10 ideas for 2026

Thinking is the foundation of everything we do and, for most of us that foundation has many cracks. Here are 10 ideas to consider in 2026. These ideas are not for everyone, but useful for some.

1. If you want to tell the story of success, focus on the actions that led to it.

   But if you want to achieve success, focus on the thinking that led to it.

2. You can keep chasing 100s of frameworks, mental models, tactics, playbooks, success stories, tools, and templates throughout your career, and yet the fundamental capability that will unleash your product mastery across domains and companies is this: understanding how people think.

3. A subtle reason why smart people make blunders when making career decisions and investment decisions is that they want to feel smart while making the decision and explaining it to others. The seductive appeal of feeling smart trounces the rational goal of making the correct decision.

4. The default reaction of “I already know that” (and the smug satisfaction from saying it and believing it) is the greatest invisible barrier keeping many otherwise-smart people from actually achieving their often-stated but ever-elusive career goals.

5. The reason you are saying we don’t have time to think right now and we must do something right away is that you said the same thing last time and before that and the time before that, and so we are now perpetual pawns of problems that shouldn’t have arisen in the first place.

6. Everyone with high intelligence will violently agree that a clever analogy is never a good reason for why you should do something, and yet in practice we are easily persuaded in meetings when someone uses a clever analogy to justify why we should do something.

7. Most conflict at work, at home, and in society comes from the illusion that of course other people can read your mind.

8. Actually using logic for important decisions is more art than science, not because logic is art (it is not) but because the user has profound flaws and overcoming those flaws is pure art.

9. A great consultant convinces you that the right answer lies with him.
   A great teacher shows you that the right answer lies within the right question. A great master shows you that the right answer lies within you.

10. We explain everything by what is visible, sophisticated, and recent, while the truth is found in what’s invisible, inscrutable, and predetermined. This is our most fundamental cognitive bias.