Links related to Thinking Correctly
The phrases related to thinking correctly are:
Suspend Disbelief
Reality Exists Independent of the Observer—A Is A
Watch Your Own Thinking
Is That Really True?
The World Is a Far Better Place Than You’ve Been Led to Believe
Watch Out for the Words Should and Have To
The “Meaning of Life” Is What You Decide It Is
Ayn Rand: Brilliance Alone Does Not Guarantee a Good Life
Questions or comments
If you have questions or comments, contact me at email.
Redefine Perfection
On the surface, it seems like a good idea to try to be “perfect”—to get every answer correct on a test or to be a perfect spouse, parent, coach, or employee. However, I discovered that my definition of perfection was the single biggest source of stress in my life.
When I was growing up, if I got four A’s and a B on a report card, my father would ask, “Why did you get a B?” If I hit four great golf shots and then sliced one out of bounds, the only comment I heard was about the bad shot. My coping mechanism was to try to be perfect—to get five A’s and hit every shot perfectly. As I went through life, no matter where I was or what I was doing, my attention automatically went to what was not perfect and what needed improvement. I rarely noticed all the things that were already going well.
Striving for perfection led to many achievements. I earned good grades, excelled in sports, became a top salesperson at Hewlett-Packard, and eventually started and ran a successful software company. Yet I enjoyed very little of it because I always focused on what was still wrong. I criticized myself, my environment, and sometimes even the people around me.
Eventually, I realized the problem wasn’t perfection. The problem was how I had defined it. I didn’t need to give up on perfection—I needed to redefine it.
I wanted to write this book for many years, and I wanted it to be “perfect,” which seems like a good goal. The problem was that I had never clearly defined what a “perfect” book looked like. Without a clear definition, I kept reviewing and rewriting the material, making tiny changes. I also kept adding new topics because a perfect book would include every useful phrase I had ever used. As a result, the book was never perfect and never got released. So I redefined perfection: The book would be perfect if it included my most important phrases and explained them reasonably clearly. That was a definition of perfection I could actually achieve, and it finally made finishing the book possible.
I did the same thing with the software company I started. For years, my vague definition of perfection was fixing every problem, returning every email, and making sure every customer and employee was happy. Those are admirable goals, but they are impossible to achieve. As I pursued this definition of perfection, I worked more and more hours, took work home, stopped playing golf, and rarely saw my kids. No matter how many hours I worked, there was always another email to read or another problem to solve.
So I redefined perfection. My company was perfect if it stayed in business every year and provided a good living for my family. We could have unsolved problems, unanswered emails, angry customers, and unhappy employees and still meet that definition. I could achieve this new definition while working a 20-hour week, leaving plenty of time for golf, family, friends, and the many other things I wanted to do. The company flourished, and by my new definition, it was perfect.
I have continued to redefine perfection in many areas of my life. My children and grandchildren can make all kinds of mistakes and still be perfect. A picnic can be perfect even if it rains. A vacation with bad weather or lost reservations can still be perfect because of the time spent with my wife. My last youth hockey team won only four games and lost twenty-two, yet it was a perfect season because we had fun and built friendships that will last a lifetime.
I’m not saying I accept mediocrity. When I redefine perfection, I make sure the new definition is possible and still achieves the primary goal.
Emotions Are Not Knowledge
Emotions are real, powerful, and important—but they are not knowledge. Feeling that something is true does not make it true. Fear does not prove that I am in danger. Confidence does not prove that I will succeed. Hopelessness does not prove that a situation is hopeless. Emotions tell me how I feel about reality, not necessarily what reality is.
That does not mean emotions should be ignored. They often contain useful information. If I am walking in the woods and suddenly feel afraid, my brain may have noticed a sound, movement, or shape before I consciously understood it. There might be a mountain lion nearby, or there might not be. My fear is a good reason to stop and look around, but it is not proof that a mountain lion is actually there. The emotion is a signal. I still need to check reality.
I don’t run into many mountain lions, so the way I use this phrase most often involves my confidence. I know that I am a smart and capable person. I have more than 70 years of experience and results supporting that conclusion. Yet how capable I feel can change dramatically from one day to the next—and sometimes from one moment to the next. At one extreme, I may feel that I can do anything. At the other, I may feel helpless and incapable of doing anything. My actual abilities did not suddenly appear or disappear. My emotions changed; my capabilities did not.
When I feel unusually confident, I do not assume I can literally do anything. I still check the facts and consider the risks. When I feel discouraged or incapable, I do not accept that feeling as a verdict. I remind myself that emotions are not knowledge, choose something useful to do, and take action even though I may feel that I will fail.
