Clear Horizons | A Dialogue with Shane Parrish

[00:00:06] I have been following this guy, I feel like forever. Like he started his blog before I was blogging, it's Farnham Street, FS.blog of Shane Parrish, and his book, Clear Thinking Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results, really

[00:00:22] is the best distillation of how to think clearly that I have read. It talks everything from mental models to what stops you from thinking clearly. He's got these various little meditations or think exercises on how to find your way to the best decision. Well, I'll let him describe.

[00:00:42] He's also got a lot of great stories. He's worked for a three-letter intelligence agency, and here is Shane Parrish. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. I'm excited to talk to you man, long time fan.

[00:01:13] We talked a few years ago. I don't even know if you remember that over email. I think it was five or six years ago. Was it? Let me just check because I feel like I've been reading you forever. When did you start your blog?

[00:01:25] It was at least 15 years ago. Oh yeah, it was 2008, I think in one way or another, 2009. We talked a long time ago. I remember, I was going to look it up actually. I just didn't have time, but I remember talking to you.

[00:01:38] Well, I've been a huge fan forever and you have a new book out, Clear Thinking. What got you started? Clear Thinking is all about decision-making and examples from your life, from the lives

[00:01:50] of others, and you give a lot of criteria for clear thinking, which I want to ask you about. But what got you started on this path? I'm so glad we could talk. What got you started doing your blog?

[00:02:00] You had one of the first blogs that really stood out for me. Well, I started working at an intelligence agency in 2001. Something changed after September 11th. Nobody had really taught me how to make decisions, and yet I was thrust into sort of these positions

[00:02:16] of authority and responsibility as a necessity. It wasn't like I was competent and people identified that. It was like, oh my God, we have to do all this stuff here. You're doing this now.

[00:02:28] And I felt so blindsided by this, and I felt a big sense of responsibility to not only my country and my team, but also to the troops in theater and everybody who is putting their lives on the line. And so I wanted to get better at decision-making.

[00:02:44] And there's no real way to get better at decision-making when you think about it. It's not like one skill. It's all these disparate little skills that you put together. So I started studying what other people were doing and how they were going about it.

[00:02:56] And I started this website. And the website was anonymous because I can't have a profile at that point in time because I was working for a three-letter agency. They would have frowned upon that. I didn't have Facebook page, no LinkedIn, nothing like that. You Google me.

[00:03:11] I didn't exist. I was some soap opera star in Australia. And I just started dissecting what I was learning and trying to put it into practice. And the blog became sort of my scrapbook of reflecting on all these concepts that

[00:03:26] I was learning and integrating them and synthesizing them and putting them to use in real life in order to make better decisions. And can I ask, how did you get to the three-letter agency? It's very hard to get one of those types of jobs for various reasons.

[00:03:42] I know this and they check out a lot of things about you. Oh yeah. I mean at the time, the security process, it's changed a bit now. But I mean they showed up. They interviewed my neighbors. They sort of talked to my teachers, my professors, my references.

[00:03:57] They go really deep on you because they want to make sure that you're a good person and you're trustworthy. You're trusted with national secrets and these secrets can mean the life or death to other people. And so it's really important that they go deep in that.

[00:04:11] I was either going to work there or go back and do my MBA. I had no interest in really doing anything else. And this is like the hay of the dot com bubble, right? Now I had no interest in working for any of these big companies.

[00:04:22] I really just wanted to work there because I thought it was so cool. I grew up with two military parents and I had this sense of patriotism that I want to give back to my country. I want to make the world a better place and there's an obligation.

[00:04:35] I'm so lucky to sort of be born here and get all the advantages of living here. And part of me wants to give back. And this was my way of giving back. And anybody who knows me knows that I'm not going to stand on the front lines in

[00:04:47] a conflict firing a machine gun. That would be dangerous to everybody. But I can give back in this way that it mixes sort of my passion and my desires and something I'm really interested in. And these problems are hard. I really like hard problems that are basically unsolvable.

[00:05:03] Yeah, and you talk a lot about, and this is throughout the history of your blog where you really provide a concise summaries or kind of this distillation of all your thoughts in this book. But you talk a lot about mental models. You talk a lot about learning.

[00:05:17] What I find when people, there's always a lot of discussion about cognitive biases and mental models, you know, dating from Kahneman and his work. And just everybody now has some opinion or thoughts on mental models. But even knowing the mental models like that you have certain cognitive

[00:05:33] biases doesn't protect you from them. Doesn't protect you from those biases, according to Kahneman. Like he always believed that you can't avoid them, even if you understand. Like what's a use case of knowing about mental models that's actually helped you? Well, so that's a really important point, right?

