Clear Thinking

by Shane Parrish

If you’re like me, no one ever taught you how to think or make decisions. There’s no class called Clear Thinking 101 in school.

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.

In order to get the results we desire, we must do two things. We must first create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and second, we must deliberately use that space to think clearly.

Each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future. It’s that positioning that eventually makes life easier or harder.

A good position allows you to think clearly rather than be forced by circumstances into a decision. One reason the best in the world make consistently good decisions is they rarely find themselves forced into a decision by circumstances. You don’t need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you can out-position them. 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 bad one.

The greatest aid to judgment is starting from a good position.

Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned.

What a lot of people miss is that ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your options. Clear thinking is the key to proper positioning, which is what allows you to master your circumstances rather than be mastered by them. It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today. Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. It all depends on whether you’re thinking clearly.

In the space between stimulus and response, one of two things can happen. You can consciously pause and apply reason to the situation. Or you can cede control and execute a default behavior.

So our first step in improving our outcomes is to train ourselves to identify the moments when judgment is called for in the first place, and pause to create space to think clearly.

All the time and energy you spend fixing your unforced errors comes at the expense of moving toward the outcomes you want. There is a huge advantage in having more of your energy instead go toward achieving your goals instead of fixing your problems.

We’re naturally wired to organize the world into a hierarchy. We do this to help make sense of the world, maintain our beliefs, and generally feel better.

Evolution favored stimulus-response shortcuts because they’re advantageous for the group: they enhance group fitness, group survival, and reproduction. As humans continued flourishing in groups, hierarchies developed, creating order out of chaos and giving us all a place. Territory is how we tried to avoid fighting others—you stay out of my territory, I’ll stay out of yours. And self-preservation means we choose survival over rules, norms, or customs.

The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts. The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy. The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group. The inertia default: we’re habit forming and comfort seeking. We tend to resist change, and to prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.

You experience anger, fear, or some other emotion, and feel compelled to act immediately. But in these moments, the action you’re pushed toward rarely serves you.

Later we’ll see some of the many inbuilt biological vulnerabilities that leave us even more exposed to the emotion default’s influence: sleep deprivation, hunger, fatigue, emotion, distraction, stress from feeling rushed, and being in an unfamiliar environment.

Appearing Successful vs. Being Successful Not all confidence is created equally. Sometimes, it comes from a track record of applying deep knowledge successfully, and other times it comes from the shallowness of reading an article. It’s amazing how often the ego turns unearned knowledge into reckless confidence.

Our ego tempts us into thinking we’re more than we are. Left unchecked, it can turn confidence into overconfidence or even arrogance. We get a bit of knowledge on the internet and suddenly we are full of hubris. Everything seems easy. As a result, we take risks that we may not understand we’re taking. We must resist this kind of unearned confidence, though, if we are to get the results we desire.

Having them depend on us makes us feel not only necessary but powerful. The more people who depend on us the more powerful we feel. However, this position is often self-defeating. Slowly and then all at once we become a prisoner of the circumstances we created; more and more effort is needed to stay in the same place, and we approach the ceiling of brute force.fn1 It’s only a matter of time until things break.

The person who wants to be seen as great shows the world how to manipulate them.

We’re prone to being less concerned with actual greatness than with exuding the appearance of greatness.

The ego grabs your unconscious, throws your long-term goals out the window, and sets you sailing on a path toward destruction.

Feeling Right over Being Right Our desire to feel right overpowers our desire to be right.

The ego default urges us to feel right at the expense of being right.

I had unconsciously organized the world in a way where I could be above him and feel better about myself. Both of us reverted to the ego default that day.

Most people go through life assuming that they’re right … and that people who don’t see things their way are wrong.

We mistake how we want the world to work for how it does work.

If you find yourself expending tremendous energy on how you are seen, if you often feel your pride being wounded, if you find yourself reading an article or two on a subject and thinking you’re an expert, if you always try to prove you’re right and have difficulty admitting mistakes, if you have a hard time saying “I don’t know,” or if you’re frequently envious of others or feel as though you’re never given the recognition you deserve—be on guard! Your ego is in charge.

