A Simpler Way to Think for Moving Through Parallel Worlds

From the book First Principles, Everyday Wins by Kevin L. Michel.

You do not need more inspiration. You need fewer moving parts.

What is about to follow, is powerful. But I must apologize as it may not make sense when you first read it. Bear with me. This is an upgrade, for one's operating system. Yes.

Every day I meet talented people stuck in loops. They are smart, they care, and they still go home tired with little to show for it. The common pattern is fake complexity, the kind that creeps in through vague goals, story-first planning, and meetings that do not decide. A simpler way to think is not about lowering your ambition. It is about raising the clarity of your next move.

When I sat down to write the book First Principles, Everyday Wins, I wanted to create an operating system you could run on real days, not ideal ones.

• Real days = days full of meetings, fatigue, surprise crises, bad moods.

• Ideal days = the rare days when the calendar is clear and you're bursting with energy

  
  

We are going to cut through to first principles, then put them to work. I will share a few reader stories along the way. The path is the same every time. Find the real problem. Build the smallest model that explains it. Speak in odds. Size your bet. Match your speed to reversibility. Strip friction. Design recovery. Win small today, again tomorrow.

The uncomfortable truth

Most stress is not a character flaw. It is a systems flaw. You can care deeply and still drown in noise if your process is vague. In the book I tell the story of a team that kept missing its weekly release. We did not hunt for heroes or villains. We wrote a one-sentence problem, ran Five Whys, then changed one rule on the board. Any task waiting more than 24 hours was labeled Waiting, blocker named in the first line. Throughput jumped in two weeks. “You stop arguing about symptoms and find a cause you can act on.

You name things cleanly. You change one rule that changes many outcomes.”

A simpler way to think starts with that kind of honesty. If you cannot describe the problem in one sentence, you do not have a problem, you have fog.

One sentence that changes your week

If you do not write the one sentence, you are choosing confusion. Start with the sentence, then add one success metric and one constraint. In the book I give an example: “Currently, 50% of new users drop off in week one; we want to reduce that to 20% within three months without increasing support staff.” That is concrete. That steers. That tells you what not to do.

A reader wrote me after trying this for the first time. She runs a nonprofit in Nairobi. Their request board was a maze. They paused one hour, wrote five one-sentence problem statements, and ended two projects quietly because those sentences exposed that both were solution-in-search-of-a-problem work. Energy returned to the room. That is the point. A clean problem statement is not paperwork. It is oxygen.

The five-minute turnaround

When meetings drift, I pull out a simple script. Ask, out loud: “Can someone state the decision and the success metric in one sentence?” Then give the room ten seconds of silence. That line has saved teams hundreds of hours. It is in the book, and it fits on a sticky note.

Then run FAR, three lines on a page: Facts, Alternatives, Risks. It is a pre-decision checklist. “Establish a simple pre-decision checklist… Facts, Alternatives, Risks.” Keep it short. Insist on one sentence per line. You are not trying to be clever. You are trying to be clear.

One founder in Manchester told me his Thursday staff meeting felt like quicksand. He tried the FAR box live on a shared doc. Twelves minutes later they discovered a single missing fact that made the choice obvious. They ended the meeting twenty minutes early, laughing. That is the audacity of simple structure. It rescues willpower for real work.

Story-first planning is a trap

We love stories. We repeat the one fantastical time some team somewhere delivered in half the time and we build plans around outliers. Decision science begins elsewhere. “Always start with the base rate, then adjust for specifics.” Anchor on what usually happens in your reference class, then move a little for context.

If you plan a launch, look at your last five launches. If you are hiring, look at how long similar hires took to ramp. A reader, a sales leader in Toronto, began each forecast review with base rate ranges from the last four quarters. Nerves dropped in the room. The team still used judgment, but they did not gamble their quarter on a fairy tale story.

Talk like a decision maker

Teams talk past each other because the words “likely,” “maybe,” and “confident” mean different numbers for different people. Give those words numbers. “Express a probability as a frequency, like ‘1 in 4 chance’.” Or use ranges. Say 30 to 40 percent instead of a single spiky number. People can act on that.

When we put numbers on our beliefs, disagreement becomes productive. “Do you estimate a 50 percent or 80 percent chance we hit Q4?” Now you can ask what would move each person up or down. You can look for the missing fact worth finding. You can design a safe trial.

Bet sizing, expected value, and kill criteria

You do not need a thousand-line spreadsheet to think like an investor. Start with rough scenarios, then compute the expected value. And check the downside is survivable. That simple loop will keep you away from seductive zero-sum bets and toward compounding bets. The book’s guidance is blunt and useful: compute EV and ensure the downside is acceptable, then “repeatedly trim the weakest and reinforce the strongest bets.”

I watched a product trio in Lisbon list three roadmap options. They wrote base, low, high for revenue and effort. Option B had the same EV as A but far more variance. Their risk budget was already stretched, so they went with A, and they moved B into a sandbox exploration. That kind of portfolio thinking is grown-up decision making. It protects the team. It protects the mission.

Match your tempo to the door you are walking through

Speed is a virtue only when reversibility is high. Many teams confuse reversible with irreversible and pay for it. The fix is a habit. “Classify each decision at hand as two-way or one-way.” Tag it at the top of the doc. Talk about reversibility first.

