Aim for at least eight hours of sleep daily to ensure you are functioning effectively and productively.
Incorporate physical activity, such as working out a number of times a week or playing a sport, to maintain balance in your daily routine.
Spend a significant portion of your day reading and conducting research, as this is a key element of a productive routine.
Integrate sleeping well, eating well, exercising, and extensive reading into your daily routine to achieve a typical and productive day.
Methodically block out large chunks of time, especially for reading and writing, to improve sustained effort and attention and avoid distractions.
Actively turn off or tune out technology as much as possible, checking it only from time to time, to avoid being easily distracted during focused work.
When making decisions, always start with a base rate or statistical approach, then layer in your intuition to avoid seeking out supporting evidence first.
Focus on the quality of the decision-making process itself rather than solely on individuals or outcomes, especially in organizational settings.
Before seeking solutions or alternatives, ensure you have settled on and clearly understand what you are trying to figure out to begin with.
Actively work to surface all possible alternative solutions and ideas within a group to prevent suppression of views and ensure comprehensive consideration.
If you are a senior leader, refrain from expressing your view too strongly at the outset to encourage alternative points of view from others and avoid suppressing opinions.
Beyond simply having diversity in an organization, focus on how to actively manage and take advantage of diverse perspectives for broad improvement.
Do not equate successes with good decisions and failures with bad decisions after the fact, as this is a common and significant mistake in assessment.
When teaching or parenting, focus on praising and dwelling on effort rather than outcomes (like grades or test results) to foster a growth mindset.
When guiding others, especially children making decisions, provide recommendations and ideas rather than telling them exactly what to do, to encourage independent thought.
Offer frameworks, ideas, or recommendations to help others in their decision-making process, rather than making decisions on their behalf.
When making your own decisions, explain your thinking process aloud to others, demonstrating how you approach problems.
Make a concerted effort to read widely across various disciplines to expose yourself to different ways of thinking and foster open-mindedness.
Consciously expose yourself to different ways of thinking to broaden your perspective and improve your ability to update your views.
Foster a setting where various ideas are not only welcomed but actively encouraged, allowing people to be exposed to and consider different perspectives.
In stable and linear environments, improve your intuition through deliberate practice and consistent feedback to correct course and internalize lessons.
Use concepts from your reading in your own research, writing, or speaking to deepen your understanding of the material.
Try to remember, bring up in conversation, and weave new learnings into your mental models to better integrate them into your thinking.
For particularly impactful books (about one in ten), underline and write extensive notes to engage more deeply with the material.
Develop a mindset for thinking about the world probabilistically, potentially by practicing games like poker to understand concepts like pot odds.
As a lower-level employee, articulate better ways of doing things to senior people by explaining the benefits to the organization.
When suggesting changes, frame them constructively, focusing on how they will lead to better business results rather than criticizing current methods.
Propose trying new processes as low-cost experiments for a subset or limited time, with the option to revert if unsuccessful.
Utilize technology to access and analyze large amounts of data and establish base rates more effectively for decision-making.
Set up thoughtful decision rules or algorithms to guide decisions, as they can help maintain quality and consistency when emotions are aroused.
In head-to-head competition, if you are the stronger player, simplify the game by having as few battlefields as possible to overwhelm your competitor.
If you are the weaker player, add battlefields or diversify domains to dilute the strength of a stronger opponent, using tactics like guerrilla warfare or disruptive innovation.
Prompt children or others to consider different perspectives on a topic to broaden their understanding and thinking.
Engage in small, “fun bets” with a clear payout structure to teach children about probabilities and the underlying math, even if they win.
When teaching, go beyond just the answer to a problem; explain the math and concepts behind it, potentially using simulations, for deeper understanding.
Read physical books over e-readers for longer reads, as the physical format can aid memory recall by associating information with its location in the book.
Be aware that there is an optimal team size for decision-making; teams that are too large (e.g., 10-15 people) can dilute efforts and hinder effective outcomes.
Employ the Colonel Blotto game (simplified) with children or in simple disputes as a more interesting way to resolve squabbles than rock, paper, scissors, teaching strategic allocation.
Read Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book” to learn about different levels of attention to pay to various types of reading material.
Read David Myers’ book “Intuition” for a thoughtful and comprehensive treatment of the role and limitations of intuition.
Read Al Rappaport’s “Creating Shareholder Value” for influential insights, particularly from a business and financial perspective.
Read Dan Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” to understand how evolutionary thinking can permeate and influence almost everything you think about.
Read E.L. Wilson’s “Consilience” to appreciate the unification of knowledge and the importance of solving problems at the intersections of disciplines.
Read Mitch Waldrop’s “Complexity” to learn about complex adaptive systems and apply this mental model to understand various systems like organizations, businesses, and markets.
Read Laszlo Bock’s “Work Rules” for insights into innovative, analytically driven human resources policies and managing people effectively, including lessons from Google’s experiences.
Read Ed Catmull’s “Creativity Inc.” to learn how to generate diversity in an organization while maintaining a common mission and handling necessary restarts.
Read Michael Gazzaniga’s “Tales from Both Sides of the Brain” for fascinating research on split-brain patients and the “interpreter” module in the left hemisphere, revealing how we construct narratives.