Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How to Make Good Decisions | Shane Parrish

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Here's what might be preventing you from making better decisions and how to know what's even worth wanting.Shane Parrish is the entrepreneur and wisdom seeker behind Farnam Street and the host of The Knowledge Project Podcast. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results.In this episode we talk about:How to position yourself to make better decisionsShane’s decision making processThe difference between decisions and choicesFull Shownotes:https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/shane-parrishSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how are we doing? I suspect the following is true for all of us, but I personally cannot count the amount of times I have made dumb decisions because I have not been thinking clearly. Today, we've got an ex-spy turned blogger who has spent many, many, many years thinking about

how to think clearly and very specifically, thinking about what stops us from thinking clearly. His name is Shane Parrish. He runs a very popular site called Pharnam Street, which sends out a highly subscribed newsletter. He's also the host of the Knowledge Project podcast. And now he's got a book called Clear Thinking Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results. In this conversation, we talk about how to position yourself and how to tweak your environment in order to make better decisions, Shane's method of creating rules or safeguards to position himself for better decisions,

his decision-making process, the difference between decisions and choices, and a key part of decision-making, often overlooked, how to know what is actually worth wanting in the first place. Bosch Legacy returns now streaming. Matt has been taken. Oh God. His daughter is in the hands of a madman. What are the police have been looking for me? But nothing can stop a father.

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Follow Ghost Story on the wandering app wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes at free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Shane Parrish, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I'd love to talk before we dive into your new book.

I'd love to talk a little bit about your background. As I understand it, you're a spy turned blogger. How did that career leap get made? Well, just to be clear, I never called myself a spy. The New York Times called me a spy. I started working at an intelligence agency two weeks before September 11th. And as we know, a lot of things changed on that day.

And we sort of got thrust into all these roles and responsibilities that we weren't really prepared for at a really young age. And I got put into these positions where I was making a lot of decisions. But nobody had really taught me how to think, how to make decisions. I'd gone to school for computer science. And now, you know, you're making decisions that affect your team, your organization, your government, your country, other countries, troops in the theater. And I really wanted to learn how do I make better decisions? And who makes the best decisions in the real world?

I went back, I sort of did an MBA. I followed people around the organization trying to figure out who consistently makes better decisions. And I studied sort of the titans of the real world, the people who consistently put themselves in a position where their outcomes are better than average or better than expected, trying to figure out what they do differently and how I can use that to improve the work that we were doing at the intelligence agency.

So I started this blog online and to put things in perspective, we weren't allowed a public profile. I did not exist. If you googled me, there's no Facebook page, nothing, no LinkedIn, anything. This is around 2008. And I started this journal online and the journal was really my reflections about what I was learning. And it was never intended for anybody else. It was intended for me. And the sort of URL for this was like, I think it was like 12 digits, right? Like it was just these random sort of numbers to everybody else. They weren't random to me. But the whole point was that it went a password protected. I just wanted to be able to pull it up and see it and sort of enter information as it

was coming across it and reflecting on it. And then all of a sudden, it started to get some traction. I still don't quite know how. But before I know it, it was sort of being passed around Wall Street as sort of something to read, and I started getting these emails, and then people started asking who's behind this. And then that's how it sort of transitioned over the next number of years to what it is today, which is fs.blog or pharnum street. And it's sort of my online learning journal.

And yeah, it's very unexpected to have 600,000 people reading your work every Sunday. And Sunday is when your newsletter goes out. Yeah, just to clarify, what is Pharnam Street referred to? So Pharnam Street is the street in Omaha, Nebraska, where Warren Buffett has the headquarters for Berkshirerathaway. So the original website was 68131-1440.

And 68131 is the zip code for Berk Shrathaway headquarters. And 1440 is their unit number in Qit Plaza. And this is an homage to sort of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, who I held up and still hold up as sort of heroes in some way and have learned a ton from of a real-world decision-making. And that was how it got its name. It's interesting. This has really become a passion for you how to make decisions.

I can imagine other people in your position would be interested in how to make decisions given that you're working at a national security agency and the stakes are high, but you really took it very far. And I wonder what it is about you that allowed this to become such a, obsessions probably not the right word, but like focus, fixation. Well, anybody who knows me knows that when I go into something, I want to give it my best and I felt like everybody who is depending on me deserved me giving my best. And my best sort of, I had to dive into this and sort of learn about it as best I could

with that said. I mean, I think everybody who does something like this, it has to be a liver of love for what you're doing to study something for sort of 15 years and have hundreds or thousands of conversations on it with multiple different people. There's just a deep sense of curiosity inside me, harnessed for this particular focus over the last 15 years. Was there something else in your personal life like did you make a bunch of dumb decisions in high school or? Oh, dude. I made so many terrible decisions before high school. I mean, high school was where things started to get on track.

I was a straight D student until grade 10 at borderline, getting in trouble at every level. I mean, my grade nine teacher wrote in my report card, Shane will be lucky to graduate from high school. And she was 100% correct. This is back when teachers actually wrote what they thought instead of these form little nuggets, they have to pick out.

It all turned around for me in grade 10 with my peer group change, the expectations change. The person who would go on to become my best friend, his father pulled me aside two months into grade 10 and said, you know, we were talking about university at dinner and it doesn't sound like you're going to university. And if that's not the path you're on, I don't want you hanging around my son. And I remember looking at him going, I don't even know what university is, like what is university. And then he's like, I'll tell you, I'll help you. But like,

this is the path you're on if you want to hang out with my son. And it just totally changed my trajectory. I have so many other questions about your decision making prowess now. But I'll hold it for a second. Let's get into the book and all. Well, I also don't want to be held up as sort of somebody who never makes bad decisions. I think we all make stupid decisions from time to time. The point is, can we be better than we are? I have making decisions. Yeah, I appreciate that. And more to come on that front. But let's get into the book because it's very interesting. And I believe universally applicable. You start in

the book by outlining the enemies of clear thinking. Can you describe what those enemies are? Yeah, so let's start with biology before we sort of get to the default, the derail us. We are animals, and we share a lot of tendencies and instincts with other animals. And some of what we share with other animals is that we're territorial, we're self-preserving, we're hierarchical. These are evolved in us for thousands of years, and they don't look the same. We're not a wolf walking around a peeing and marking its territory. Our territory isn't necessarily physical. It's our identity and how we share it.

What happens for animals when any of these instincts are triggered? They react without thinking. What makes humans different is that we have the ability. how we share it. And what happens for animals when any of these instincts are triggered, they react without thinking. And what makes humans different is that we have the ability, we don't always exercise it, but we have the ability to pause before responding. So between stimulus and response, we can actually make a choice. We can think, we can reason, we can use all of our abilities to make a different choice than our instinctive reaction.

