It is not about talent. How your position makes it look easy

It’s 11:35 pm on December 25th. Its Christmas. That time of the year, my old friends from school spare a couple of days of their busy lives to spend some family time at (their parents’) home. It’s the perfect time, however short, to catch up with the people you haven’t seen all year. Stress is on, but it’s the good one.

I am at a way too expensive location. Their strategy appears to be based on justifying their overpriced menu with a lovely ambience and lighting that brings out the old barn’s style — It works, however. A friend invited me and some of his friends for dinner.

I know three people at the table. The first people have already left. You can tell people got warm and comfortable with each other when they start moving seats, changing neighbours and subjects to meet everyone at the table. It reminds me of playing musical chairs, and I like those situations.

I’m sitting next to a lean dude and his girlfriend. He told me he is 24 but looks much younger. He could as well be 20, yet something tells me his mind has already made retirement plans, married his girlfriend, and moved into a full-paid country estate with plenty of room for half a dozen kids. 24 seems fair to me.

His appearance is strong, head to toe. His jawline flatters the sharp business look, completed by double-monk leather shoes. He spent the last half-hour talking about his business while I did a poor job of hiding my interest. We’ve covered quite a few topics.

“You invited Manuel Neuer to your party, and he actually showed up?”

My jaw drops as I lean towards him: “ The Bayern Munich player and World Cup winner in 2010?”

A confident smile on his side.

“Maybe it wasn’t Manuel Neuer, but your girlfriend?” — The words of some 2014 commercial echo from some deep valley in my head. I resist, but it would have been funny, maybe.

Now I’m hooked. He may have lost me in some detail at some point in his story, but Manuel Neuer saved my attention for good.

“I’ll show you a picture!” He pulls out his phone, bearing witness. Leave no doubt about it: The selfie shows a group of people with the goalkeeper at their back — as he always has it.

“How did that happen?”

“You wouldn’t believe it, but it was not that hard. Long story short: My work got me to know people around him, and one thing led to another. So, while planning my party, it just occurred to me: Why not? — It seemed like a good idea. But hands-down, I would have never imagined it, either. Sometimes life is just easier than you think.”

From Manuel Neuer as the point of departure, our conversation takes off and goes down the rabbit hole that evening — a good discussion about creating realities we thought impossible.

There must be something in the water with our circumstances and environments that we are able to influence more than we think. More often than not, it’s the small things that make life easy, creating circumstances where good things gravitate towards us.

When you do your ‘homework’ whatever that is (we missed an adequate definition), we agree that life will become easy. You prepare for what the future may hold, and little by little, you increase your odds of good opportunities.

This we call the “natural forcing” of opportunities.

I felt we were on to something. Something — I needed to clarify what we implicitly felt to be true.

Thus, I jotted some nodes down right after. Some time and research later, it became clear that we were digging into something a great mind; Shane Parrish, author of ‘Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results’, had already gone down the rabbit hole.

He found words describing what we were feeling yet unable to express clearly:

Achievements, whether meeting famous people or passing an exam with distinction, are products of our position. The best way to put yourself in a good position is to prevent circumstances from backing you into a corner.

Positioning is creating favourable circumstances.

Putting yourself in a good position means designing an environment that supports your objectives step-by-step. As Shane puts it, this is as simple as eating healthy, getting enough sleep, exercising or networking. Our position is the result of many small actions, but they determine the quality of our life to a large degree.

From a good position, an opportunity can cause positive cascading.

If you are in a good position, maybe Manuel Neuer isn’t the Manuel Neuer, but a normal person who enjoys a good party?

Results are a function of position

“You don’t need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you can out-position them. Anyone looks like a genius when they’re in a good position, and even the smartest person looks like an idiot when they’re in a bad one.” ~ Shane Parrish

Shane Parrish does a great job of demystifying greatness. His work highlights the role of positioning in decision-making. A good position is the sum of previous choices, however small, that impact the decisions at hand. The choices we make, such as investing in relationships or managing debt, determine whether we ‘play on easy mode’ or ‘hard mode’ in life.

The position decides over communication with ease and effectiveness or walking over minefields as well as peace of mind at the end of the month, knowing there’s a nest egg, or being threatened by frugalism (nothing wrong with frugalism, but it should be a choice by design rather than circumstances).

A good position shows you options and possibilities and removes potential hazards. Bad positioning, in contrast, puts the blinders on and may force into decisions by circumstances.

Good positioning does the heavy lifting of preventing bad decisions by default. Rather than spending resources on making a good decision, you do not happen to get into bad spots in the first place.

