Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish — Notes

Sohil Gupta

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19 min read

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Sep 7, 2024

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Top Quotes

1. Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
   — WALTER LIPPMANN, The Stakes of Diplomacy
2. “The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.” — Warren Buffett
3. More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence.
4. Confident people take their feedback from reality, not popular opinion.
5. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends
6. Never say yes to something important without thinking it over for a day.
7. It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis . . . that you will grow to be like them. . . . Place an extinguished piece of coal next to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite. . . . Remember that if you consort with someone covered in dirt you can hardly avoid getting a little grimy yourself.
   — EPICTETUS, Discourses
8. Our surroundings influence us — both our physical environment and the people around us. Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people. It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.
9. Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions.
10. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions. They have a winning standard of performance before they are winners. — Bill Walsh
11. Show me your role models and I’ll show you your future.
12. No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others — Peter Kaufman

CHAPTER 1.1
Thinking Badly — or Not Thinking at All?

1. Rationality is wasted if you don’t know when to use it.
2. In the space between stimulus and response, one of two things can happen. You can consciously pause and apply reason to the situation. Or you can cede control and execute a default behavior.

The High Cost of Losing Control

1. Reacting without reasoning makes every situation worse.

Biological Instincts

1. Your mind is doing exactly what biology programmed it to do: act quickly and efficiently in response to threats, without wasting valuable time thinking.
2. This idea that we’re naturally prone to defend our territory is an idea I came across through Robert Ardrey’s book The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations, as well as conversations with various people. While animals instinctively mark and defend their territory, I believe this biological instinct manifests itself in humans in a deeper and more nuanced way. We instinctively respond when people encroach on not only our physical territory but also our self-image. Since we wrap our identity into our jobs, when someone criticizes you at work, it’s akin to an animal walking into your territory. Certain bad actors use this very fact to get you off your game — they’ll criticize you or your role at the office in order to nudge you into reacting without reasoning.
3. We’re naturally wired to organize the world into a hierarchy. We do this to help make sense of the world, maintain our beliefs, and generally feel better.
4. We’re self-preserving. Most of us would never intentionally push someone else down to get where we want to go
5. Conscious processing takes both time and energy. Evolution favored stimulus-response shortcuts because they’re advantageous for the group: they enhance group fitness, group survival, and reproduction. As humans continued flourishing in groups, hierarchies developed, creating order out of chaos and giving us all a place. Territory is how we tried to avoid fighting others — you stay out of my territory, I’ll stay out of yours. And self-preservation means we choose survival over rules, norms, or customs.
6. In today’s world, basic survival is no longer in question. The very tendencies that once served us now often act as an anchor holding us in place, weakening our position, and making things harder than they need to be.

Knowing Your Defaults

1. The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts.
2. The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy.
3. The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group.
4. The inertia default: we’re habit forming and comfort seeking. We tend to resist change, and to prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.
5. There are no hard edges between defaults; they often bleed into one another. Each on their own is enough to cause unforced errors, but when they act together, things quickly go from bad to worse.
6. People who master their defaults get the best real-world results. It’s not that they don’t have a temper or an ego, they just know how to control both rather than be controlled by them. With the ability to think clearly in ordinary moments today, they consistently put themselves in a good position for tomorrow.

CHAPTER 1.2
The Emotion Default

From Emotion to Action

1. There’s a bit of Sonny in each of us. You experience anger, fear, or some other emotion, and feel compelled to act immediately. But in these moments, the action you’re pushed toward rarely serves you.
2. Anger at a rival prevents you from doing what’s in your own best interest. Fear of losing an opportunity pushes you to cut thinking short and act impulsively. Outrage at a criticism causes you to lash out in defense, alienating potential allies. The list goes on.
3. Emotions can multiply all of your progress by zero. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve thought about or worked at something, it can all be undone in an instant. No one is immune.
4. Be wary of sleep deprivation, hunger, fatigue, heightened emotions, distractions, the stress of feeling rushed, and unfamiliar surroundings. These conditions can impair your judgment, as emotions often take the lead in such scenarios.

