Master the Art of Thinking Clearly with Simerjeet Singh and Shane Parrish

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of the Beginner's Mind Podcast. I know, I know. Guilty as charged. We haven't been around much. We have not created new episodes. And that's because I was seeking more clarity in my life. When 2023 started, it was a deliberate decision to sort of remove the clutter and focus on what's truly important. Not saying that podcasting wasn't truly important, but I had to change gears for a while, do a lot of housekeeping, a lot of decluttering, a lot of cleaning up and getting things back into order, which slowly are falling into Place. And 2023 is almost coming to a close. So thank you for sticking around during this time. I hope you extracted all the value you could from the previous episodes, the recordings, et cetera. Today we have a very special guest with us, Shane Parrish, the author of this book called Clear Thinking. And that is going to be the subject of our discussion today with Shane. Clarity, which I believe is a big superpower in this era of AI, generative AI, overload of information. We have wars raging right now, so human beings definitely need more clarity about what do we truly want from our lives and from our existence, pretty much. So let me introduce Shane to you today before we welcome him into the show. Shane is the brain behind Farnum street, the go to blog for clear thinking enthusiasts. He's also known as the Wall Street's biggest influencer. Shane has taken the podcast world by storm with the Knowledge Project. Check out the videos on YouTube and the audio on podcast, which has amassed a whopping 35 million downloads. His weekly Brain food newsletter, you'd love it, is a hit too. With nearly half a million people tuning in for their dose of wisdom. Shane has recently penned his insights into this fantastic book called Clear Turning ordina moments into extraordinary results. So I hope the ordinary chit chat that'll happen today will create something extraordinary into your life. This book is more than just a read, I feel it's a journey towards mastering the art of positioning yourselves for success. We'll discuss that as we begin sharpening your decision making skills and really making the most out of every situation that we face in our lives. In a word, buzzing with confusion, Shane introduces clarity. And I hope this conversation here today will introduce some clarity into your life. So let's get the ball rolling and dive into. You're welcome to the show, Shane.

Oh, thanks for having me. I love how you said positioning yourself for success because that's one of the key takeaways that I hope people Take from the book is how to play life on easy mode instead of hard mode.

I know. I mean, I've done my research, and that was something that really, when I watched your videos, the whole positioning thing, it really stood out because I think it's one of your chords which goes something like this. It's not about who's most powerful, who's faster, who's stronger. It's about were you in the right place at the right time, and how did you position yourself at that point? Shane Let me begin by. Since the subject is clarity, let me begin by asking you, are human beings born with a natural sense of clarity, like we are born with a natural sense of creativity? Perhaps? Is this something that's hidden somewhere, or have we always been the confused species that we are today?

I think we're always a bit confused. You know, we're like a little squirrel chasing around whatever's moving. And to get clarity, we actually have to pause and take ourselves out of ourselves, if you will, and get a different perspective on the world. It sounds like you did that at the end of 2022, heading into 2023. You have to get out of your environment. You have to look at your life from a different perspective. And when you look at it from a different perspective, you get different insights into what you're missing. Because it's hard for us to see fully any system that we're a part of. And I think that if we're just focused on our life, then we think what we see is all that there is to see. And so we. All of these things that other people tell us to chase, we chase money, we chase power, we chase fame. And at the end of our life, do those things really matter? And it doesn't matter if you want these things and you go after them, the question is, are you consciously choosing what you go after and what you don't go after?

Right.

And most people I know, I don't know about you, but they have like 10, 15 priorities, and they feel busy, they feel stressed. And what tends to happen in those moments is you sacrifice your sleep, you sacrifice how healthy you're eating, you sacrifice your relationships with other people. And so it just gets worse and worse. And you put yourself in a position where you're playing on hard mode instead of easy mode.

Absolutely. And that's a dangerous place to be in. In fact, when I started this year, I came up with this tagline, stress free in 23. That's because I love that. Yeah, thank you. That's because I had slowly come To a conclusion that maybe we were taking on board too, trying to do too many things at one time and in the process forgetting what the most important thing was. So thank you for your answer to that question. Tell us about your how did you move into this? How did you become the go to person across the globe for clarity in decision making from a background in cybersecurity and intelligence, I'd love to hear the backstory.