So I came up with four sort of defaults. And defaults are the enemies of clear thinking. These are situations that prime us not to think. So when we're emotional, when we're driven by our ego, when we're social pressure, social situations going along with the crowd and inertia, doing things that we've always done just to keep doing them. And in those situations, we tend not to think. Now, let's rewind just for a second here, because we're taught about decision making. We're taught, you get the big decisions

right? And you're going to be okay. And the big decisions, you know, sort of like, what are the common ones? Who you marry, the career you go into, where you live. And those are moments where we think about what we're doing. We actually reason through the decision. We might not be perfect, but we're directionally correct. Because we're thinking, we're actually pretty good once we start thinking. The problem is we end up in these situations where we don't think, and that gets us into trouble. The tagline to the book is turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. And the reason is these ordinary moments

are what power these big decisions. You can pick the right partner, but if you don't go home and invest in that relationship, you're gonna find that it's not there when you need it. You can pick the right career path, but if you don't bust your butt and work hard every day, then it's not going to be there for you. You're going to get laid off. And I think that these things are sort of forgotten in society. And we sort of don't think of

these moments. The same as a great example of sort of, have you ever been into an argument with your partner or spouse over like loading the dishwasher or something, just trivial. You're not thinking in that moment about, I'm arguing with my spouse and I'm choosing to argue with them. If I were to tap you on the shoulder and say, Hey, Dan, you're about to pour gasoline or water onto this situation. What do you want to do? I don't tell you what to do. I just sort of like pause.

I insert that pause. What would you do? You'd be like, Oh, I want to put water on this. I don't like this isn't worth fighting about. This is stupid. But we don't realize that we're doing that. And then all the time that we have to spend repairing that relationship comes with the cost of enjoying each other, building our connection, or doing something fun, or even striving towards our goals. And so all the energy that we put into correcting these little failures and decision making in everyday moments comes at the expense of all the things that we want to do.

So as humans, we have this capacity to reason and use logic to make solid or at the very least defensible decisions. However, that capacity is blocked by the fact that we are often operating in automatic pilot or sleepwalking through our lives, captured by these various defaults. And those are the enemies of clear thinking. Yes. That's a great summary of that. Could you give us a brief tour through the four defaults, emotional default, ego default, social default, and inertia default? Yeah, sure. So when we're emotional, a great example, you know, alcoholics and onumus has this thing

called halt, which is hungry, angry, lonely or tired. When you're driven by any of those things, and so hungry doesn't really count as an emotion, but angry and lonely do. And when you're driven by those, you're not really in charge of yourself. You're not thinking clearly. You put yourself in a bad position to make a decision. That doesn't mean that you can't make the right decision, but you're playing on hard mode. Think about sending an email. And I remember, you know, I don't know, must have been like five years ago, and it's late at night, and I'm writing this email, and I'm really angry. I'm upset. Something didn't go my way. And I'm typing

this out. And I'm like, I don't even know what's going through my head. Anger is in charge. I'm not in charge in that moment. I'm not thinking about, is this going to move me closer or further away from the outcome I want? That doesn't happen. And so you just end up doing these things that to rail you. Ego is another one at work. If you're a knowledge worker, this is a common one for people. If you're a knowledge worker, this is a common one for people. If you're a knowledge worker, a lot of your identity, so a lot of your territory to go back to the biology, is tied up in being right. You need to contribute.

You wanna be right. If you're not right, what are you? You're wrong, and if you're wrong, well, then what value do you have as a knowledge worker? And so you're driven by yourself. You're not driven by getting the best outcome. You're driven by your ego. You want to prove yourself right. What happens when you want to prove yourself right? Well, not only are you going to ignore evidence to the contrary

of what you're doing, but you're going to make all your relationships with all your coworkers harder in that situation. Socials and other one, I think we've all seen sort of like group think. We don't want to stand out. We don't want to be different. The risk of failures really high. And the rewards often for success are pretty small, especially inside an organization. A great example of that is I had a friend who took a big risk, saved the company he was working for about 20 million. And you know And he could have looked like an idiot. He could have fell on his face. And they gave him, I think it was like a $2,000 bonus.

And he's like, why would I take all this risk? Why would I go against the crowd? Take all this risk. And if I'm wrong, everybody's like, I told you. We want to fit in. We're evolved to fit in. We're self-preserving. We're going back to that.

We need to fit in to be part of the tribe. But today, it's more advantageous to know when to create positive deviation. Positive deviation is when do I go against the crowd? And I'm right. It's not enough to go against the crowd. We all know that person. He sort of is in every meaning, always going against everything.

They don't get listened to. But the people who can positively deviate, which is go along, go along, oh, here's where we need to hop off. There's a huge advantage to knowing when that time is and when that place is. There's a lot of comfort to being part of the crowd and doing what everybody else is doing. A nurse is another one, we just continue doing the same thing that we've always done. In the book, I talk about the zone of average. The zone of average is a great example of that as your inner relationship. It's too good to leave, but too bad to stay. You don't want to do

anything about it. You're comfortable with it. You've been doing it so long. You feel you're so invested in it that you can't change it. And when all of these things are happening, and you know, each one is powerful when they work in concert, they're super powerful. And they prevent us from thinking and they make it a lot harder. And we end up doing these things that worsen our position and make the future harder than it should be. Is one of these defaults your particular cryptidite? I think the one for me is probably ego, right?

I have a little sticky note on my desk, you can't see it, but it literally has three words on it that says outcome over ego. And when I worked at the intelligence agency, I thought every solution had to be my solution. I always thought my solution was the best solution. It was only really when I left the intelligence agency, so about six or seven years ago now. And I started running my own business. That that really solidified for me that like, I don't care who has the best idea. I really want the best outcome because I have so much of my future wrapped up in the outcome and not me being right.

And I think that that was a really pivotal moment for me where I realized just how in charge our ego can be but these things and how it can blind us. How we have an opinion on everything. How we basically think that we know everything we're an expert we Google for like, I don't know 20 minutes and we feel like we get the gist of it and we can pull it off. And I think there's so much more to it and there's so much involved with stopping to prove ourself right. Getting out of that perspective, because when you're in that perspective, you have all these massive blind spots to what other people can see. Perspective and blind spots, these are part of decision making. You wrap this back into the source of all bad decisions, is that we have blind spots. One way to eliminate our blind spots or reduce

them is to take a different perspective into the problem. When we get rid of our ego, it makes it a lot easier for us to take a different perspective into the problem. I have the exact same problem. Oh, you're going to tell me about that. Yeah, I just, in certain relationships, there are certain relationships where I find this comes out more often than in others. But yeah, I can kind of just dig a trench and refuse to give up. And I know it's happening, but somehow even knowing it's happening makes me dig in even more.

Yeah, that's true, because you don't want to admit that you're wrong. And we're all like that. That's a normal, natural response to things, right? Even when you see it and recognize it, then it becomes less of a ego and it becomes more about, I just don't want to admit that there's a better approach to it.

