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The further we are from the results of our decisions, the easier it is to keep our current views rather than update them. When you put your hand on a… - Shane Parrish
" "The further we are from the results of our decisions, the easier it is to keep our current views rather than update them. When you put your hand on a hot stove, you quickly learn the natural consequence. You pay the price for your mistakes. Since you are a pain-avoiding creature, you update your view. Before you touch another stove, you check to see if it’s hot. But you don’t just learn a micro lesson that applies in one situation. Instead, you draw a general abstraction, one that tells you to check before touching anything that could potentially be hot.
Organizations over a certain size often remove us from the direct consequences of our decisions. When we make decisions that other people carry out, we are one or more levels removed and may not immediately be able to update our understanding. We come a little off the ground, if you will. The further we are from the feedback of the decisions, the easier it is to convince ourselves that we are right and avoid the challenge, the pain, of updating our views.
Admitting that we’re wrong is tough. It’s easier to fool ourselves that we’re right at a high level than at the micro level, because at the micro level we see and feel the immediate consequences. When we touch that hot stove, the feedback is powerful and instantaneous. At a high or macro level we are removed from the immediacy of the situation, and our ego steps in to create a narrative that suits what we want to believe, instead of what really happened.
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About Shane Parrish
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.
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Telling someone to “work smarter” is useless because it assumes they already know what smarter looks like. If they did, they’d be doing it.
“Work smarter, not harder” is often framed as the opposite of hard work, but working smart is itself a derivative of hard work. You have to work hard to figure out what working smart means.
It’s like a chess master spotting the best move instantly; it looks like working smart, but it’s built on thousands of hours of working hard to earn that intuition.
What looks like working smarter is often just contextual insights uncovered through deep, sustained effort that others would find unreasonable.
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Working with a master firsthand is the best education; it’s the surest way of raising the bar. Their excellence demands your excellence. But most of us aren’t lucky enough to have that opportunity. Still, not all is lost. If you don’t have the chance to work with a master directly, you can still surround yourself with people who have higher standards by reading about them and their work.
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