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Core Insights#

• Good decision-making boils down to knowing what is worth pursuing and how to get what you want. The most important thing for this is to have wisdom, turning your future hindsight into present foresight. You need to see the full breadth of life: the wisdom of work, health, family, friends, faith, and community. You need to avoid the wisdom influenced by four types of biases: emotion, ego, society, and inertia. You need to set high standards and seek the wisdom of objective laws with a mindset of self-accountability, self-awareness, self-control, and confidence.
• The most important message of this book is that there are some invisible instincts conspiring against good judgment. Your defaults will encourage you to react without reason—living unconsciously rather than deliberately.
• A good position allows you to think clearly rather than being forced by the environment to make decisions. One reason the world's best people can consistently make the right decisions is that they rarely find themselves making decisions under environmental pressure. Clear thinking is key to proper positioning, allowing you to master your environment rather than be controlled by it.
• In the space between stimulus and response, two things can happen. You can consciously pause and apply reasoning to the situation. Or you can relinquish control and execute default behaviors. We do not realize that our emotions are causing us to react, thus creating problems downstream. Therefore, the first step to improving outcomes is training ourselves to recognize the moments that require judgment first and to pause to create space for clear thinking.
• Inertia is a double-edged sword; if we have good habits, inertia can continue to reinforce those habits.
• Many inherent biological weaknesses can hinder good judgment: lack of sleep, hunger, fatigue, emotions, distractions, feelings of tension, and being in an unfamiliar environment are just a few examples. We will inevitably find ourselves in such environments from time to time. But we can implement safeguards to protect ourselves from the effects of defaults. These include prevention, successful automatic rules, creating friction before doing something poorly, setting checklists, and shifting perspectives.
• The four steps to making decisions are: define the problem, explore possible solutions, evaluate options, and finally make a judgment and execute the best option. Lastly, learn from the decisions made.
• The four steps to more effectively handle mistakes are: (1) take responsibility; (2) learn from mistakes; (3) commit to doing better; (4) do your best to make amends.
• Seneca said, “Let us prepare our minds as if we had come to the end of life.” If you want a better life, start thinking about death. Reminding yourself that you are going to die is the most important tool I have used when making significant decisions in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fears of embarrassment or failure—disappears in the face of death, leaving only what truly matters. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
• Time is the ultimate currency of life. Managing our brief time on Earth is like managing any scarce resource: you must use it wisely and prioritize what matters most.
• The older we get, the more we tend to view things like Marcus Aurelius: “When you are disturbed by an external thing, it is not the thing itself that disturbs you, but your judgment about it. You can clear it away in an instant.”

Four Default Settings or Factory Settings#

1. Emotional Default: We tend to respond to feelings rather than reason and facts.

2. Ego Default: We tend to react to anything that threatens our self-worth or our status in the group hierarchy.

3. Social Default: We tend to adhere to the norms of our larger social group.

4. Inertia Default: We develop habits and seek comfort. We tend to resist change and prefer familiar thoughts, processes, and environments.

Four Key Advantages Needed for Clear Thinking#

Self-Accountability: Hold yourself accountable for developing your abilities, managing your incompetence, and using reason to manage your behavior.

Self-Knowledge: Know your strengths and weaknesses—what you can do and what you cannot do.

Self-Control: Control your fears, desires, and emotions.

Confidence: Believe in your abilities and your value to others.

The Most Important and the Unimportant#

Say something to those you care about now, whether it’s expressing gratitude, asking for forgiveness, or seeking information.

Spend the most time with your children.

Enjoy the small joys of each day rather than waiting for “big items” to make you happy.

Do work that you love.

Choose your partner carefully, don’t rush.

No one says it’s important to be as wealthy as those around you.

No one says you should choose your career based on income potential.

No one says they regret not getting revenge on those who despised them.

