9 Habits For Clearer Thinking (I Wish I Knew Sooner)

How do you stop feeling overwhelmed and confused when you're thinking about something tricky? You know that feeling

something tricky? You know that feeling when you're trying to make a difficult decision or you're working through a particularly complex problem and there's so much going on that you don't even know where to start. In those

situations, how do you get to the right answer quickly without missing something important? I'm Dr. Justin Sun. I'm a

important? I'm Dr. Justin Sun. I'm a

learning and cognitive performance coach. And for the past 14 years, I've

coach. And for the past 14 years, I've taught tens of thousands of people how to use their brain the way that their brain actually likes to think. And today

I'm going to share with you nine habits for clearer thinking that make you a better decision maker and a better problem solver. And I wish I knew these

problem solver. And I wish I knew these sooner. I'm going to break this down

sooner. I'm going to break this down into two categories. First, bad habits that are really common that you need to stop. And then the second part, good

stop. And then the second part, good habits that you should start that most people don't do. So starting with the first category, bad habits that you need to stop. So bad habit number one, stop

to stop. So bad habit number one, stop cramming your deep thinking. Over the

years, especially as my personal and professional responsibilities started increasing, I found it harder and harder to have these nice uninterrupted periods of time where I can really sit and think through the problems that I'm facing.

And one thing I noticed about myself was that I tended to lean towards executing on things more than thinking about things. And I noticed this a lot with a

things. And I noticed this a lot with a lot of my clients, especially those that have a track record of being high achievers and high performers. But the

thing about most complicated problems or difficult decisions that you really need to think clearly about is that it's rarely bottlenecked by your ability to execute on things. And it's more bottlenecked by how clearly you can

think through it. And if you're not really actively carving out the time and space to do this deep thinking and instead you're relying on uh just naturally becoming a little bit less busy and using that opportunity to do

more thinking and it's not really a predictable or sustainable way of doing things. I found that a lot of the time

things. I found that a lot of the time when there was something really complicated for me to try to think through that felt really overwhelming and really confusing, it was only overwhelming and confusing because I was

trying to think through it in like 5 to 15 minutes. And so a practical takeaway

15 minutes. And so a practical takeaway for you and one thing that I started implementing in my life is actually putting aside 30 minutes to an hour in the evenings. doesn't have to be every

the evenings. doesn't have to be every day, but certainly when there are these uh pressing problems that you're trying to think through and actually dedicating that time just to sit there with a pen

and paper just freely thinking about that problem and letting yourself put those thoughts on paper. So just not cramming your deep thinking becomes one of these really easy no-brainer changes

that you can make that actually gives you the opportunity to think more clearly. The second bad habit is to stop

clearly. The second bad habit is to stop trying to be right. This one is really a gamecher and it can be difficult for some people. But when you've got a

some people. But when you've got a confusing, overwhelming situation that you're trying to think through, trying to think through everything in the right way and come to the right conclusions all of the time can make it much harder

to think clearly. And to understand this, it's useful to actually break down the anatomy of confusion. So when we feel confusion, what does our brain actually sensing? What does our brain

actually sensing? What does our brain detect that triggers this confusion feeling? Well, most of the time it

feeling? Well, most of the time it actually boils down to just the fact that there is lots of stuff going on. So

if each of these dots represents some kind of factor or variable, then a simple not confusing situation is when there's only maybe one or two of these

dots. It's really easy for our brain to

dots. It's really easy for our brain to think about this. But as we introduce the number of factors and variables for our brain to keep hold of, it becomes overwhelming. But it's not just

overwhelming. But it's not just overwhelming because there's lots of things to think about. It's because we have an understanding that these things also influence and relate to each other.

And the confusion comes from the fact that you know there is some kind of relationship between them, but you don't really know what those relationships are. You know they're connected, but

are. You know they're connected, but you're just not quite sure how. And in

cognitive load research, we call this multiple element interactivity. There

are multiple elements. Each element is a factor, a variable, a principle or a concept that affects your decision-m and those elements interact with each other.