[00:05:49] And that was one thing that stuck out to me. So here's Daniel Kahneman and he spent 65 years studying cognitive biases. And at the end of it, he basically concludes these are really useful at explaining

[00:06:00] why we do bad things or why we make mistakes, why we have blind spots. But they're not really useful at preventing them in the future. So knowledge of them does not in and of itself make for better outcomes. And so with the mental models that we've put together,

[00:06:16] these are just different lenses to see the world on. And so we have this series of books called the Great Mental Models. And the idea behind that was like, critter and psychopædia, Britannica sort of type work for these things

[00:06:29] that are taught in university if you were to sort of go to the 101 classes and you put them into use outside of their discipline. So a great example of one that I use all the time,

[00:06:39] I use it with my kids, I use it with the people I work with is and then what? And so this is just a thinking tool that helps you think to the next step. So you're solving this problem.

[00:06:49] Well, tell me what the world looks like at this point of view. Okay, so we've solved this problem. What new problems have we created? What opportunity costs are we giving up? How do we think through this problem so that we know that we're actually

[00:07:00] making a dent in terms of what we're trying to do or moving towards our destination? So often we just think about solving the immediate problem. We don't think about the new problems we're creating. We don't think about the cost of solving those problems.

[00:07:12] A great example of that is most people listening to this probably work for a large company. They have a software program they really hate. There's one thing about it that drives everybody insane. They replace that software program with something new and they don't ask themselves and then what?

[00:07:26] So they end up with all these new problems, new integration problems, new training problems. But we didn't think down the line before we made that choice. So it's about consciously sort of understanding what does the world look like now and is that a better place for us?

[00:07:39] That's a really great example. I mean, a lot of times you see companies, for instance, redesigning their website just because, oh, we should be with the times or whatever. But they don't understand that they don't ask the questions you

[00:07:52] just said like, are we really going to move forward towards whatever our corporate goal is? You know, there's a saying if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So are they really do they really need to redesign? They don't really question around the question.

[00:08:04] And I think a lot of that happens when relationships too, like the typical problem in marriage is often is that people have kids because they think that will improve the marriage. And, you know, this is a huge example of what's actually the

[00:08:17] real problem that you say to yourself, we need to actually create another human being in order to solve some other problem. So and it creates more problems in the process of as you were sort of saying redesigning the website.

[00:08:30] So often organizations are focused on speed and not velocity. So they're focused on doing things. But I mean, I can go fast running around in a circle, but that doesn't mean I'm getting anywhere with all that energy. And so it's about applying that energy towards a direction, towards

[00:08:45] a goal. But how do you know what the right goal should be? Like a lot of people, I mean, this is a I'm sure you get this a lot based on the content of your blog, which is someone comes up

[00:08:53] to you and says, I don't know how to figure out my goal. Yeah, I think that that's a really important question. But the problem is you have to figure it out. Right. So we're often looking to other people.

[00:09:04] And when other people tell us the goal, we sort of the way that I relate this in the book is like we end up like Scrooge, right? Ebenezer Scrooge. And so we've read the story Charles Dickens. We've all heard this and what did he want?

[00:09:16] He wanted to be the wealthiest, most famous, most well respected person in his community. And he ended up getting all of those things. But at the end of his life, what did he want? He just wanted to do over because those things he

[00:09:28] realized, well, not only those things don't matter, but the way that he was achieving those things were mutually exclusive from living a life of meaning. And so what I advocate for people to do is sort of, you can work backwards here and let your future hindsight become

[00:09:43] your current foresight. And the way to do that is to envision yourself, close your eyes, envision yourself, you're sort of at the end of your life. You're lying in a hospital and you know it's the end. You can't see, but you can hear and you can't talk.

[00:09:59] You're in a coma, but you can hear what everybody's saying. You're surrounded by the people in your life who are close to you. And what is it they're saying about you and what do you want them to say about you?

[00:10:09] And they're not talking about the number of Twitter followers you have or how much money you have in your bank account. They're talking about whether you showed up, right? Whether you loved, whether you were, you played life by your own terms or you just sort of like

[00:10:21] followed what everybody else was doing. And so often we get to these ages, you know, it really dawns on people at 60, 70 that they just didn't, they weren't themselves. And there's a great book by Karl Pilmer, which is Lessons for the Living.

[00:10:35] And what he did was brilliant strategy, just went around to all these people who are close to death and say, what lessons can you teach us about living today? How do we take your hindsight and make it our foresight?

[00:10:47] And I think the way to do that is just to be conscious about those things. And that doesn't mean that it's going to be static. What you want at 20 is not going to be what you want at 50. But the process is that you think about those

[00:10:58] things annually to make sure that you're going in the right direction, but that direction has to be set by you consciously. If not, it's going to be set by everybody else. And you're just unconsciously going to be walking this path. And then at the end, hopefully you've walked

[00:11:13] the right one, but more often than not, you end up with regrets. And let's say you're listening to this and you're 65 years old and you're thinking yourself, oh my gosh, he's right. You do this little meditation that you just said and then you start, you have regrets.

