Secrets of "Clear Thinking"

The post says clear thinking begins by separating decisions from outcomes. It then summarizes habits from Shane Parrish’s book that help people notice emotional, ego, social, and inertia defaults, define problems carefully, compare options, and decide with better information.

Reading notes

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• Decisions should be judged apart from their outcomes, because good outcomes can come from bad decisions and bad outcomes can come from good decisions.
• Self-serving bias leads people to credit themselves for good results and blame outside factors for bad ones.
• Hunger, thirst, sleep deprivation, and other basic needs affect judgment.
• Emotional, ego, social, and inertia defaults work against clear thinking.
• Awareness of these defaults helps people address them, even if emotional responses cannot be turned off.
• People can create automatic rules to stop recurring mistakes, such as refusing to guess estimates on the spot during calls.
• Checklists reduce human error and help teams follow the steps needed for safe deployment.
• Writing down the problem makes it visible and helps make sure it is understood before moving on.
• In teams, one meeting can be for problem definition and another for solutions.
• Option evaluation should push for more possibilities, ask what happens next, consider removing one option, consider combining options, and think about opportunity cost.
• Useful information should come unfiltered and as close to the source as possible, because different groups have different incentives.
• New information gathering should stop when waiting starts to have negative consequences, when no useful information appears, or when the right option is already clear.
• Decisions should be assessed by how reversible they are and how serious their consequences are.
• Low-cost, low-consequence reversible decisions should be made ASAP, while high-cost or irreversible ones should be made ALAP.
• A margin of safety helps when the downside of being wrong is high, such as in server capacity planning.
• A decision is the judgment that a certain option is the best one.
• Teams should document decisions clearly so people can revisit earlier choices and understand them.
• The post ends by saying decision-making shapes how we operate and that improving it affects many parts of life.