And that overwhelm that is what creates the confusion. But the issue that stops

the confusion. But the issue that stops us from thinking through this clearly and actually seeing what is the right way to think about this is the fact that when we don't know how all of these

things connect together, we believe that we need to figure it out and get it right. We need to correctly map how all

right. We need to correctly map how all of these factors influence each other first in order for us to make our conclusions or decisions or solve that problem. And while it's true that we

problem. And while it's true that we eventually need to be right about the way that we think about it, we don't need to be right straight away. And this

is really the habit of really clear thinkers that are able to just sort of cut through and see those patterns and see how the dots connect much faster than most people is that they're not trying to be right straight away.

Instead, they're going to make predictions. They're going to make

predictions. They're going to make guesses and let themselves be corrected later on. So, they might look at these

later on. So, they might look at these and say, "Hey, well, I think this one and this one are probably connected in this way, and maybe it's connected like this, uh, and like this, and maybe

there's something like this." All you need is for your brain to have some way of making sense of this. And even if the way it makes sense of the situation is

not correct, just taking a guess at how it all connects together unblocks your brain and stops it from just continuing around uh in circles over and over again. And so the obvious question with

again. And so the obvious question with this is well if you just take a guess at how everything is important and how it all connects together and you are wrong which you're probably going to be because you you just took a guess then

doesn't that mean that your solution or your decision or the conclusions that you come to are also going to be wrong and the answer is yes if you stop there

but you don't stop there. Once you have a way of thinking about this, once you've taken your guess at how all these factors relate to each other, you can then move forward and get more

information and data about whether you were right or wrong. So let's say that you're trying to solve this really tricky problem and you think that there is this certain way of solving it.

You've created a model for yourself uh which you've just taken your best guess at. You can then try to apply that model

at. You can then try to apply that model to solving the problem and see whether that seems right or wrong. Or perhaps by forming this model, you realize that there are a couple things that you want to learn a little bit more about. So

you're going to go and learn about that.

In either situation, you're going to get information about how your way of thinking about it, how your guess was correct in some ways and incorrect in

other ways. And that feedback allows you

other ways. And that feedback allows you to go and correct your earlier working model. So you might have realized, hey,

model. So you might have realized, hey, yeah, this relationship is correct, but actually it goes back and forth. And

this one that I had is actually wrong.

Uh and actually it's more like this one.

And so now you're not working with three to five different variables that all connected together in some confusing way. Each error that you made in your

way. Each error that you made in your guess becomes a single focused thing for your brain to think about and improve.

And over multiple iterations of feedback, every time you do that cycle, you get closer and closer to having an accurate, correct view of the situation.

And so people who struggle with thinking clearly, they don't want to make these errors. They're trying to be right

errors. They're trying to be right straight off the bat. People that are very efficient with thinking clearly are focused on just being wrong quickly and upfront and engaging in as many of those

feedback cycles as quickly as they can.

So that's bad habit number two. And this

goes handinhand with bad habit number three which is you need to stop overeing information. So if we go back to this

information. So if we go back to this anatomy of confusion. One of the ways that we habitually respond to this confusion is to just learn more and this

often means reading more asking more questions. And that's not always a bad

questions. And that's not always a bad thing but it can make it harder to think clearly about the situation. And this is because when you're confused about something, it's often not because you

lack information, but because you don't know how the information you already have connects together to form a big picture. And so, if there are five

picture. And so, if there are five important things for you to consider when you're thinking about this problem, it's hard to make a decision about it because if you change one of those variables, you don't know how it's going

to impact all four of the others. And so

if you're feeling confused and your response is just to try and learn more or think about more factors and variables, all you're doing is going from five things to think about to 10

things to think about. You're actually

giving yourself more things to be confused about. When you're feeling

confused about. When you're feeling overwhelmed and confused, the thing that allows your thoughts to become more organized and for your thinking to become clearer is actually digesting

what you've already got to work with, not eating and consuming more information, which is only going to add to your existing confusion. And so the practical takeaway for you is that when

