Shane Parrish Quotes

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.

We’re all born rather creative, but during our formative years, it can be beaten out of us by busy parents and teachers. As adults, we rely on convention and what we’re told because that’s easier than breaking things down into first principles and thinking for yourself. Thinking through first principles is a way of taking off the blinders. Most things suddenly seem more possible.

Children develop self-confidence when they learn simple skills like pulling up a zipper, tying their shoes, or riding a bike. Eventually, that self-confidence evolves and propels them to develop more complex abilities as adults — for instance, writing software, painting murals, or cheering up a disheartened friend.

Rationality is wasted if you don’t know when to use it.

I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.

Too often we get stuck in “functional fixedness,” a mindset where we see in things only their intended use, rather than their potential use.

gets updated, and so too must your circle. There are three key practices needed in order to build and maintain a circle of competence: curiosity and a desire to learn, monitoring, and feedback.

we make repeated choices in life that become habits, those habits determine our paths, and those paths determine our outcomes.

don’t control. All the energy you put toward things you don’t control comes out of the energy you can put toward the things you can. While no one chooses difficult circumstances, adversity provides opportunity. It allows us to test ourselves, and see who we’ve become. The test isn’t against other people, though; it’s against our former selves. Are we better than we were yesterday? When circumstances are easy, it’s hard to distinguish ordinary people from extraordinary ones, or to see the extraordinary within ourselves. As the Roman slave Publilius Syrus once said, “Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.”[*]

Energy is precious and we employ it sparingly. It’s human nature to allow the current state to remain as changing it requires us to expend energy.

Facing reality demands acknowledging our mistakes and failures, learning from them, and moving forward.

Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely.

business, the person with the fewest blind spots wins. Removing blind spots means we see, interact with, and move closer to understanding reality. We think better. And thinking better is about finding simple processes that help us work through problems from multiple dimensions and perspectives, allowing us to better choose solutions that fit what matters to us. The skill for finding the right solutions for the right problems is one form of wisdom.

our default behavior often makes things worse.

The second thing we can do is to learn how to fail properly. Failing properly has two major components. First, never take a risk that will do you in completely. (Never get taken out of the game completely.) Second, develop the personal resilience to learn from your failures and start again. With these two rules, you can only fail temporarily.