CLEAR THINKING

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

This engineering leader makes terrible decisions before morning coffee, so he created automatic rules to protect himself. When clients ask for timelines on calls, he says "I have a rule against estimating on the spot." Nobody questions rules, they just accept them. The same principle applies to bigger decisions - we're sabotaged by emotion, ego, and laziness. His solution is forcing structure: write the problem down first (you'll see gaps you missed), find three options instead of settling for two, and ask "and then what?" to think past the immediate outcome.