you notice yourself feeling confused and feeling overwhelmed and you notice that you're trying to resolve that just by learning more, stop yourself and instead

do habit number two, which is make some guesses about how you think it might be connected together. Even if it's wrong,

connected together. Even if it's wrong, just get to a point where it at least feels more organized. And what makes all of this much much easier is preventing

bad habit number four, which is to stop keeping things in your head. When I was in my teens and early 20s, I thought that mental sharpness was about being

able to think about a lot of stuff in your head. I wanted to be that person

your head. I wanted to be that person who can take something really complicated and just sit there and nod sagely about it and just have answers appear. But that's not really how the

appear. But that's not really how the brain actually works. And one of the strategies that really tripled, even quadrupled my ability to think clearly

and quickly about things was to stop trying to hold on to all of this stuff mentally. I trained myself in a new

mentally. I trained myself in a new habit, which was anytime I have the thought, hm, this is tricky. I'm having

to really think about this. Straight

away I will reach for my notebook and start mapping out my thoughts. If I have these five points and I'm thinking, well maybe it's connected like this and like this and like this or maybe it's

connected like this and like this and like this or maybe actually I need to group these two things and actually it's you know these things connected uh to each other like that. I'm not going to

even try to do this thinking in my head.

I'm going to literally draw it out and visualize it. And by externalizing your

visualize it. And by externalizing your thoughts, what you're doing is you're optimizing what's called your working memory. In neuroscience, working memory

memory. In neuroscience, working memory is basically the workbench of where your brain does a lot of uh information related thinking. So if I get you to do

related thinking. So if I get you to do some mental maths like 12 * 13, that mental calculation that you're doing where you're calling on your knowledge of multiplication and arithmetic that's

happening in your working memory. If I

ask you, uh, what did you have for breakfast yesterday? Then that knowledge

breakfast yesterday? Then that knowledge is coming into your working memory in order for you to be able to describe it to me. So, anytime you're trying to

to me. So, anytime you're trying to apply your knowledge uh like teaching something or building something or recalling and explaining or anytime that you're trying to understand something

new and learning things, all of that work is happening in your working memory. And the thing about your working

memory. And the thing about your working memory is that it is very limited and very fixed. I I mean all of our working

very fixed. I I mean all of our working memory, the human working memory, not just you in particular. And really

effective thinkers optimize how they use their working memory because it is so limited. It's also very easily

limited. It's also very easily distracted and hijacked. And what the research tends to show is that you can only really hold on to between 3 to

seven different things in your working memory at any given time. Now you might be thinking, hm, 3 to 7? Well, I mean, in this example that you've been giving

this whole time, there's only 1 2 3 4 five things. So, five things should be

five things. So, five things should be something that I can perfectly do within my working memory. No, remember what I said. The confusion comes from not

said. The confusion comes from not knowing how these five things connect together. If you have five individual

together. If you have five individual things to think through, there are over 1,000 permutations of relationships. In

reality, maxing out your working memory looks like this. Hey, here's one factor.

Here's another factor. Maybe they could be connected like this. Or maybe it's connected like this. Boom. You've wor

you've maxed out your working memory because you have now one 2 3 4 five things to keep track of. Two points and three directions of relationships. For a

topic like what I'm teaching you right now in this video, that would be the equivalent of me asking you how is confusion related to your ability to

think clearly. There's only two concepts

think clearly. There's only two concepts there. But if you really take the time

there. But if you really take the time to try and think about how confusion and thinking clearly are related together, you'll find that your brain is doing a lot of work. And that work that your brain is doing, trying to figure out

that relationship, that is how you create organization in your thinking.