Yes. It doesn't mean that my approach, I think, is best. It's that I don't want to correct the fact that I've said something, I've stated it, I've taken a position on it. Or there are people in my life where it's like I specifically don't want to admit that they were right. Oh yeah, especially if you don't like them, right? Or they're rival at work. How dare this person have a better idea than me and you know their idea would work better and be

more effective and more efficient. Yeah, I think that those things are just normal and natural, right? So what I've tried to do over the past, I don't know, six years, really, is just, I don't think I can eliminate my ego, and I don't think that's the point. But changing the ego from me being right to getting the best outcome is a much better approach to things. How do I get the best outcome possible in this situation? How do I position myself to be able to withstand a multiple different futures instead of just my version of the future?

And I think that that's the stuff where it's not about, you can't eliminate these things. We think we can just sort of like wash them clean and launder them, but we can't. We can manage them and we can sort of work around them. And one way to work around them is sort of recognizing, hey, I'm emotional or I'm egotistical, but it's a lot easier to prevent, create automatic rules, create friction around and sort of guard rails around these things. And it's so interesting to me that we don't sort of think about how to do that. One of the most counterintuitive things I learned from studying decision-making for the past 15 years

is the people who consistently make the best decisions aren't necessarily smarter than everybody else. But they're always in the right position to take advantage of the circumstances. And the right position puts them on easy mode to manage the defaults and to think independently, which are sort of the three key elements of clear thinking. So when you say positioning, what do you mean specifically? Yeah, so the reason that I came up with this is like, anyone looks like a genius when they're in a good position and even the smartest person looks like an idiot when they're in a good position, and even the smartest person looks like an idiot when they're in a bad position.

And why is positioning relevant to sort of decision-making and defaults, and I want to get into that, but first a little bit of it, two examples, two different contexts about positioning. So if we look at Berkshire Hathaway today, and we talked about Warren Buffett and Charlie Mugger, they have about $150 billion in cash on their balance sheet. They're not predicting what's gonna happen with the stock today. And we talked about Warren Buffett and Charlie Mugger. They have about $150 billion in cash on their balance sheet. They're not predicting what's going to happen with the stock market. They're not predicting what's going to happen with the economy. If the economy and

the stock market go up, they win. If the economy and the stock market stay the same, they win. If the economy and the stock market crash, they win. They're in a position no matter what happens to take advantage of the circumstances in order to grow, in order to expand, nothing can knock them on course. That makes managing the day-to-day easier. They're never forced by circumstances into a bad decision. They're never forced by circumstances to respond to something that I want to respond to. That's really important when you think about the quality of decision-making.

That basically determines whether you're on easier hard mode. The goal is to put yourself on easy mode. Another example of positioning that I'll mention, just a completely different context for the parents who are listening. One of my kids came home and he passed me a test, and he did terrible on this test. He just, in his teenage little attitude, he just sort of shrugged his shoulders and he's like, I did my best and walked by me.

And I remember sort of playing sports when I was a kid and I was like, you know, the worst time to talk to somebody about what's happening or their performance or the game is in that moment, right? There's too much emotion going on. He's got a lot of things going on in his head. I might not be able to see it, but that's not the time to talk to him. If I talk to him, well, the emotional, it's going to end up in a fight or an argument and in sports that manifests itself as quitting.

So I sort of waited. I let his emotions stamp him down a little bit, let him feel the feelings that he's feeling. You know, they passed through him. So later that night, I came up to him and I was like, okay, I want to talk. You need to walk me through this, right? But you said you did your best. And I really want to appreciate what doing your best means. And his response was, I sat down at 10. I read all the questions. I knew which ones were worth which points.

I focused on the questions, were the highest points. I answered them to the best of my ability. I handed in my test after I double-checked my work. I just got my buck kicked and I was like, huh, that's really interesting. A lot of people think about decision-making as that exact same thing. I am faced with a decision I did my best

in that particular moment where I took this conversation with him as I was like, let's rewind. Let's go back in time. Did you have a healthy breakfast? No, I did not have a healthy breakfast. Did you get in a fight with your brother that morning? I did get in a fight with my brother that morning. Why didn't you have a healthy breakfast? Because I slept in, why'd you sleep in? Because I was cramming. Did you study in the three or four days before the test? No, I waited until 10 o'clock the night before, went to bed late, woke up late, got into a fight with my brother, didn't eat a healthy breakfast. It was like,

you know what you did is you chose to play on hardwood. All of those things are within your control. Those things are your position. Your position determines that the moment you sit down into your test, you know if you've done your best. Because your best is all the things you control leading up to that moment that put you in a position for success. So when he sat down to take that test, and this is what a lot of us do with a lot of our decisions,

is circumstances took over. It didn't matter that he read the points on the questions. He wasn't prepared for the test. And we don't get warnings in life, which is like, go home and, hey, you know what, next week, we're really going to give you this emotional challenge. Or next week, we're going to give you a financial challenge. We don't get to prepare like that. It doesn't work like that. We have to constantly position ourselves to withstand whatever the world is throwing at us.

And most of positioning, whether it's sort of taking a test or financial positioning, or however you want to think about running a business, all of that positioning is within our control. And when we're well positioned, managing our defaults is a lot easier than when we're poorly positioned. A great example of that is sort of if you sleep really poorly, you get up really early for some reason, you can't get back to sleep, you have a long stressful day at work. When you come home, you're going to be primed to be more emotional, more territorial, more self-preserving, more ego-driven.

You don't have time for this. You're not empathizing with my day and what's going to happen in that moment, managing all of those emotions is going to be harder than it would have been had you slept and put yourself in a good position. So positioning is the most underrated aspect of decision- making because good positions lead to good choices, bad positions lead to bad to worse, like really bad choices. That all makes sense. I guess I'm wondering whether like, and I mean this in a friendly way, but it feels like a very smart articulation of the obvious.

Yeah. I mean, isn't that sort of all the best insights are all obvious insights? Yes. Yeah. People call Buddhism advanced common sense. But no, I think that sort of all the best insights or all of these insights? Yeah. People call Buddhism advanced common sense. But no, I think that's exactly right. And I guess what comes to mind is there's a great expression from David Axelrod who ran Obama's campaigns here in the United States. And at one point, he said, all we can do is everything we can do.

And so that's what you were recommending to your son pre-test. So, on one level, yes, that's just advanced, common sense. On another level, I guess the other thing that was coming up in my mind as I listen to you talk is there's a kind of psychological positioning too that seems like it might lead you in a position to outperform to make good decisions, which is a kind of intellectual humility and openness, not being sucked up in what my friend Maria Popova calls the pandemic of certainty that is sweeping through our culture. How does all of that land for you?

