# How to Think So Clearly People Assume You’re A Genius

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qh4bHqQlnQ

[00:00] Thinking clearly is a skill that you can train.
[00:04] And when you have the skill, you go from being overwhelmed about what the right decision is or how to solve a difficult problem to being able to see the missing connections and gain clarity while everyone else is still stuck in confused.
[00:16] The ability to think clearly is also an incredibly rare skill that almost universally puts you in the top 1% most valuable people that others want to work with and have on their team.
[00:27] And as a learning and cognitive performance coach for over 14 years now, I've realized that there are three common traps that intelligent, high-functioning people often fall into that makes thinking clearly more overwhelming and confusing than it needs to be.
[00:40] So, in this video, I'll share those three traps and how to avoid them so that you can become the most valuable person in your team.
[00:45] Trap number one, when you're feeling stuck, think harder.
[00:48] When you're stuck with a really difficult problem, and especially if you historically are pretty good at solving problems and wrapping your head around things, it can feel like the best way to solve this especially difficult problem is to
[01:00] just spend more time and effort thinking through it.
[01:02] But in reality, when you feel stuck, it's usually an indicator that your brain is entering into cognitive overload.
[01:06] So, continuing to think about it harder doesn't actually resolve the issue, it can actually worsen it.
[01:09] So, for example, let's say that there's this important decision that you're trying to make.
[01:14] But this is a complicated decision because there are lots of different factors that influence it.
[01:21] And you have to balance all of these different factors to make sure that you get the result that you want at the end of this decision.
[01:27] But it's complex because if you optimize for A, then maybe B gets worse.
[01:30] If you optimize for B, maybe you're sacrificing on C.
[01:32] All of these factors are tied together, and this makes the decision confusing.
[01:39] And so, you sleep on it.
[01:40] You think about it a few more times.
[01:42] You run through these different factors over and over again in the shower, while you're eating, when you're lying in bed.
[01:48] You run these mental simulations of what the decision might look like and how the result might change.
[01:53] And really, no matter how much you think about it, the decision's not really getting any easier.
[01:55] In fact, it's actually getting harder to make the right decision because each time you go
[02:01] through it, you're getting more and more fatigued with thinking about it.
[02:04] The more you try, your clarity is actually going down.
[02:08] And so, in this situation, instead of thinking harder, we actually need to think less.
[02:12] The brain is an incredible organ, and it's great at problem-solving.
[02:16] And within the brain, there is this concept called working memory.
[02:19] And working memory is basically the workbench of your brain.
[02:21] So, when you are thinking about how all these different factors relate to each other, your brain is pulling all of the stuff into your working memory, trying to see how it all fits.
[02:32] But here's the thing, your working memory is also very limited in general, the human working memory, not your working memory specifically.
[02:40] And so, when you're thinking about too many things at once, it actually gets pretty easily overwhelmed.
[02:43] So, there are five factors over here.
[02:46] If you try to think about all five factors all at once in your working memory, you would reach overload.
[02:52] And when this happens, this is when you feel stuck.
[02:54] This is when you feel confused.
[02:56] And so, what we have to do is we have to respect the fact that our working memory is limited and limit
[03:02] our thinking to just a couple of factors at a time.
[03:05] And by doing this, it allows your brain to actually focus in and resolve the question marks that it has around how everything connect.
[03:11] And once you know how this thing connects together, you bring in the next piece.
[03:15] And so, you allow yourself to focus on just a few factors at a time and gradually, step by step, build that understanding.
[03:23] This ties into a concept taught in computer science known as the separation of concern.
[03:27] It says that when there are lots of things that are happening that are unresolved simultaneously, it's really confusing trying to resolve all pieces at the same time.
[03:35] It's much simpler to take that unresolved mass and separate them out into individual components.
[03:42] And when you resolve each one by itself, it's much easier to put it back together again.
[03:48] Most of the clients that I coach, they're perfectly capable of resolving each of these individual components.
[03:54] The part that wastes time and adds confusion and wears them down is that they put that off until much later.
[03:59] They spend all of this time and this effort
[04:03] thinking hard, trying to push through that feeling of getting stuck.
[04:07] When actually, as soon as they feel that they're getting stuck and confused, they should straight away start separating out those concerns and focusing down their thinking.
[04:15] And I see this trap especially often with intelligent, high-functioning people because they're used to being able to just figure it out.
[04:22] And for me, at least, I remember feeling almost like a hit to my pride accepting that my working memory can only hold so much.
[04:28] But that's just how the human brain is, and it's kind of a dumb thing to be proud about.
[04:31] So, don't be like me.
[04:33] And the second common trap is believing that overwhelm is a capacity issue.