One measure of a person is the degree to which they’ll do the right thing when it goes against the popular belief.

The social default inspires virtue signaling—getting other people to accept or praise your professed beliefs. Especially when there is no cost to such signals. Princeton professor Robert George wrote, “I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.”1 No, they wouldn’t have. They may understandably want to send that signal now when it’s safe to do so, but back then they would have likely behaved the same most everyone else did at the time.

The only way to outperform if you’re doing undifferentiated work is to work harder than everyone else.

Success requires shamelessness. So too does failure.

Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely. If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results that everyone else gets.fn2 Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average.

Warren Buffett pointed out, though, “The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.”

Lou Brock might have put it best when he said, “Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy you can beat every time.” In other words, someone who’s possessed by the social default is easy to defeat.

that is, laziness or idleness. In physics, “inertia” refers to an object resisting a change in its state of motion. Hence, a popular way of stating Newton’s first law of motion—the law of inertia—is this: “A body in motion tends to stay in motion, and a body at rest tends to stay at rest.”

The physicist Leonard Mlodinow sums it up this way: “Once our minds are set in a direction, they tend to continue in that direction unless acted upon by some outside force.”2 This cognitive inertia is why changing our minds is hard.

When circumstances change, we need to adapt. But inertia closes minds and stifles the motivation to change how we’ve been doing things. It makes it harder to imagine alternative methods, and discourages experimentation and course correction.

A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

WHILE WE CAN’T ELIMINATE OUR DEFAULTS, WE CAN REPROGRAM them. If we want to improve our behavior, accomplish more of our goals, and experience greater joy and meaning in our lives, we need to learn to manage our defaults.

You unconsciously adopt the habits of the people you spend time with, and those people make it easier or harder for you to achieve progress toward what you want to achieve. The more time you spend with people, the more likely you start to think and act as they do.

They had to find new friends whose default behavior was their desired behavior.

That’s just how it goes sometimes when we’re forming or breaking habits. What may look like discipline often involves a carefully created environment to encourage certain behaviors.

The people with the best defaults are typically the ones with the best environment.

Joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behavior is an effective way to create an intentional environment.

To stop our defaults from impeding good judgment, we need to harness equally powerful biological forces. We need to take the same forces that the defaults would use to ruin us and turn them to our advantage. Chief among them is the force of inertia. Inertia is a double-edged sword. We saw earlier that inertia is a tendency to maintain the status quo. If the status quo is sub-optimal or dysfunctional, inertia works against us. But the status quo doesn’t have to be sub-optimal. If you train yourself to consistently think, feel, and act in ways that further your most important goals—if, in other words, you build strength—then inertia becomes a nearly unstoppable force that unlocks your potential.

Establishing rituals is the key to creating positive inertia.

Here are four key strengths you’ll need: Self-accountability: holding yourself accountable for developing your abilities, managing your inabilities, and using reason to govern your actions Self-knowledge: knowing your own strengths and weaknesses—what you’re capable of doing and what you’re not Self-control: mastering your fears, desires, and emotions Self-confidence: trusting in your abilities and your value to others I’ll define each of these strengths and discuss how they counteract your defaults, before explaining how you can begin to build them and take command of your life. •

People who lack self-accountability tend to run on autopilot. This is the exact opposite of commanding your own life. These people constantly succumb to external pressure: seeking rewards, avoiding punishments, and measuring themselves against other people’s scoreboards.

Excuses, Excuses Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be. —JEFF BEZOS1

No one cares about your excuses as much as you do. In fact, no one cares about your excuses at all, except you.

Not Your Fault? It’s Still Your Responsibility Just because something happened that was outside of your control doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility to deal with it the best you can.

Thinking about how it wasn’t your fault doesn’t make anything better. The consequences are still yours to deal with.

Always focus on the next move, the one that gets you closer or further from where you want to go.

