I loved the book Clear Thinking. Maybe because I have Shane Parrish as a role model for a thinker, problem solver, and curious person as I listen a lot to his podcast The Knowledge Project. His podcast The Knowledge Project was actually my second most listened-to podcast in 2023.

Now, see more about the book Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results.

This post is part of the series Learnings from books where my goal is to share what I learned from the book that I read. It is a mixture of review and summary with a bit of my opinion and point of view. But, as reviews, these learnings can say more about me than the book itself, so I trust that you the smart reader will take it with a grain of salt.

Learnings from Clear Thinking

What I like the most about the book is the idea of our defaults (mainly the ego default). It is really nice to see that to be able to clearly think, we have to check and verify what is our state of mind when we make decisions, not only the factors that are part of decisions.

I was kind of aware of the existence of most of the other defaults (not that just being aware without practice means anything) but the ego default was for sure a slap in the face. While reading the book I remember a lot of situations that the ego default took the best of me.

The book is full of learnings, but to not be a too-long post, I will share the 5 most important learnings from the book.

new ideas require bad ideas

Companies and other organizations usually say that they want new ideas, but what they usually mean is that they want good ideas and not bad ones. Because they really don’t want to choose bad ideas, they never explore enough to discover new good ones.

ego is your enemy

Of the defaults explained in the book, the ego is by far the more dangerous in my view. Maybe because I see myself falling for it sometimes.

The idea is that ego default makes us react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth and self-image at cost. It makes us believe that we are more than we actually are.

As the author nicely says: “The ego default urges us to feel right at the expense of being right. Few things feel better than being right—so much so that we will unconsciously rearrange the world into arbitrary hierarchies to maintain our beliefs and feel better about ourselves.”

If we’re not careful, having a little knowledge can make us too confident or even arrogant. When we learn something online, we might start thinking everything is easy. This can lead us to take risks without realizing how risky they are. As another part of the book says: “Our ego default wants us to think that we’re smarter than we are and tells us that we work harder and know more than we actually do. The overconfidence that the ego demon inspires prevents us from examining our decisions with a critical eye. It keeps us from distinguishing skill from luck—what’s in our control from what isn’t. If you get trapped by the demon, you’ll never learn from your decisions and never get better at making them in the future.”

The ego part reminded me a lot about the book Mistakes were made (but not by me)

the problem is defining the problem

I remember that in the Startup Weekend world, the point about defining the problem is stressed a lot. But it also applies to anything that you are trying to solve in your life or in your company.

We usually spend very little time really trying to find out what the problem really is. We just hear a brief explanation and already start solving it instead of digging deeper to understand what the real problem really is.

The result is that we waste a lot of time solving the wrong problems or only treating the symptoms and not the real cause so we never really fix it. We want to add value, so we start solving a problem, any problem.

be kind, not nice

There is a difference between being kind to others and being nice to others. Being kind means (in my view) being honest and helping other people be better as being nice means making them like us.

As the book says, “Kind people will tell you things a nice person will not. A kind person will tell you that you have spinach on your teeth. A nice person won’t because it’s uncomfortable. A kind person will tell us what holds us back even when it’s uncomfortable. A nice person avoids giving us critical feedback because they’re worried about hurting our feelings.”

happiness is a choice, not a condition

Probably I am falling for confirmation bias here, but I truly believe in this. As I read a lot lately about death, life, priorities, etc, I truly believe that we have to choose to be happy.

A great snippet from the book: ‘According to Pillemer, “The elders make the key distinction between events that happen to us, on the one hand, and our internal attitude toward happiness, on the other. Happy in spite of. Happiness is not a passive condition dependent on external events, nor is it the result of our personalities— just being born a happy person. Instead, happiness requires a conscious shift in outlook, in which one chooses—daily— optimism over pessimism, hope over despair.”’

Favorite quotes

These are my 5 favorite quotes from the book.

  • “While the rest of us are chasing victory, the best in the world know they must avoid losing before they can win. It turns out this is a surprisingly effective strategy.”
  • “A good position allows you to think clearly rather than be forced by circumstances into a decision”
  • “Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely.”
  • “Eventually, almost everyone loses the battle with willpower; it’s only a matter of time.”
  • “The biggest mistake people make typically isn’t their initial mistake. It’s the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it. The first mistake is expensive; the second one costs a fortune.”

Other resources

This section is extra and here I compliment the post with content from other sources that resonate with the book.

These are my learnings from the book Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results written by Shane Parrish. A special thanks to Vancouver Public Library (VPL) for allowing access to the book for free.

Cheers.