Information overload. Analysis paralysis.

You’ve probably heard this little factoid before:

There’s more information in today’s issue of the Wall Street Journal than someone 100 years ago would encounter in a year…

…more than someone 200 years ago would encounter in a lifetime.

And while that would seem on the surface to mean that today’s society would be forced to become a more logical society to cope, the opposite is actually the case: we mostly cope through the filtering, shortcuts, assumptions, and mantras that simplify our world.

Just think about it: how often do colleagues from other teams or leaders genuinely and carefully consider what you say? How often does a supposedly smart member of one political party genuinely consider the views of another? How often do you hear people’s assumptions and conclusions and know instantly that zero logic was applied or attempted?

Consider yourself very lucky if you were able to answer any of those the good way. Most people can’t.

This entire newsletter is written on the premise that we chronically underthink important topics like speed, accountability, customer trust, culture, and more. So it is with delicious appropriateness that we today discuss the chronic underthinking of thinking itself.

Let’s show some empathy first.

It is actually perfectly understandable that so few people truly engage with logic and clear thinking these days. There’s the obvious reason that we just looked at above: information overload is a real thing. Even if you don’t pick up today’s Wall Street Journal, you’re still going to encounter more in Slack, email, twitter, text messages, podcasts, meetings, and decisions today than your parents did in years of work.

People have no choice but to filter on what feels urgent or important, ignore a lot of things, and act quickly using pattern recognition and experience to make decisions.

And this is where the less-obvious reason shows up. Pattern recognition and experience are both stored in your brain. In your memory. Retrieved by your hippocampus. And that proud hippocampus spends most days doing something brains do best: save energy.

Other than keeping you safe, the brain’s other primary imperative is to conserve calories. This is one of those biological facts very few people know.

For most of our time on this earth, there wasn’t a Taco Bell down the street. Saving energy made a lot of sense…our brains just considered it another form of keeping us safe.

And using memory to solve problems is the single best way to save thinking calories. It costs you nothing to use memory. Zero calories. It is automatic, and free.

Don’t think of something while staring at these words:

New York City.

Don’t think of something you’d see at the beach.

Don’t think of what happened in the room the last time you bombed a presentation.

You can’t. And you never will be able to.

Memory is how and why we remember what worked last time…and why we want to do it again. It’s why we remember what didn’t work last time…and why we want to avoid it. And it’s why we hesitate at things we’ve never seen or experienced before…where memory is blank and the thing is unfamiliar, unsafe, and unproven (regardless of how familiar, safe, and proven it might be to someone else in the room).

And our brains are so evolved at using memory that, wait for it: it feels like logic when we use our memory to make decisions.

It feels logical to do the thing that worked, avoid the thing that failed, or hesitate at the unfamiliar.

But it isn’t. None of that is logic.

Nor is it logical to avoid things out of fear or the feeling of risk.

Nor is it logical to prioritize things that are more fun.

Nor is it logical to go as fast as possible.

Nor is it logical for people to take accountability instead of figuring out what actually happened.

The way the brain is designed makes our emotions feel like logic. We crave these things, and then we find the reasons those cravings make sense. We have a whole part of the brain dedicated to rationalizing things that logic never touched: our medial prefrontal cortex. And for a lot of people, the mPFC is doing a lot more work than the actual PFC it is neighbors with, putting energy into rationalization instead of correctness.

The human organism is literally designed to not use logic if there is a cheaper tool in the brain…and then to come up with an explanation that sounds and feels like logic.

And when information overload hits us, these tools kick in even harder. Logic likes space. And space is probably the last thing you have.

Hopefully it’s pretty clear that great looks like using logic a lot more often than almost never.

But how?

I want to openly admit something before answering: I express hate toward many popular ideas in the business world. And expressing that hate can make me come off as being a hater. And since that’s what’s about to happen, I want to propose a different explanation for why I hate these popular ideas: unclear thinking that takes hold makes clear thinking very difficult.

The first thing that great looks like is actually destructive. Great requires the removal of ideas that ensure you can’t be great. I believe that greatness requires the outright rejection of very-bad ideas, and the open discussion of exactly why they are harmful and stupid, ensuring no weeds of unclear thinking can take root within your culture.

Very-bad ideas plant intellectual bugs in your brain. They create the force of “should,” but without an underlying logical explanation. There are a lot of brains out there with a lot of “should” in them:

If you have ever dared to publicly think logically, you’ve no doubt watched these shoulds come out like swords coming out of sheathes.