I mean, I wish I had a really good answer to this question. I think I started working at a three letter agency a couple weeks before September 11th. Everything changed September 11th. I got thrust into positions of authority and responsibility that no, you know, 23 or 24, 25 year old would be put in today. And it wasn't because I was competent or capable. It was because I was in the building and we just needed things done and you just had to step up. And part of stepping up for me meant I need to figure out how to make decisions. I need to figure out how to get better at this. Because, you know, my country depends on me, other countries depend on me, my team depends on me, troops in theater depend on me. And I want to be the best decision maker, the best thinker that I can be because I feel like that's what I can do to help out in this situation. And so I started this journey in, I would say, 2005, really about getting better at decision making. I started looking inside the organization, I started looking outside the organization. Luckily, I mean, I've talked to some of the best people in the world. Naval Ravikant. I've talked to Charlie Munger, I've talked to all of these people. Daniel Kahneman. I've learned lessons from them. I've had one on one conversations with them. And I was like, what are they doing better than everybody else? Why is it they can seem to consistently make better decisions than everybody else? And can I take that and use that in my life and my work?

Wow, that's incredible. Having access to people like that who make quick decisions and decisions which will have implications. You talk about Charlie Mango. There's huge money involved, right?

Yeah. So I started a blog called FS Blog, which was my way to chronicle what I was learning and reflect on these lessons and how people were putting them into practice in the real world. And that reactive reflection is actually how we learn. We think we learn from experience, but we don't. If you think of it, I have this idea of a learning loop, which is you have an experience, then you reflect on that experience, you draw a Compression from that reflection and then you have an action. And so you just continuously learn, but if you skip the reflection part, you're not really learning. And so I started just publicly putting out my reflections anonymously because I wasn't allowed to have any Internet presence because I was working for an intelligence agency. And people on Wall street started to pick up on it and they started to like it and then they started to reach out and, and say, can you come talk? Can you come help me? Can you coach me? Can you be an advisor? And before you know it, you know, five or six years had passed and we had this huge audience from an anonymous website. And it was a little bit crazy.

Interesting because Wall Street's also a high stakes environment, right? Pretty much just like the one you were in. And I wanted to peel back a little, you know, wanted to peel the layers of this learning process, the journey that you undertook. You suddenly found yourself in a situation that you weren't prepared for. You had a lot of learning on the job itself for the average Joe or the average Singh or the average Kumar. Listening to this podcast right now, who wants to improve his or her decision making skills? What are two or three things that stand out, Shane, from the learning process?

Well, I think you just hit on something really key when you said you weren't ready for it. And this is how life works. We're not ready for whatever comes our way. There's no warning about cancer. There's no warning about a financial panic. There's no warning you don't get to get. You don't get a two minute warning where you go home and you get time to prepare. And so you always have to be positioned in a way that you can handle a wide variety of future scenarios. And I think that that is the key. If there's one message I want people to take away from this book, it's how do I improve my position today? What is one thing that I can do today to make myself more valuable tomorrow to change my trajectory, to make it make myself a more valuable employee, to make myself more likely to be able to strike out and start my own business? What can I do? What is within my control? And there's always something within your control that you can do. What tends to happen to a lot of people is they sit at home and they just wait. When will somebody recognize my potential? When is somebody going to tap me on the shoulder and give me what I deserve and nobody's going to come do that for you. You have to put yourself in a position where you're taking advantage of opportunities that other people can't take advantage of. And the way to do that is literally one day at a time. It builds inch by inch, day by day, week by week. And that's how you get better at this. And I think that's the key to decision making. Because if you're in a good position, if you're in a better position than somebody else, and you have contrast between your positions, then you're going to be able to take advantage of an opportunity when it inevitably comes when other people.

Can'T, just because you were there. You know, I don't know who said this, but it goes something like the showing up as 50% of. I think Woody Allen or someone probably said this. Showing up is more than 50% of success and being there.

And yet so many people have to show up consistently. It can't just be once, right? Showing up and just being present is not what you want. What you want is you want to show up up, you want to work your butt off, and you want to do it consistently. There's a difference between just showing up and showing up every day consistently. But in the back of your mind, you also want to think, what are the things that I can do today that put me in a better position to be able to do the things that I want to do tomorrow? And for everybody, there's all these little things that you can do if you want a promotion. Well, what skills should I acquire now before the promotion ever becomes available, that make it so that when it becomes open, I can just take that job right away?

That's a great thing to think about. To Mullover, what are the things I can do today to better position myself? I think caught up in the web of desires and dreams and things that we want and complaints and so many other things. We don't focus on what's immediately right in front of us. That tiny little opportunity to make your presence felt or perhaps learn a new skill or do something or help two people collaborate or do something. That's not part of the job description. And that's how you expand yourself beyond it, right?