That's where the clarity actually comes from. So you want your brain to be doing

from. So you want your brain to be doing that. You want it to be really focused

that. You want it to be really focused on doing that kind of thinking. And it

cannot do that thinking if it's distracted just trying to remember the thoughts that you had before. So forget

about mental sharpness. Just put it on paper and stop trying to do it all in your head. And the fifth bad habit to

your head. And the fifth bad habit to stop, which I think we're all going to be guilty of, is to stop forced decisiveness. When I was growing up, I

decisiveness. When I was growing up, I always had this concept that it's good to be a really decisive person. And what

I confused was that a good thinker is naturally able to come to decisions quickly because they know how to think about it. They are not doing those bad

about it. They are not doing those bad habits that I've already mentioned. When

I was younger, I I didn't really have the tools to make good decisions. I

didn't know how to think through these things and allow myself to navigate through that confusion in a productive way. And so instead, I just thought,

way. And so instead, I just thought, well, I need to make decisions more quickly. And I would actually force my

quickly. And I would actually force my decisiveness. And while that's not a bad

decisiveness. And while that's not a bad thing if you're trying to decide uh what to eat for lunch and there's, you know, 10 different menu options, the decision that you make there is not really going to be consequential. But if it's a

really big decision and let's say there's hundreds of thousands of dollars or your career uh or you know a business strategy that's on the line then making the decision quickly is not as important

as making a good decision. And the

reason this is so dangerous I think as a habit is that when you're met with this confusion and there are all these things

going on it is much much faster to just not think about some of these variables.

If the reason we're confused is that there are five different things that are confusing us, then we can just tell ourselves, hey, well, maybe uh this one, this one, and this one are not as

important. And now we just have to think

important. And now we just have to think about this. We've gone from a confusing,

about this. We've gone from a confusing, overwhelming situation to a really simple situation, and we're able to come to a decision very quickly. But

simplifying this situation to just these two points may not be accurate. When we

do this kind of thinking where we've basically just locked in some kind of decision or conclusion by oversimplifying something because we don't know how to think through this

confusion. I call this an ETC decision.

confusion. I call this an ETC decision.

I once read that when you're writing lists of things and you can't think of more things to write on the list, you just write etc because you're just lazy.

Uh and therefore the etc stands for end of thinking capacity. And this is basically the situation. there's

something that's complicated, but we've reached the end of our thinking capacity about this. So, we just tell ourselves,

about this. So, we just tell ourselves, okay, maybe it's simpler than that. And

we just arbitrarily lock in some kind of conclusion. That's an etc decision. So,

conclusion. That's an etc decision. So,

as a practical takeaway, if you're trying to work through something complicated and you need to think clearly about it, if you arrive at a decision and it feels really simple, ask

yourself, is this just an etc decision or have I properly thought through it with the respect that it needs? So,

those are the bad habits that you should stop. Now, these are good habits that

stop. Now, these are good habits that you can start that make it easier for you to think clearly. The first good habit is to start looking for blackbox

swans. Now, if you're not familiar with

swans. Now, if you're not familiar with black box or black swans, I'll quickly explain it. Black box refers to any time

explain it. Black box refers to any time that there is some kind of input and an output and there is some kind of process that happens in the middle that we don't really know much about. This is the

black box. So, with thinking, a good

black box. So, with thinking, a good example of this might be that we know that we have to put time thinking. We

need some kind of information about the problem and the output of this is some kind of solution or maybe some kind of decision that we're making. But the

thing that allows time and information to become a good solution and decision is what happens inside the black box.

This is our thought processes or frameworks or mental models that we're using. And if this stays inside the

using. And if this stays inside the black box and we don't really know what the right thought processes or frameworks to use are then often what happens is that uh we have to put in a

lot of time and we need a lot of information to try and uh increase the quality of this output. Whereas when you know what's inside this black box really well then you can do more with the time

and information that you have. Now on

the other hand, a black swan refers to something that is currently unknown to you but may be significant in the way that you think about something. So

unknown plus significant. It comes from this uh story where uh somewhere I think in Europe they used to think that no such thing as black swans existed and so

the word black swan used to mean this thing that doesn't exist. And then uh eventually explorers realize that hey there are some countries out there that do have black swans and then black swan

came to then be known as the thing that you think doesn't exist but it actually does you just don't know about it. So

let's say that you are thinking about a job change thinking about moving to another company and you're already thinking about this decision. A black

swan might be not knowing that when you move to this new company, your manager and all the other people in the team are going to leave and you're going to be left there by yourself. That is

information that you may not have had access to. And if you did know that,

access to. And if you did know that, that would have significantly altered the decision that you make. And what I found to be really useful is to look for both of these things, especially when

they occur together. And this is basically what I call a blackbox swan.