[00:11:28] What should you do now? Well, it's never too late to improve your position. Right. And so that's the thing is like, OK, well, all of that's happened. You can't go back and change the past, but you can start operating in a way that is more

[00:11:41] conducive to the things that you want. You can start making time for the things that you value. And this is one thing I do with people all the time, which is like, don't tell me your priorities. Show me your calendar.

[00:11:53] And what we say and what we do don't often match up. So if you tell me your priority as your family, well, then I should be able to see that. Are you home for dinner? Are you there for breakfast? Are you there when they need you to go

[00:12:03] to the kids soccer games? Do you have a date night with your partner or spouse? Are you putting in the effort and that effort will show up every day? And so I think it's about matching. What do I say I want?

[00:12:14] How am I spending my time making sure those things align and being conscious about the things that you say that are valuable to you, making sure that you're picking them and not somebody else. So even if you're 65, you can sort of pause right now, take an

[00:12:28] hour, think about this, go for a walk and then you can change things going forward. Right? Like I really want to apologize to this person. I, you know, maybe I've worked with a lot of CEOs who sort of work their way up the corporate ladder in

[00:12:42] a way that is mutually exclusive from developing relationships with people. It's all transactional. And often they come to realize that sort of towards the end. And it's still not too late to repair those things. And it's not too late to do something about them.

[00:12:56] I like these little meditation exercises you have, like for instance, the one you just said where imagine, you know, close your eyes, imagine you're on your death bed and go a little farther, like imagine you're in a coma, but you could still hear everybody talking around you.

[00:13:11] And you know, you have another one in the book where this this lady is up for essentially the job of CEO and her rival for the job has essentially a better solution for the company than she does. And she's asking you about this and and and you provide

[00:13:28] her with this mini meditation, which is imagine you own 100 percent of the company and you cannot sell for 100 years. Which solution would you do? And that one little insight or basically meditation exercise gave her gave her the insight that that allowed her to get the

[00:13:46] job, which is that the other person did in fact have a better solution. She acknowledged it and her lack of ego in this and acknowledging it convinced the board that she was the right choice for for CEO. And I like these little meditations

[00:14:01] because whether or not you understand all the mental models and the confusions about, you know, the puzzling aspects of learning and solving these issues doing these meditations are helpful no matter what. So two thoughts come to mind there. One, the meditations why they work and why they're so

[00:14:19] effective is they allow you to assume a different perspective into your problem. And by looking at the problem through a different lens, you start to see things that you missed before. Doesn't mean you get a full picture, but now you get more of the picture

[00:14:32] than you did before. So when you step outside of yourself and you imagine yourself your future self, while all of a sudden you're not seeing the things you see today, you're positioning yourself in the future. And this comes from physics, right? We all learn how

[00:14:46] important framing is and relativity when we're in grade nine physics I think the example that you still use in the textbooks today is imagine you're on a train and you're holding a ball and the train is moving at 60 miles an hour and all the blinds are down.

[00:15:00] Well, how fast is the ball moving? You would look down and say it's not moving at all. But does somebody watching the train go by? It's moving at 60 miles an hour. And so really what we're trying to do is step outside of that train and see into

[00:15:13] what's happening from a different lens. The same thing applies today. You're sitting at your desk. I'm sitting at my desk. But if we were standing on the sun, we're moving at like 18,000 miles an hour or something. Right? So like how you look into these problems matters

[00:15:28] because the source of all bad decisions and all bad outcomes is really blind spots. Right? Otherwise we would have perfect information. We would make perfect decisions. And so how do we acquire better information? And one way we do that is through these little meditations or thought

[00:15:41] experiments. However, you want to think of that. What's another good useful meditation that you found? And by the way, I'll mention one from your book. You quote Charlie Munger saying, I need to be able to when I'm going to argue something, I need to be able to

[00:16:10] explain it better than the person arguing the other side. Like I need to explain their side better than they can explain their side. Yeah, that's the one of immediately came to mind when you asked that question. Another one is sort of like what will I regret? Right?

[00:16:25] In terms of what am I doing today that I'm going to regret later on? And how do I figure that out? It's sort of like if I were to continue down this path, is it sustainable? Is it making me the person that I

[00:16:36] want to be? Am I showing up in the ways that I want to show up? And you can use that to sort of quit your job or take on a new project or start a side hustle or because not starting these things is going to be this sort

[00:16:48] of constant regret. And it's like fast forward five years. Are you going to wish you had written that book? Are you going to wish you had started that podcast or started that business or switched jobs or done these things? And I think that that's really

[00:16:59] important to think about. The other one that I like to use with my kids is how do I position myself for success? And that's about sort of like seeing the future, but you're using your own mind to sort of meditate into the future or thought experiment.