If you play poker, you learn this intuitively. You’re dealt a hand based mostly on luck. Feeling sorry for yourself, complaining about the hand you were dealt, or blaming others for how they played their hands only distracts you from what you can control. Your responsibility is to play the hand as best you can.

One of the most common mistakes people make is bargaining with how the world should work instead of accepting how it does work. Anytime you find yourself or your colleagues complaining “that’s not right,” or “that’s not fair,” or “it shouldn’t be that way,” you’re bargaining, not accepting. You want the world to work in a way that it doesn’t.

Failing to accept how the world really works puts your time and energy toward proving how right you are. When the desired results don’t materialize, it’s easy to blame circumstances or others. I call this the wrong side of right. You’re focused on your ego not the outcome.

You can’t control everything, but you can control your response, which makes circumstances better or worse. Each response has an impact on the future, taking you either a step closer to or a step further from the outcomes you want and the person you want to be.

One effective question to ask yourself before you act is, “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”

Complaining isn’t productive. It only misleads you into thinking that the world should function in a way that it doesn’t.

Each of us is the hero of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Being at fault when things go wrong doesn’t suit the hero status we ascribe to ourselves. So, when it comes to explaining why things went wrong, we look for someone else to blame.

While pointing fingers when we don’t get the results we want might satisfy us in the moment, it doesn’t give us better judgment, and it doesn’t make us better people. It’s instead a defensive reaction prompted by our ego default—a reaction that keeps us nestled in the arms of weakness and fragility.

If you pay attention to chronic victims, you’ll notice how fragile they are—how dependent their attitudes and feelings are on things they don’t control. When things go their way, they’re happy; when things don’t, they’re defensive, passive-aggressive, and occasionally aggressive-aggressive. If their spouse is in a bad mood, they’re in a bad mood too. If they hit traffic on the way to work, they bring their anger and frustration to work with them. If a project they’re leading isn’t on track, they blame someone on their team. Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you do control how you respond to everything. It’s a mindset that empowers you to act and not just react to whatever life throws at you. It transforms obstacles into opportunities for learning and growth. It means realizing that the way you respond to hardship matters more to your happiness than the hardship itself. And it means understanding that the best path is often just to accept things and move on.

If you want to better understand your level of self-knowledge, ask yourself how many times a day you utter the phrase “I don’t know.” If you never say, “I don’t know,” you’re probably dismissing things that surprise you or explaining away outcomes instead of understanding them.

Understanding what you do and don’t know is the key to playing games you can win.

Charlie Munger elaborated on the same idea my real estate investor friend had put forth. He said, “When you play games where other people have the aptitude and you don’t, you’re going to lose. You have to figure out where you have an edge and stick to it.”

SELF-CONFIDENCE IS ABOUT TRUSTING IN YOUR ABILITIES and your value to others.

The groups we surround ourselves with encourage us to think the problem is with the world and not with us. We think we are right and everyone else is wrong, denying reality at the expense of the energy and focus we need to adapt and improve.

I was taking a stroll one day with the CEO of a large public company, when we started discussing how he hired people for key roles. I asked, “If you could pick one trait that would predict how someone would turn out, what would it be?” “That’s easy,” he said. “How willing they are to change their mind about what they think they know.”

Self-confidence is the strength to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right. It’s the strength to face reality. It’s the strength to admit mistakes, and the strength to change your mind. Self-confidence is what it takes to be on the right side of right. Outcome over ego.

THE FIRST STEP TO BUILDING ANY OF YOUR STRENGTHS IS raising the standards to which you hold yourself, a practical matter of looking around at the people and practices that pervade your day-to-day environment.

If all you see are average people, you will end up with average standards. But average standards aren’t going to get you where you want to go. Standards become habits, and habits become outcomes. Few people realize that exceptional outcomes are almost always achieved by people with higher-than-average standards.

Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions.

Smart People with Low Standards The difference between average and exceptional results for a leader often comes down to whether they’re consistently getting more out of smart but otherwise lazy people.