[04:38] I used to be a medical doctor, and I remember holding the phone after hours when I'm on call and looking after 150 different patients, nurses constantly messaging me for things that they need me to do.
[04:49] And sometimes the on-call is insanely busy.
[04:51] Like across 5 hours, you may have less than 10 seconds of rest.
[04:53] One time I had to put a catheter line in one of the patients, it took me like 5 or 10 minutes longer than it should have.
[05:01] And in that time, I missed like five calls.
[05:03] And in that situation, one
[05:05] of the reframes that I had to learn and adapt was going from thinking about how do I get through all of this to what is really important for me to focus on first.
[05:14] Whenever I felt overwhelmed, especially when things feel like everything is urgent, I would tell myself that this overwhelm is a signal for me to triage more aggressive.
[05:25] Because just thinking, how do I get through all of this, is not productive.
[05:28] Because realistically, you probably can't.
[05:30] And continuing to think, how do I get through all of it, how do I get through all of it, actually stops you from making the important decisions that move the needle forward, take problems off of your plate, and give you clarity on what you really need to work on first.
[05:42] And this is a mentality that I think has been incredibly helpful for me outside of medicine, especially in business.
[05:46] Often when things are overwhelming, even if it's not urgent, but just there's a lot of things going on, the decision is really complicated, there are high stakes and responsibilities on the table, I find it's really easy to get stuck into the question of, how do I resolve this?
[06:01] How do I achieve the outcome?
[06:03] Or, what's even worse, you don't even prioritize at
[06:05] all, you just jump straight into it because you feel like there's so much you need to cover, you have no time to spare.
[06:09] But really, what was much more important for me to understand was that this feeling of overwhelm is not an issue with my capacity.
[06:16] It's not a capacity problem.
[06:18] It's a triage problem.
[06:20] The reason I'm feeling overwhelmed is I don't know what to do next.
[06:24] And the trick is understanding that you don't need to know how all of it connects together to know what you need to do next.
[06:30] This is one of the reasons why I really like the concept of the theory of constraint.
[06:33] The theory of constraint says that if you have a big problem with lots of different factors involved, making a complex decision, you ask yourself, what is the one biggest constraint that if I resolved or removed, would make everything else simpler and easier?
[06:47] And by reframing, this essentially achieves what we were doing with overcoming that first trap, which is to tighten in on where we're focusing our working memory.
[06:56] Instead of trying to resolve everything, now we just focus on figuring out what that biggest constraint is and working through it.
[07:03] So, the takeaway for you is that when you're feeling overwhelmed,
[07:07] don't see it as a capacity problem, see it as a triage signal.
[07:11] Now, naturally, a question that may follow on from this if you're trying to apply this in your actual life is you would ask yourself, well, what is the right way to triage?
[07:17] And this is a good question.
[07:19] And I want to share with you two very useful, practical tips that you can use straight away to make this easier.
[07:24] The first thing is learning how to do what's called a dependency map.
[07:28] A dependency map is a really simple, super useful technique.
[07:31] I use it in my work all the time.
[07:32] You just write down all the different factors, concepts, events, considerations that are making this difficult for you.
[07:39] You just You just dump it.
[07:40] Everything that you can think of.
[07:42] And then you start connecting together dependency.
[07:43] Which factors or considerations are causing other factors or blockers?
[07:48] And you can start visually mapping out where your dependencies are,
[07:53] and you can literally look at your map to see where your biggest constraints are.
[07:57] I do dependency mapping for decisions that I need to make, uh project management, product planning, personal prioritization, even personal upskilling to prioritize what I should
[08:07] start getting better at next.
[08:09] And the second tip is when you look at that dependency map, make sure to prioritize blocking out a small amount of time,
[08:15] probably every week to work on the constraint [music] that are needle movers long-term, but may not be urgent right now.
[08:22] The biggest mistake you can make is ignoring those because they're not relevant to you right now, and eventually, when they do become your biggest, most urgent constraint, you're now out [music] of time.
[08:32] If this constraint is not going to become urgent for another 6 months, but it takes you 6 months to unblock it, then actually, [music] that's urgent now.
[08:39] And you can often start unblocking that with a very small amount of time scheduled per week.
[08:43] So, for example, just like 1 hour once a week could be enough to make meaningful movement on that particular [music] long-term strength.
[08:50] And when you neglect that constraint, that's when you end up on this sort of hamster wheel where you're constantly working on the things that you think are a top priority, but there's always something new, a new constraint around the corner.
[09:01] That's what happens when you don't proactively [music] unblock yourself.
[09:04] And I think one of the greatest examples of this is learning to learn.
