Shane Parrish

And all of those things sort of conspire to create situations that think situations or circumstances that do the thinking for us.

And this is why positioning is so key to this, because all of these things are going to come up.

You're always going to be faced with these things.

But how do you position yourself so that you're playing on easy mode instead of hard mode?

Can I give you an example from my life?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So one of my kids came home and he, you know, he's a teenager and he passed me his exam and he didn't do as well as he should have or hoped to do on that exam.

And, you know, he shrugged his shoulders and he said, I did my best.

Later on that evening, I approached him and I talked to him and I said, hey, what does it mean to do your best?

Like, walk me through when you said I did my best.

What do you mean?

He's like, well, in the moment that I sat down to write the test, I read all the questions, checked all the points, allocated my time accordingly.

And I'm like, oh, that's so interesting because you think about doing your best as from the moment the circumstances arrive at your doorstep to the moment you finish whatever you sort of set out to do.

That's how a lot of adults think about decision making, too.

And it's how we handle our emotion or ego or social or inertia.

But let's rewind.

Let's go back 72 hours for the sake of argument.

And did you study?

Well, not really.