Other Insights#

◆ Preface

That night, I began asking myself some questions that I would continue to explore over the next decade. How can I reason better? Why do people make poor decisions? Why do some people consistently get better results than others who have the same information? How can I make the right judgments more often in life-threatening situations and reduce the likelihood of bad outcomes?
To achieve the results we desire, we must do two things. First, we must create space for reasoning in our thoughts, feelings, and actions; second, we must consciously use that space to think clearly. Once you master this skill, you will find that you have an unstoppable advantage.
I will turn to perhaps the most important question: What is your primary goal? If it is not for the right results, then all successful execution in the world is worthless, but how do you decide what the right result is?
If my life has a motto, it is “Master what others have already mastered best,” and this book is a tribute to that belief. I have done my best to credit these ideas to those who deserve praise. I may have missed some, for which I apologize. When you put things into practice, they become part of you. For twenty years, I have had thousands of conversations with the best people in the world, and I have read countless books, making it difficult to remember where everything comes from. Most of it is deeply rooted in my subconscious. It can be safely said that anything useful in this book is someone else's idea; my main contribution is embedding what I learned from predecessors for the world to use.
◆ Introduction: The Power of Clear Thinking in Ordinary Moments
The enemies of clear thinking—our more primitive parts of nature—make it difficult for us to see what is happening, instead making our lives more challenging. When we react emotionally to colleagues in meetings, we must compensate. When we make decisions to prove ourselves right rather than to achieve the best possible outcome, we end up leaving a mess to clean up. If we start arguing with our partner on a Friday, the entire weekend could be lost. No wonder we have less energy, more stress, and always feel busy.
◆ Part 1: The Enemies of Clear Thinking
Never forget that your subconscious is smarter, faster, and more powerful than you. It may even control you.
◆ Chapter 1.1: Thinking Badly—Or Not Thinking at All?
Conscious processing takes time and energy. Evolution favors stimulus-response shortcuts because they benefit the group: they enhance group adaptability, survival, and reproduction. As humans continue to thrive in groups, hierarchies evolve from chaos to order, giving us all a place. Territory is our way of trying to avoid fighting with others—if you leave my territory, I won’t interfere with yours. Self-protection means we choose survival over rules, norms, or customs.
◆ Chapter 1.2: The Emotion Default
"The Godfather" is one of my favorite movies, partly because it contains many business lessons. Vito Corleone, the head of the Corleone crime family, is a master of patience and discipline. Because his flaws are under control, he never reacts without reasoning, and when he does react, his response is ruthlessly effective.
Vito's eldest son, Santino, also known as Sonny, is Vito's heir; however, unlike his father, Sonny is vengeful, impulsive, and passionate. He easily flies into a rage, reacting first and reasoning later. His non-compulsory errors ensure that he is always playing life the hard way.
Anger at competitors can prevent you from doing what is best for yourself. Fear of missing out can prompt you to stop thinking and act impulsively. Anger at criticism can lead you to lash out defensively, alienating potential allies. Such examples are countless.
Emotions can even make us act foolishly, distancing us from clear thinking. However, they often receive help. Later, we will see many inherent biological weaknesses that make us more susceptible to emotional presets: lack of sleep, hunger, fatigue, emotions, distractions, tension, haste, and being in an unfamiliar environment. If you find yourself in any of these situations, be sure to stay vigilant! The emotional default is likely to dominate the show. We will also explore safeguards that can protect you in such situations.
◆ Chapter 1.3: The Ego Default
In the case of Carlo, being reminded of his low status in the family combined with his desire to defend his self-image (“I can do more than just work, but they won’t give me more”) led him to ultimately betray. Carlo never intended to dismantle the Corleone family from within. He just wanted a role that matched his self-perception. The anger of being belittled daily triggered a chain reaction he never anticipated.
Our ego tempts us to think we are more important than we are. If left unchecked, it can turn confidence into overconfidence or even arrogance. We gain a little knowledge on the internet, and suddenly we are filled with hubris. Everything seems easy. Thus, we risk things we may not understand we are risking. However, if we want to achieve the results we desire, we must resist this unearned confidence.
Confidence does not reduce the likelihood of bad outcomes, nor does it increase the likelihood of good outcomes; it merely blinds us to risks. The ego also makes us more concerned with maintaining or enhancing our perceived status in the social hierarchy rather than expanding our knowledge or skills.
