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. (Page 32)
If things were much worse, we would act, but since they’re not terrible, we stay, and hope things get better. (Page 32)
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. (Page 33)
While my colleague didn’t threaten me physically, he threatened how I saw myself as working hard and getting things done. And when someone threatens how you see yourself, you stop thinking and start reacting. (Page 46)
No one cares about your excuses as much as you do. In fact, no one cares about your excuses at all, except you. (Page 47)
Exceptional people know they can’t change the hand they’ve been dealt, and don’t waste time wishing for a better one. They focus instead on how they’re going to play the cards they have to achieve the best result. They don’t hide behind others. The best people rise to the challenge—whatever it is. (Page 49)
Anytime you find yourself or your colleagues complaining “that’s not right,” or “that’s not fair,” or “it shouldn’t be that way,” you’re bargaining, not accepting. You want the world to work in a way that it doesn’t. (Page 50)
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. (Page 53)
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. (Page 53)
The real test of a person is the degree to which they are willing to nonconform to do the right thing. (Page 54)
The size of what you know isn’t nearly as important as having a sense of your knowledge’s boundaries. (Page 57)
Anyone can maintain excitement for a few minutes, but the longer a project takes, the fewer the people who can maintain their excitement for it. The most successful people have the self-control to keep going anyway. It’s not always exciting, but they still show up. (Page 61)
Crucially, they also know that to outperform the crowd, you have to do things differently sometimes, and that hecklers and naysayers inevitably tend to follow. They take their feedback from reality, not popular opinion. (Page 65)
Reality isn’t a popularity contest. Surrounding yourself with people who tell you you’re right doesn’t mean you are. (Page 66)
The people who frequently find themselves on the wrong side of right are people who can’t zoom in and out and see the problem from multiple angles. They get locked into one perspective: their own. (Page 68)
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. (Page 74)
Most of the time when we accept substandard work from ourselves, it’s because we don’t really care about it. We tell ourselves it’s good enough, or the best we can manage given our time constraints (Page 78)
Masters of their craft don’t merely want to check off a box and move on. They’re dedicated to what they do, and they keep at it. Master-level work requires near fanatical standards, so masters show us what our standards should be. (Page 78)
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. Sure, your high school friends might be great examples of character and acumen, but odds are they’re average. (Page 80)
Look around, find the best examples you can of people with the attributes you want to cultivate—the people whose default behavior is your desired behavior, those who inspire you to raise the bar and make you want to be a better version of yourself. (Page 83)
One way of creating space for reason in your thinking is to ask yourself what your exemplars would do if they were in your position. It’s the natural next step. Once you imagine them watching, you make decisions and put them into action. (Page 88)
Bad habits are easy to acquire when there is a delay between action and consequence. (Page 93)
If you eat a chocolate bar or skip a workout today, you’re not going to suddenly go from healthy to unhealthy. Work late and miss dinner with your family a couple nights, and it won’t damage your relationship. (Page 93)
When we get feedback about our own weaknesses from the world, it’s a rare opportunity for getting better and getting closer to the kind of people we really want to be. Use these opportunities wisely! (Page 97)
The first kind of safeguard aims at preventing problems before they happen. One way to do this is to avoid decision-making in unfavorable conditions. (Page 102)
people typically don’t argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules. (Page 105)
Checklists, for instance, offer a simple way to override your defaults. Pilots go through a preflight checklist every time they fly. Surgeons go through preoperative checklists every time they operate. (Page 109)
When mistakes happen, the emotion default works hard to usurp control over the situation. It will take over if you let it. (Page 116)
Mistakes turn into anchors if you don’t accept them. (Page 118)
If you can’t keep those in check—if you’re easily swayed by emotion, if you can’t adapt to change, if you value being right more than doing what’s best—then all the tools in the world aren’t going to help you. (Page 122)
the definition principle: Take responsibility for defining the problem. Don’t let someone define it for you. Do the work to understand it. Don’t use jargon to describe or explain it. the root cause principle: Identify the root cause of the problem. Don’t be content with simply treating its symptoms. (Page 128)
A handy tool for identifying the root cause of a problem is to ask yourself, “What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?” (Page 129)
A mentor of mine once taught me that the best way to avoid finding the perfect solution to the wrong problem at work, when time allows, is to hold two separate meetings: one to define the problem, and one to come up with the solution. (Page 130)
“What do you know about this problem that other people in the room don’t know?” That question makes people think. (Page 131)
Short-term solutions might make sense in the moment, but they never win in the long term. You feel like you’re moving forward when you’re actually just going in circles. People gravitate toward them because finding a short-term fix signals to others that they’re doing something. (Page 133)
like the weather. It doesn’t just happen to us. We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, (Page 136)
the 3+ principle: Force yourself to explore at least three possible solutions to a problem. If you find yourself considering only two options, force yourself to find at least one more. (Page 146)
When you hear yourself say, “Either X or Y,” it means you’re entering the narrow pathway between a rock and a hard place—a binary decision. Digging in and forcing yourself to add credible alternative options allows you to see solutions you may not have considered before. (Page 150)
Thinking through opportunity costs is one of the most effective things you can do in business and in life. The optimal way of exploring your options is to take all the relevant factors into account. You can’t do this without considering opportunity costs. (Page 151)
the 3-lens principle: View opportunity costs through these three lenses: (1) Compared with what? (2) And then what? (3) At the expense of what? (Page 152)
A lot of managers secretly enjoy being the bottleneck. They like the way it feels when their team is dependent on them. Don’t be fooled! This is the ego default at work, and it puts a ceiling on how far you will go. (Page 159)