We're all looking for these big things, but it's really these little things that determine whether you're playing on easy mode or hard mode. All of these things are going to happen in your life, right? You're going to have an opportunity for promotion. You're going to get angry, there's going to be a health crisis, there might be a relationship crisis. You're probably going to have a financial struggle. At some point, if you haven't had one already, and the position that you're in at the time that those things happen will dictate whether they're on easy mode or hard mode. It doesn't mean your outcome is going to be better. But if you're playing on easy mode, it's a lot easier to get through that than it is. And not only do you get through it, you're not focused on surviving, you're focused on capitalizing on the opportunity to the extent that you can. It makes you stronger, it makes you better. You can just. If you look back through history, you sort of see Carnegie, Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, all of these people, what have they done? No matter what happens, they can take advantage of this situation. You look at Warren Buffett, he's got $150 billion on the balance sheet. And so if the stock market goes up, he wins. If the stock market stays the same, he wins. If the stock market crashes, he wins. And then you have to think, well, what is it that I can do to apply that to my life so that I'm never forced by circumstances into doing something that I don't want to do? And I can always take advantage of whatever the environmental changes around me happen to offer. People are getting laid off. I'm so valuable, I don't get laid off. Promotions are coming up. I already have the skills for that job. I've been working on it for a year. And to the outside person, this seems like luck. How is it that this person's in a position to get this job? They're so lucky. Well, they're not lucky. They've worked at it every day for the last six months.

Absolutely. And we don't see that because it's usually behind the scenes. Right, exactly.

These little day to day decisions, these ordinary moments that sort of dictate what happens.

Indeed. Talk to us about the role of emotions in this entire process. And especially emotions overtaking the clarity process, the decision making process, because, you know, we have wonderful models available and human beings have had access to wisdom since the ancient Greeks and you know, ancient folks in India and all those texts and so much knowledge has always been around. And yet history is scattered with examples of people who made horrible decisions just because the emotional hold of that passion, the moment of passion, you know, it took hold and all common sense was shut down and people made horrible decisions, including what's happening in the world right now, you know, with all the suffering and all the damage that human beings are inflicting on each other. Please Talk to us about the role of the emotional part of this process.

It sounds like common sense, but I don't think I've ever seen somebody put it this way before. Which is when your emotions are in charge of you, you're not thinking. There's no moment of clarity. If you're typing an angry email or you're scared, you're making decisions and you're less likely to think, so you're more likely to react without reasoning. So all these reasoning tools that we've been taught are useless in these moments because we don't think. I mean, it just happens that way, right? So what can we do to counterbalance this? So we're not making decisions out of fear, so we're not making emotional decisions. Well, if you look at common prevailing wisdom, it' catch yourself. Right? All you need to do is catch yourself in these moments and then all of a sudden you won't feel angry. You know, you won't do these things. And you know, to some extent that works about 20% of the time. And you can feel it. You know, I'm angry, I'm going to walk away from this situation. But more importantly, what you can do is build in automatic rules and safeguards and rituals that you can use. Because all you're really trying to do, you just need one little space, one little notch, one little breath. And that breath is enough between stimulus and response so that you're not reacting. And so an example of that is, you know, you can create a rule for yourself or a ritual if you will, which is, you know, whenever anybody says anything, I'm going to take a breath before I respond. And in that breath all you're doing is creating a gap between stimulus and response. And you're giving your brain enough time to catch up and be like, okay, I'm not going to say this thing that I was thinking, I'm going to say now I'm going to say something else, right? Because I'm going to, I'm going to ask myself, what is the outcome I want? How do I associate my ego with the outcome? So outcome over ego. It's not about me. It's not about me. It's not about being right, it's not about asserting my dominance. But all of these traits are within us. We're animals, right? So we're self preserving, we're hierarchical, we're territorial. So whenever anybody slights us, we get our backup. And what happens when we get our backup? We're not thinking our territory isn't physical like animals. We're not like a wolf walking around in a forest pissing on trees. And then when you know, you get a warning when you come into this. Our territory is how we see ourselves, our identity. So when you, you speak to something, if you're my partner, my colleague, my kids, my parents, when you tell me something that I don't believe about myself, when you tell me something I don't want to believe about myself, I am inclined biologically to respond without reasoning. So what we want to do is we want to create a gap, we want to create a pause. We want rules around these situations to handle this right. You know, you can have a rule which is just like you let it go. My rule is I let all these comments go. You can have a rule where. Or a ritual where it's like I always respond with a breath, and then I. Then I say what I'm thinking. And all of these little things just circumvent the wiring in your brain to give you a little bit of a pause, a little bit of a space, so your emotions are less in control. Now, how does positioning relate to this? Well, you're going to get emotional, you're going to get angry, you're going to experience fear, you're going to experience all of the emotions that everybody feels. That's not going to change. But if you've eaten healthy, if you slept well the night before, you're going to be in a better position to handle that, right? So it sounds so basic and sounds so simple, but nobody's put this together yet, which is, hey, if you sleep, if you eat, if you invest in your relationships, if you do the basic things that you need to do. Well, now you're playing on easy mode. It doesn't mean you're not going to get scared, doesn't mean you're not going to get angry, but it's going to be a lot easier to handle and overcome and manage those emotions and those urges that tend to get people in trouble than it otherwise is.

