Principles

High-Level Thoughts

Embrace reality, think of yourself as a machine and objectively engineer your life. Have clear goals and don't tolerate problems. Pratice open mindedness. Understand the ego/blind spot barriers in your life.

Summary Notes

Embrace Reality and Deal with It

1. Be a hyperrealist.

• Dreams + Reality + Determination = A successful life

2. An accurate understanding of reality is the essential foundation for any good outcome.
3. Be radically open minded and radically transparent.

• Fears inhibit growth. Opened mindedness leads to rapid learning & effective change in addition to more meaningful relationships.

4. Pain + Reflection= Progress

• Embrace tough love. Go to the pain.

5. Understand nature’s practical lessons.

• Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permeant and it drives everything. Evolve or die. 

6. Own your outcomes.
7. Look at the machine from the higher level.

• Think of yourself as a machine.
• Distinguish between you as the designer of your machine and you as the worker with your machine. Modify your machine. 
• See yourself and others objectively. Weaknesses & strengths.
• Ask others about your strengths and weaknesses. Find guardrails. 
• Open mindedness + determined= achieving whatever you want.
  
  

Use the 5-Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life

1. Have Clear Goals

• Prioritize
• Don’t confuse goals with desires.
• Decide what you really want in life by reconciling your goals and desires.
• Great expectations create great capabilities.
• Almost nothing can stop you from succeeding if you have flexibility & self-accountability.
• Knowing how to deal with your setbacks is as important as knowing how to move forward.

2. Identify and don’t tolerate problems

• View problems as potential improvements screaming at you. Don’t avoid them.
• Be specific in identifying your problems. Don’t mistake the cause of a problem with the real problem.
• Distinguish big problems from small ones.

3. Diagnose problems to get at their root cause

• Focus on “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.”
• Distinguish proximate causes (actions or lack of actions) from root causes(deeper).

4. Design a plan

• Go back before you think forward.
• Think about your problem as a set of outcomes produced by a machine. 
• There are many paths to achieving your goals.
• Recognize it doesn’t take lots of time to design a good plan.
• Write down your plan for everyone to see and measure your progress against.

5. Push through to completion

• Great planners who don’t execute their plans go nowhere.
• Good habits are vastly underrated.
• Establish clear metrics to make certain that you are following your plan.

6. Weaknesses don’t matter if you find solutions

• Look for patterns in your mistakes and identify and which step in the 5-step process you fail.
• Everyone has at least one big thing that stands in the way of their success; find yours and deal with it.

7. Understand yours and others’ mental maps and humility
   
   

Be Radically Open-Minded

1. Recognize your two barriers

• Understand your ego barrier- fatal flaw
• Understand your blind spot barrier- fatal flaw
• Understand the logic/conscious and emotional/subconscious fight in you.

2. Practice radical open mindedness

• Sincerely believe that you might not know the best path forward and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important than whatever it is you do you do know.
• Recognize that decision making is a two-step process: First take in all the relevant information then decide.
• Don’t worry about looking good; worry about achieving your goal.
• Realize you can’t put out without taking in.
• Recognize that to gain the perspective that comes from seeing things through another’s eyes, you must suspend judgement for a time- only by empathizing can you properly evaluate another point of view.
• Remember you are looking for the best answer, not simply the best answer you can come up with yourself.
• Be clear on whether you are seeking to understand or arguing. Talking with a peer vs expert.

3. Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement.
4. Triangulate your view with believable people who are willing to disagree.

• Plan for the worst-case scenario to take it as good as possible.

5. Recognize the signs of closed-mindedness and open-mindedness that you should watch out for.
6. Understand how you can be radically open minded

• Regularly use pain as you guide toward quality reflection.
• Make being open minded a habit.
• Get to know your blind spots.
• Meditate.
• Be evidence based and encourage others to be the same.
• In discussion encourage others to be open minded.
• Use evidence-based decision-making tools. Your machine.
• Know when to stop fighting and have faith in your decision-making process.
  

Understand That People are Wired Very Differently

1. Understand the power that comes from knowing how you and others are wired.
2. Meaningful work and relationships aren’t just nice things we chose for ourselves- they are genetically programmed into us.
3. Understand the great brain battles and how to control them to get what “you” want.

• Realize that the conscious mind is in a battle with the subconscious mind.
• Know the most constant struggle is between feeling and thinking.
• Reconcile your thinking and feeling.
• Choose your habits well.

4. Find out what you and others are like.

• Introversion vs extroversion
• Intuiting vs sensing
• Thinking vs feeling
• Planning vs perceiving
• Creators vs refiners vs advancer vs executors vs flexors
• Focusing on tasks vs focusing on goals
• Shapers are people who can go from visualization to actualization.
• Shaper= Visionary + Practical Thinker + Determined

5. Getting the right people in the rights roles in support of your goal is the key to succeeding at whatever you choose to accomplish.

• Manage yourself and orchestrate others to get what you want.
  

Learn How to Make Decisions Effectively

1. Recognize that 1) the biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions, and 2) decision making is a two-step process. First learning then deciding.
2. Synthesize the situation at hand.

• One of the most important decisions you can make is who you ask questions of.
• Don’t believe everything you hear.
• Everything looks bigger up close.
• New is overvalued relative to great.
• Don’t oversqueeze the dots during synthesizing.

3. Synthesize the situation through time.

• Keep in mind both the rates of change and the levels of things, and the relationships between them
• Be imprecise
• Remember the 80/20 rule and know the key 20 percent
• Be an imperfectionist (typically 5-10 important factors when making a decision)

4. Navigate levels effectively

• Use terms “above the line” and “below the line” to establish level of conversation.
• Decisions need to be made at the appropriate level, but they should also be consistent across levels

5. Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.
6. Make your decisions as expected value calculations.

• Knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing what bets are probably not worth making
• The best choices are the ones that have more pros than cons, not those that don’t have any cons at all.

7. Prioritize by weighing the value of additional information against the cost of not deciding.

• Separate “must-dos” from “like-to-dos”
• Chances are you won’t have time to deal with the unimportant things
• Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities

Shortcuts for Becoming a Great Decision Maker

1. Simplify- get rid of irrelevant details. “Any damn fool can make it complex.”
2. Use Principles- almost all “cases at hand” are just “another one of those.”
3. Convert principles into algorithms- takes decision making power to a whole new level.
4. Have a deep understanding of AI- computers have bias too.