[00:17:13] Like I have a test coming up. How do I position myself so that when I show up that test is on easy mode and not on hard mode? I like that. Or you know, I have a bunch of kids. You could say I'm imagining

[00:17:26] now what I will say to them based on this conversation. I could say, OK, imagine 10 years from now you are who you are 10 years from now. What are you going to regret not doing today? Ten years from now. Yeah, that's a great one.

[00:17:39] Right. And the way that I came up with this with the kids is, you know, I don't know if you have teenagers, but I have two of them and one of them, you know, came in the door a couple months ago storming, you know,

[00:17:50] with his shoulders down and hands me this test because I need to sign them. And it's like this terrible grade. And he's like, I did my best and, you know, stomps by me and like sloaches on the furniture. And I'm like, OK, I'm not going

[00:18:03] to talk to you right now. But later on that night, I was like, OK, let's talk about what does it mean to do your best? Right. And explain this to me because you told me you did your best. And this is like such an

[00:18:14] easy way out of these conversations. And so he sits down and he's like, well, you know at 10 o'clock when the test started, I read all the questions. I added up all the points. I focused on the questions worth like he sort of went through his

[00:18:25] little algorithm for taking tests. And then I was like, oh, I understand what you're thinking about. We do this with decision making too. Right. We we think about the moment of the decision and making the best decision possible. But let's rewind 72 hours. Did you study? No.

[00:18:42] Were you up late the night before cramming? Yes. Did you have a good breakfast? No. Did you argue with your brother? Yes. For your rush on the day of the test? Yes. So when you showed up, you were playing on hard mode, not on easy mode.

[00:18:55] Like you made it hard. You made that decision hard and you set the circumstances by which you sat down. So yes, you did your best from 10 to 11. But doing your best is actually the position that you're in at the time you take the test.

[00:19:07] And so that's the thought experiment that you can use going forward too. If you're up for a promotion at work or anything like that, how do I position myself for success here? And that's like a forward future thought experiment that can change you. I need to acquire these

[00:19:21] skills. I need to volunteer for these projects. I need to make a closer relationship with this person because that's how we get promoted at work. Well, now I can start thinking and being proactive about the things that I'm doing instead of reactive.

[00:19:34] Yeah. In the book, you use the example of Tetris, which was a great example. So in the video game Tetris, depending on how you play, there's always a solution when the when the block comes down. There's always some place you could fit it. But

[00:19:46] depending on how you played in like the one, two or five minutes prior, it's either going to be very easy for you because there's lots of options where you could put the falling piece or it could be very hard for you because there's

[00:19:56] going to be few options in the pile of pieces is way up high and you're going to mess up. Exactly. And that's the one thing that a lot of people miss about decision making that sort of like counterintuitive having studied, if you will, like the blueprints

[00:20:11] of the people who consistently make really good decisions. I don't think that they're any smarter than the rest of us. I think that they position themselves so that almost all of their options are always good. And I know, you know, you're an investor. Look at Warren

[00:20:25] Buffett, right? He's got 150 billion in cash on the balance sheet right now. And so if the stock market goes up, he wins and if it goes down, he wins and if it stays the same, he wins no matter what happens. He's in a position of strength.

[00:20:37] He's never going to be forced by circumstances into doing something he doesn't want to do. So you can also think of positioning as like the greatest aid to judgment that exists in decision making. And I like how with your kid, you said, did you argue with your brother?

[00:20:52] And on the first instinct is, well, what does it have to do with doing well in a test? But it really does have everything to do with it. Like if if your mind is not, you know, you talk about in the beginning, you talk about these four

[00:21:06] defaults that will go against clear thinking. So the emotion default, the ego default, the social default. I'm sorry, I forget the fourth one now. Inertia. Inertia default. Yeah. That's because the nurse is a little harder word to think about, actually. Totally is.

[00:21:23] Like in the one case, the emotion default is what you're referring to, like did you argue with your brother? Like that is going to get in the way of clear thinking when you have to make decisions. Yeah, it does for kids. It does for adults.

[00:21:35] You get slated in a meeting. Your next meeting, you're not fully 100 percent, right? It's harder than it should be. It's harder than it was. Same as like traffic. I don't know about you, but you know, sometimes I get out of the car and I need like five

[00:21:46] or 10 minutes after this, like just commute to work trying to find a parking spot, all the red lights, all the construction, all this stuff. And you know, sometimes you just sort of like have to realize where you're at, but you can change these things, right?