One reason people find it hard to delegate to others at work is that making them rely on us for every decision makes us feel important and indispensable. The more people depend on us, the more powerful we feel. However, this position often backfires. Slowly, and then suddenly, we become prisoners of the environment we have created; maintaining a place requires increasingly more effort, at which point we approach the limits of violence. 【】 It’s just a matter of time before things break.
Most people go through life thinking they are right. Those who do not see things their way are wrong. [2] We misunderstand what the world we hope for looks like versus what it actually is.
◆ Chapter 1.4: The Social Default
The social default makes us fear being left out, ridiculed, or seen as fools. In the minds of most people, this fear of losing social capital outweighs any potential benefits of deviating from social norms, leading them to conform.
If you are doing indiscriminate work, the only way to surpass others is to work harder than they do. Imagine a team of ditch diggers working with their hands. The almost imperceptible small changes in the amount of soil moved per hour. Your work is no different from that of the person next to you. The only way to move more dirt is to dig longer. In this model, it seems crazy for the diggers to spend a week experimenting and inventing shovels. They not only look like adventurous fools, but their cumulative output lags behind every day they don’t dig. Only when the shovel appears can others see its advantages. Success requires shamelessness. Failure does too.
We easily feel comforted by others agreeing with our views. As legendary investor Warren Buffett pointed out, “In fact, whether others agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. If your facts and reasoning are correct, you are right.”
If you find yourself struggling to fit in, if you often fear disappointing others, if you fear being an outsider, or if the threat of ridicule fills you with dread, then beware! The social default is at play.
◆ Chapter 1.5: The Inertia Default
Inertia leads us to do things that do not get us what we want. It operates in our subconscious, largely unnoticed until its effects become too difficult to resist. Later, I will discuss more examples of inertia defaults at work and how to combat them. For now, keep in mind the following: if you find yourself biting your tongue in a team, if you find yourself or your team resisting change, or continuing to do something a certain way simply because that’s how you’ve always done it—be vigilant! The inertia default is likely at work.
◆ Chapter 1.6: Default to Clarity
You will unconsciously adopt the habits of those around you, making it easier or harder to achieve your goals. The longer you spend time with others, the more likely you are to start thinking and acting like them.
◆ Part 2: Building Strength
Our default behaviors eliminate deeply rooted biological tendencies—our self-protective tendencies, the tendency to acknowledge and maintain social hierarchies, and the tendency to defend ourselves and our territory. We cannot simply know of these tendencies' existence and then eliminate them. Instead, the feeling that willpower is all that is needed to eliminate these forces is one of the tricks they use to keep us under their control.
To stop our defaults from hindering good judgment, we need to harness equally powerful biological forces. We need to take the same forces that defaults use to destroy us and turn them into our advantages. The most significant of these is inertia.
Inertia is a double-edged sword. As we saw earlier, inertia is a tendency to maintain the status quo. If the status quo is suboptimal or dysfunctional, inertia can work against us. But the status quo is not necessarily suboptimal. If you train yourself to think, feel, and act in ways that promote your most important goals, in other words, if you build strength, then inertia can become an almost unstoppable force that unleashes your potential.
Establishing rituals is key to creating positive inertia. Rituals help focus attention on things beyond the present moment. They can be simple, like pausing briefly before responding to someone’s point in a work debate. A former mentor of mine once told me, “When someone belittles you in a meeting, take a deep breath before you speak and notice how often you change what you were about to say.”
◆ Chapter 2.1: Self-Accountability
When the results of people's actions are inconsistent with their self-perception, they tend to isolate their self by blaming others or unfavorable circumstances. Psychologists even have a term for this tendency. They call it self-serving bias, a habit of evaluating things in a way that protects or enhances self-image. Statements like “That was a good idea, just poorly executed,” “We did our best,” or “We shouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place” are often manifestations of this bias.
If you do not accept the way the world truly operates, your time and energy will be spent proving how right you are. When the expected outcomes do not materialize, people easily blame the environment or others. I call this the correct side of the wrong. You focus on your vanity rather than the outcome.
Self-accountability is the realization that even if you cannot control everything, you have the power to control your reactions to everything. It is a mindset that empowers you to act rather than merely react to whatever life throws at you. It transforms obstacles into opportunities for learning and growth. It means recognizing that how you respond to difficulties is more important to your happiness than the difficulties themselves. It means understanding that the best approach is often to accept reality and then move forward.