I love how you define it. The easy mode. It's like a vehicle in the overdrive mode and on the cruise mode. So tell us a little bit more about the easy mode. What sort of tendencies do we exhibit in it and how we can be more in the easy mode rather than the I'm gonna take my gun out any moment. More than most people are these days, fueled by Red Bull and caffeine.

Well, let me give you an example from my own life and my kids, right? One of my sons came home with an exam and he got A pretty bad mark on it. And, you know, I'm a pretty strict parent. I guess you could say I'm like an Indian parent. I'm very, you know, I'm very. You need to do well in school and you need to. You need homework and you need to work hard, and those are non negotiable. So he hands me this test and, you know, in a typical North, North American kid ways, like, I did my best and walks by and like, shrugs his shoulder. And I was like, you know, on the inside, I'm fuming, right? I'm just like, okay, but I'm gonna let this dissipate, right? We're gonna come back to this conversation. We're gonna let the emotions cool a little bit for you and for me, and then we're gonna talk about it. So I was like, later on that night, I came up to him and I was like, tell me what it means to do your best. I really want to know. What does it mean for you to do your best? And he's like, well, I sat down and at 10am when my exam started, I read all the questions and I looked at all the points and I allocated my time accordingly. And I, you know, answered the questions to the best of my ability. I was like, oh, that's interesting. You think about decision making and doing your best the same way that adults think about it, which is at the moment of decision, at the moment that I was. I was supposed to do something. I did my best in that moment, but I was like, pause for a second. I want to rewind. 96 hours. Tell me about the four days before your exam. Did you study? No. Were you up late the night before your exam? Yes. Why were you up late? I was cramming because I hadn't studied all week. Did you sleep well? No, I didn't sleep well. Were you late in the morning and rushed? Yes, I was late and rushed. Did you get into a fight with your brother? Yes, I got into a fight. Why did you get into a fight? Because I was late in the morning. We were arguing over the bathroom time, and I'm like, okay, so you chose. All of these things are within your control. So you chose to play on hard mode. You didn't choose to play on easy mode. That doesn't mean the test wouldn't have kicked your butt. However, you chose to make it a lot harder than it had to. And we do this every day, right? And it's these simple, basic things. Saving money, having financial security, going after, you know, different skills that make Us more widely employable or more valuable to the company that we're with. Sleeping well, investing in our relationships with our partner. If you imagine a patch of grass between you and your partner, and if you don't invest in that, that grass dries out. But every time you invest in it, you water it. And what happens if there's a little spark? If that grass is dry, it starts to fire. And if there's no. And if the grass is wet, what happens when there's a spark? Nothing happens. And so you have to do these basic things because they put you in a better position to play life on Easy Mod. It doesn't mean you're not going to get angry. And you know, the thing that I use with my kids all the time is especially when they're a little bickering, right? They don't know that they're bickering and they're escalating, and they're slowly escalating. And we do this all the time with our partners, our spouses, people at work. We end up in these situations. And that three words I use with them is gas or water. Do you want to pour gasoline on this situation or do you want to pour water on this situation? I'm not going to tell you what to pick. You need to tell you what to pick. But what I'm doing is tapping them on the shoulder in this moment. They don't realize they're making a decision. And this decision, this ordinary moment, this small, tiny moment, is going to have a lot of implications for them because you know, if it continues, you're going to get upset, your brother's going to get upset. What's going to happen? Well, now you got to spend time repairing that relationship. Not only that, you're going to be upset all day. It's going to affect everything you do for the rest of the day. This little ordinary moment in the morning before school is going to change the experience you have in your entire day. You're going to be on hard mode. Do you want to put oil, do you want to put gas on this? Or do you want to put water on this?