Most of this should is totally illogical upon closer inspection. Sayings that feel right, but that are physically impossible to logically calculate as actually true, actually helping, actually getting us the results we are capable of getting.

Just yesterday, one of these counterproductive ideas popped up on twitter:

Have you ever worked with an idiot in motion before?

I have worked with many. Not one of them went further than a rock at rest, never mind a genius at rest. Most felt like working with a drunk seagull.

And yet, the business world is marinating brains in 50-gallon drums of think bleach that is disinfecting teams of logic and reason.

The trouble with these unclear thoughts is that many people feel like the mantra helped them get better. Few people realize that the ideas that can elevate a team from bad to mediocre are the very ideas that will prevent a team from escaping mediocrity into greatness.

So, with the capacity and desire to fight off unclear thinking in place, here are a few areas to do your own logical thinking about what great looks like. These are the tools I’m covering in depth in my upcoming Maven course on Logical Thinking, and that we’ll be doing this Friday’s deep dive and Q&A on if you’d like to bring more logic into your work right away.

The reason our memory (and our fear and excitement) feels like logical thinking is because a lot of people only have a partial understanding of what logical reasoning is.

It feels very logical that if we can come up with a cause that has an effect (particularly if we’ve seen it work before, and it is “proven”), we are being logical in using that same cause to have that effect today.

But this is only part of the story. There are two things we need to add to truly be logical.

First, we need to understand that every cause and effect happens within the conditions around it.

Let’s take the well-worn phrase “Bias to action” or its cousin “Fail Faster.”

Why does that phrase seem to work in some places, and cause endless dumbassery and suffering in others?

Because when Google told people to “Fail Faster,” they were asking computer science PhDs who were the best in the business and true perfectionists to fail faster.

But when MediocreCo tells non-PhDs who are not remotely perfectionists to fail faster, things clearly go very differently.

The lesson: conditions are often an even bigger part of cause and effect than the cause.

So, to start reasoning for real, ask yourself if your conditions are the kinds of conditions that cause and effect will actually work in. Are they the same conditions as last time it worked, or didn’t? What are your conditions saying they want you to do?

Doing that alone makes you more logical than probably 80% of people. Next, let’s get to 99%.

We’ll do that by turning “Outcome” into what happens in the real world.

In the real world, we don’t just get the thing we’re looking for. Instead, the real world is a bit more like a pharmaceutical ad, where most of the ad is about the great outcome, but then we get to hear the lawyers talk about how we are going to have a dry mouth and have to go to the bathroom a lot more. And how prolonged use will give us restless legs.

Those are called side-effects and nth-order effects. The downsides we can feel right away and the lasting, indirect, and precedent-creating effects that are guaranteed to accompany the outcome we are chasing.

With this all in place, real reasoning is possible:

There, now you’re smarter than 99% of teams.

And you probably see that “Fail faster” is almost nobody’s best decision to utter.

I’ll give you one more nugget to think about on your own before we dive deeper on Friday.

A lot of people think that principles (like “Customer Obsessed”) are inspirational fluff.

Not logical thinkers.

Logical thinkers do everything in their world based on principles.

They use principles to know when to apply more logic, and when they can apply less (customer obsessed is a pretty good clue). This helps them to not get overwhelmed with the information overload.

And once they disproportionately focus on the things that need the best thinking, logical thinkers next use principles to know how to apply logic. Principles shine a light on what the correct and incorrect answers look like. They break ties. They solve conundrums. They become weapons. But the good kind.

Normal thinkers take one look at principles, think they are empty, and proceed to violate them and make all sorts of bad decisions.

Logical thinkers take a look at a principle and know in advance it has just helped them make all sorts of good decisions.

Principles need to be created and explained logically, using real reasoning. I’ll show you a bit more about how to do that on Friday if you want a primer.

If you are ready to become more logical, I’ll see you on Friday. Sign up for Friday’s mini-course below, and don’t forget that paid subscribers get big discounts.

Fridays are where I go deeper, get into tactics, and address your questions directly.

I know many of you have been coming to all of these, so I’ve created subscriptions for both recordings and live attendance to all Friday deep dives at a significant discount. Check those details out by clicking on the See Subscription Options button below.

(If you choose the recording or live subscription, I’ll sign you up for Fridays automatically)

If you just want this one, you can sign up here:

And I’ve planned out every newsletter and Friday session through the end of the year. Check the schedule here (that will help you decide if the subscription is for you).