When the door swings both ways, decide today, test tomorrow, revert if needed. When the door locks behind you, slow down, gather evidence, run a pre‑mortem, write kill criteria. The book is practical about this: reversible calls deserve light process, one‑way calls merit more input and a written rationale.

A reader in Manila emailed me after labeling five active decisions R or O. Two R decisions had been stuck for weeks. Once labeled, they decided in one meeting, tested for a week, and moved on. The O decision, a key hire, got the attention and structure it deserved. That rebalancing of effort is what a simpler system buys you.

Physics you can feel

If your day feels like pushing a boulder through mud, you are feeling friction. If your day clicks and you keep rolling, you are feeling momentum. I call this the progress physics. Lower friction. Increase momentum. Protect flow.

On friction: clear the runway for starts. Design two-minute “blast‑off” routines so the first sixty seconds of a task are on rails. Treat the start as its own design problem. “Commit to just 2 minutes of the task.” It sounds small, and it works.

On momentum: stack wins. Batch similar work to avoid context switching. When you remove a recurring drag, measure the time you saved and celebrate it. The feedback loop teaches your brain to look for the next drag to remove.

On flow: find the bottleneck and protect it. If editing is your choke point, stop flooding it with new drafts. Limit WIP. Put your board where everyone can see it. Once you label the bottleneck, people align their help to the right place.

On leverage: invest in assets that do work for you while you sleep. A template that cuts a monthly report from five hours to three and a half is real leverage. Build one such asset this week. Aim for a 30 percent time cut the next time you use it.

These are simple, physical ideas. They are also controversial, because they expose waste and habit. When I say cancel the recurring meeting that no longer produces a decision, I am poking a sacred cow. Do it anyway. You are not here to protect rituals. You are here to move the work.

The humble checklist, and why you should stop winging it

We trust pilots and surgeons with checklists. Yet we try to run high‑stakes meetings from memory. “Would you board a plane if you overheard the pilot say, ‘Pre‑flight checklist? Nah, I’ll wing it today’?” Treat your important moments with similar respect. Use a checklist. Use shared phrases that pull clarity out of noise.

And please, do not weaponize rituals. Keep them short. Test whether each checklist still helps. “The structure should reduce overall friction, not become busywork.” If a checklist no longer catches the critical misses, prune or retire it.

Biology you already run

Lasting change respects homeostasis. Systems fight sudden change. Crash diets and crash processes rebound. Design ramps, not cliffs. Build slack on purpose. Make the healthy choice the easy default.

Treat your health and relationships as carefully as your roadmap. Set defaults and scripts. “Treat basic health activities as non‑negotiable appointments.” Put movement, sleep, and meals on your calendar first. The rest of your life will fit better when the foundation is strong.

Set relationship rituals before the crisis. A weekly 20‑minute check‑in with appreciations and one concern is not corny. It is maintenance. It keeps pressure from spiking at midnight on a Tuesday. “A couple that does a designed weekly retro likely has fewer blow‑up fights because nothing festers.”

And be unromantic about memory. Offload it. “Turn ‘I hope’ into plans, ‘I assume’ into checking in, and ‘I forgot’ into automations.” Put dates on calendars. Use reminders for promises. Your future self and your partner will thank you.

A nurse in Queens told me she began using an apology script with colleagues after a heated shift: state the fact, state the impact, state what will change. She said it lowered the temperature of the whole floor. That is a checklist doing its work where tempers and adrenaline usually win. The same scaffolding that makes you safer in a cockpit can make you kinder in a hallway.

Meetings that decide

Treat meetings like decision factories. Send a pre‑read that includes the one‑sentence decision, base rates, options, and the ask. Name the decider up front. Keep the agenda tight. Use a round‑robin to surface silent risks. Capture the decision and next step before you leave the room. That rhythm changes culture.

When someone pulls the conversation back into fog, use your script: “Can someone state the decision and the success metric in one sentence?” It resets the room. Every time.

Your practice plan for this week

I built the book so you could start in minutes. Here is the day‑one loop, straight from the page.

“Write a one‑sentence problem. Run the FAR pre‑decision check. Tag the decision type. Build a three‑variable model. State your odds out loud.” Then put a date on when you will check the result and learn. “You will feel an immediate shift… You will see the decision more than you feel it.”

If you only do that for one live decision this week, you will notice the room gets calmer. People argue less, act more, and the next steps are visible. As I wrote early in the book, “Your anxiety around decisions will drop… Your team will argue less and act more… Your results will improve in small, measurable ways that compound.”

A final push

Here is the boldest claim I can make after watching thousands of people run this playbook. The gap between your best week and your typical week is structure. Not talent. Not effort. Structure.

Use base rates before stories. “Translate uncertainties into frequencies or ranges.” Stop winging critical moments. “Facts, Alternatives, Risks.” Match speed to reversibility. “Classify each decision at hand as two‑way or one‑way.” Reduce friction. Build momentum. Protect flow. Invest in leverage. Design recovery. These are the bones of a simpler way to think.

I will close with the line I want you to carry into your next messy room: “In a world full of noise and rush, you’ll be operating with a quiet, effective rhythm grounded in first principles.” Start with one sentence. Then take one step. Then repeat. That is how you move through parallel worlds, the default one to the ideal one.

- Kevin L. Michel

From the book  First Principles, Everyday Wins by Kevin L. Michel.