CHAPTER 1.3
The Ego Default

Appearing Successful vs. Being Successful

1. Unearned knowledge rushes us to judgment. “I’ve got this,” we think. We convince ourselves that low-chance events are zero-chance events and think only of best-case outcomes. We feel immune to bad luck — to the bad things that happen to other people, because of our newfound (and false) sense of confidence. This idea of rushing to judgment with unearned knowledge is one I got from my friend Morgan Housel in “History’s Seductive Beliefs,” Collab (blog), Collaborative Fund, September 21, 2021, https://www.collabfund.com/blog/historys-seductive-beliefs/

Feeling Right over Being Right

1. Our desire to feel right overpowers our desire to be right.
2. The ego default urges us to feel right at the expense of being right.
3. We mistake how we want the world to be with how it actually is.
4. We mistake how we want the world to work for how it does work.
5. If you find yourself expending tremendous energy on how you are seen, if you often feel your pride being wounded, if you find yourself reading an article or two on a subject and thinking you’re an expert, if you always try to prove you’re right and have difficulty admitting mistakes, if you have a hard time saying “I don’t know,” or if you’re frequently envious of others or feel as though you’re never given the recognition you deserve — be on guard! Your ego is in charge.

CHAPTER 1.4
The Social Default

1. Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
   — WALTER LIPPMANN, The Stakes of Diplomacy
2. The social default inspires conformity. It coaxes us to fall in line with an idea or behavior simply because other people do. It embodies what the term “social pressure” refers to: wanting to belong to the crowd, fear of being an outsider, fear of being scorned, fear of disappointing other people.
3. Survival inside the tribe was hard but survival outside the tribe was impossible. Because we needed the group, our individual interests became secondary to the group interests.
4. The social rewards for going with the crowd are felt long before the benefits of going against it are gained.
5. The social default encourages us to outsource our thoughts, beliefs, and outcomes to others.
6. Paul Graham, “The Four Quadrants of Conformism,” July 2020, http://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html.
7. One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.
8. To be a successful scientist, for example, it’s not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong
9. any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. And when a process makes a lot of mistakes, you need to leave a margin for error. Which in this case means you need to ban fewer ideas than you’d like to. But that’s hard for the aggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoy seeing people punished, as they have since they were children, and partly because they compete with one another. Enforcers of orthodoxy can’t allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned.

Lemmings Rarely Make History

1. The social default makes us fear being snubbed, ridiculed, and treated like an idiot. In most people’s minds, this fear of losing social capital outweighs any potential upsides of deviating from the social norm and disposes them to accept it.
2. Success requires shamelessness. So too does failure
3. Our desire to fit in often overpowers our desire for a better outcome.
4. The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.
5. if you find yourself exerting energy to fit in with a crowd, if you’re frequently fearful of disappointing other people, if you’re afraid of being an outsider, or if the threat of scorn fills you with dread, then beware! The social default is in charge.

CHAPTER 1.5
The Inertia Default

1. The great enemy of any attempt to change men’s habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by inertia.
   — EDWARD L. BERNAYS, Propaganda
2. Starting something is hard but so too is stopping something.
3. The “zone of average” is a dangerous place when it comes to inertia. It’s the point where things are working well enough that we don’t feel the need to make any changes. We hope things will magically improve. Of course, they rarely do.

Doubling Down When You’re Wrong

1. Public statements can create inertia. Putting something on the record establishes expectations along with social pressure to meet those expectations.
2. Inertia also prevents us from doing hard things. The longer we avoid the hard thing we know we should do, the harder it becomes to do. Avoiding conflict is comfortable and easy. The longer we avoid the conflict, however, the more necessary it becomes to continue avoiding it. What starts out as avoiding a small but difficult conversation quickly grows into avoiding a large and seemingly impossible one. The weight of what we avoid eventually affects our relationship.
3. Groups create inertia of their own. They tend to value consistency over effectiveness, and reward people for maintaining the status quo. Inertia makes deviating from group norms difficult. The threat of standing out in a negative way too often keeps people in line. As a result, group dynamics end up favoring people who don’t deviate from the defaults.