[00:21:59] So it's like, did you pick a fight with your brother? Did you escalate? Did you put water or gas on the situation? That's the language that we use at home with the kids is like, it's OK if somebody slites you, you got to learn to let that

[00:22:10] go. But what happens is we do this too as adults. Like somebody says something slightly passive aggressive to you and then you passively, aggressively reply. And before you know it, you're like aggressive, aggressive. But the problem is you're not thinking in any of these

[00:22:23] moments. Like if I were to tap you on your shoulder and say, hey James, you're you're putting water or gas on this situation. What do you want to do? You'd be like, oh, this situation doesn't matter at all. I'm going to put water

[00:22:34] on this. Like I don't care. But we don't think in these little defaults, right? We get emotional and we just respond because at the end of the day we are animals. And just like animals, we have a biological instinct to be territorial. But that territory isn't necessarily

[00:22:49] physical territory for us. It's also mental territory. How do I see myself? How do I want other people to see me? So if you infringe on any of that by sliding me in a meeting in front of other people, I'm going to respond

[00:23:03] and I'm going to respond in a way that escalates the situation. But what I'm doing is reacting, not reasoning. I like that you had another little meditation in there like you can either pour water on this or gasoline. Like you take your little meditations, take things to

[00:23:17] extremes. Like you can either set the situation totally on fire or not. What are you actually doing? Well, sometimes it's funny because with my kids, I don't ever tell them what to do. I'm like, do you and sometimes they choose gas? Like they're just like

[00:23:32] consciously like, no, this this is a fight worth having. And those are important sort of lessons to learn with adults too, right? Like sometimes it is a fight worth having and sometimes it's not. Well, you know, it's funny the living by example

[00:23:47] is you discuss this in the book is an important way to lead. Like if if they're like you talk about Mike, a brash off, I believe his name is I actually saw him speak back in nine in early 2000. I saw him speak at you might remember this.

[00:24:04] You remember the company CMGI was internet tech company that invested in like Lycos and all these. So I was at a meeting that CMGI had for companies that had invested in it was invested in one of my in a company I had started and Mike a brash off

[00:24:17] who you discuss in this book, who was the you know, ran this this ship that was failing the Benfold. You discuss an example in this book where instead of telling people what to do in this one situation, he just did what he felt was the right thing.

[00:24:33] And then everybody started following him like he led by example. And I think as a parent and even as an employee, one should do that. Your kids see everything you do. Like, yeah, it's crazy, right? Like if you tell them one thing and do another, they pick

[00:24:48] up on that hypocrisy, even though they might not know what the word hypocrisy means. They they understand you're telling them one thing and doing another. I got this as a kid. I don't know about you, but like it always drove me crazy because

[00:24:58] my mom was like, don't put your feet up on the table. But my dad was there like putting his feet up on the table and didn't you know, she didn't say anything to him. And you just pick up on these little nuances, but you model

[00:25:08] sort of the behavior you grew up in. You model the environment that you're in. Well, and speaking of models, you write in the book, tell me your role models and I'll tell you your future. Now, you've mentioned Charlie Munger. You've all in the book, you

[00:25:21] mentioned some figures from the past who are like current living role models that you have? I have a couple of good friends who are role models in very different ways. Like one of my best friends is just like an amazing father. And you know, he inspires me

[00:25:36] to be a better father. And so when I'm thinking about how to deal with the situation with my kids, I often do it like I assume his mental model. I look at the how would he look at this situation? What would his perspective be on this situation?

[00:25:49] Sometimes I'll call him and ask him. I mean, I'm super fortunate to be able to do that, but you don't need to be able to do that to do that. Elon Musk inspires me in different ways, right? And he doesn't necessarily inspire me with his

[00:26:00] personality. He inspires me with sort of tackling really difficult problems and ignoring all the people trying to pull him down and just moving forward through difficult situations. I like there's there's one aspect that I haven't read Walter Isaacson's biography of him. I should probably read that.

[00:26:20] But I like how when he was starting SpaceX, everyone said essentially, look, you're not a rocket scientist. You didn't study this in school. What do you think you're doing? Stay in your lane. But he read a lot and consulted with a lot of rockets. He didn't build the

[00:26:36] rockets themselves. He didn't design the rockets themselves, but he got enough knowledge that he could consider himself very knowledgeable about rocket science. And we were so often limited by what the institutions tell us, like, oh, you cannot do X if you didn't major in X or study

[00:26:52] X when self-study actually has driven the greatest thinkers throughout history. It's almost like the biggest lie that we're told, right? Is that other people can tell us what's possible. And I don't believe that at all. I think, you know, we set the boundaries on what's possible.