◆ Chapter 2.2: Self-Knowledge
Self-knowledge is knowing your strengths and weaknesses. You must know what you can do and what you cannot do; your abilities and limitations, your strengths and weaknesses, what you can control and what you cannot. You know what you know, and what you do not know. And you know you have cognitive blind spots—some things you do not know that you do not know about them—Donald Rumsfeld famously referred to as “unknown unknowns.”
At dinner one day, Charlie Munger elaborated on the same point my real estate investor friend made. He said, “When you play a game, if others have talent and you do not, you will lose. You must find out where your strengths lie and stick to them.”
◆ Chapter 2.3: Self-Control
Emotions are an unavoidable part of human life. Mammals like us have evolved to respond quickly to immediate environmental threats and opportunities—fear is a response to threats, pleasure is a response to social relationship experiences, and sadness is a response to loss. We cannot eliminate these physiological responses or the conditions that trigger them. We can only manage how we respond to them.
A significant part of achieving success is having the self-discipline to do whatever needs to be done, regardless of whether you feel like doing it at the time. In the long run, the intensity of emotions is far less important than the consistency of discipline. Inspiration and excitement may propel you forward, but persistence and routine are what keep you going until you reach your goals. Anyone can maintain excitement for a few minutes, but the longer a project lasts, the fewer people can maintain that excitement. The most successful people have the self-discipline to keep going regardless. While it may not always be exciting, they still show up.
◆ Chapter 2.4: Self-Confidence
Confidence is believing in your abilities and your value to others.
You need confidence to think independently and to stand firm in the face of social pressure, ego, inertia, or emotions. You need it to understand that not all results are immediate and to focus on doing those things that will ultimately earn them.
Confidence enhances resilience after negative feedback and adaptability in the face of changing environments. You know what your abilities are and how they add value, regardless of whether others appreciate them. If you have built healthy self-confidence, it will help you navigate any challenges and difficulties that come your way.
Confidence without humility is often the same as overconfidence—a weakness rather than a strength. Confident people have the ability to acknowledge their weaknesses and shortcomings, recognize that others may do some things better than they do, and seek help when needed.
The internet makes it easy for us to find people who agree with us, no matter what we believe. Want to deny the Holocaust? There’s a group that believes vaccines cause autism? Many people do too. Hell, we still have a flat Earth society with members all over the globe.
◆ Chapter 2.6: Setting the Standards
The first step to establishing any advantage is to raise the standards you hold yourself to, which is a practical matter of examining the people and practices that fill your daily environment.
The most successful people have the highest standards, not just for others but for themselves. For example, I once was sent to work in a remote location, and I remember standing up in a meeting to explain how some aspects of an operation worked. After a while, another person recognized as an expert in that area interrupted me, asking me to stop until I knew what I was talking about. Then he stood up and explained it in more detail than I could have imagined. After the meeting, I went to his office to talk with him. He explained that while he did not know where I came from, the standard here was not to speak unless you knew what you were talking about.
The best teachers have higher expectations for their students and themselves. More often than not, students rise to meet those expectations. The best leaders have higher expectations for their employees; they hold their employees to the same standards they hold themselves—standards higher than most people imagine.
Working directly with masters is the best education; it is the most reliable way to raise standards. Their excellence demands your excellence. But most of us are not lucky enough to have such opportunities. However, not everything is lost. If you do not have the chance to work directly with masters, you can still raise the standards of those around you by reading about them and their work.
◆ Chapter 2.7: Exemplars + Practice
When you choose the right role models—those with standards higher than yours—you can surpass the standards you inherited from your parents, friends, and acquaintances. Your examples tell you what your standards should be. As Peter Kaufman once told me, “Nothing is more effective than learning from and adopting the good examples of others to achieve success in life.”
One of my role models is Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's billionaire business partner. He raised the standard I hold for my opinions. One evening at dinner, he commented, “I never allow myself to express an opinion on anything unless I understand the other side's argument better than they do.”
If your hero is Tobi Lütke, the founder of one of the most successful companies in world history, Shopify, you can find countless interviews with him online. You can sit at the feet of a master and learn how he thinks, how he makes decisions, and how he runs his company. The same goes for Peter D. Kaufman, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Tom Brady, Simone Biles, Serena Williams, or Katie Ledecky.