That's a great way to describe it. You know, the domino effect kicks in and one thing leads to another, and you're probably going to end up saying or doing something that you are going to deeply regret later on, then spend half the day repairing that. And some of those repairs will never happen. You know what you call the hard mode? I think I'd probably, from my observation and some of my writing recently, I'd call it the self inflicted pain. I was in the hospital the other day, you know, just to a family member not doing well. And I could hear folks in agony, right? And it just occurred to me in that moment that this is the real pain. And this is pain that these people did not ask for. They're being treated for it right now, but they didn't ask for it. And then just as you know, right at that moment as an epiphany occurred to me that we are inflicting so much pain on ourselves that has not been given to us, but we are the cause of it. We are the participants of the. In the matches and the games, in the little. These political games or whatever interpersonal games that happen. We participate in it and we inflict ourselves with so much pain and probably the pain that we have to go through that there is no escaping is probably 2, 3, 4, 5%, 10%, worst case scenario, but 90% or a huge chunk of pain that we go through in our lives is self inflicted through our own actions that we do without thinking. Just what you mentioned, without pausing.

I'm sorry to hear about your family member.

It's my mom, Shen. She's in the hospital at the moment, but she's doing better today. She's been in the hospital for about 12 days now and she's putting up a good fight. So we're looking forward to bringing her back home tomorrow.

My thoughts are with you.

Well, thank you. Thank you. Okay, shall we? I wanted to move on to the subject of age and maturity and decision making. Do we get better with age or what's the. Does it have a positive correlation as the years roll by?

Not really. I mean, after a certain number of years, do you get better at driving? No, you sort of go on autopilot and you stop. To get better at decision making requires one of two things. It requires a constant environment with a lot of repetitions and rapid feedback, which most of us don't have on our. You know, we do. If we're cooking, we can get better at cooking pretty easily. But when it comes to decision making, that's a different sort of set. Or it requires conscious effort on our part to get better at decision making. And so few of us want to put in that conscious effort and to get better and that conscious effort. To go back to what we talked about earlier with the learning loop, the conscious effort for decision making is reflection. So how do I take these decisions that I've made and how do I reflect on them in a way that helps me compress what I've learned into something I can take away and put into use later. And I think that one way to do that is sort of, I call it in the book, make the invisible visible, which is just sort of write out what's going on in your head. You don't have to show anybody you can burn it after. It doesn't matter. But, like, write down the decision, write down the scenario that's going to help you see clearly what's going on inside your head. And it's going to. Because we think what's going on in our head makes sense, but when we start writing about it. One thing that's really interesting about writing down your thoughts and sharing them is that the act of writing is, you know, often reveals that we don't understand what we're thinking, what we're talking about. Not only that, it helps us understand what we're talking about, and more importantly, it gives us new ideas. And so writing has this incredibly powerful benefit to solidifying our own thoughts, reflecting on our own thoughts, pointing out areas where we don't understand what we're thinking about and giving us new ideas. And if you want to get better at decision making with age, and you want to get better at sort of understanding yourself and where you're strong and where you're weak and making adaptions around that, then you have to do the process of sort of going back and calibrating, how is my thinking right and where am I weak and what can I do? You don't have to show that to anybody else if you don't want to. You can just do it yourself.

Absolutely. And what would you say to people who completely avoid decisions just because they find this whole process overwhelming, or they're afraid to make a decision, or they're afraid to make a wrong one? And, you know, I encounter this very frequently in corporate circles or elsewhere. You know, the best strategy is avoidance. Avoidance until somebody. Somebody else will take initiative and really go after that thing. Yeah.

So most times when I encounter people who are scared to take a decision, what they're really scared of is they don't have the confidence to get to the outcome. And what you need to do is reframe the decision around what's the next step, and so change what you're looking at to close the gap. Because what's happening in those moments is the gap between where I am and where I want to be seems so large that I'm just going to stand here. And that comes in a couple ways. One, it comes in paralysis. So you don't actually make decisions. Two, it's endless amounts of research so you convince yourself you're doing something when you're not doing something. Or three, you start talking about it in a way that you've done it, but you haven't actually done it. And so these are all indications that you're looking at the end. You're looking at the outcome, and you're trying to close the gap between where you are and the outcome. Stop that. Like, that's just ridiculous. Focus on what's the next step that I can take? What is the next most tangible thing I can do to make myself progress towards this goal. I don't even know if I'm going to reach that goal. It doesn't matter. I call this next step confidence. You don't need the confidence to get to the end. You need the confidence to take the next step.