It is a black box inside which there is a black swan. In other words, it is a process that you use to achieve some kind of output that you don't know a lot

about. But there are parts of this

about. But there are parts of this process that if you knew about would significantly change your strategy or your decision or the way that you would approach this problem. And a great

example of blackbox swans are performance reviews or uh switching careers or trying to get recruited. When

I was a doctor, uh back then what I was really interested in was getting into eye medicine and eye surgery. It's

called ofthalmology. And I knew that the inputs were going to be uh spending time getting really good, you know, having certain levels of competence and having uh papers and research published. And

the output that I wanted was to be accepted onto a training program. It's

very competitive and there are limited seats. The black box was the actual

seats. The black box was the actual selection process and criteria. when you

have 10 different people all with publications who have all spent a lot of time who are all pretty competent, how do they actually pick who gets through to the next round? And so I did some searching and I spoke with people and I

learned that there is certain criteria that need to be met. But the black swan that I didn't know about was how important it is for certain people to just know who you are, have seen your

face, and have interacted with you.

Those are the people that are actually vouching for you in closed doors. And

what that means is I can't just focus on getting things published and becoming competent. I need to go to those

competent. I need to go to those conferences and try to present and have those proactive conversations with certain people so that they know who I am. So that's an example of a important

am. So that's an example of a important variable that significantly changes my approach or my strategy inside a process that was pretty opaque. And I find that

sometimes it's an effective way of navigating through confusion and figuring out really where you need to focus your learning on by asking yourself what is the outcome that I'm

trying to reach right now and what are the processes and mechanisms through which my time and effort is going to reach that outcome and look for those

processes and mechanisms that you can't really explain. You don't really know

really explain. You don't really know how your time and effort is going to translate. That's a black box. Unpack

translate. That's a black box. Unpack

that black box. Learn a little bit about what that process involves and specifically look for those factors that once you know about changes the way that you go about solving this problem,

making that decision or executing on a strategy. And I can tell you that there

strategy. And I can tell you that there are business mistakes that have cost me hundreds of thousands if not even millions of dollars that could have been avoided if I had looked for these

blackbox swans more proactively. Now,

I've actually gone through and created a list of black boxes, the processes that I didn't really know about that I eventually unpacked uh for any type of

black box and process related to thinking and learning. Where can you find this list, you ask? Thanks for

asking. It's in my free weekly newsletter. If you found the insights in

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takes about three to five minutes to read. I write them myself personally

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interested in that, I'll leave a link to the newsletter in the description below.

And moving on to good habit number two that you should start is to start using a confusion compass. This is honestly one of my favorite techniques for cutting through confusion quickly. It's

incredibly simple. Every time you feel confused, ask yourself why. We're

turning our confusion into a question. A

lot of the time, what happens is that we feel this emotion of confusion straight away. As soon as we recognize there's a

away. As soon as we recognize there's a lot going on, they connect to each other in some kind of mysterious way. Bam,

we're hit with this emotion of confusion. And habitually we respond to

confusion. And habitually we respond to this by oversimplifying it, making an EDC decision or just learning more about it, which actually makes the confusion

worse. Instead of doing that, just look

worse. Instead of doing that, just look at that confusion. Feel the emotion.

Tell yourself, there's nothing wrong with feeling confused and say, "What am I confused about specifically?" Turn the emotion of confusion into a cerebral

focus. And by doing that, you create a

focus. And by doing that, you create a list of questions that if you were to go and find the answers to these questions, your confusion naturally dissipates. One

of the worst habits that many of us have is treating confusion like the enemy.

