Most errors in judgment happen when we don’t know we’re supposed to be exercising judgment.

don’t control. All the energy you put toward things you don’t control comes out of the energy you can put toward the things you can. While no one chooses difficult circumstances, adversity provides opportunity. It allows us to test ourselves, and see who we’ve become. The test isn’t against other people, though; it’s against our former selves. Are we better than we were yesterday? When circumstances are easy, it’s hard to distinguish ordinary people from extraordinary ones, or to see the extraordinary within ourselves. As the Roman slave Publilius Syrus once said, “Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.”[*]

Techniques for establishing first principles If we never learn to take something apart, test our assumptions about it, and reconstruct it, we end up bound by what other people tell us — trapped in the way things have always been done. When the environment changes, we just continue as if things were the same, making costly mistakes along the way.