Absolutely. That's a great way to look at it. You know, in a lot of these hallways and hotels and convention centers, you'll see it'll be dark because in the lights are on. This efficiency, light saving mode. Moment you step forward, first line comes up, step forward, next one comes on and you know, motion sensors. Yeah.

Action creates confidence. People don't understand that you're not going to get confidence from reading or research or you get confidence from doing things, but you don't have like. So I came up with this when I was with my son and we were cliff jumping. So we're jumping off a cliff into the water. It's like 25ft down, and he's looking. He's looking at the bottom, and he's like, I'm never gonna make it.

Right?

And I'm like, whoa. So this is like, you know, analogous to what we were just talking about. I was like, no, you're thinking about this wrong. Think about the confidence to take one step off the ledge. That's the confidence.

That's all you need.

And then you'll figure, and you know, he. Fair enough. He does it, and within 10 seconds he's like, up and running around again. And we never have to have that conversation again. But what you really need is just the next step confidence. You focus on that and you'll be okay.

And that's the power of momentum. You know, I often talk about it. We. In fact, I speak a lot on the subject of change. And we had created a new keynote on the subject of agility in changing times, et cetera, et cetera. And theoretically, I'd put in a lot of effort making sure it's crisp and concise, you know, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, personal examples, corporate examples, everything to make all the right ingredients. And then I felt I need to go out and presented somewhere before I take it to a large corporate audience. So I do what I usually do. I take it out to students and to other audiences. And that force of momentum was so strong that by the time I really had to take it to my corporate audience, my level of confidence was very high in terms of, not that I wanted to memorize all the material, but in terms of these so many new connections that come up with the material that you already know. That only happens when you put yourself out there. And I was so hesitant to do that, that. But the process was so rewarding. Your thoughts on that?

Totally. If you look at any performer, anybody who's in front of anybody, be it a comedian, an athlete, they're practicing behind the scenes and they're failing. And that's what they're supposed to be doing. That's where they get the confidence to go in front of everybody. They go in front of the big audience, to go in front of the bright lights on a Sunday and play sports. And you get that confidence in the dark.

Yep, absolutely. And I think that answers the questions for so many people who leave their questions in the comments. I want to be a public speaker, influencer, YouTuber, et cetera, et cetera. There you go. Or writer for that matter. I forget the name of the author. It was a gentleman who is friends with Seth Godin and is a book on the art of the war, the War for Steven Pressfield. And he said the hardest part of writing is the sitting down to write.

Yeah, yeah, it is. It's scary. It's lonely. You're all alone, right. You get distracted. It's easier to vacuum, it's easier to wash the dishes. It's easier to cook dinner. Because writing can be hard.

And if those thoughts of how people who buy the book or read that blog are going to perceive it, it's even harder. Right. So it's about to shut down that self conscious thing and just go for it.

Well, one thing that helps me is if I sit down and I think about writing a book again, the gap between the blank page and a finished book is huge. But if I think about the gap between how about I just create one good sentence? Why do I have to write a book? I don't. I have to write one sentence. Okay, can I write another sentence? And now the gap is manageable. It's small. I can do it I can accomplish it. I can see the feedback and I can build the momentum.

I read in your book the Importance of Mental Model, you've written a lot about that. What role do they play in fostering clear thinking? Are there any specific mental models that you would like beginners, especially, especially youngsters to get familiar with, to get better at decision making?

So mental models are just sort of representations of how something works in your head. And so we've created a series of books called the Gray Mental Models, which is basically all the big ideas you would have learned in university and apply them to daily life.

Okay.