Confusion is a form of intuition. It is

your brain telling you that there is something to figure out and that thing is in this direction. Go to the confusion. Turn it into a question. And

confusion. Turn it into a question. And

a useful way that you can think of some of these questions is good habit number three, which is to start using pre-mortems. Traditionally, the word post-mortem is a technique for when

someone has died and you examine the body to see what the cause of death might be. A premortem in the more

might be. A premortem in the more general sense, uh, this word has now been used to analyze why something has

gone wrong. And so a premortem is before

gone wrong. And so a premortem is before you do it, assume it went wrong and ask yourself if it goes wrong, why would it go wrong? This technique is really

go wrong? This technique is really useful because it helps to combat some of our biases in decision-m. It reduces

motivated reasoning, which is when we think about and process information uh to align with something that we're motivated towards. And it helps us to

motivated towards. And it helps us to see the situation a bit more objectively. For example, if we're

objectively. For example, if we're thinking about moving to a new city and starting a new job because you're really burnt out in your current job and the new place says that after 6 months uh

you might get a pay rise and the team seems really lovely over the interview, then motivated reasoning might kick in because you're already burnt out and you're excited about this new change and you tell yourself, "Hey, the the kids

are still young. If we move cities, they'll still be able to adapt and plus I'm going to get a pay rise and it's going to make me more than I'm making right now." and this team would be so

right now." and this team would be so much uh better to work with than my current team. But if we do a premortem

current team. But if we do a premortem and we assume, hey, let's assume that we moved, we started this new job and we hate it. Why might that be? Or maybe I

hate it. Why might that be? Or maybe I actually just hate living in that city.

Maybe the kids don't adapt because they're in this formative time of their life and these relationships are really hard to rebuild. And hey, now that I think about it, they said, "You might get a pay raise after 6 months. Not you

definitely will. Maybe the team is not that great to work with. After all, I've only spoken with them for 20 minutes.

And now that I think about it, do I really want this job or am I just sick of my current job? So, you can see how forcing yourself to assume a worst case scenario and working backwards helps us

have a more balanced and objective perspective. Often, it allows us to see

perspective. Often, it allows us to see solutions that are not so black and white. Like, maybe there are things that

white. Like, maybe there are things that you can do in your current job, in your current city, that stop you from feeling so burnt out. Or maybe there's a gradual transition that you can make. It

dromanticizes this new shiny decision.

And I really love premortems because they allow you to think more clearly so quickly. It straight away just points to

quickly. It straight away just points to where your thinking might be biased. And

now the fourth good habit to start is to start obsessing over clarity. Your brain

is good at thinking clearly. It is good at solving complicated problems. It is bad at focusing on more than one thing at a time. When you have to think through something complicated, there are

multiple parts of your brain that are tightly coordinated together to do the thinking necessary for you to get to your answer and it cannot do that very

precise coordination. If it's constantly

precise coordination. If it's constantly asking itself, wait, what is the point of this again? What is the outcome I'm trying to reach? What is the real win

condition? This is what it means to

condition? This is what it means to obsess over clarity. Before you even start thinking about a problem or trying to solve it, ask yourself, do I have clarity on what it even means to solve

this problem in the first place? Do I

understand what the purpose is? Do I

understand what the outcome we are trying to achieve is? Thinking clearly

and solving complex problems is not a oneshot process where you start and then you just finish. It requires you to constantly be going back and forth, solving lots of little problems and

making lots of little decisions that all come together to your final solution. So

having clarity on what that ultimate outcome and goal is is what allows those tiny little micro decisions and little problems to be solved in the right direction. Not having this clarity is

direction. Not having this clarity is one of the biggest issues, especially in busy teams where there often isn't that much time to communicate that clarity step by step. But you can't really

expect yourself to think clearly about something when you don't even know what you are thinking clearly about. So ask

those questions, be proactive, get the clarity before you start trying to think clearly. So those were nine habits for

clearly. So those were nine habits for clearer thinking that I wish I knew sooner. Now, if you remember, thinking

sooner. Now, if you remember, thinking on paper and externalizing that working memory uh was one of the key takeaways that I gave to you earlier on. If you

want to learn how to think on paper better, check out this video here where I talk about just that. Otherwise,

thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next