Yeah, your mind says totally going to position how everything unfolds, right? If you, for example, you're a cynical person, you're going to see everything through a cynical lens, that's going to make it a lot harder to get what you want in life. If you're the type of person who's sitting there and you hear things in your head, that little conversation in your head is saying, you know what, if only they recognized my potential, if only they gave me the opportunity I deserve, if only, well, that's a sign that you're waiting, you're being passive about, your approach to life is you're waiting for somebody to come up and tap you on the shoulder and say, hey, here's your big shot. We're gonna give it to you. But the world doesn't really work that way. I mean, it might in Hollywood movies, but practically speaking, running business, working in organizations and all the organizations we've worked with, it doesn't work that way. You have to go out there and you have to change your mindset. And your mindset is going to position how everything all is unfold.

Because again, it's going to put you on easy motor hard mode. Coming up, Shane Parrish talks about how to position yourself to make better decisions and how to create rules for yourself to stay accountable and exercise solid judgment. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. And it sounds like a renewable natural gas bus replacing conventional fleets. We're bridging to a sustainable energy future, working today to ensure tomorrow is on. And bridge, life takes energy. I'm Rob Briden and welcome to my podcast, Briden and. We are now in our third series. Among those still to come is some Michael Pailin, the comedy duo Egg and Robbie Williams. The list goes on. So do sit back and enjoy. Brighten and on Amazon Music,

Wondery Plus or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't miss out on celebration of Sharon Salzburg's new book. We've made her course on loving kindness, which we call 10% nicer. Free over in the 10% happier app until October 23rd. Download the 10% happier app today wherever you get your apps and get started for free. So what could be done so that we are getting better at positioning ourselves in the holistic sense of that word from mindset to logistics. Yeah, so in the book, we sort of talk about different safeguards, different aspects of what we can do to position ourselves better, prevent automatic rules, friction, and card rails.

And I think the key thing is a lot of it is common sense, right? Like sleep working out, eating well, those are common sense. Okay, investing in your relationship with your partner before a time of crisis. Well, that's common sense. But how many of us do, I've just listed what four things, how many of us do all four of those? We don't. Saving money at great example of positioning. Okay, well now let's apply it to work because these are all sort of like personal things. Well, how do we position ourselves for success at work?

I know from working with people who make decisions that often what happens is you get a whole bunch of talented people in a room. You sit down in that room and you say, what's the problem? And somebody throws out an idea that sounds like the problem. And that idea sounds reasonable enough, and then all of a sudden you go into solution space.

This is what happens when you put a whole bunch of type A people together who want to solve problems, who are driven to solve problems, and who get rewarded for solving problems. This all sounds great. It probably all sounds familiar to everybody listening to this. The problem is, do we ever really define the problem? Who defined the problem?

Somebody who came to a meeting and just threw the problem on the table. So one of the safeguards that we talk about in the book is sort of the person who is responsible for making the decision has to define the problem. Okay, well, that's one safeguard. What does that do? It instills accountability around the decision making. It instills consistency around it, and it instills somebody's names on it.

So they're going to take pleasure. They're going to take ownership of that decision. The second guard role we have sort of around those things is, like, let's break that meeting into two. So we're solving this through an artificial environment constraint. The artificial environment is we're going to separate this one meeting, which might have been an hour. Now we're going to do two half hour meetings, and we're going to do them one or two days

apart. We're not going to do them on the same day. We're going to have a 30 minute meeting. We're going to get some input on what the problem is so that we can make sure that we're solving the right problem. And then on the flip side of that, we're going to meet the next day, the decision maker, the person who is responsible for making that decision is going to outline what the problem is, and then you're going to start coming up with solutions.

And that guardrail is so simple, and it prevents us from derailing. It prevents us from going down and solving the wrong problem. It prevents us from having one person dominate the conversation because then other people can chime in afterwards through whether through email or through side of our conversation with the person making the decision and it sort of reduces our blind spots and allows us to make better decisions. Those are examples of how we can put this into practice in the real world. Another great example is sort of automatic rules, right? So we talk about when we find ourselves in the moment, it's really hard for us to catch ourselves in a conversation with ourselves and be like,

hey, I'm derailing here, I'm negotiating with myself, I'm emotional or my ego is probably driving me here. And even when you do, like you said, that's really hard for us to course correct. So we can have these automatic rules for success and they sort of have to be individual and you have to come up with them yourself. And these automatic rules allow you to circumvent the wiring in your brain that currently exists towards these things, right? It's just another sort of default. It's very powerful.

Creates an inertia. So we have inertia. Nertia is by itself non-judgmental. You know, it works for you. It can work against you. What we've been taught are whole lives to follow rules. Here's the speed limit. You don't question it.

You just follow it. Here's the tax code. You don't question it. You just follow it. You don't question it. You just follow it. Here's the tax code. You don't question it. You just follow it. You don't follow the rules you get punished. And if you're getting punished, you don't want that. Nobody has to tell you every day to follow the rules. You just do. You learn the rule. You follow the rule. That's how it works. But we've never thought about how we can turn these rules into something that helps us get more of what we want, and less of what we don't.

I think that it's really important to think about how do we create rules that move us towards something we want and away from something we don't. So, I came up with this sort of, I was talking to Daniel Conman about it and we were at his PanHouse in New York and his phone rang and he had to take the call and towards the end of the call he was like, you know, my rule is, I don't say yes on the phone. And when he hung up the phone, I said, whoa, tell me more about that. I've never, I've never heard that. Why do you have this role?

And he's like, well, I hate disappointing people. And so I don't want to say, you know, I'm, I tend to say yes in situations that I want to say no to because I'm talking to the person. I don't want to disappoint them. And he's like, I devise this little strategy, which is I created a rule. And the rule was that I wouldn't say yes on the phone. And he's like, I went from saying yes, you know, 80% of the time on the phone to I think 10% of the time. And so he ended up creating a rule that allowed him to circumvent thinking in that particular moment. So he created his own default, his own inertia default by creating this rule.

His brain wasn't thinking about what's the rule. He just knew the rule. And so he thinks of it the rule. So he's not, he doesn't have to be conscious in that moment. But now all of a sudden, these ordinary moments start working for him instead of against him. And I was like, what other rules do you have? This is so powerful. And he's like, I don't have any other rules, but that rule is great. And I was like, okay, so I went away from that meeting and I started thinking about this. And then I think it was like the next week.

And I was like, going to the gym. And I don't know about you, but I'm not a person who loves going to the gym. I mean, it's okay. Like at some days, a lot of days, actually, I'm just not super motivated to go. And I call myself having this conversation, which was the conversation was, you know, I didn't sleep well. I have a lot of stuff to do today. I'm not going to go to the gym today.

Why don't we just do extra tomorrow? And since I'm working out like two or three days a week, you know, this conversation replays a lot. Have you ever had that conversation with yourself? 1000%. Yeah, so I was like, what if I used a rule to get around this and what would that rule be? And so what do I want?

