• Strip away assumptions and conventional wisdom

• Identify what we know to be true

• Build solutions from these basic truths

• Question everything, especially "that's how it's always been done"

• What could go wrong? How do I prevent it?

• What would failure look like? Work backwards

• Sometimes it's easier to avoid stupidity than seek brilliance

• "Show me where I'm going to die so I don't go there (Charlie Munger)"

• Identify which 20% of inputs create 80% of outputs

• Double down on what works, eliminate what doesn't

• Not all tasks are created equal - prioritize ruthlessly

• Applies to time, money, relationships, and almost everything

• Clarifying: What do you mean by...? Can you give an example?

• Probing assumptions: What are we assuming? Why would someone assume this?

• Probing evidence: How do you know? What evidence supports this?

• Exploring perspectives: What's an alternative view? How would others respond?

• Examining consequences: What are the implications? Then what happens?

• Don't multiply entities beyond necessity

• When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras

• Complexity should be added only when required

• Simple solutions are easier to understand, test, and maintain

• What's already spent is gone - focus on future value, not past investment

• Ask: Would I start this today knowing what I know now?

• Cutting losses early is often the rational choice

• The question isn't 'How much have I invested?' but 'What's the best path forward?'

• Ladder up: Why does this matter? What's the bigger picture?

• Ladder down: How specifically? What are concrete examples?

• Being stuck at one level limits your thinking

• Great problem solvers move fluidly between abstract and concrete

• Start with the problem and ask why it's happening

• Take the answer and ask why again - repeat 5 times

• Usually reveals the root cause by the 5th why

• Prevents treating symptoms instead of causes

• Local maximum = best solution in your immediate area

• Global maximum = best solution overall (might be far away)

• Incremental improvements can trap you at a local peak

• Sometimes you need to take a step back to make a leap forward

• The first 80% of results comes from 20% of effort

• The last 20% of results takes 80% of effort

• Perfect is the enemy of good - know when good enough is enough

• Ask: Is the improvement worth the additional investment?

• Low confidence in the problem? Focus on speed to validate quickly

• High confidence in problem, low in solution? Balance speed and quality

• High confidence in both problem and solution? Focus on quality

• Don't over-engineer solutions to uncertain problems

• Criticism: Attacking someone's character rather than addressing specific behavior ("You always..." "You never...")

• Contempt: Treating others with disrespect, mockery, or sarcasm - the most destructive horseman

• Defensiveness: Deflecting responsibility by making excuses or playing the victim

• Stonewalling: Withdrawing from interaction, shutting down, or giving the silent treatment

• Each horseman has an antidote: gentle start-up, building appreciation, taking responsibility, self-soothing

• What?: Tell them what you're going to tell them (e.g., 'We need to align on the user problem...')

• So what?: Tell them why it's important to them (e.g., '...this is important because we need to validate that we're investing in the right area...')

• Now what?: Tell them what the next steps are and who should complete them (e.g., '...so how about we develop a research plan. How does tomorrow sound?')

• Provides a clear, structured approach to delivering feedback or information

• Start specific: concrete example or problem

• Expand to the bigger picture: why it matters, broader context

• Narrow back to specific: concrete next steps or solutions

• Shape: Narrow → Wide → Narrow (like a diamond)

• Actively seek out and record contradictory evidence to your beliefs

• Such facts are far more apt to escape memory than favorable ones

• Counter-intuitive thinking - look for what doesn't fit your worldview

• Builds stronger, more defensible theories by addressing objections upfront

• Four components: Observations (facts without evaluation), Feelings (emotions, not thoughts), Needs (universal human needs), Requests (clear, specific, and doable)

• Separate observations from evaluations and judgments - describe what happened, not what you think it means

• Express needs rather than strategies for meeting needs - focus on what you value, not how to get it

• Make requests, not demands - be clear about what you want and open to hearing 'no'

• Empathy first: Listen for feelings and needs behind others' words, even when they're expressed as criticism

• Situation: When and where did this happen? Set the context

• Behavior: What specific actions did you observe? Focus on facts, not interpretations

• Impact: What was the effect? How did it affect you, the team, or the project?

• Keeps feedback objective, specific, and actionable

• What's the one thing that, if changed, would make you decide differently?

• Focus on the decisive factor, not supporting evidence

• Helps clarify what you truly care about most

• Simplifies decision-making by cutting through complexity

• Map the conflict: Two opposing wants (D vs D') that can't both be satisfied

• Identify needs: What each want is trying to achieve (B and C)

• Find common objective: The shared goal (A) that both needs serve

• Challenge assumptions: Each logical connection hides an assumption that can be questioned

• Victim: Feels powerless, avoids responsibility, and seeks others to fix the problem

• Persecutor: Blames or criticizes, asserts control through aggression or coercion

• Rescuer: Jumps in to save others, enabling the victim role and reinforcing dependency

• Break the triangle by shifting to healthier roles like Creator, Challenger, and Coach

• First-order thinking is fast and easy - solves the immediate problem only

• Second-order thinking is deliberate - considers interactions and time

• Always ask: 'And then what?' to see downstream consequences

• Think across time: What happens in 10 minutes? 10 months? 10 years?

• Extraordinary performance comes from seeing what others can't see

• Credibility: Your words and how believable you seem. Build experience, credentials, and knowledge. Be transparent about what you know and don't know.

• Reliability: Your actions and how dependable you seem. Make and keep small promises to build a track record. Deliver exactly what you promise.

• Intimacy: How safe people feel sharing with you. Demonstrate vulnerability, react to emotions behind words, and seek out others' humanity.

• Self-orientation: Your focus on self versus others (the divider). High self-orientation reduces trustworthiness. Stay present to others' needs while maintaining your sense of self.

