Shane Parrish

But how can we avoid them in the first place?

How can we prevent them from happening?

How can we add friction to them so that we actually end up

Enabling ourselves to think clearly.

Because all of the things that we know we should be doing, all the common sense, the obvious actions that we know are going to result in success, we avoid them because they all require prepayment.

They all require us to do something today, to expend effort, to expend money, to put in time.

in order to get paid in the future.

And increasingly, we're unable to sort of make those trade-offs in our head.

If I wanna invest in my relationship today, I'm not gonna see the payoff today, but we have to be smarter than that.

We know the payoff's coming.

We can foresee that that watering the grass is not only good for our soul on a daily basis, but it's really good for our relationship and it helps us stay connected to our partner.

And it helps us handle the inevitable ups and downs that life is going to throw at us.

There's other ways, you know, we talk about positioning, but, you know, another thing that we talk about, how do we handle these daily situations so that we can think clearly?

A great example is social situations.

So one of the four defaults is the social default.

And, you know, I don't know about you, but I tend to say yes to people because I want them to like me.

So they might request something from me.

And if I'm talking to them,

You know, it's really hard to say no to people.

It's a lot easier to say no to people on email.