it. And if you have 10 or 12 plates spinning at one time, well, if I don't feel like doing that one thing that I know is important, I'm just gonna go to another plate. And it becomes like an excuse not to, you know, you procrastinate by doing more, you actually procrastinate doing the thing that you're supposed to be doing that's gonna make a difference.

• 52:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I'm thinking about how, you know, I asked you a question earlier on about prioritizing and triaging the things that you do in life. But if you have fewer things to do in life, there's less prioritization or triage needed. Well, I just have the small number of things to do. So maybe one of the best ways to actually fix the prioritization problem is to only do the number of things in life that contribute in the highest form possible. You know, the Greg McEwan thing of less but better, right? Not the trivial many, but the vital few.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  And then if you do that, you'll find you're more consistent even on the days you don't feel like it, because the distractions aren't as easily available from a project perspective.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  I've got bored with this one thing. Let me just task switch to the other. It's fine that I'll fix that problem, that difficult problem I need to overcome mañana. But for now, there's emails to be answered, or there's whatever to be done.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  I saw this thing with my son last night. He's studying. He's got exams this week. He gets to a really hard part in his science studying, and he immediately switches to studying French. And I was like, what are you doing? You have your science test tomorrow. And he's like, yeah, but you know, French, I need French too. And I'm like, what's going on here? And then we sort of rewound. And the thing that he was trying to study in science, he didn't quite understand. So what he was doing is exactly what we do as adults. I'm just gonna switch to this other project. It's a little easier. And hopefully, this problem will solve itself. But the problem doesn't solve itself. It just grows.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  Shane Parrish, ladies and gentlemen. Where should people go? They want to check out all of the stuff that I've been obsessed by from you over the last few years and also pick up the book. Where do you want them to go?

• 54:37Speaker 01

  You can go to fs.blog, you can Google Shane Parrish, or you can pick up the book Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Outcomes. Thank you so much, Chris.

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you. And go and check out The Knowledge Project. It's where I first learned about a ton of interesting guests on this podcast like Rory Sutherland. Shane, I appreciate you. I'm excited to see what you do next, man. You've been very formative in my thinking journey from total idiot to adult infant or whatever I am now. And yeah, long may you continue coming up with interesting insights.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  So happy to see your success, man. It's amazing. When I come across you online, I see how you've blown up. It just makes me feel really good.

• 55:15Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you. Thank you, man.