Positioning and preparation

Preparing for an event and positioning ourselves well are different pairs of shoes.

Timberlands and Chelsea boots are both called winter shoes, yet you wouldn’t trade one over the other. When the temperature drops, you might need them both; this is no style advice, though.

Preparation is when we take specific action to increase the possibility for a particular event to happen in the future; we approach it with a vision and an end in mind. We increase our odds of success by making a plan and defining the next steps. This puts us in the driver’s seat, and we determine, to some degree, what will happen.

In contrast, with positioning, you are not trying to predict what’s coming. Instead, you prepare for multiple possible futures.

Good preparation enables good positioning. Having one pair of boots in your wardrobe prepares you for the winter. Having another pair puts you in a position to choose outfits when it’s cold and dress more appropriately for an occasion.

You might feel and act slightly more comfortable, which could set you up to meet interesting people — maybe Manuel Neuer — who knows?

How to get into a good position:

Creating favourable circumstances and removing obstacles early on requires precaution.

Such as to…

• Manage your attention
• Get the basics right
• Raise your standards with simple rules

Use attention to manage attention.

Being in hard mode feels like sprinting a marathon. You will eventually hurt yourself. Moreover, the act of sprinting requires our full attention. When stress commands our full attention, it steals it from our ability to consider alternatives, opportunities and shortcuts.

Sprinters rarely tell you about the view on their way.

Attention is the key asset of life, and how we allocate it literally determines how we view the world. In hard mode, we are vulnerable to external forces stealing and redirecting our attention. Many forgone opportunities go with a lack of attention.

When we pay attention, however, we recognise certain things happening around us. With that, we can create a system to make fewer mistakes by default.

Get the basics right

As Shane’s book title, “Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results”, suggests, there is often less magic involved than we think. Moreover, Shane Parrish once again stresses a boring truth that we all don’t want to hear:

It all comes back to getting the basics right and analysing our defaults in our focus areas.

While positioning has no distinct end in mind, the best way to prepare for multiple futures is to improve how we act and make decisions by default.

By doing the basics right, we prevent problems, avoid situations, and put ourselves in the best possible situation.

So, how do we get the basics right?

To start with, we take the questions we ask ourselves.

Questions guide our thinking. Different questions produce different patterns of cognition, affect and behaviour. No matter the question, we always seek the information to answer them. It changes how we think about our concerns.

For example, moving from “Do I work out today?” to “What am I going to train today?” or “How long do I work out today?” will literally have you moving and going from a couch potato to a fit person.

Change the questions, change the results.

A helpful approach that reframes questions and how we think about specific activities is to make them non-negotiable.

Making things non-negotiable can bring about powerful and subtle change. When something is non-negotiable, we waste less energy and willpower on questioning. It saves you a lot of headaches when something is not up for discussion. It’s like an energy-efficient shortcut.

So, the question becomes: How do we make this a non-negotiable, and how do we incorporate them into our daily routines?

Raise your standards with simple rules

The human mind likes decisions that are simple. It prefers categorising, selecting perception, and using heuristics in decision-making to deal with complex situations.

Rules embody clear, concise, and easy-to-understand guidelines that help navigate in complex situations. They provide a framework for decision-making that is both efficient and effective.

Rules introduce simplicity because they define boundaries. They simplify areas of life where possibilities seem endless, and it’s hard to resist temptations using willpower. Rules provide guidelines that help us feel more confident and clear-headed when making decisions.

If something is declared a rule, it has a different impact on you.

For example, you are more likely to resist overeating if you make it a rule that you don’t need dessert. Similarly, odds are you hit the gym if it’s your rule to work out every day.

Rules are powerful tools for making better decisions by default without relying solely on our willpower. We tend to follow rules with less resistance. Improving our default decisions just slightly will compound and create a better situation for us in the long run.

Simple and effective rules have a significant impact on our position.

It does not matter if you have the best idea in the world from the stock market perspective. If you have no money in your bank account to take advantage of it, you might as well not have that idea ~ Shane Parrish.

Our position is both a limiting and enabling factor.

For me, improving my position is as simple as having a card ready to jot some warm words for my girlfriend when I leave the house on a busy day, calling my parents every Saturday or saving 25% of my paycheck every month.

When it comes to positioning, little things make all the difference. But little by little, a little becomes a lot.

Our positions determine our outcomes; they either play for or against us.

Our positions decide whether to play in hard mode, taking a shot from the middle lane against Manuel Neuer or be a piece of cake just as a penalty on an empty target — and maybe — celebrate the golden goal with him afterwards.

Note: Content idea from Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parrish

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