Most of the time when we accept substandard work from ourselves, it’s because we don’t really care about it. We tell ourselves it’s good enough, or the best we can manage given our time constraints. But the truth is, at least in this particular thing, we’re not committed to excellence.

When we accept substandard work from others, it’s for the same reason: we’re not all in. When you’re committed to excellence, you don’t let anyone on your team half-ass it. You set the bar, you set it high, and you expect anyone working with you to work just as hard and level up to what you expect or above. Anything less is unacceptable.

Excellence Demands Excellence

Masters of their craft don’t merely want to check off a box and move on. They’re dedicated to what they do, and they keep at it. Master-level work requires near fanatical standards, so masters show us what our standards should be.

We’ll never be exceptional at anything unless we raise our standards, both of ourselves and of what’s possible. For most of us, that sounds like a lot of work. We gravitate toward being soft and complacent. We’d rather coast. That’s fine. Just realize this: if you do what everyone else does, you can expect the same results that everyone else gets. If you want different results, you need to raise the bar.

Your Exemplars Show me your role models and I’ll show you your future.

Look around, find the best examples you can of people with the attributes you want to cultivate—the people whose default behavior is your desired behavior, those who inspire you to raise the bar and make you want to be a better version of yourself. Your exemplars needn’t be alive. They can be either dead or fictional, as well.

Your Personal Board of Directors Put all of your exemplars on your “personal board of directors,” a concept that originates with author Jim Collins: Back in the early ’80s, I made Bill [Lazier] the honorary chairman of my personal board of directors. And when I chose members … they were not chosen for their success. They were chosen for their values and their character …. They’re the sorts of people I wouldn’t want to let down.2

The exemplars on your personal board can be a mix of high accomplishment and high character. The only requirement is that they have a skill, attitude, or disposition you want to cultivate in yourself.

One of my exemplars is Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett. He raised my standard for holding an opinion. One night at dinner, he commented, “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.”

The phone in your pocket literally gives you access to the smartest people who’ve ever existed, alive or dead. Even if you don’t have direct contact with them, you can often listen to them talk in their own words—unfiltered! Think about that for a second. For the first time in history, you have the opportunity to listen to your exemplars explain things in their own way, without someone getting in the middle.

If your hero is Tobi Lütke, who started Shopify, one of the most successful companies in the history of the world, you can find countless interviews with him on the internet. You can sit at the feet of the master and learn as he shares how he thinks, how he makes decisions, how he runs his company. The same goes for Peter D. Kaufman, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Tom Brady, Simone Biles, Serena Williams, or Katie Ledecky.

As Montaigne put it, “I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them.”

The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated. Just because the results aren’t immediately felt doesn’t mean consequences aren’t coming.

Abrashoff turned the Benfold into one of the highest-performing ships in the Navy. And he did it within a stifling hierarchy. But how? What’s incredible is how he didn’t do it. He didn’t fire or demote anyone. He didn’t change the hierarchy. He didn’t change any technology. The only real change was within himself. He started to identify his potential blind spots, and to look at the world from the crew’s perspective.

From the start, Abrashoff knew you can’t simply order people to be better. Even if that appears to work, the results are short term and the consequences enormous.

You don’t tap into people’s resourcefulness, intelligence, and skills by command-and-control. “Show me an organization in which employees take ownership, and I will show you one that beats its competitors,” says Abrashoff. “Captains need to see the ship from the crew’s perspective. They need to make it easy and rewarding for crew members to express themselves and their ideas.”

Safeguards are tools for protecting ourselves from ourselves—from weaknesses that we don’t have the strength to overcome.

Here’s a simple example. Suppose you want to start eating a healthier diet. You make this task exponentially harder on yourself if you inhabit an unhealthy environment—if, say, your pantry and fridge are full of junk food. Purging your home of all junk food is a safeguard. It protects you against impulsively ripping open a bag of potato chips when you’re feeling hungry or bored.

There are lots of safeguard strategies, though. My favorites include prevention, creating rules for yourself, making checklists, shifting your frame of reference, and making the invisible visible.

