#695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More

Writing is the process by which we realize we don't understand what we're talking about.

Automatic rules turn your desired behavior into your default behavior, and they do it when you're at your best.

I have this phrase I remind myself with, which is outcome over ego. Am I focused on getting the best outcome, or am I focused on satisfying myself and proving myself right? Because the minute I'm proving myself right, what tends to happen is I ignore all this information that says that I'm not right.

Side note here, Naval Ravikant saved the podcast ... Nobody's listening to this podcast, and I had just recorded with Naval, and I was like, that's the last episode I'm gonna do. And then, of course, that episode goes parabolic ... I was like, oh my God, I can't give up on this anymore.

People don't argue with rules ... We're taught our whole life to follow rules, but we've never thought of how can we create rules for our self that we just follow when we're at our worst, when we're sort of in the worst situation possible?

I'm a high-trust person. I operate on trust. I don't want to be in business with you if we need a contract ... If I feel the need of a contract, it's an easy no for me.

When I invest with friends, my rule is... I write that investment off the minute I write the check, because I never want my investment with friends to affect our friendship.

School has become almost too easy. We're not challenging the kids, and we're not holding them to a high enough standard, and it's causing all these downstream problems later on in life.

A great way to think about mental models is the source of all bad decisions is blind spots. Mental models allow you to see a problem through a different lens.

Cognitive biases are really good at explaining why you made a mistake in the past, but they're really poor at preventing you from making mistakes in the future.

The counter intuitive insight that I had about decision-making from studying Buffett and Munger... is that they almost never find themselves out of position ... They're never forced by circumstances into doing something that they don't want to do. And often, that means they look like an idiot in the short-term, but in the long-term, they win.

So often we think about life in terms of 'How do I do the best I can in this particular moment?' rather than 'How do I put myself in the best position?

Speed doesn't have a direction, so it doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're running in circles. You really want to get to the best outcome possible in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of effort.

There's literally four permutations of a relationship—there's win-win, win-lose, lose-win, and lose-lose. And only one of those permutations can survive time.

Your environment sort of determines your behavior a lot—not only your physical environment but the people you surround yourself with. And it's just a slow escalation.

My belief is that the person who makes the decision has to come up with a problem statement for the decision.