I want to be healthy. What does that mean in the context of this? It means going to the gym every day. So I created a rule that I work out every day. And I was like, okay, well, if my rule is I work out every day, that doesn't mean the scope or duration of my workout can't change.

But the rule is I do something every day. Some days I just go to the gym and do squats, I go home. Some days I go for a little run and I go home. Some days I go and I'm like, there are 90 minutes and I like kick butt and then I come home. Some days I go for a little run and I go home. Some days I go and I'm like, there are 90 minutes and I like kick butt and then I come home. But I go every single day. And I've had that rule for just over two years now. And it has been one of the most powerful things ever. Because now the negotiation in my head doesn't go from the conversation with myself is not should I work out today. It's what scope and duration am I going to work out today?

He goes from, should I go to the gym to, how do I fit this in? And that is so powerful for getting what we want in life. Another example, I had a friend who was trying to eat healthy. And I don't know about you, but you go to these social situations, a lot of work events. He used a salesman, he's funny, he's at heart, he eats at restaurants all the time, so he's got this social pressure going on. And when are we making our decisions about food usually in wine and alcohol and all of that

stuff? Sat night. Well, eventually everybody loses the battle with willpower. And so we started talking about this. And I was like, why don't you just create a rule that you don't eat dessert? And he's like, what do you mean? I was like, we'll just make it a rule. We never have a dessert.

That's your thing. Unless you're with your kids or whatever. Like, you just don't have dessert. And he's like a rule. I've never thought of a rule. And I was like, well, right now what you're doing is you're sitting down and you're making these decisions every moment. And you're relying on willpower to make the right choice.

And in the social, right, going back to the social default, social environment, not only do you want to do what everybody else is doing because everybody else is doing it because you're a social creature. You're in animal. But they're going to pressure you, social pressure into doing this thing that might be fun, but you don't want to do. So how do you avoid the whole thing?

You just say, my rule is I don't need dessert. And so he started thinking about this, he's like, okay, well, let me try this. And so he started trying it, and he's like, it only took two times. I only had to say it twice. The first time I said, our rule is I don't need dessert. And people sort of were like, huh? What two times. I only had to say it twice. The first time I said, you know, our rule is that only it deserves.

And people sort of were like, huh? What is what you always ate dessert before? He's like, oh yeah, but many rule, like I just don't eat dessert. He's like the second time we're out, the same thing happened. Everybody's like, oh, we're celebrating. It's a big win.

You know, the bottles are popping. Sort of cake is coming out. And you know, he's enjoying champagne, but he's like, you know, my rule is that only it's dessert. Nobody pushed back on him. Nobody argued. The social pressure in the situation dissipated. And from that point on, everybody knew his rule was he didn't need dessert.

As long as he was consistent in not eating dessert, that would never come up again. It would never be a thing. He's created his own way around a situation where he doesn't even have to think. All he has to do is watch the rule, follow the rule. But we automatically remember what rules are. So rules can work for us in this really weird way. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Total digression here, I had a rule of no dessert for a long time and found that it was actually

creating like a dysfunctional relationship with the whole category of food that I didn't want to pass along to my son. But that's a good way. I want to hear about that. Yeah, because you had this role, no dessert, but like walk me through the trajectory of this role, right? Because just because you create a role for a year, it doesn't mean you have to stick with it forever, but I want to hear about the arc to this because this is really important. In brief, I was raised by parents who were super strict

about sugar, then I fetishized and fixated as a consequence and would, as I got older, and as you know, as you get older, your sleep is a little bit more tenuous. And so I would eat a bunch of dessert and not be able to sleep. And also like I would maybe feel like shit the next day because I had super gorge done it. By the way, I'd also quit doing drugs and drinking.

And so like dessert became like my one quote unquote, vice. And I had a fateful conversation right here on this show. We can put a link in the show notes with a woman named Evelyn Tribbley. Loyal listeners probably, they've heard that episode or have heard me gush about it subsequently. That she's one of the architects of something called Intuitive Eating.

And her argument, among other arguments, but her argument as it pertains to sugar is, the holistic fix isn't for you to rule it out and describe it as sinful and like these moralistic terms or like a vice The holistic fixes for you to have a healthy relationship with food in your body and By the way, that's a really important model to send to your I think then five-year-old son He's now eight and I really took that to heart and I've spent many years working with her directly and having a healthy relationship with Sugar so that I

have true permission to eat it when I want it, but I don't feel this childish animalistic urge to gorge. And that, I think, has been very helpful. I don't know if that is any way relevant to the discussion of decision making, but that's the truth. Well, totally because what you're doing is you're taking a different environment, right? So if you're thinking of an environment where you want to avoid dessert, that doesn't mean you don't eat dessert. Like his rule socially was, I don't eat dessert, but he was doing it with his kids.

And so you're creating that sort of situation, artificial environment where you, you know, your environment often determines your behavior. And so by changing and creating this environment, you superpower your charges. So you can have it both ways, right? You can have a healthy good relationship with your home life and showing your your kids are emulating what behavior you want to be normal around dinner. And in social settings with work, you can have a completely different set of rules that keeps you out of trouble or it doesn't enable you to do the things that might lead you away from the goals that you have. Some of the other rules that I have are, I don't have meetings before 12 every day.

I stopped drinking at 9, what I'm out at work events. I invest in an index fund every month. They're boring things, but I call them automatic rules for success, because they put you in the position and on the path to sort of get what you want out of life, right? Stop drinking at night. Why do I do that? Because I want a good sleep. And nothing good happens past nine when you're out at a work event. No meetings till 12. Why is that a rule? Because I need to find creative time in my day. I don't want to have to search for that time. If that's the most important thing that I do, I want to always be able to have that time

and I don't want to have to find it. And it doesn't mean that it's all productive time or that I'm doing something super valuable with that time, but I never have to find the time. And so it's just a rule that we block off all of that stuff. I love that. I have a lot of those rules too.

I try not to have any meetings before one. What are your other rules? I'm curious because I don't get to hear other people's rules right off to just one of them. I'm trying to think about the difference between rules and practices, but maybe they're the same thing. I work out every day, maybe take one day off. I meditate every day. I try to meditate for an hour,

but I'm pretty, another rule is that I'm pretty flexible about all of these rules because I have, in the past, demonstrated a real pension for taking the rules so seriously and being so rigid that it makes everybody miserable. So there's a three rules, meditation, exercise, and flexibility. And then I would say, I can think of a three rules, meditation, exercise, and flexibility. And then I would say, I guess I can think of a million others, but another is that I really try to be pretty diligent about, this is going to sound a little corny, but I've found it really helpful, to make in my mind a little dedication of pretty much everything I do

throughout the day, to the extent that I can remember to do this, to dedicate it to the benefit of everybody, including myself. So I'm doing this exercise to make myself stronger and happier so that I can, you know, be a good dad and do good work that helps other people. Yeah. I do say that I thought of one of the rules that I haven't really talked about, but one of my rules is I look at my inputs on a quarterly basis and inputs being, who am I spending my time around as people? Do I want to be spending my time around those people?