Safeguard Strategy 1: Prevention The first kind of safeguard aims at preventing problems before they happen. One way to do this is to avoid decision-making in unfavorable conditions.

Nothing forces you to accept the ingrained behaviors and rules from your upbringing and life circumstances. You can decide to eliminate them at any time, and replace them with better ones.

In my conversation with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, the godfather of cognitive biases and thinking errors, he revealed an unexpected way we can improve our judgment: replacing decisions with rules.

When it comes to your health, just like many other elements of your life, environment determines behavior. Your environment makes one path easier than another.

Your environment isn’t just your physical surroundings. It also includes people.

In a quirk of psychology, people typically don’t argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules.

Kahneman told me his favorite rule was never to say yes to a request on the phone. He knows that he wants people to like him, so he wants to say yes in the moment, but after filling up his schedule with things that didn’t make him happy, he decided to be more vigilant about what he agrees to do and why. When people ask him for things over the phone now, he says something along the lines of, “I’ll have to get back to you after I think about it.”

After speaking with Kahneman, I spent some time thinking about what automatic rules I could create for myself so that my desire in the moment didn’t overpower my ultimate desire. The way I did this was to imagine a film crew following me around documenting how successful I was.fn4 Regardless of whether I was a success or not, how would I act to show someone I deserved my success? What would I want them to see? What am I doing that I would want them not to see because I’m embarrassed or ashamed?

While the crew would be expecting to see meetings and people asking me for things, what they’d see is no calls or meetings until lunch so I could spend time working on the most important opportunity. This is where my no-meetings-before-lunch rule came from.fn5

We’re taught our whole lives to follow rules, and yet no one ever told us about how we can create powerful rules that help us get what we want.

Safeguard Strategy 3: Creating Friction Another safeguarding strategy is to increase the amount of effort it takes to do things that are contrary to your goals.

If there were a recipe for accumulated disaster, it would be giving the best of ourselves to the least important things and the worst of ourselves to the most important things.

The path to breaking bad habits is making your desired behavior the default behavior.

Checklists, for instance, offer a simple way to override your defaults. Pilots go through a preflight checklist every time they fly. Surgeons go through preoperative checklists every time they operate. You might have a packing checklist every time you travel. In each of these cases, the checklist acts as a safeguard, forcing us to slow down whatever we’re doing and go back to basics: “What am I trying to accomplish? And what are the things I need to accomplish it?” Questions like these are the guardrails that will keep you on the road to success.fn6

Everyone makes mistakes because everyone has limitations. Even you. Trying to avoid responsibility for your decisions, your actions, or their outcomes, though, is tantamount to pretending you don’t have limitations.

The four steps to handling mistakes more effectively are as follows: (1) accept responsibility, (2) learn from the mistake, (3) commit to doing better, and (4) repair the damage as best you can.

A decision is a choice that involves conscious thought. The decision = the judgment that a certain option is the best one

When the stakes are low, inaction hurts you more than speed. Sometimes it’s better just to make a quick choice and not spend time deliberating. Why waste time evaluating if an action is inconsequential and its effects are easily reversed?

When the stakes are higher, though, speed can hurt you. If an action could have a major impact on your life or your business and its effects can’t be reversed, you must decide and not merely choose.

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF DECISION-MAKING IS THAT THE decider needs to define the problem.

Defining the problem starts with identifying two things: (1) what you want to achieve, and (2) what obstacles stand in the way of getting it. Unfortunately, people too often end up solving the wrong problem.

We’ve been taught our whole lives to solve problems. But when it comes to defining problems, we have less experience. Things are often uncertain. We seldom have all the information. Sometimes, there are competing ideas about what the problem is, competing proposals to solve it, and then lots of interpersonal friction. So we’re much less comfortable defining problems than solving them, and the social default uses that discomfort. It encourages us to react instead of reason, in order to prove we’re adding value. Just solve a problem—any problem! The result: organizations and individuals waste a lot of time solving the wrong problems. It’s so much easier to treat the symptoms than find the underlying disease, to put out fires rather than prevent them, or to simply punt things into the future.