You can choose from historical greats: Richard Feynman, George Washington, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, Coco Chanel, Charlie Munger, Marie Curie, Marcus Aurelius. They are all ready to accept your invitation to become your personal board of directors. All you need to do is gather the best of them together and unify them in your mind. As Montaigne said, “I have collected a garland of other people's flowers; nothing in it is mine except the string that ties them together.”
If you imagine your role models watching you, you will tend to do all the things you know they would want you to do and avoid those you know would hinder you.
◆ Chapter 3.1: Knowing Your Weaknesses
Some of our weaknesses are limitations on what we can know, our blind spots. We are all familiar with perceptual blind spots—we cannot see things accurately at a certain distance or in insufficient light. We also have deaf spots; we cannot hear sounds below a certain volume or above a certain pitch.
We cannot see our weaknesses for three main reasons.
First, it is difficult to detect these flaws because they are part of how we are accustomed to thinking, feeling, and behaving. Flawed behaviors become entrenched through a long process of habit formation. These flaws are part of us, even if they do not align with who we want to be.
Second, seeing our flaws can hurt our self-esteem, especially when these flaws are deeply ingrained behaviors. They differ from flaws like lacking a technical skill because they feel like a referendum on how we perceive ourselves. Our self-image is territorial and tends to ignore information that challenges it.
Third, our perspective is limited. It is hard to understand a system of which we are a part. Just as you look back at your sixteen-year-old self and wonder what you were thinking, your future self will look back at your present self and think the same thing. Your present self is blind to your future self.
◆ Chapter 3.2: Protecting Yourself with Safeguards
A simple example. Suppose you want to start eating healthier. If you live in an unhealthy environment, say, with your pantry and refrigerator full of junk food, you make this task much harder. Clearing all junk food from your home is a safeguard. It can protect you from impulsively tearing open a bag of chips when you feel hungry or bored. Of course, you can still go to the store to buy chips, but that’s a big effort. You have to think, plan, and act. While doing all this, you may think better about your options and choose to eat something more aligned with your health goals.
Clearing all junk food from your home is an example of a protective strategy: increasing the amount of “friction” required to do something contrary to your long-term goals. However, there are many safety strategies. My favorite methods include prevention, setting rules for yourself, making lists, changing your reference frame, and making the invisible visible. Let’s discuss each strategy.
We are also inherently inclined to fit in with others. Think about how many times you have had a drink at a social event when you really just wanted water. Your friends or colleagues ordered a drink first, say, and you felt guilty for not ordering one too. So, you ordered a drink as well, compromising on what you truly wanted.
Similarly, suppose your goal is to drink less soda. 【】 Instead of deciding on a case-by-case basis whether to have a soda—this requires a lot of effort and is easy to get wrong—set a rule. For example, “I only drink soda at dinner on Fridays,” or “I don’t drink soda at all.” Having a rule means you do not have to make a decision at every meal. The execution path is short and not easily mistaken.
A psychological quirk is that people generally do not argue with your personal rules. They simply accept them as characteristics of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules.
When you look back, I gave one of my most important things, which I wanted to do most, to myself. Emails, the days I feared the most, brought out my most energetic and creative self. Many of us do this with our partners. When we finish everything we need to do during a long day, we are exhausted. And this is the time we give to our spouses, the most important people in our lives!
The way to break bad habits is to make the behavior you want the default behavior. To ensure I smoothly completed reports, I told my colleagues that before submitting a report, if they saw me checking emails before 11 AM, I would treat them to lunch. My competitiveness and not wanting to buy them lunch created enough friction that the first thing I did in the morning was not check it.
◆ Part 4: Decisions: Clear Thinking in Action
Decisions themselves should represent the outcome of the decision-making process. This process is about weighing your options with the aim of choosing the best one, consisting of four stages: defining the problem, exploring possible solutions, evaluating options, and finally making a judgment and executing the best option.
◆ Chapter 4.6: Learn from Your Decisions
Clearly, we all want good outcomes, but as we have seen, good decisions can have bad outcomes, and bad decisions can have good outcomes. Evaluating our or others' decisions based on outcomes (or our feelings about the outcomes) fails to distinguish luck from skill and control. Because of this, committing to outcomes does not help us improve. Outcomes, in fact, lead to stagnation.