What information am I consuming from other people? Am I conscious about the information I'm letting in to my head by who I follow in social media, by who I read, who I consume? And I just sort of do a check-in every quarter. I book it actually, It's like two-hour meetings sort of last week of every quarter with myself. And I sort of like, okay, just mentally walk through these. I reflect on, you know, am I adapting bad habits that I don't

want? Why is that? Is there somebody in my life who's got that habit that I, you know, need to think about consciously? Who am I letting into my head? Is it negative? Is it positive? How am I feeling a bit that? And I sort of objectively just go through this as if I was a third party auditing myself, because we don't think of this as being important, but like what you read, what you consume, the conversations you have become sort of the feed or raw material, if you will, for your future thoughts. But we don't think of it that way, because we think that, oh, no, we just process it and we filter it out, but that's not really how the brain works and how the mind works.

You hear something enough, you start to believe it, even if it's not true. And sort of, like if you're consuming slightly, or even extreme negative content online, like that just sort of enables and snowballs, all of this stuff. And so I want to be positive smart people who have interesting ideas. Let's do a check-in balance on that because not everybody stays that way. And sometimes people creep in to your network or

your circle, not only in person, but online and the information you're consuming. And it pays to have a consciousness, again, to position yourself to have the right input so that you can actually think independently and when you do think independently, you have the right thoughts. I love that. Yeah, the Buddha said the mind is the forerunner of all things. You really do want to be pretty careful and curatorial as it pertains to what you're letting in there.

Or I guess another expression is garbage in, garbage out. Coming up, Shane outlines his decision-making process. He talks about the difference between decisions and choices and the biggie, how to know what is worth wanting in the first place. Deep in the enchanted forest, from the whimsical world of Disney Frozen, something is wrong. Arondelle is in danger once again from dark forces threatening to disrupt the peace and tranquility.

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massacres in French history. But in reality, she was a mother holding on to her dying dynasty. Royal status might be bright and shiny, but it comes with the expense of everything else, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Follow even the royals on the Wendry app or wherever you get your podcasts. If you don't want to wait for more episodes, join Wendry Plus today to listen exclusively and add free. for more episodes, join Wondery Plus today to listen exclusively and add free. So we've talked a lot about the enemies of clear thinking and what we can do to

at least partially stifle those enemies. There are a million other things I'd like to ask you about, but I do want to make sure in our limited time that we get to decision-making. So you have a five-step process for decision-making that you talk about in the book. Those steps are to find the problem, explore possible solutions, evaluate the options, make the judgment, and execute the best option. Can we spend some time on each of these and explicating them and also getting a sense of how you came to these five? Yeah, it's sort of like a basic decision-making process. each of these and explicating them and also getting a sense of how you came to these five. Yeah, it's sort of like a basic decision-making process. I don't think there's anything super different from what you would think about in terms of making a decision, right? So if

position independent, so this comes at the moment sort of of your decision. So maybe you don't have a chance to make your position better. And as you say, the goal is to find the problem. But if I'm making the decision, I have to define the problem. I can't let somebody else define the problem for me. And ownership over that is where the decision-making process really starts. And it's super important.

That's a detail a lot of people mess. If your boss tells you to solve this problem, but you're responsible for solving the problem, you get to verify that that's the actual problem you need to solve. If you're the one solving the problem, you need to get the inputs you need to make sure that you're defining the right problem. A great way to do that is sort of when you get people together in a meeting, like we talked a bit earlier, instead of asking everybody for like a summary of the situation where everybody basically like paraphrases and says the same thing,

change the social signaling value to what do you see about this problem that nobody else sees, and try to get unique insights that remove the blind spots that you have into the problem. So what you're trying to do is change your perspective and walk around the problem almost in a three-dimensional way. Explore the possible solutions is once we've defined the problem, well often what tends to happen, we get into this sort of rut at work where we have one real solution and then we have maybe like a status quo solution and like we have to choose between these options. And what you're trying to do again is get the best thinking out of other people to solve the actual problem that you're facing. And it's often it's not an either or thing

often you can combine things between them. And if you've only come up with two solutions, you haven't really thought about the problem really hard and long, because usually there's three, four, or five. And the more you think, the more insight you're gonna have, not only into the problem, but into the solutions.

And once you've identified possible solutions, sort of evaluate the criteria by which you're making this decision. What are the key variables that adder and how do I wait them? And one way that I've come up with to sort of identify the criteria, because often we say like, oh, here are the 16 things

that matter. Usually there's one or two, and often we can't pick out what the most important thing is, come up with this idea of sort of like battling criteria, which is like take out a post-it pad and start writing down all the criteria for your decision making, all the criteria for this. And the criteria being, I will know this is a success

if XYZ. These are the key variables I need to monitor to make sure the situation is going as planned. These are the variables that I need to monitor to make sure the situation is going as planned. These are the variables that I need to pay attention to. They're also the variables that are going to tell me whether this is working or not. So I want to watch them and I want to give everybody else permission to tell me if they start going as skew so that we can course correct really quickly. But if you hold up, each sticky note has one criteria on it and you hold up these two at a time,

you have them battle with each other. It's like which one is more important, and they can't be the same. There's no ties. And so you put down the one that's less important and you pick up a new one. And at the end of this whole thing, you're left with sort of like your criteria ranked

in order of importance. And that allows you to put a weight to them. Because often when you explore possible solutions, they're going to solve different or maximize different aspects of that criteria. Once you have that, you can make the judgment about which decision is which criteria is being solved, which solution is going to solve the most criteria, what's going to give you the best bang for the buck, all things considered, including time, energy, focus, cause, like all of that stuff, and then you can execute.

And sort of like that's a standard decision making process that you learn about. We often follow it, sort of unconsciously, with inertia, right, where we define the problem, exploring the solutions, we don't really come up with the criteria very often. We don't tend to think about that. We get one or two that sort of like stick in our head and we don't think, oh, well, there's other criteria, right, which might be sort of the overtime cost or sort of, are we thinking about the complexity we're introducing into the situation? All of those things are relevant to making a judgment. This is why decision-making is sort of so hard and you know we make it really academic. But at the end of the day you have to simplify your processes around this and you don't want to use

the same process for different types of decisions. So you know Jeff Peasos has the concept of one way door or two way door. A one way door being once you go through it you can't really go back or it's hard to go back. A two way door being you can just like walk around and go through it, you can't really go back or it's hard to go back. A two-way door being you can just like walk around and go through again. And it's easy. You go through the door, you don't like it, you come back. And often what organizations do, what people do is we sort of apply the same process around decision making to one-way doors and two-way doors. That's not really what we want to do to hone judgment, to develop judgment in people. We want two-way doors to be made quickly.