There is only one most important thing in every project, goal, and company. If you have two or more most important things, you’re not thinking clearly. This is an important aspect of leadership and problem-solving in general: you have to pick one criterion above all the others and communicate it in a way that your people can understand so they can make decisions on their own. (Page 161)
It’s natural to think these abstractions will save us time and improve our decision-making, but in many cases they don’t. Reading a summary might be faster than reading a full document, but it misses a lot of details—details that weren’t relevant to the person summarizing the information, but that might be relevant to you. You end up saving time at the cost of missing important information. Skimming inadvertently creates blind spots. (Page 166)
Real knowledge is earned, while abstractions are merely borrowed. Too often decision-makers get their information and observations from sources that are multiple degrees removed from the problem. (Page 166)
Great thinkers understand the importance of high-quality information, and that other people’s abstractions are often limited in their usefulness. As information travels up an organization, it tends to lose quality and nuance. (Page 168)
Whenever possible, you need to learn something, see something, or do something for yourself. Sometimes the best information is the least transmissible. (Page 170)
Judging people and telling them they’re wrong only shuts them down and prevents a free flow of information. When you’re gathering information, your job is to see the world through other people’s eyes. You’re trying to understand their experience and how they processed it. (Page 173)
Explicitly stating that the person you’re reaching out to is an expert whose time and energy you respect goes a long way to secure their goodwill. (Page 179)
don’t just ask experts what they think, ask them how they think. (Page 179)
If you want to build a network and make this more than a transactional request, follow up to report on your progress no matter what the outcome is. Whether their advice helped you in this case or not, following up and keeping them updated on your progress primes them to help you in the future. (Page 179)
inertia holds us in place as we gather more and more information in the false hope that we can ultimately eliminate uncertainty. (Page 183)
friend of mine works with engineers. He says they tend to be highly risk averse: they wait as long as possible to decide and can’t tell when they should act more quickly. “They keep thinking that gathering more data will make things firmer,” he said, “but they’ve already been prototyping and gathering information for months. They don’t know when to stop and commit. They start losing interest in the problem too, because all they’re doing is having meetings, aligning, gathering information, and writing up a giant document laying out how they made their decision. (Page 189)
When failure is expensive, it’s worth investing in large margins of safety. If you’re an investor, (Page 193)
It’s that preparation mindset—as opposed to a prediction mindset—that saves you (Page 196)
Performing small, low-risk experiments on multiple options—in other words, shooting bullets and calibrating—keeps your options open before you commit the bulk of your resources to shooting a cannonball. (Page 202)
Preserving optionality can make you look stupid in the short term, which means that from time to time you’ll have to tolerate people treating you like you’re a fool. But if you look at the most successful people in the world, they’ve all looked short-term stupid on a number of occasions, when they were keeping their options open and waiting for the right time to act. (Page 202)
Also, living with a decision on your own for a day— (Page 204)
Keeping it to yourself before executing allows you to keep open the possibility of undoing (Page 204)
One sign that you’ve failed to empower your team is that you can’t be away from the office for a week without things falling apart. Some leaders think it makes them indispensable—that the team’s inability to function without them is a sign of how important they are. Don’t be fooled! (Page 209)
The quality of your decisions eventually determines how far you go and how fast you get there. If you learn to make great decisions consistently, you’ll quickly move past the people whose decisions are merely good. (Page 211)
The right call doesn’t always get the intended outcome. Sooner or later everyone who makes decisions in the real world learns this lesson. (Page 214)
The quality of a single decision isn’t determined by the quality of the outcome. (Page 214)
A bad process can never produce a good decision. Sure, it might result in a good outcome, but that’s different from making a good decision. Outcomes are influenced in part by luck—both good and bad. Getting the right result for the wrong reasons isn’t a function of smarts or skills, but just blind luck. (Page 217)
In life, we experience regret over both things we’ve done and things we’ve failed to do. The worst regret is when we fail to live a life true to ourselves, when we fail to play by our own scoreboard. (Page 222)
The social default prompts us to inherit goals from other people, even if their life circumstances are very different from ours. The inertia default encourages us to continue pursuing the goals we’ve pursued in the past, even after we’ve come to realize that achieving them doesn’t make us happy. The emotion default sends us this way and that, chasing whatever captures our fancy in the moment, even at the expense of pursuing long-term goals that matter more. (Page 222)
Don’t live life by another person’s scoreboard. Don’t let someone else choose your objectives in life. Take responsibility for where you are and where you are headed. Real wisdom doesn’t come from chasing success but from building character. As Jim Collins wrote, “There is no effectiveness without discipline, and there is no discipline without character.” (Page 223)
the key to a successful life is good company and meaningful relationships. (Page 226)
Say things now to people you care about—whether it’s expressing gratitude, asking forgiveness, or getting information. Spend the maximum amount of time with your children. Savor daily pleasures instead of waiting for “big-ticket items” to make you happy. Work in a job you love. Choose your mate carefully; don’t just rush in. (Page 232)
We regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did. The pain of trying and failing may be intense but at least it tends to be over rather quickly. The pain of failing to try, on the other hand, is less intense but never really goes away. (Page 237)
my mind wanders to what people will say about me after I’m gone, when there is no opportunity for me to respond. What will people really say? (Page 242)
What seems to matter in the moment rarely matters in life, yet what matters in life always matters in the moment. (Page 242)
What seems like winning in the moment is often just a shallow victory. It seems important at the time, but unimportant when you view it from the perspective of life as a whole. (Page 242)
If you want to develop good judgment, start by asking two questions: “What do I want in life? And is what I want actually worth wanting?” (Page 243)