A bad process will never yield a good decision. Of course, it may lead to a good outcome, but that is different from making a good decision. Outcomes are influenced by luck to some extent, both good and bad. Achieving the right outcome for the wrong reasons does not depend on smarts or skill, but merely on luck.
Principle of Transparency: Make your decision-making process as clear and visible as possible and open to scrutiny.
Safeguards: Record your thoughts when making decisions. Do not rely on your memory afterward. Trying to recall what you knew and thought when making a decision is a fool's game.
The third benefit of writing down your thoughts is that it allows others to see your thoughts, which are primarily invisible. If they can see it, they can check it for errors and provide a different perspective that you might otherwise be blind to. If you cannot easily explain your thoughts to others (or yourself), it indicates that you have not fully grasped the matter and need to dig deeper and gather more information.
◆ Chapter 5.1: Dickens’s Hidden Lesson
After stepping away for a while, he concluded that he had been trying to win the wrong game. His goals were to gain wealth, power, and prestige—goals many tell us to pursue. He prioritized these goals and relentlessly pursued them. In the end, he got what he thought he wanted. But it left him feeling empty. He got what he wanted, but at the cost of losing meaningful relationships, and he began to realize that this was what truly mattered. Unlike Scrooge, he did not get a second chance.
I know many successful people whose lives I do not want to have. They have wisdom, they have drive, they have opportunities, and they have the means to leverage it all. But they also miss out on other things. They know how to get what they want, but what they want is not worth wanting. In fact, what they want ultimately ruins their lives. They overlook what Scrooge gained at the turning point of his story—the factor that differentiates the masses of the unhappy from the few who are happy.
◆ Chapter 5.3: Memento Mori
Now, think deeply. What does your imagined life look like? Who are the people in it? How have you influenced them? What have you done for them? How do you make them feel? What have you achieved? What possessions do you have? In your last days, what matters most? What seems unimportant? What memories do you cherish? What do you regret? What do your friends say about you? What about your family?
Shifting our perspective to the end of life can help us gain insight into what truly matters. It can help us become wiser. When we look back at the present through the lens of life's end, the fears and desires that occupy our attention are pushed aside, making room for things that have greater significance for our overall lives. Steve Jobs said:
Reminding yourself that you are going to die is the most important tool I have used when making significant decisions in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fears of embarrassment or failure—disappears in the face of death, leaving only what truly matters. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Jobs had a daily ritual. Every morning, he would ask himself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” [3] He said that whenever the answer was “no” for many consecutive days, he knew he needed to make a change. At some point in my life, I began to perform the same ritual. This was also part of the reason I ultimately decided to leave the CIA. We all have bad days, but when the answer to Job's question is “no” day after day, week after week, it is time to make a change.
When you do this exercise, you may think of your relationships. Perhaps you and your partner are crying on the couch, spending a romantic weekend together, or holding hands while walking on the beach. Maybe it’s your wedding or the pure joy you experienced with your children. Perhaps it’s the times you spent with friends or when they were there for you.
Jeff Bezos used a similar thought experiment:
I want to live to 80 and then say, “Well, now that I look back on my life, I want to minimize my regrets.” . . . I know that when I’m 80, I won’t regret having tried (Amazon). I won’t regret having tried to be part of this thing called the internet, which I thought would be a real big deal. I know that if I fail, I won’t regret it, but I know one thing I might regret is never having tried. I know that this thing haunts me every day, so when I think about it, it’s a very easy decision. [4]
The importance of possessions lies less in their intrinsic value than in the significance they can bring. I guess in this thought exercise, you did not think of your house as an investment. If it comes to mind, it might be in the context of family dinners, laughter, tears, gatherings, and the marks on the doorframe recording your children's heights at each age.
You may also remember times when you did not become the person you wanted to be—we all have had experiences like that. Perhaps you sent an inappropriate email, or you lost your temper and yelled at someone you love. Maybe there was a time you said something thoughtless just to elicit a reaction from others because you did not know how, in that moment, to tell them you loved them or how scared you were. Or perhaps someone said they needed you, and you were too busy with your own things to pay attention.
You might think about the impact or lack thereof you have had on your community, your city, your country, or the world. You might think about your health. Have you done everything you can to keep your body alive to eighty, ninety, or a hundred? Have you taken care of yourself so you can take care of others?