Where this becomes valuable is if you think of the source of all bad decisions is blind spots. And that's because we, we don't see a system for what it is. We see a system just because we're in a system. We think that all we see is what there is. So mental models allow us, if you will, to put on different glasses and see the situation, the circumstances, the problem through a different lens. And you can have a mental model which is, I can adopt your Persona and be like, what does my life look like from your perspective? Well, that's a mental model in a way. It's not the mental models we typically talk about. The ones that we talk about are thinking tools and sort of, how do we use these big ideas to see situations, to see similarities between what we're seeing and what's happening? I think the big ideas for students, the ones that they can take away are. And then we'll what? So second order thinking, we call it second order thinking. But the real question is, and then what if I do this? And then what? And you can think of, you know, something simple like if I eat a chocolate bar today, that's not going to be a problem. But if I eat a chocolate bar every day, well, now I'm going to create a problem. And so you can often have these first order positive, second order negative things, which is first order positive, eat a chocolate bar, feel good, second order negative, well, it leads to me being unhealthy. But you can also have first order negative, second order positive, which is, if I go workout today, that might suck. I don't like working out, so some people might. But if I'm healthy and exercise today, then great. But that's really a negative. I don't want to do that. It takes up time, it takes away everything. But second order positive, I'm likely to be healthier as a result of that. First order negative, I don't want to eat a salad. But second Order positive. Eating a salad might be the best thing on the menu to make sure that I stay healthy and happy. And so you can think about these things in terms of. And then what if I position myself for the next promotion? Then what happens? Well, I'm more likely to get the job. And so it's all just about thinking through things. If I do this, then what position am I in? What does the world look like from that position?

Right.

That's a really valuable one. Another one is thought experiment. And you know, just think about. We were talking earlier about focus and meaning in life. And so what you want at 10 is not going to be the same at 20 or 30 or 40 or 50. But you can do this thought experiment often, which is like, where do I want to go in life? Where is it that I'm trying to get to? I want to be conscious about pursuing those goals and I want to be focused on pursuing them. But the only way I can be focused on pursuing them is that if I know what matters to me, why it matters, and I go after it.

Sure, that's a great way of putting yourself.

You can think about inversion too, right? Which another. Sorry, one more mental model. You can think about inversion, which is how do I avoid certain outcomes? I don't know how to get the outcome, but I can avoid it. So what is. I don't. Maybe I didn't grow up with my parents living in a happy marriage, but I know what a bad marriage looks like.

Looks like, right.

So I can just pursue. What does it mean to be a bad partner? Okay, I won't be those things, things. And then if I eliminate all the bad things, only good things are going to happen. And Charlie Munger sort of sums this up and tell me where I'm going to die so I don't go there. And that's Inversion.

Edison with his light bulb, trying all different metals, all different substances, until he got to tungsten to figure out what does that will eliminate and create a light bulb in the process. 10,000 ways of how this doesn't work. That's a great way to look at it. Two questions before we let you go, two very important questions. One is around on the education of young people. Is there something that can be introduced in schools and colleges across the world that can help more clarity, given that they now have access to smartphones and so many other things that they perhaps did not have a couple of years ago. So it's a very different world that these kids, a lot more stimulation is available to them as compared to the previous generations. So is there something that a teacher or in that environment or a good trainer can do to help people have more clarity?

Yeah, I think it's. I would start teaching kids about positioning and you know, we live in a world where you probably can't take the phones away at this point and you can't do those things, but you can talk to them about how that impacts them and how that makes them play on easy mode or hard mode. And I think that there's a lot of things we could do differently in schools, including, especially in North America. I don't know what the school system's like in India, but we could challenge kids more. We could have higher standards for what we expect out of them. I mean, teachers are doing their best, but we're not really helping them very much.

Oh, we already have very high standards to the extent academically, you know.

Well, we don't here. Right. So maybe it's some balance between these.

But I think so that's the sweet spot. That's what they need. Is that the right mix of, you know, and there's a new segment of schools and schooling coming up in India which is completely going the opposite direction. In an effort to undo this or to balance it out. They're just completely going in the opposite direction. And even they are going to face challenges. As you rightly said, it's about finding the balance.

But let's work backwards. Right? So what's valuable in real life that we know as adults? Resourcefulness is valuable. Being able to figure things out on your own without instruction. Being self motivated is valuable. Right. So being competent. But you don't need to be the best in the world at sort of math or English or any of these things. And so being competent and competent means I can figure it out, I can get by, I can hack something together. Being hardworking is really valuable in real life. And so how do we teach those things to kids and then add positioning to that? And I would sort of look at the curriculum that way, which is you want to be positioned so that you have all of these skills. And if you have all of those skills and you're trustworthy and you're, you have high integrity, you're going to be unstoppable. Like there's, it doesn't matter what your grades were in school, like, no, but you're going to be a force of nature in the workforce. Because in the workforce it's not about your grades, it's about contrast between you and everybody else.

Right.

And if you can create that Contrast, you're going to get opportunities that nobody else gets.

