Safeguards Against Weaknesse

  • Follow good models of others
  • Create a personal board of directors
  • Ask for their advice before you make any decisions

Inbuilt vs Acquired Weaknesses

  • Inbuilt weaknesses → safeguards
  • Acquired weaknesses → strength + safeguards

Identify Blind Spots

  • Identify your blind spots and weaknesses to avoid repeating them
  • Safeguard against inbuilt weaknesses

1. Prevention

  • Avoid decision-making in unfavorable conditions
  • Use HALT:
    • Hungry
    • Angry
    • Lonely
    • Tired
  • Deal with these conditions first before anything else

2. Automatic Rules for Success

  • Replace decisions with rules
  • Don’t say yes to things without sleeping on them for a day
  • Imagine a film crew following you around, documenting your life
  • Make decisions based on how you want the world to see you

3. Create Friction

  • Add rewards for good behavior you want
  • Add friction for behavior you want to avoid

Guardrails, Perspective, and Mistakes

4. Putting in Guardrails

  • Use checklists like pilots
  • Ask:
    • What am I trying to accomplish?
    • What are the things I need to do to accomplish it?

5. Shifting Your Perspective

  • Give or seek crucial information to help avoid catastrophe
  • See things from other people’s perspectives
  • Ask them: “What did you miss?” (ask twice)
  • Don’t default to your own judgment

How to Handle Mistakes

  • Avoid self-serving bias
  • You can’t learn if you ignore mistakes
  1. Accept responsibility — acknowledge your contribution
  2. Learn from mistakes — take time to reflect
  3. Commit to doing better — plan to improve in the future
  4. Repair the damage as best as you can
    • Strive to do consistently better going forward

The most powerful story in the world is the one you tell yourself

How to Make Better Decisions

1. Define the Problem (Most Important Step)

  • What do you want to achieve?

  • What obstacles stand in the way of getting it?

  • Take responsibility for defining the problem

  • Don’t use jargon to describe or explain it

  • Identify the root cause of the problem

Avoid defaults

  • Separate the problem-definition phase from the solution phase
  • Tip: Write down the problem without jargon
    • If you can’t, you don’t understand it

2. Explore Possible Solutions

  • Don’t resort to magical thinking that the problem will disappear
  • See the problem as it really is, based on how the world works — not how you want it to work

Anticipate problems and prepare for them

  1. Don’t just imagine an ideal future — imagine the worst outcome and how you’d deal with it
  2. For each solution, apply second-level thinking:
    • “And then what?” (good and bad side effects)
  3. Force yourself to find three solutions
    • Remove one option and think about what else you could do

Options

  • A) Option 1
  • B) Option 2
  • C) Option 1 and Option 2 (combine options creatively)

Opportunity Cost

  • The cost of choosing one option over the others
  • View it through three lenses:
    1. Compared with what?
    2. And then what?
    3. At the expense of what?

Evaluating Options & Execution

3. Evaluate the Options

Determine Criteria

  • Clear, active goals
  • Decisive
  • Focus on what you want to achieve, not what you don’t want
  • First figure out “what you value most”
  • Let your employees know and empower them to make decisions

Finding What’s Most Important

  • List all criteria and let them compete against each other
  • Get high-quality first-hand information
  • Get high-expertise information
  • Experts love sharing if you give them a reason

4. Do It

Consequences vs Reversibility

  • ASAP principle:
    • If the cost of undoing a decision is low → make the decision ASAP
  • ALAP principle:
    • If the cost of undoing a decision is high → make it as late as possible

Stop, Plop & Know Principle:

  • Stop gathering information once it’s no longer useful
  • Otherwise, you risk losing opportunity or clarity

5. Margin of Safety

  • Have insurance when decisions are high-stakes
  • When uncertain, keep a large margin of safety
  • When possible, run small experiments to test risk
  • Live with the decision before announcing it

Execution Systems & Learning

  • Build fences
  • Set up tripwires to decide in advance what you’ll do when you hit specific time, amount, or circumstance thresholds

Commander’s Intent

  • Give your subordinates time, structure, and authority to make decisions without you
  • Formulate → communicate → interpret → implement
  • Ulysses pact: tie your hands to keep execution on track

6. Learn From Decisions

  • When evaluating a decision, focus on the process, not the outcome
  • You can only control the process, not the result

Good decision ≠ Good outcome

Transparency principle:

  • Make your decision-making process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible

  • Keep records of your thoughts when making decisions

    • Don’t rely on memory after the fact

Wanting What Matters

Good decisions require:

  • Knowing how to get what you want

  • AND knowing what’s worth wanting

  • Knowing what you want is more important

  • Don’t run on the hedonic treadmill

  • Seek real relationships, good friends, family, and happiness

    • Instead of money, power, and status

Happiness

  • Life is short

  • Think about what people will say about you

  • Work toward achieving what you want them to say

  • Happiness is a mindset

  • Stop worrying about things that never happened

Ask yourself:

If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?

  • Achieve what matters in life, not what matters in this moment

Key Insight

  • The key to getting what you want out of life is to identify how the world works
  • And align yourself with it