Shane Parrish Quotes

Canadian author and Farnam Street blogger

Shane Parrish is a Canadian author and podcast host best known for founding Farnam Street (fs.blog), a learning platform dedicated to mastering the best of what others have already figured out. A former intelligence analyst at Canada's Communications Security Establishment, he is the author of Clear Thinking and The Great Mental Models series, and hosts the Knowledge Project podcast, featuring long-form conversations with world-class thinkers on decision-making, leadership, and wisdom.

Most errors in judgment happen when we don’t know we’re supposed to be exercising judgment.

This model teaches us that it’s much more important to pay attention to where you are going and not how fast you are moving

Self-confidence is what empowers you to execute difficult decisions and develop self-knowledge. While the ego tries to prevent you from acknowledging any deficiencies you may have,

When understanding is separated from reality, we lose our powers. Understanding must constantly be tested against reality and updated accordingly

More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence.

I’ve been fortunate over the years to talk to my heroes Charlie Munger and Daniel Kahneman about thinking and decision-making, along with other master practitioners like Bill Ackman, Annie Duke, Adam Robinson, Randall Stutman, and Kat Cole. Many of these conversations are public on The Knowledge Project podcast.

What separates good thinkers from great thinkers is:

1) The number of mental models at their disposal;
2) The accuracy of those models; and
3) How quickly they update them when they're wrong.

Why risk looking like an idiot when you can remain average?

«A theory is part of empirical science if and only if it conflicts with possible experiences and is therefore in principle falsifiable by experience.»

If there were a recipe for accumulated disaster, it would be giving the best of ourselves to the least important things and the worst of ourselves to the most important things.

using conditional probability means being very careful to observe the conditions preceding an event you’d like to understand.

in using maps, abstractions, and models, we must always be wise to their limitations. They are, by definition, reductions of something far more complex.

All the energy you put into things you can't control comes at the expense of things you can control.

The skill for finding the right solutions for the right problems is one form of wisdom.

So our first step in improving our outcomes is to train ourselves to identify the moments when judgment is called for in the first place, and pause to create space to think clearly.