So it's the deliberate art of being conscious, aware, mindful of what you're doing. What are the implications of that thing going to be in a year, in a two year's time? And to be mindful and to just take charge of it right now instead of waiting for the damage to happen later on, which is the life story of many people who don't have proper guidance or mentoring, is that they end up making these huge mistakes. Many of them cannot be undone. Sometimes they spend decades together to undo some of those mistakes and reinvent themselves. They bounce back later on in their 40s or in their 30s. But imagine the same people with the right.

Yeah, we all make mistakes. I mean, if the narrative in your head, once you make a mistake, I make mistakes, you make mistakes. Like mistakes are inevitable. But if that narrative starts beating you up, if that inner voice in your head starts putting you down and beating you up, well, that doesn't help anything. And if anything, it just makes you curl up into a shell, right? We make mistakes. Change the song that's on repeat in your head. Not today. I'm not going to listen to this today. I'm going to listen to a new song today. And that new song is like, okay, I made a mistake. What's the next step? What's the next thing that I can do to put myself in a good position to get out of this? What's the next thing that I can do to take a step forward? What's the next thing? There's something in your control right now, no matter where you are in life, that you can move one step forward in a positive direction. Focus on that. Don't focus on the mistake. You want to learn from the mistake. Don't beat yourself up about it, though.

That's what Carol Dweck at Stanford, she calls it the growth mindset thing, to not be attached to the negative outcome. So personally, it's something that happens in the process of moving forward, right? Bad things happen. Right. Setbacks happen. But to understand Paulo Colo, I think in one of his books he wrote, those who have never been defeated can say with pride that I've never lost a war, but they've never fought. For those who fought a battle, they would definitely have experienced defeat at some stage or the other.

So true.

It's been a great discussion. And since you've mentioned positioning a lot of times and we did not, we got carried away on a lot of different things. All very valuable to the subject matter. Before we let you go today, help us with some tangible maybe action steps, perhaps for our audience as we come to a close of this discussion, in terms for them to better position themselves. Because there's a huge environment of fear out with generative AI and layoffs and recession and wars happening right now, huge amount of uncertainty. What can people do to position themselves more strongly?

Well, one, you can do less, and that's going to position you more strongly because you're going to do better at the things that you're focused on and you're going to have more opportunity. If something comes your way, take it. If you're saying yes to bad opportunities, you're going to have no time for good opportunities. So one counterintuitive positioning way is to actually, what are the three things that I have to do and how do I create space? And in that space, I can start developing myself. And so you can sell yourself the best hour of your day for development. Whatever skill you need to acquire, whatever skill you want to acquire, you can focus on that. And if some other opportunity comes along that's exceptional, well, now you already have the time to work on that opportunity. You can save money today if that's possible for you. You can sort of get some sleep. You can invest in your relationships. You can position yourself in all of these different ways by eating healthy. You can volunteer to work for somebody who's got really high standards, who's exacting, who's detail oriented. You can work for a master, if you will, and learn from them. There's a million things that you can do today that will position you better for the future.

I'm reminded of this quote by Seneca. I think he said, good luck as well. Preparation meets opportunities.

100%.

Yeah, we don't control opportunities. We control preparation. So I think the message is loud and clear, ladies and gentlemen, who have stayed with us through this entire conversation, prepare, Prepare for an uncertain tomorrow. And I think that's the true spirit of leadership as well. To be able to look forward to something brighter, bolder, bigger, even if you're in the middle of uncertainty and turmoil right now.

Yeah, it's a good way to sum it up. You're not going to control what happens with the future. Stop trying to predict the future and start trying to position yourself for multiple possible futures.

Grab this moment right here. And you know what you mentioned about taking a few deep breaths. I always encourage, I would encourage our audience even right now, to just take a deep breath in, inhale, and just hold your breath for a few seconds and a long exhale and as you feel your body and mind begins to settle down, you will hear these words. You will hear this conversation at an entirely different level. I encourage you to share in the comments section what some of your top takeaways are. Maybe apply two or three and make them a part of your life. I think it was Sifu Harinder Singh we hosted earlier this martial arts experiment expert from the United States who Talked about take three 5 minute breathing breaks during the day. If not meditation breaks, just breathing breaks. Sit down and breathe. So you're in charge. You're in charge when you go to buy a new dress. Well, you're in charge when you go to make big purchase decisions. You should be in charge when there are important things about your life or about your day. Mr. Shane Parish, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for sparing your valuable time.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you.