[09:07] So, if you're
[09:08] spending hours per week on reading through documentation and keeping up with the industry or, you know, studying part-time for a master's, or whatever you're doing, and that's soaking up hours of your time every single week,
[09:19] then learning [music] to increase your efficiency by, let's say, 20 or 30%,
[09:22] which is very doable for most people,
[09:24] that has a compounding tail of benefit that saves you time and opens up new opportunities every single week for the rest of your life.
[09:31] And usually, people put it off because, like, it takes a long time to learn how to learn.
[09:34] People don't realize that you can put aside just 3 to 5 minutes once a week when my newsletter hits your inbox to take those practical strategies [music] that have been triaged for you.
[09:46] Where all you need to do is read the short email, understand an important insight or transformative perspective, much like maybe the ones that you're hearing right now, and then practice that for the rest of the week [music] to get that benefit.
[09:59] And when these newsletters are free to sign up to, I mean, is there a reason for this to really be a constraint for you moving forward?
[10:05] No, I don't think so.
[10:07] The link's in the description if you
[10:08] want to sign up below.
[10:10] And trap number three, and this one is so common that as soon as I teach it to you, you're going to notice people falling into this trap all around you all the time.
[10:16] And the trap is not working.
[10:18] in confidence interval.
[10:20] Okay, this is going to take me a minute to explain, but it's genuinely a life-changing perspective.
[10:24] Confidence is a statistics concept.
[10:28] So, imagine that you are a medical researcher, and you have this new blood pressure medication.
[10:33] And you do this research, you get a bunch of people, and you find that this blood pressure medication reduces blood pressure on average by 10 points.
[10:40] But obviously, this is just a sample group of people, right?
[10:42] You can't test this medication on every living human.
[10:45] And so, what you calculate is the confidence interval.
[10:47] And so, the confidence interval might be 7 to 13 points.
[10:51] And you might report this as this blood pressure medication reduces blood pressure by 10 points plus or minus three points with a 95% confidence interval, which sounds incredibly confusing if you don't already understand what confidence intervals are.
[11:07] But it's basically saying, we are 95% confident
[11:11] that the true effect of this medication is 10 points plus or minus three.
[11:15] So basically, 7 to 13 points, right?
[11:18] Minus three from 10, plus three from 10.
[11:19] We can't say it's exactly 10 points cuz it won't be for some people, but if you ran the study 100 times, then 95 out of those 100 times, you're going to get some number that's between 7 and 13.
[11:32] So, what the heck does this have to do with thinking more clearly?
[11:33] Okay, I've given you the number 95% as a confidence interval, right?
[11:37] And that's with this sort of margin of error of three points, plus or minus three points.
[11:41] So, if you wanted to make a statement that is 100% confident, would this margin of error go up or would it go down?
[11:49] Now, intuitively, what I used to think is that, well, if I'm being more confident, then I should be getting more accurate.
[11:55] So, my margin of error is coming down.
[11:58] I'm saying, this medication is effective by reducing by 10 points, and it's it's 10 points plus or minus 0.5.
[12:03] That's how precise and accurate my prediction is.
[12:07] More confident, more accurate, more precise.
[12:10] And if that feels intuitive to you,
[12:11] you're falling into the exact same trap that I fell into.
[12:15] In reality, bigger confidence means less precise.
[12:19] If I told you this medication is going to affect your blood pressure by 10 points plus or minus 10, then I can say that with 100% confidence because 10 minus 10 is zero.
[12:28] It means that this medication may have no effect on you.
[12:30] I could give you literally anything and say that this is going to affect your blood pressure by 10 points plus or minus 10.
[12:37] If I ask the question, how many English speakers are there in the world right now?
[12:40] I don't know the answer to that, but I can 100% confidently say that the answer is 3 billion plus or minus 3 billion.
[12:46] And so, when we move away from the math and the stats, and we come back to making decisions and solving through complex problem, often we're trying to arrive at a confident solution, a confident answer.
[12:58] And we try to get to that confident conclusion by being more precise and more meticulous and more detailed.
[13:03] But this can create paralysis by analysis.
[13:06] We're trying to be 100% confident in the right decision to make.
[13:09] And so, we think through every possible factor
[13:14] that can influence that decision until we are 100% confident that this is the right decision to make, plus or minus 1%.
[13:22] But in practical reality, with complex, messy systems, it's not possible to reach that 100% level of confidence.
[13:26] There are just too many factors that interact in ways that are too complicated to ever arrive at a decision where you can truly say, hand on heart, I'm 100% confident that this is the right choice.
[13:38] And so, what a lot of high-functioning people do is that they either ignore all the other considerations or the factors.
[13:44] They say, yep, I'm I'm confident with this decision.
[13:46] They become overconfident, and they disregard all these reasons why actually they probably shouldn't be that confident.
[13:53] Or some people go the other way.