Those decisions to be made quickly, the biggest risk with those decisions is that we go too slow as an organization. There's too much bureaucracy around them because the cost of failure is really low. The opposite being at one-way door, we want go slower, more methodically. Once we go through that door, it's going to be harder to go back. That's not the time where we want to use to develop judgment. Another people, that's the time where we want to use the people who have the judgment to make those decisions and communicate that to people who are developing their judgment. And that's how we go about getting an organization that makes good decisions and consistently

executes. You said before that there's five step process for making good decisions, isn't revolutionary. Having said that, you also said that we often forget to do it because we're in default mode. So, how can we get better at remembering to do this? Is it that we should make up some automatic rules that when a big decision comes up? We've got a process, we have a checklist. Yeah, well, I think what's relevant is sort of like doing it for yourself, right? And so I can give you sort of rules that might work where you follow the process

and you can define decision. I mean, the first step is like what type of decision am I making? Is it, you know, is the cost of failure really small or is it high? And then that'll guide the process that we take from there. I have a friend who keeps that little diagram actually from the book on their dust down. They showed me a picture of it the other day. And it sort of just reminds them to walk through the process around that.

We talked a little bit about this earlier by sort of breaking up these meetings between defining the problem and evaluating the criteria or coming up with possible solutions, sorry, defining the problem, coming up with possible solutions into two different meetings. And so what you can do is just right now, just design the process before you're faced with a decision, don't wait for the actual moment of a decision because then that's gonna rely on willpower

to follow it, it's gonna rely on remembering it. You can design the process by which you wanna go about making these decisions, okay? So if this decision is a two-way door, here's how we rely on remembering it, you can design the process by which you want to go about making these decisions. Okay, so if this decision is a two-way door, here's how we're going to make it, we're going to delegate it to junior employees, let them go fast, and we want to have some method of capturing the judgment and evaluating and improving that judgment. If it's a one-way door, well, here's the process, we're going to follow, we're going to have this series of sort of three or four meetings.

These meetings don't need to be long, right? They can be literally like define the problem, explore the possible solutions, evaluate the options, and then at that point, making the judgments easy. Maybe you've taken this hour long meeting and now you've broken it into three 30 minute meetings over a period of a week, but that's the process by which you make decisions. And so again, you're creating an artificial environment that helps you do the things that you wanna do instead of relying on your willpower,

instead of relying on catching yourself in the moment, you're preventing all these problems from happening in the first place. Yes, I love that. It's sort of a logistical and intellectual infrastructure to avoid getting carried away by our default modes, by overriding some of our less helpful animalistic tendencies. It makes a lot of sense. You also talk in the book about the difference between decisions and choices.

I guess what you're getting out there is that not everything requires a five-step process. Sometimes you just order the happy meal. Yeah, totally. When you're in the aisle at the drug store and you're buying toothpaste and they don't have your brand, you're not going to go through this process of, let me evaluate. You're just going to grab something and if it doesn't work, the cost of failure is really low. It's really important to have these tools or behaviors or approaches around decision-making

that allow you to sort of solve these problems in a different way than you would think about. Another one that is in the book that a lot of people like is ASAP or ALAP. Am I going to make this decision as soon as possible, which is a two-way door where the cost of failure is really low? Well, I want to make that as soon as possible, or as late as possible, which is sort of, oh, well, you know, this is going to bind us. This is the one-way door.

The cost of failure is high. And then the question becomes, well, how do I know I've reached the point where I have to decide? And in the book, we talk about stop, flop, or no, which is I stop gathering useful information. So there's no new information. I want to wait as late as possible because I want to gather all the information

that I can. But when I stop gathering useful information, I start going over the same information over and over again, nothing new, nothing relevant is coming up. I flop, flop stands for first lost opportunity. So the deal is a bit to go away. The situation is changing. We're going to lose optionality. Okay, we're forced into a decision or we know we just know what to do because we've got some insight or some unique perspective into the situation. Well, now I can make that decision.

You don't want a lot of decisions sort of hanging in the middle where they're just occupying these threads in your mind. You want to make them quickly. That's all really helpful. One thing you say that is also helpful is that the final part of decision making is figuring out what to want. I'll quote you back to you. You say, quote, good decision making comes down to two things. One, knowing how to get what you want. And two, knowing what is worth wanting. Yeah, I think, you know, it's the second part that really holds people up right going back to that social default again. And the example I sort of used from the book because I thought it would resonate with a lot of people comes from a friend of mine and it was Ebenezer Scrooge, right?

And wanted Ebenezer Scrooge one. He wanted to be the most successful, most well-known, richest person in the neighborhood. What did he get? He got all of those things. He accomplished what he wanted, but he discovered what he wanted, wasn't worth wanting. At the end of his life, what did he want?

He wanted to do over. He played life by somebody else's scoreboard. He wasn't consciously deciding what mattered to him and going after that and pursuing that. And I think that so often this happens, and I've seen this with so many different people and so many walks of life. I used to work for a guy who came to the same conclusion. He reached the pinnacle of his career. He was like the CEO, huge company, very prestigious. And then when he left, he sort of retired. And when you retired, nobody wanted to talk to him anymore. Nobody wanted to deal with him. This person went from like having 18 to 20 people,

like I wanted to play golf with him on a weekly basis to nobody wanted to talk to him. And what he realized afterwards, and we talked about this about a year later over coffee, and it was such a powerful insight and he realized that he got to the CEO level and the way that he got there was mutually exclusive from living a life of meaning. It was mutually exclusive from developing lifelong relationships. He got the Rechart Belboes. He got there with stepping on people as he climbed over them to get to the top. So he got what he wanted, but he found out, you know what, that really wasn't worth wanting in the first place.

Or if it was worth wanting the strategy and approach that I was using to get it, wasn't the right one, because in the end, I just wanted to do over. And there's great sources of this everywhere in the world. If you live near a retirement community or assisted care living, you can go talk to people and volunteer.

And you can allow their hindsight to become your foresight. There's a good book by Carl Pilmer, which is Lessons for the Living, I think. And he talks about interviewing these people and what they regret and what they tend to regret. Again, somebody else told them what the scoreboard was. They played to that scoreboard at the end of life. None of that scoreboard mattered. They really wanted to do something different. The end of the day, it's not going to matter

if you have another zero in your bank account for most people. What's going to matter is are you there for the people you care about? And you can do this interesting thought experiment because the goal is to like, how do we turn our future hindsight into our current foresight. And you can sort of close your eyes and just visualize this experiment. You're, you know, 95 or I guess 110 or however old you are and you're in hospital and you're unconscious. And you can hear everything going on around you.