• Emotional elements (intimacy and self-orientation) are more impactful than rational ones (credibility and reliability) for building trust

• Before saying yes to something, ask: what am I saying no to?

• Time is the ultimate scarce resource, every hour spent on X is an hour not spent on Y

• The best option isn't always good in absolute terms, it's the one with the lowest opportunity cost

• Applies to hiring, projects, features, meetings, and personal commitments

• Type 1 (irreversible): High stakes, hard to undo. Slow down, gather data, stress-test assumptions

• Type 2 (reversible): Low stakes, easy to undo. Decide fast, learn from the outcome, adjust

• Most decisions are Type 2 but get treated as Type 1, causing unnecessary slowness

• Ask: What's the cost of being wrong? Can I reverse this in a week? If yes, just decide

• Every model leaves things out, know what your map doesn't show

• When the map disagrees with the terrain, trust the terrain

• Spreadsheets, org charts, and business plans are maps, not the business

• Update your maps frequently, reality changes faster than your models do

• "College dropouts become billionaires" ignores millions of dropouts who didn't

• Success stories are visible, failure stories are invisible, this skews every lesson you extract

• Before copying a winner's strategy, ask: how many people did the same thing and failed?

• Look for the graveyard, not just the podium, when analyzing what works

• You don't see the world as it is, you see it as you expect it to be

• Actively seek disconfirming evidence, it's far more valuable than confirming evidence

• Ask: What would change my mind? If nothing would, you're not reasoning, you're rationalizing

• Surround yourself with people who disagree with you constructively

• That frustrating email probably isn't hostile, just poorly written or rushed

• Assuming bad intent poisons relationships and escalates conflicts unnecessarily

• Look for structural explanations (bad incentives, missing info) before personal ones (they're out to get me)

• Saves enormous energy that would otherwise go to grudges and defensiveness

• Don't overreact to outliers, both positive and negative results often revert to normal

• Hiring the "best candidate ever" or firing after one bad month are both regression traps

• When performance is unusually high or low, the next measurement will likely be closer to average

• Make structural decisions based on trends and base rates, not single data points

• "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" (Charlie Munger)

• Never ask why someone is doing something frustrating until you've looked at what they're incentivized to do

• Misaligned incentives explain most organizational dysfunction, fix the incentives before blaming the people

• Design systems where doing the right thing is also the easy and rewarded thing

• Ask the team: 'It's six months from now and this project failed. What went wrong?'

• Gives people permission to voice concerns they'd normally suppress out of optimism or politeness

• Surfaces risks, blind spots, and dependencies that standard planning misses

• Far more effective than a postmortem because you can still change course

• Give first without expecting anything, the return usually exceeds the gift

• Works both ways: small favors create goodwill, small slights create grudges

• In negotiation, making a concession triggers the other side to concede something back

• Be aware when it's being used on you, free samples, unsolicited favors, and gifts with strings attached

• Lines of code, story points, emails sent, all get gamed when used as performance targets

• The metric improves while the thing it was supposed to measure gets worse

• Fix: measure outcomes, not outputs. Track what you actually care about, not a proxy

• If you can't measure the real thing, rotate metrics frequently so gaming can't take root

• Plane crashes feel more dangerous than car rides because they're more memorable, but cars kill far more people

• Recent events dominate our risk assessment, a friend getting laid off makes you overestimate your own risk

• Media amplifies this: what gets covered feels common, what doesn't feels rare

• Counter it by looking at actual data and base rates before making decisions

• A confident speaker seems smarter, more trustworthy, and more competent, even without evidence

• A company with a great product gets assumed to have great culture, great leadership, great strategy

• Works in reverse too: one negative trait can poison your entire perception (horn effect)

• Counter it by evaluating traits independently, don't let one dimension color your judgment of others

• Improving a non-bottleneck is waste, it won't make the system faster

• Identify: where does work pile up? Where do people wait? That's your constraint

• Once you fix one bottleneck, a new one appears, it's a continuous process

• Applies to teams, software, sales pipelines, manufacturing, and personal productivity

• You don't need to be an expert in everything, just know where your edge of knowledge is

• Operating inside your circle: you have real knowledge, pattern recognition, and earned intuition

• Operating outside: you're guessing, but it feels like knowing, which is more dangerous than admitting ignorance

• Expand your circle deliberately over time, but never pretend it's bigger than it is

• When someone cuts you off in traffic, you think 'jerk.' When you do it, you think 'I'm late'

• We overweight personality and underweight situation when judging others, and do the reverse for ourselves

• Causes most interpersonal conflict: you're judging their character while they're reacting to their context

• Fix: before judging someone, ask what situation might explain their behavior

• With 3 options you pick one and move on. With 30 options you agonize and second-guess

• Satisficing (picking 'good enough') beats maximizing (finding 'the best') for happiness and speed

• Constrain your own choices deliberately: limit options, set criteria in advance, decide once

• Applies to products, career moves, hiring, restaurants, and every consumer decision

• Each individual's rational choice (take more, contribute less) leads to collective ruin

• Applies to shared codebases, team capacity, public infrastructure, environment, and open-source projects

• Fix: assign clear ownership, make costs visible, or align individual incentives with collective good

• If everyone thinks 'someone else will handle it,' no one will

• Shorter deadlines force focus on what actually matters and cut unnecessary scope

• Meetings expand to fill their time slot, tasks expand to fill their sprint, projects expand to fill their budget

• Counter it: set aggressive but realistic deadlines, then protect them

• Pairs well with Pareto: the 20% that matters gets done in the constrained time

• Always ask: what's the base rate? How often does this actually happen in general?

• A compelling story about one case doesn't change the underlying odds

• Doctors, investors, and founders all fall for this: individual evidence feels more real than statistics

• Start with the base rate, then adjust based on specific evidence, not the other way around