Clear Thinking

Comparison is the thief of joy.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this ingredient: phronesis—the wisdom of knowing how to order your life to achieve the best results.

A second principle for evaluating your decisions in retrospect is this: the transparency principle: Make your decision-making process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible.

Obviously, we all want good outcomes, but as we’ve seen, good decisions can have bad outcomes, and bad decisions can have good ones. Evaluating decisions—ours or others’—based on the outcome (or how we feel about the outcome) fails to distinguish luck from skill and control. Because of that, engaging in resulting doesn’t help us get better. The res

Confidence increases faster than accuracy. “The trouble with too much information,” Robinson told me, “is you can’t reason with it.” It only feeds confirmation bias. We ignore additional information that doesn’t agree with our assessment, and gain confidence from additional information that does.

the stop, flop, know principle: Stop gathering more information and execute your decision when either you Stop gathering useful information, you First Lose an OPportunity (FLOP), or you come to Know something that makes it evident what option you should choose.

Remember, the rationale behind the ALAP Principle is to preserve optionality. When options start diminishing, it’s time to act using whatever information you have. That’s FLOP: if you’re waiting to decide, wait no longer than your First Lost Opportunity.

Whatever decision you’re facing, ask yourself, “Is there a way to make sure I will stick to the path I’ve decided is best?” By thinking through your options, and precommitting to courses of action, you free up space to tackle other problems. Even if we’re waiting as long as possible to decide, we now know exactly what to focus on and do when the ti

Giving a team enough structure to carry out a mission but enough flexibility to respond to changing circumstances is called commander’s intent—a military term first applied to the Germans who were trying to defeat Napoleon.