CHAPTER 1.6
Default to Clarity

1. A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.
   — ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
2. The people with the best defaults are typically the ones with the best environment.
3. Sometimes it’s part of a deliberate strategy, and sometimes it’s just plain luck.
4. The way to improve your defaults isn’t by willpower but by creating an intentional environment where your desired behavior becomes the default behavior.
5. Joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behavior is an effective way to create an intentional environment. If you want to read more, join a book club. If you want to run more, join a running club. If you want to exercise more, hire a trainer. Your chosen environment, rather than your willpower alone, will help nudge you toward the best choices.

PART 2
BUILDING STRENGTH

1. Criticizing others is easier than coming to know yourself.
   — BRUCE LEE
2. Our defaults work off deeply ingrained biological tendencies — our tendencies for self-preservation, for recognizing and maintaining social hierarchies, and for defending ourselves and our territory. We can’t simply know these tendencies exist and then will them out of existence. On the contrary, the feeling that willpower is all it takes to remove these forces is one of the tricks they use to keep us under their control.
3. To stop our defaults from impeding good judgment, we need to harness equally powerful biological forces. We need to take the same forces that the defaults would use to ruin us and turn them to our advantage. Chief among them is the force of inertia.

CHAPTER 2.1
Self-Accountability

Excuses, Excuses

1. Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.
   — JEFF BEZOS
2. Too often, the people we ask for feedback are kind but not nice. Kind people will tell you things a nice person will not.
3. kind person will tell you that you have spinach on your teeth. A nice person won’t because it’s uncomfortable. A kind person will tell us what holds us back even when it’s uncomfortable. A nice person avoids giving us critical feedback because they’re worried about hurting out feelings. No wonder we end up thinking other people will be interested in our excuses
4. No one cares about your excuses as much as you do. In fact, no one cares about your excuses at all, except you.

No One Cares. It’s Your Fault

1. When people’s actions have outcomes that don’t line up with how they see themselves, they tend to insulate their egos by blaming other people or unfavorable circumstances.
2. Self-serving bias is also self-preserving. The self we’re preserving is our very sense of self — our identity.

Not Your Fault? It’s Still Your Responsibility

1. Our desire to protect ourselves prevents us from moving forward. It’s tempting to absolve yourself, throwing your hands up and claiming you have no control over the situation you’ve landed in. And sure, sometimes that’s true. There are circumstances of chance that have a negative impact. People suffer misfortune all the time for reasons beyond their control: stray bullets, diseases, getting struck by a drunk driver.
2. Complaining does nothing to change the present situation you find yourself in, though. Thinking about how it wasn’t your fault doesn’t make anything better. The consequences are still yours to deal with.
3. Always focus on the next move, the one that gets you closer or further from where you want to go.
4. “Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm”
5. One of the most common mistakes people make is bargaining with how the world should work instead of accepting how it does work.
6. Failing to accept how the world really works puts your time and energy toward proving how right you are. When the desired results don’t materialize, it’s easy to blame circumstances or others. I call this the wrong side of right. You’re focused on your ego not the outcome.
7. Solutions appear when you stop bargaining and start accepting the reality of the situation. That’s because focusing on the next move, rather than how you got here in the first place, opens you up to a lot of possibilities. When you put outcome over ego, you get better results.

How You Respond Can Always Make Things Better or Worse

1. You can’t control everything, but you can control your response, which makes circumstances better or worse.
2. Each response has an impact on the future, taking you either a step closer to or a step further from the outcomes you want and the person you want to be.
3. “Is this behavior moving you closer to what you want or further away?”
4. “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”
5. This surprisingly simple question helps change your perspective on the situation and avoid making things worse. As my grandfather (and many others) used to say, “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.”

Complaining Is Not a Solution

1. Facing reality is hard. It’s much easier to blame things we have no control over than look for our own contributions.
2. Too often we fight against the feedback the world gives us, to protect our beliefs. Rather than changing ourselves, we want the world to change. And if we don’t have the power to change it, we do the only thing we feel we can do: complain.
3. Complaining isn’t productive. It only misleads you into thinking that the world should function in a way that it doesn’t. Distancing yourself from reality makes it harder to solve the problems you face. There is always something you can do today to make the future easier, though, and the moment you stop complaining is the moment you start finding it.

