Don’t believe everything you hear. Opinions are a dime a dozen and nearly everyone will share theirs with you. Many will state them as if they are facts. Don’t mistake opinions for facts.

Everything looks bigger up close. In all aspects of life, what’s happening today seems like a much bigger deal than it will appear in retrospect. That’s why it helps to step back to gain perspective and sometimes defer a decision until some time passes.

New is overvalued relative to great. For example, when choosing which movie to watch or what book to read, are you drawn to proven classics or the newest big thing? In my opinion, it is smarter to choose the great over the new.

Don’t oversqueeze dots. A dot is just one piece of data from one moment in time; keep that in perspective as you synthesize. Just as you need to sort big from small, and what’s happening in the moment from overall patterns, you need to know how much learning you can get out of any one dot without overweighing it.
Synthesize the situation through time.

To see how the dots connect through time you must collect, analyze, and sort different types of information, which isn’t easy. For example, let’s imagine a day in which eight outcomes occur. Some are good, some bad. Let’s illustrate this day as shown, with each type of event represented by a letter and the quality of the outcome represented by its height.

In order to see the day this way, you must categorize outcomes by type (signified by letters) and quality (the higher up the graph, the better), which will require synthesizing a by-and-large assessment of each. (To make the example more concrete, imagine you’re running an ice cream shop and the W’s represent sales, the X’s represent customer experience ratings, the Y’s represent press and reviews, the Z’s represent staff engagement, etc.) Keep in mind that our example is a relatively simple one: just eight occurrences over one day.