[00:27:08] And if we start listening to other people, we're easy to manipulate. We're easy to sort of give up, right? We're just sort of like, oh, I'm not going to try anything difficult because I don't want to fail. Nobody's done that before. It's like, well, you know, nobody's

[00:27:21] put a reusable rocket in the sky before. Nobody started a business before the first person did. Nobody created clothes until the first person did. Like all of these things happen because somebody willingly risked looking like an idiot in order to possibly advance humanity. And individually, this

[00:27:39] is so interesting, right? If you think about this, it's almost in our individual best interest not to do those things, but collectively it's in everybody's best interests. We all do those things so that we move forward as humanity. But it's that fear, right?

[00:27:53] Going back to emotions and how they derail our decisions. The fear of looking like an idiot, the fear of standing out, the fear of being that tall, poppy often drives us to just conform to what's happening now. And if we do what everybody else

[00:28:08] is doing, we're going to get the exact same results that everybody else gets. So and you talk about in this book, about this in the book, in the context of self confidence, like you need self confidence to kind of overcome some of these negative thinking habits.

[00:28:22] But what's the difference? How do you know when you're self confident versus overconfident? Well, there's a couple different types of confidence, right? And one type of confidence is earned confidence. You've been doing something for a long time. You know all the nuances, the ins and outs.

[00:28:36] And that's an important type of confidence. Another type of confidence is unearned confidence. And the unearned confidence comes from like I read a Google article about this, and I think I know everything there is to know about it. But the way I sort of talk to

[00:28:49] myself and the way that I talk to my kids and sort of the people I work with is you don't need enough confidence to reach the ultimate objective. You need enough confidence to take the next step. And if you're lacking that confidence because you've never

[00:29:05] done that first step, the next step, then you just have to think back and think about all the hard things that you've overcome that you never thought you'd be able to overcome. Like COVID would be a great example, right? Like you overcame this hardship with my son.

[00:29:19] You know, it's like we were jumping off this cliff once and it's a one-way door. We climbed up and like there's no climbing down. Like it's way more I was going to throw him in or he was going to go in. But like there's no way

[00:29:31] he could climb back down. The risk was way too high, just the way that you climb up in the rocks. And he's up there and he's like, I think he was like nine years old at the time or 10 years old and he's like breathing really heavy.

[00:29:42] And I'm like, OK, calm down. Let's just get control of our breath. And you know, he's looking down. It's a good 20, 25 feet. Like it's a pretty high jump, especially for your first sort of like jump off. And I'm like, you remember all the things that you did for

[00:29:55] the first time, right? Like you went snowboarding for the first time. You were scared, right? You didn't know how to snowboard and you just sort of have to work this confidence up in yourself. Control your breathing. And I was like, you don't need the

[00:30:07] confidence to reach the bottom. You just need the confidence to walk off. And so that was a smaller step for him, right? He's not looking down anymore because when he needs the confidence to reach the water, he's looking down. When he needs the confidence to just

[00:30:20] take the first step, he can look out and see the perspective of everything. And the instant just so everybody knows the instant he hit the water, like he was like right back up again, right? Like I'm doing that again. That was so exciting. God, that sounds terrifying though.

[00:30:35] I would never jump off a cliff of 20 feet to the water. Well, you wanted to. Yeah, I wasn't forcing him to. But I was like once you go up, there's no going down other than in the water. Like there's no backing out of this. Oh my gosh.

[00:30:46] But then, you know, that becomes a moment for him where he's like and we all have these stories where we've done these things where you gave a presentation and you know, you sort of you were so nervous about it. But at the end of the

[00:30:57] presentation, you were like, oh, I feel good about that. And so the next time you do we never remind ourselves about all these times we've overcome our inner voice or inner monologue. We never overcome ourselves, like remind ourselves about these times where, you know, we thought

[00:31:11] one thing and it turned out to be a different thing. And I think it's important for confidence that we sort of think about the hard things that we've done before. And that can create this earned confidence, right? Which is I don't know if I have

[00:31:23] the confidence to figure out how to put a rocket into space. But I have the confidence to assemble a team. I have the confidence to like what's the next step in this journey. And if I keep focusing on the next step, I don't need as much

[00:31:36] confidence as I do when I'm looking for the ultimate outcome. And so with all this stuff and with all your writing since 2008, how is this? Has your blog personally helped you? Like what? Totally. Like you know, you mentioned you advise CEOs and stuff to people read your blogging

[00:32:10] and now they'll read this book and they'll they reach out to you and say, hey, can you help me? I'll pay you and you help me figure something out. Or like how have you kind of worked this into your living? Well, two ways, right? So the blog is

[00:32:24] let's rewind for a second. How do we learn? So I have an idea that we learn and I call it the learning loop. And so you have an experience you reflect on that experience from that reflection, you draw compression or abstraction and then you draw an action

