The Art of Thinking Clearly

The Art of Thinking Clearly — Summary

In the autumn of two thousand and four, a Swiss novelist sat down for dinner in Munich with an obscure Wall Street trader who happened to like philosophy. The novelist was Rolf Dobelli. The trader was Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who within three years would publish *The Black Swan* and rearrange how serious people thought about uncertainty. Their conversation, by Dobelli's own account, kept circling back to the same uncomfortable question. Why do intelligent, well-paid executives make the same stupid decisions, generation after generation? The dinner went late, the wine got better, and Dobelli went home with the beginning of a list.

By two thousand and nine that list had ninety-nine entries on it, one for each predictable thinking error he had found in himself, in the CEOs he advised, in the doctors and investors and board members he met on the speaker circuit. The list became a weekly newspaper column in three countries, then a book that sat at the top of the German bestseller chart for months. The promise of the book is modest, almost embarrassingly so. Dobelli does not claim he can fix you. Cognitive errors, he says on page one, are far too ingrained for us to ever be rid of them completely. He claims only that if you can learn to recognize the biggest traps and step around them, you might experience what he calls a leap in prosperity. Not by getting smarter. Just by being less of an idiot than the person sitting across the table.

What follows is a tour of his ninety-nine cognitive errors, grouped into the ten patterns I think matter most. Read it the way Dobelli intends. Not to memorize. To recognize.