You Are Not a Victim

1. The most important story is the one you tell yourself. While telling yourself a positive story doesn’t ensure a good outcome, telling yourself a negative story often guarantees a bad one.
2. When you constantly blame circumstances, the environment, or other people, you are effectively claiming that you had little ability to affect the outcome. But that’s not what actually happened. The truth is that we make repeated choices in life that become habits, those habits determine our paths, and those paths determine our outcomes. When we explain away those unwanted outcomes, we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for producing them.
3. There’s a word for people who always respond to problems by blaming others or circumstances: victims. Of course, they’re often not actually victims. They just feel like they are, and that feeling gets in the way of good judgment. Chronic victims feel helpless, powerless, and often hopeless. Nothing is ever their fault; it is always someone or something else that got in the way. No one begins life wanting to be a chronic victim, but the slow accumulation of responses that avoid responsibility makes it hard for people to see that’s what they’re becoming. Eventually, it’s just who they are.
4. It’s so much easier to hide and to blame other people, circumstances, or luck.
5. No successful person wants to work with a chronic victim. The only people who want to work with victims are other victims.
6. If you pay attention to chronic victims, you’ll notice how fragile they are — how dependent their attitudes and feelings are on things they don’t control. When things go their way, they’re happy; when things don’t, they’re defensive, passive-aggressive, and occasionally aggressive-aggressive.
7. Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you do control how you respond to everything. It’s a mindset that empowers you to act and not just react to whatever life throws at you. It transforms obstacles into opportunities for learning and growth. It means realizing that the way you respond to hardship matters more to your happiness than the hardship itself.

CHAPTER 2.2
Self-Knowledge

1. Know thyself.
   — INSCRIPTION ON THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT DELPHI
2. When you play games where other people have the aptitude and you don’t, you’re going to lose. You have to figure out where you have an edge and stick to it — Charlie Munger
3. Self-knowledge isn’t limited just to hard skills, though. It’s also about knowing when you’re vulnerable to your defaults — the kinds of situations where circumstances do the thinking for you.
4. Maybe you’re prone to being overly emotional — to sadness, anger, or intrusive self-defeating thoughts. Maybe you have a short temper when you’re tired, or you become an ogre when you’re hungry. Maybe you’re acutely sensitive to social pressure and the threat of social scorn.
5. Knowing about your strengths and weaknesses, your abilities and their limits is essential to counteracting your defaults. If you don’t know your vulnerabilities, your defaults will exploit them to gain control of your circumstances.

CHAPTER 2.3
Self-Control

1. Give me that man
   That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
   In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart.
   — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
2. Self-control is the ability to master your fears, desires, and other emotions.
3. Self-control is about creating space for reason instead of just blindly following instincts.
4. It’s about being able to view and manage your emotions as if they were inanimate objects — things that don’t have the power to determine what you do unless you let them.
5. The emotion default tries to remove any distance between you and your emotions, triggering a reaction in the absence of any deliberation. It wants to win the present moment, even if it means sabotaging the future. Self-control empowers you to keep emotion in check, though.
6. What’s truly frightening is that some adults are only marginally better than a toddler at fending it off. These are people who lack self-control and are routinely carried away by their emotions.
7. A large part of achieving success is having the self-control to do whatever needs to be done, regardless of whether you feel like doing it at the moment.
8. Emotional intensity is far less important in the long run than disciplined consistency.
9. Inspiration and excitement might get you going, but persistence and routine are what keep you going until you reach your goals.

CHAPTER 2.4
Self-Confidence

1. You need self-confidence to think independently and to stand firm in the face of social pressure, ego, inertia, or emotion.
2. Children develop self-confidence when they learn simple skills like pulling up a zipper, tying their shoes, or riding a bike. Eventually, that self-confidence evolves and propels them to develop more complex abilities as adults — for instance, writing software, painting murals, or cheering up a disheartened friend.

Confidence vs. Ego

1. More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence.
2. It’s important to talk to yourself about the adversity you’ve faced, because past hardship is where you get the confidence to face future hardship.
3. Confident people take their feedback from reality, not popular opinion.