You can't open your eyes and everybody thinks that you can't hear and everybody's lying around your bed and it's sort of your last night before you pass, before you die. And what are they saying about you? And what do you want them to be saying about you? And are you living your life in a way that's going to get them to say that about you or you doing something else? And I think it's a really powerful thought experiment that allows us to get them to say that about you or you doing something else. And I think it's a really powerful thought experiment that allows us to change our perspective, remove

a blind spot, and allows us to see into the future, our future, the future we're creating and be conscious about the choices we're making today. I have this saying, which is, don't tell me your priorities, show me your calendar. And are we living life? Are we seeing one thing and living another one? Are we matching up our real priorities with our calendar and our calendar means time, commitment, energy, focus? Are we doing the things that we wanna be doing

to live the life that we wanna be living? I love that. Reminds me of this woman, A. Lua Arthur, who's been on this show, I'll put a link in the show notes. She gave this incredible TED talk. She's a death doula. That's basically somebody who's there to help the dying and their family make this transition. And she talked a lot about envisioning your deathbed.

What is going to matter from that perspective? And can you live your life to the best of your ability from that perspective? And given the fact that the defaults that we've talked about, the ego, the emotions, social pressure, inertia, they're powerful. You kind of make this a practice. You have to make an automatic rule to infuse this viewpoint into your life. Well so many people, it's so interesting. I used to work with a lot of people like this. And at the intelligence agency and workaholicism or whatever you want to call it,

was really an escape from their life. They didn't want to be home with the kids. They didn't want to be at home with their partner. Work became an outlet to get away from the life that they had created for themselves. And I think that there's a lot of inertia to that. And you need to recognize when that's happening. Part of that is choosing to play life on your own scoreboard instead of somebody else's. Is this the life I want to be living? Am I living it in the way that I want to be living it?

And am I doing it with the people that I want to be living. Am I living it in the way that I want to be living it? And am I doing it with the people that I want to be doing it with? I think for me, and I don't know if this is true for you, my workaholism to the extent that it's still operational, and I think it's less than it used to be, but not gone. I don't think it's driven by a desire to escape, because my home... Oh, I didn't mean that in all cases. Sorry, No, no, no, I don't. I know. Okay. You know, I totally, totally, I took, I took that in the spirit in which he was intended, I believe, but I'm just building on it. I think there are lots of ways we can become workaholics. And in my case, I think it's fear, like quasi rational fear of, you know, being destitute or something like that. Right. I don't even know. Fear. I shouldn't. I shouldn't. I shouldn't.

I'm excited by calling it quasi-rational, totally irrational. Well, yeah, a lot of fear going back to fear, fears and emotion, more making decisions and more fearful. And you can be fearful of failure and success. And I think a lot of people don't appreciate that. If you're trying to quit smoking, for example, being successful at quitting smoking means changing

your peer group most of the time. And so subconsciously, a lot of people are afraid to be successful because it means giving up all these familiar friends, all these familiar social situations. What does that mean for me? And I think fear is a very powerful emotion that dictates behavior. Have you figured out what matters most for you? Yeah, but I mean, it's sort of the big things don't change, right? The big things, you know, I sort of have a mosaic of life.

I don't view things as balance between work and life. I have different pieces and they can shrink and expand, but they can never go to zero. And the kids are obviously, you know, my kids are the most important thing in my life. The second most important thing for me right now is like, I want to make the world a better place. I'm on a mission through the podcast and the blog and the book to try to put out higher quality information for people to consume, for people to have easy access to, to help them sort of become the best versions of themselves.

That's really important to me. In order to do that, I also have to take care of myself, right? Going back to what we talked about, I got to sleep, I got to work out, I got to eat well, I got to invest in my relationships. I want to be financially independent, so I don't have to make choices that other people tell me to make. So saving more money than I spend, investing every month, and having these rules around that.

I think if I can leave the world a better place, I will be excited about what I've done here on this brief time on Earth. Sounds like our priorities are exactly the same. Yeah, I think so. Are there other practices that support this process of clear thinking and good decision making, what's coming to mind,

things like meditation, which I referenced earlier, but also reading anything else that I mean, I know you talk a lot about curating your role models or any of these worth mentioning in whatever time we have. Yeah. So, I mean, we can talk about personal board of directors, but sort of it's interesting that you mentioned meditation and,, because there are two things that position you to make things easier. So meditation, at least in my experience with it, makes me less emotional, less egotistical,

gives me a different perspective on not only myself, but others and the situation and the context and the problems that I'm facing. And so it actually makes those things easier to handle, because now I've reduced my blind spots. I can more easily circumvent those things. Same as reading, right? Reading allows me to avoid mistakes so that I find fewer mistakes. Literally the tagline to our website

is mastering the best of what other people have figured out. None of these ideas are mine. But through them, I can prevent problems. If I can prevent problems, then the defaults become less relevant. Another one that I have that I mentioned in the book is a personal port of tractors. And you might not be fortunate enough to work with the people that you want to work with or you know, you don't always get to pick the people you're around. But you can have access to the best people in the world, best people in history has ever produced by just enlisting them on your personal board of

directors. You don't need their permission for that. And what you're doing in that moment is you're coming up with a repository of people that are your heroes, and they exhibit a trait that you want to adopt or exhibit a mindset or an approach that you want to take. I often do this when I'm walking or just walking to the gym and I sort of think through problems or think through a situation. I just ask myself, what would Warren do? What would Dan do? What would anybody who's on your personal board of directors, I even have Michael Jordan on there.

What would Michael Jordan say? What would Kobe Bryant say about this situation? And it just allows me to, what it does is it really gives you a different lens into the situation. You assume that person's identity, you look at the problem through their eyes and that removes your blind spots. And when you remove blind spots, again, the source of all bad decisions is blind spots. We can't entirely eliminate them, but we can dramatically reduce them. By seeing the world through their eyes, we get a completely different perspective onto the problem that we're facing. Often, we know what to do, and we

stop getting in our own way. This has been very helpful. I appreciate your time in helping us do better at thinking clearly before I let you go. Can you please, you've referenced the website, the newsletter, the book. Can you just give us the full rundown, the full blast of resources so that people can go check it out if they want? Yeah, the book is clear thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. It's available at all major bookstores and booksellers around the world. The blog is fs.blog, f as in pharnum, s as in street, so fs.blog. And if I'm in all social platforms

and the podcast is called the knowledge project. Shane, such a pleasure. Congratulations on the new book. Thank you for your time. Thanks, Dan. Thanks again to Shane Parish. Great to meet him. Thank you to you for listening.

Go give us a rating or a review that really helps. Also go check out all the stuff I'm doing on social media. That also helps. Thank you most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Justin Davie, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson, DJ Cashmere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor, and Kimmy Reggere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor and Kimmy Regular is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet

Audio and Nick Thorburn of the Great Band Islands wrote our theme, check out his new album. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a freshy, a brand new episode. We're talking about ADHD. We haven't really done a full episode on ADHD with a true expert, a physician like this before so I'm really excited to have on my friend, my new friend, Dr. Mark Burt. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.

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