Author: Shane Parrish

Notes:

• Reacting without reasoning → Defaulting, Instinct
• Most prominent instincts/defaults
  1. Emotion Default → Feelings > Facts
  2. Ego Default → Threaten of self-worth or group hierarchy position
  3. Social Default → Conform
  4. Inertia → Habits and change resistance
• Build strengths to overcome inertia, establish rituals to create positive inertia
• Four key strengths
  1. Self-accountability
  2. Self-knowledge
  3. Self-control
  4. Self-confidence
• Raise your standards by looking around at people and practices around your day-to-day environment
  • Choose the right exemplars and practice imitating them in certain ways
• Managing weakness
  • Understand your blind spots
  • Protect yourself with safeguards: Prevention, Automatic Rules, Friction, Guardrails, Perspective Shifting
  • Handle mistakes
    1. Accept responsibility
    2. Learn from mistake
    3. Commit to doing better
    4. Repair the damage as best you can
• Decision Making Process
  1. Define the problem
     • Take resp for defining, don’t let others define it for you
     • Do the work to understand it
     • Don’t use jargon to describe
     • Identify root cause of problem, don’t work on symptoms → Test of time
     • Build a problem-solution firewall (separate the phases)
     • Write down your problem definition and iterate
  2. Explore possible solutions
     • Beyond Ideal: Imagine what could go wrong and how you will overcome them
     • Second-Level Thinking: “And then what?”
     • Explore at least 3 solutions
       • Imagine one of the binary option is off the table → tool to find new options
     • Both-And: Try finding combinations of the binary
     • Consider opportunity cost → Compared to what, and then what, at expense of what?
  3. Evaluate the options
     • Know what you are looking for before sorting through data
     • Get High Fidelity info - close to source and unfiltered
     • Run experiments
     • Evaluate motivation and incentives of sources
     • Don’t ask what they think, ask how they think
     • Get High Expertise info - very knowledgeable in specific area or knowledge and exp in many areas
  4. Do It
     • Consider consequential and reversibility of actions
     • If cost to undo is low, act ASAP
     • If cost to undo is high, decide as last as possible
     • Stop gathering info and execute decision when: Stop gathering useful info, First lose an Opportunity (FLOp), Know something that makes it evident
  • Margin of safety
    • Often sufficient when double the worst-case scenario
    • Run small tests first
    • “Live” with a decision before committing publicly
    • Set up fail-safes to determine in advance what you’ll do when you hit a specific time/amount/circumstance + Empower others to run fail-safes + Tie your hands to ensure execution
  • Learn from your decisions
    • Examine the process of decision, not outcome
    • Make decision making process as visible as possible + Keep good records
• Wanting what matters (right goals, not process)
  • Memento Mori - Shifting perspective to looking back at your life