The most critical step in any decision-making process is to get the problem right.

Only by talking to the experts, seeking the opinions of others, hearing their different perspectives, and sorting out what’s real from what’s not can the decision-maker understand the real problem.

THE DEFINITION PRINCIPLE: Take responsibility for defining the problem. Don’t let someone define it for you. Do the work to understand it. Don’t use jargon to describe or explain it.

THE ROOT CAUSE PRINCIPLE: Identify the root cause of the problem. Don’t be content with simply treating its symptoms.

A handy tool for identifying the root cause of a problem is to ask yourself, “What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?”

A company might think that its problem is getting too few new sales, so it marshals resources to get new leads. But what if getting new sales isn’t the root of the problem? What if there’s an issue with, say, the product itself? The root cause of any problem like this is customer satisfaction, and that’s not necessarily the same as getting new customers. It could also be keeping existing customers happy.

SAFEGUARD: Build a problem-solution firewall. Separate the problem-defining phase of the decision-making process from the problem-solving phase.

A mentor of mine once taught me that the best way to avoid finding the perfect solution to the wrong problem at work, when time allows, is to hold two separate meetings: one to define the problem, and one to come up with the solution.

The most precious resources in any organization are time and the brainpower of your best employees.

“What do you know about this problem that other people in the room don’t know?”

philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein sums up this idea: “To understand is to know what to do.”fn4

TIP: Remember that writing out the problem makes the invisible visible. Write down what you think the problem is, and then look at it the next day. If you find yourself using jargon in your description, it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand the problem. And if you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t be making a decision about it.

SAFEGUARD: Use the test of time. Test whether you’re addressing the root cause of a problem, rather than merely treating a symptom, by asking yourself whether it will stand the test of time. Will this solution fix the problem permanently, or will the problem return in the future? If it seems like the latter, then chances are you’re only treating a symptom.

When the same problem returns again and again, people end up exhausted and discouraged because they never seem to make real progress. Extinguish the fire today so it can’t burn you tomorrow.

The way to come up with possible solutions is by imagining different possible futures—different ways the world could turn out.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

You can think of first-level thinking as your today self and second-level thinking as your future self.

First-level thinking looks to solve the immediate problem without regard to any future problems a solution might produce. Second-level thinking looks at the problem from beginning to end. It looks past the immediate solution and asks, “And then what?”

A failure to think of second-order consequences leads us unknowingly to make bad decisions.

Masters see the simplicity hiding in the complexity. As Frederic Maitland purportedly once wrote, “Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work, not the starting point.”

THE 3+ PRINCIPLE: Force yourself to explore at least three possible solutions to a problem. If you find yourself considering only two options, force yourself to find at least one more.

Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, refers to this technique as integrative thinking.5 Rather than grappling with seemingly opposed binary options, combine them. Simplistic Either-Or options become integrative Both-And options. You can keep costs down and invest in a better customer experience. You can stay at your job and start a side hustle. You can deliver for your shareholders and protect the environment.

THE 3-LENS PRINCIPLE: View opportunity costs through these three lenses: (1) Compared with what? (2) And then what? (3) At the expense of what?fn4

TIP: If you’re having trouble assessing opportunity costs, it sometimes helps to put a price on them. For example, putting a price on those extra two to three hours a day spent commuting will make them more visible and easier to assess.

If you find yourself struggling to determine specific criteria, it’s a sign either that you don’t really understand the problem, or that you don’t understand the general features that criteria are supposed to have. Those features include the following: Clarity: The criteria should be simple, clear, and free of any jargon. Ideally, you should be able to explain them to a twelve-year-old. Goal promotion: The criteria must favor only those options that achieve the desired goal. Decisiveness: The criteria must favor exactly one option; they can’t result in a tie among several.

One reason we fail to take action is that we’re scared to deal with the consequences.