Confidence and Honesty

1. The quicker you stop denying inconvenient truths and start responding to difficult realities, the better.
2. We all have something that we’re denying right now because accepting it is hard, and we want to avoid the pain.
3. The quicker you accept reality, though, the quicker you can deal with the implications, and the sooner you do that, the easier those implications are to manage.
4. People with self-confidence are honest about their own motivations, actions, and results
5. Reality isn’t a popularity contest.
6. Unsuccessful hires are too focused on proving they’re right instead of being right

The Wrong Side of Right

1. When everything is on your shoulders and the cost of being wrong is high, I told her, you tend to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right. The more I’d given up wanting to be right, the better the outcomes I had. I didn’t care about getting the credit; I cared about getting the results.
2. Self-confidence is the strength to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right.
3. Outcome over ego.

CHAPTER 2.5
Strength in Action

1. Self-accountability, self-knowledge, self-control, and self-confidence are essential to exercising good judgment

Example 2: Resisting the Social Default

1. Never say yes to something important without thinking it over for a day.
2. Automatic rules for common situations get results.
3. Knowing your vulnerability to social pressure and the limits of your power to resist it requires self-knowledge. Deciding to do something about this vulnerability to secure better outcomes involves self-confidence. Following the rule you’ve made for yourself takes self-accountability. And overcoming short-term discomfort in ordinary moments for long-term gain displays self-control.

CHAPTER 2.6
Setting the Standards

1. It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis . . . that you will grow to be like them. . . . Place an extinguished piece of coal next to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite. . . . Remember that if you consort with someone covered in dirt you can hardly avoid getting a little grimy yourself.
   — EPICTETUS, Discourses
2. Our surroundings influence us — both our physical environment and the people around us. Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people. It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.
3. We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later you become selfish. If you hang around someone who’s unkind, you’ll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you. The changes are too gradual to notice until they’re too large to address.
4. Becoming like the people around you means that over time you come to adopt their standards. If all you see are average people, you will end up with average standards. But average standards aren’t going to get you where you want to go. Standards become habits, and habits become outcomes. Few people realize that exceptional outcomes are almost always achieved by people with higher-than-average standards.
5. The most successful people have the highest standards, not only for others but for themselves
6. Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions.
7. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions. They have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.

Smart People with Low Standards

1. The difference between average and exceptional results for a leader often comes down to whether they’re consistently getting more out of smart but otherwise lazy people.
2. Someone creates a half-assed draft of something that’s full of poor thinking, sends it around, and waits for others to correct it. This tactic takes advantage of one of our defaults: we love correcting people. If someone does something wrong, we almost can’t help but tell them how to do it the right way. So you do the work, and they get the credit in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken them to do it themselves. Smart. But lazy.

Excellence Demands Excellence

1. A master communicator wouldn’t accept a ponderous, rambling email. A master programmer wouldn’t accept ugly code. Neither of them would accept unclear explanations as understanding.
2. We’ll never be exceptional at anything unless we raise our standards, both of ourselves and of what’s possible. For most of us, that sounds like a lot of work. We gravitate toward being soft and complacent. We’d rather coast. That’s fine. Just realize this: if you do what everyone else does, you can expect the same results that everyone else gets. If you want different results, you need to raise the bar.
3. Working with a master firsthand is the best education; it’s the surest way of raising the bar.

CHAPTER 2.7
Exemplars + Practice

1. If you don’t curate the people in your life, the people who end up surrounding you will be there by chance and not by choice. That group includes your parents, your friends, your family, your coworkers.
2. Sure, your high school friends might be great examples of character and acumen, but odds are they’re average. Sure, your parents might be some of the smartest businesspeople in the world, but odds are they’re not.

Your Exemplars

1. Show me your role models and I’ll show you your future.
2. When you choose the right exemplars — people with standards higher than yours — you can transcend the standards you’ve inherited from parents, friends, and acquaintances.
3. No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others — Peter Kaufman
4. People at the far right of the bell curve (the positive outliers) can teach you tips, tricks, and insights that might otherwise take a lifetime to learn. They’ve done the heavy lifting. They’ve already paid for the lessons, so you don’t have to