[00:32:40] from that compression or reflection or the compression or abstraction and then you have an experience through action. So you go experience, reflection, compression, action. And this is how you learn. And most of the time we're consuming other people's abstractions or compressions. When we read online, we're not

[00:32:59] getting all the details, the nuance, we're consuming the sound bites, we're consuming sort of the micro learning and we have no idea how the context works. And the context comes from reflection. And so when you think about you know, I can make a recipe

[00:33:13] at home and a chef can make a recipe at home. And if everything goes right, it might taste the same to you, James. But if anything goes wrong, the instant something goes wrong, a chef knows right away, not only can they course correct, but they can taste

[00:33:25] mine and be like, too much salt, too high of heat. You didn't do this. You forgot an ingredient. They instantly know because they've done all the reflections. And so that's where that sort of earned confidence comes from is doing the reflections. The website is my reflections in public.

[00:33:40] Like here's what I'm learning. I want to share that with you. And I'm reflecting on these different ideas and I'm trying to connect them in real time. And they're not always perfect, but that's what I'm doing. So I'm taking these esoteric ideas and I'm trying to put

[00:33:52] them into practice and I'm trying to synthesize them in different ways. And that developed this this huge following. And through that following, I mean, I've done speaking. I've sort of helped a lot of people with a lot of decisions. I tend to be the person

[00:34:08] people call when they have a really tough decision to walk through and they need help. And that's resulted in multi-billion dollar mergers for corporations. It's resulted in acquisitions, private companies and hundreds of millions of dollars. And sort of should I stay in my relationship?

[00:34:26] I mean, I've helped people with sort of everything, but I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just helping them walk through it and see it from a different lens and a different perspective. And do they do you think a lot of the people we help

[00:34:36] do think they value that? Oh, they keep coming back. So I think they do. Yeah, I think that's the biggest sign. It's like, OK, I helped you with this one specific decision. That's fun. And I try not to do a lot of this

[00:34:47] now because I find it very time consuming. But they'll come back and you're later and be like, OK, I have another decision that I think I need your help with or I think you can add value to in a different way. And what was the time when

[00:35:00] you had a real fork in the road where you had a big decision to make and you were able to use these techniques to make the decision? Yeah, I think the one that stands at the most is sort of quitting my job at the intelligence agency and going

[00:35:13] out on my own and having no income and cashing in my pension. So, you know, imagine this, right? I'm recently divorced. I'm a single parent. I have a great job, a great income, a great pension. And I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore.

[00:35:30] You know, the uniform doesn't fit and I need to do something else. And then everybody in my ear chirping is like, you are insane. Like this is not only the best job in the world. It's very lucrative. You have fun every day. Like, why are you leaving?

[00:35:44] Don't give up this golden parachute, this pension that you have that's amazing. And I was like, you know, that's just not what I want in life. And so not only did I have to make a decision to sort of jump ship, I did that through everybody else

[00:35:58] telling me it was the craziest idea that I ever heard of, including my parents. My mom literally came to my apartment at the time and was crying because she thought I was throwing away my life and she might have been right. I mean,

[00:36:09] it didn't work out that way, but there is an alternative universe where, you know, that might have been a terrible decision. And I think I also made, I cashed out my pension. So rather than keeping my pension, I could have started collecting it at some point

[00:36:23] in the future. I was like, that makes the most financial sense and the most tax sense for me. But like, I need the psychological pressure of knowing everything's on me and nobody is coming to save me. And so cashing in that pension

[00:36:39] was also like a very real way to make things tangible. And I lived off that income for like three years while I sort of like figured everything out. And so presumably it worked out, but like people said to you, hey, you're having so much fun at work.

[00:36:56] Why did you decide to leave? What do you think was the decision that actually led you to leave? The problems are really fun, right? And the problems don't go away and the problems are amazing. And the group of talented people are awesome to work with.

[00:37:10] I just wanted to do something different, right? Like, you know, the uniform didn't fit anymore. I was in a less technical role, more sort of political managerial role. And that just didn't really align with the things that I wanted in life. I wanted more accountability for my decisions.

[00:37:25] I wanted less sort of politics involved in things. And I miss the days of being close to the operations and the stuff in the early days that I was really excited about. And I just knew, you know, a lot of people stay. They don't know when to quit,

[00:37:40] right? And when they don't know when to quit, they don't leave on a high and I left on a high. You know, it's like that person who plays one year too long in sports, right? You go from potentially being Tom Brady to like O and 18

[00:37:54] in your last year. And I didn't want to do that. And the way that manifests itself in organizations is cynicism, passive aggressiveness, work to rule, like all of these things. I didn't want to become any of that. I despise all of that stuff.

