Being Not Overwhelmed

If you work in Strategy, or are an Entrepreneur, or are dealing with complicated and compounding challenges (with high risks associated) I have a little mental model for you.

It's been helpful for me. It might prove to be helpful for you.

1. Never assume something is either possible or impossible without real evaluation and analysis.
2. The more you want something to be possible the more skeptical your analysis must be.
3. Don't waste energy working on or regretting the impossible.

As always, this is not a menu. You don't get to pick and choose. It's all or nothing or it doesn't work.

I find that people who are not actually strategists fail on both #1 and #2 more than 90% of the time.

And I find that strategists who have bad leadership fail at #3 nearly 100% of the time.

One final little trick... I find that turning the evaluation into written output reduces the challenges of #3 dramatically.

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