The decisive moments we think of, like promotions or buying a new house, have less impact on life satisfaction than the accumulation of those seemingly unimportant small moments. Ultimately, the everyday moments matter more than the big prizes. In the bright spotlight, it’s the small joys.
◆ Chapter 5.4: Life Lessons from Death
For example, after doing this thought experiment, I began to eat better, sleep more, and exercise regularly. Why? Because to live to ninety and do all the things I want to do, I need to be healthy. Similarly, after doing this thought experiment, it became clear that I wanted to be a more present father. Therefore, I reduced the time I spent on my phone around my children and created some routines to connect with them: every day when they come home, we sit on the couch and talk about their day at school. No doubt, these are small changes, but they have a significant impact on me and the important people in my life.
Smart people know what is truly valuable. They are more aware than anyone that life is lived only once, with no drafts, no do-overs, and no restarting from an earlier save point. They do not waste time chasing trivial ambitions. They know what true wealth consists of, and they are fully committed to the process of acquiring it—regardless of what others think or say.
Sometimes, the price of being smart is that others see you as a fool. It’s no wonder: fools cannot see what smart people do. Wise people see the full breadth of life: work, health, family, friends, faith, and community. They do not focus solely on one part while excluding others. Instead, they know how to coordinate the various parts of life and pursue each part in proportion to the whole. They understand that achieving harmony in this way makes life meaningful, admirable, and beautiful.
If you want to cultivate good judgment, first ask two questions: “What is the life I want? Is what I want truly worth wanting?” Unless you answer the second question, all the decision-making advice in the world will not help you much. Knowing how to get what you want is of no benefit if those things do not bring you happiness, no matter how successful you are in gaining power, prestige, or money if in the end you wish you could do it all over again.
◆ Conclusion: The Value of Clear Thinking
Good judgment is expensive, but bad judgment can cost you a fortune.
The most important message of this book is that there are some invisible instincts conspiring against good judgment. Your defaults will encourage you to react without reason—living unconsciously rather than deliberately.
When you revert to defaults, you are engaging in a game you cannot win. When you live on autopilot, you will get bad outcomes. You make things worse. The things you say cannot be taken back, and the things you do cannot be undone. You may achieve the immediate goals in front of you, but you do not realize you have made achieving the ultimate goals harder. All of this happens without realizing you were exercising judgment in the first place.
Most books about thinking focus only on being more rational. They overlook a fundamental issue: most judgment errors occur when we do not realize we should be making judgments. They happen because our subconscious drives our behavior and excludes us from the process of deciding what we should do. You do not consciously choose to argue with your partner, but you find yourself saying hurtful things that cannot be taken back. You do not consciously pursue money and status at the expense of family, but you find yourself spending less and less time with the most important people in your life. You do not consciously defend your ideas, but you find yourself harboring resentment toward anyone who criticizes you.
The key to getting what you want out of life is to recognize how the world works and align yourself with it. People often believe the world should operate differently, and when they do not get the results they want, they try to escape responsibility by blaming others or their environment. [1] Avoiding responsibility is a recipe for suffering, the exact opposite of what is needed to cultivate good judgment.
It turns out that improving your judgment is less about accumulating tools to enhance your rationality and more about implementing safeguards that make the desired path the path of least resistance. It is about designing systems that work for you at your best and for you at your worst. These systems will not eliminate defaults, but they can help you recognize when they are operating.
Managing your defaults requires more than just willpower. Defaults operate at our subconscious level, so overcoming them requires harnessing equally powerful forces to pull your subconscious in the right direction: habits, rules, and environments. Overriding defaults requires implementing safeguards that make the invisible visible and prevent you from acting prematurely. It requires cultivating habits of thinking responsibility, knowledge, discipline, and confidence that keep you on the right track and help you stay there.
The small improvements you make in judgment will only be felt until they become large enough to be impossible to ignore. Gradually, as improvements accumulate, you will notice that you spend less time fixing problems that should not have existed in the first place. You will notice that the various parts of your life harmoniously blend together, and you will notice that your stress and anxiety decrease while your happiness increases.
Good judgment cannot be taught, but it can be learned.