[00:38:07] So I didn't want to stay past my prime. Like right now, what's a good day for you professionally? Like what would, you know, obviously like, you know, when I was first starting to blog personally, like let's say back in 2010 or 2009 around then, a good day for me professionally

[00:38:25] was a lot of people liked a lot of people liked me. So a lot of people liked what I was writing and I would get a lot of, you know, shares and reshares and reposts and people would come on a Facebook and Twitter and on

[00:38:37] my blog and that felt like and also I felt good about what I was writing. So there was, there was a quality component, but then also a quantity component. And that felt like a good day for me professionally. What's a good day right now?

[00:38:50] It will look like it for you. Well, in terms of feedback, it's am I useful? Am I helping people see things in a different way? Am I helping people take control of their life in a way that they didn't think was possible? Am I helping them get the

[00:39:02] outcomes they want? In a personal way, it's I don't have a lot of commitments during the day. I have a lot of freedom of time and you know, I can say no to things because I want to not because I don't do things because I have to.

[00:39:16] And and I think that that is sort of really important to me and that sort of freedom. That's the freedom I want. And but but you could be free and do nothing, right? So you obviously choose to do things that move yourself forward. What do you think you're

[00:39:30] moving yourself forward to right now? I want to make the world a better place, right? I want to put a small dent in terms of how to help people think, how to help people get the outcomes that they want. And I just think like

[00:39:43] that's sort of what life is, right? I want to help other people be the best version of themselves. And I think I get a lot of reward out of doing that. And well, Shane, I definitely think your book Clear Thinking and of a subtitle is

[00:39:57] Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results definitely does that as such. It's probably the most concise book I've read about these types of mental models and decision making and learning and so on. And these are all areas that I'm very, very interested in. It was just really well done.

[00:40:14] Plus your blog in general, FS.Blog, people, you know, Farnham Street. I'm sure you've written it somewhere, but I don't know. How did you pick the name Farnham Street? And by the way, I hate that cliche question. Everyone's going to ask that.

[00:40:26] But how do you pick the name? Well, so the original website was 68131-1440.blogger.com. And so don't go to that website. Somebody's actually like I've said it in so many interviews now. Somebody's picked it up and they use it. But the reason was

[00:40:40] it was never meant for other people's consumption. And 68131 is the zip code for Berkshire Hathaway and Omaha, Nebraska and 1440 is their unit number in Q at Plaza. And so it was an homage to them. So I continued with that theme. The street that their office

[00:40:56] is on is Farnham Street. Hence the name Farnham Street. By the way, there's a newsletter called 1440. Do they is that are they called 1440? It's like a news summary site in the morning that I get every morning. I wonder if I do that. I don't know.

[00:41:08] I don't subscribe to that, but I bet you that might be it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. But OK, that clears that up on Farnham Street. I did not know that even though I've been there and I'm sure you've been to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings.

[00:41:20] Yeah, I haven't experienced that is. Right. Yeah, it is. It's just it's always a story like there's non-substories out of that because there's so many smart people in one place talking. So buffing and monger, those were the two people that sort of inspired what I was

[00:41:34] thinking about because it's like how do these two people consistently make better decisions than other people? And what is it about them? And are there other people that consistently do that? And are there commonalities between that? And you can argue a lot of people do argue, oh, well,

[00:41:48] they're rich. It's easy for them to make the big good decisions. A being rich doesn't necessarily correlate with future good decisions. And B, Buffett's been making those decisions since he was working in his living room as a 25 year old. So or it's his parents'

[00:42:03] living room, I should say, when he was like a 25 year old. So it really is interesting to look at not even so much their decisions right now, but their decisions in like 1959 or 1962 when monger and Buffett were more close. And those early decisions that they made like Buffett's

[00:42:21] decision to go big into American Express, which was totally not his style at the time and or his decision in the early 70s to go into the Washington Post when that was a huge risk. I mean, the president of the United States was starting to shut

[00:42:34] down the Washington Post and Buffett like that became his biggest position. So and monger right before he ever was rich when he first started practicing as a lawyer when he was like a junior, junior associate, he would sell himself the best hour of his day

[00:42:52] and he used that hour to sort of develop himself. And I always thought that that was such a powerful. I didn't know that. Yeah. So he would book one hour with himself every morning and that hour was about learning and developing himself and that compounded over

[00:43:06] a number of years, right? So it starts small and what do we know about compounding? All the advantages come at the end. And so you have these people who've made these choices and these choices are somewhat counterintuitive, but they also position them for future success. So interesting.

[00:43:21] I didn't know that about monger. I thought I knew everything about him. Well, again, Shane, Shane Parish, author of Clear Thinking, Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results. Love the book. I hope people buy it and and I hope you come back on the podcast.

[00:43:35] Let's let's continue the discussion. I've always wanted to hang out with you ever since I started reading your blog. So this is great. Thank you. I'd love that, man. Thanks for an amazing interview.