[13:55] They say, well, I can't possibly give you a confident answer because all of these factors are so complicated.
[14:00] These people get stuck.
[14:02] They get paralyzed.
[14:03] They can't make that decision.
[14:03] But that is not the right way to think about it.
[14:05] Confidence is the byproduct of your scope.
[14:07] If you want to increase the confidence of your decision or your conclusion or your analysis, all you do is you make a broader conclusion.
[14:14] You add more margin
[14:17] of error into it.
[14:19] So, for example, let's say that you are a marketing manager,
[14:21] and you need to figure out this marketing campaign to sell this new line of shoe.
[14:24] And you're trying to figure out, what is the marketing message that's going to really resonate with our customers?
[14:28] Well, the overconfident move might be to say, just look at last year's data and say, oh yep, this is what resonated with our audience last year.
[14:36] I'm just going to go with that.
[14:37] And it's really complicated to think about how your audience has changed and how culture has changed and where the business is at.
[14:42] So, you just ignore all of that and say, yep, this is what the last year's data said.
[14:45] I'm confident I'm going to stick with it.
[14:47] That's overconfident.
[14:50] The paralyzed move is to say, man, there are all these things that have changed.
[14:52] The business has changed, the culture has changed, the audience has changed.
[14:55] We have to test more, we have to research more.
[14:56] And you just do rounds and rounds and rounds of endless testing and analyzing to see exactly what you think is going to be precisely the right marketing message.
[15:04] Honestly, it's so complicated that you're probably never going to get that certainty.
[15:07] And even if you do, it's going to take forever.
[15:09] And so, the right move is to increase confidence by widening out your interval.
[15:11] You say, well, last year, this
[15:17] is the message that resonated with the audience.
[15:19] And I'm 70% confident that that's going to resonate with our audience this year, but I'm 99% confident that one of these five messages is going to resonate with our audience.
[15:32] So, that becomes your high-confidence move.
[15:34] You might do a quick test on those five messages.
[15:36] Let's say that you're trying to set up the sales funnel, and you're wondering, what's the conversion percentage?
[15:38] If I'm spending a million dollars on setting up this funnel, but only 2% of people convert, then I'm not going to make my money back.
[15:48] The overconfident move is to say, hey, well, I've tried this in a different business, and it converted at 10%, so we should be fine.
[15:54] The paralyzed move is to spend the next 9 months doing 40 different variations of sales funnel testing and cost optimization to figure out exactly what is the conversion percentage going to be like when you launch this to the public.
[16:06] But the confidence interval approach is to ask, well, what is the range of conversion percentage that I'm 95, 99% confident of?
[16:14] Well, I'm 99% confident that the conversion is going to be anywhere
[16:18] between 2 to 7%.
[16:20] And because I'm confident that conversion is going to fall within that range, let's set up the sales funnel so that if it's performing really badly, I can make it cheaper and pull parts away.
[16:27] And if it's performing really well, I can scale it up.
[16:30] Let's not commit to the idea that only breaks even if I hit 10% conversion.
[16:35] This is the trap here that gets people really confused and overwhelmed and stops them from really thinking clearly through problems and decisions is that they're aiming for confidence.
[16:44] And they're trying to resolve through factors that frankly maybe you just can't figure out.
[16:49] But the reframe, and this is the takeaway to avoid this trap, is don't aim for confidence.
[16:52] Aim for accuracy, and adjust your interval, your margin of error.
[16:57] Shrink your claim until you get it to a point where you feel confident enough with the statement or the decision that you're making.
[17:04] That allows you to plan accurately, move forward safely, and continue making progress without getting stuck.
[17:11] And I think this is a key difference between real high performance and optical high performance.
[17:17] Optical
[17:19] high performance just want to look like they're high performance.
[17:23] So, they just care about sounding confident.
[17:25] When they have a difficult problem, they just say, oh, you can just do it this way.
[17:28] They solve the problem by ignoring the problem.
[17:32] Whereas real high performers, they reframe the problem instinctively.
[17:34] If they realize they can't resolve it easily, they switch to, what is the level of detail or the scope of the conclusion or the decision that I can confidently make right now with the information that I've got available while staying honest to myself.
[17:49] And when you realize it's okay to acknowledge uncertainty, it becomes a lot easier to think clearly.
[17:54] Now, one of the most valuable strategies that you can pair with what I've taught you so far in this video is learning how to think on paper.
[18:01] This makes thinking through even the most complex problems trivially easy.
[18:04] It's strategy I use all the time.
[18:05] In fact, I keep a notebook next to me at all times just for that purpose.
[18:09] If you want to learn how to think on paper, check out this video here where I teach you exactly that.
[18:14] Otherwise, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.