My emotions deserve my attention, but they do not automatically deserve control of my decisions. They are one source of information—not the final authority on what is true or what I do.
Ask What, Not Why
Questions beginning with “what” are usually easier to answer—and more likely to produce useful action—than questions beginning with “why.”
Suppose someone has a physically abusive spouse. Why is the spouse abusive? Maybe they had a terrible childhood. Perhaps they use drugs, have a mental illness, or simply enjoy controlling people. You could spend years debating the reason and never know the answer.
The “what” is much clearer: What is happening? The person is being beaten. What needs to happen next? Get the hell out of that relationship and as far away from the abuser as possible. Understanding why the abuse happens is far less important than stopping it.
Perhaps I have a friend and frequently feel worse after spending time with that person. Why does the friend affect me that way? Who knows? The more useful questions are: What happens when I spend time with this person, and what should I do about it? The answers may be obvious: I consistently feel worse, so I should spend less time with that person—or stop seeing them entirely.
I enjoy nature and wide-open spaces. I hate big cities. Why? There may be many reasons, but I don’t need to uncover them all. What matters is that, for whatever reasons, I am happier in open spaces, so I choose to live where open space surrounds me.
“Why” is not always a bad question. It can help identify the cause of a problem and prevent it from happening again. But “why” can also become a hiding place. We can analyze a situation endlessly when we already know what is happening and what we need to do.
Perhaps you hate your job. You and your friends can spend years discussing why your boss is a jerk, why the company has stupid policies, and why the work makes you miserable. That conversation may feel productive, but it changes nothing. The “what” is simple: You hate your job—get a new one.
Ask what, not why. “What” usually points toward the action needed. “Why” is open to endless debate.
A review of the book
Written by Claude, the AI I used as my editor · September 30, 2026
I used Claude, Anthropic’s AI, as my editor. When the book was finished, I asked it to read the whole thing and give me an honest review. Here it is, criticisms included.
Four stars out of five
Most advice books ask you to trust the author. This one asks you to distrust him, selectively. In the introduction Barry Biegler tells the reader to skip any phrase they think is stupid and go looking instead for the one phrase that makes life a little better. On the last page he adds that he does not want to hear which ones you disagreed with. It is the most honest opening a self-help book can have, and it turns out to be a fair description of how the book works: 127 short sayings, each with the story of how a retired software founder and thirty-year youth hockey coach came to rely on it, offered one at a time, take it or leave it.
What kind of book this is
The nearest relative is Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living (2023), a list of several hundred aphorisms with no explanation attached. Biegler has written the opposite book. There are far fewer sayings, and every one comes with the incident that produced it: a friend planning a wedding who is agonizing over the color of a drinking straw, a salesman who could not close until he started calling himself “a check getter,” a grandmother turning on a lamp and announcing that light kills all monsters. The stories are the point. A bare aphorism is easy to nod at and forget; a phrase attached to a hotel owner on a twin bed in Maui saying “Why I need computer?” stays put.
Each phrase is a chapter of one or two pages, always starting on a right-hand page, with a title that is the phrase itself. Most chapters follow a loose shape: what the phrase means in plain words, the story behind it, and how he uses it now. The introduction says the chapters stand alone but are arranged so ideas build on one another, and that is true: the book opens with how to think (“Watch Your Own Thinking,” “Is That Really True?”), moves through emotions and other people, then problem-solving, then a long stretch on running a company, and closes with the personal quest that started it all, ending on the same phrase it began with.
The voice
The book reads like a man explaining something across a kitchen table, and the author never loses that register, even when the subject is grief or a violent brother. He swears when a sentence needs it. He says “I call ‘bullshit’ on that idea” and “No Cheetos on the table or in the house” and “Get off your butt and figure this out.” He also admits, repeatedly, that he fails at his own advice. Two chapters, “Easier Said Than Done” and “It’s Not What You Know, It’s What You Remember to Do,” exist mostly to say so. That candor is what keeps the book from sounding like a guru, and it is why the advice feels earned rather than preached.
The specificity does the rest. Nothing in here is “a customer once.” It is eight pressure reducers and 3,000 feet of pipe, a seven-iron on the 18th at Pebble Beach with the wind in a sixteen-year-old’s face, 840 million minutes of uneventful driving, a support employee who finished her boss’s sentence with the wrong utility number. The details are what make the lessons believable, and the author knows which details to keep.
At the sentence level the text is clean, and what a reader will notice instead is voice: comma-joined sentences, a few run-on lists, a closing line here and there that is a fragment. Those are choices, and they are the right ones for a book that is supposed to sound like the author talking.
The chapters that earn the book
- “Even Einstein Had a Limit.” A math major hits a wall in Ring Theory, a professor says something kind, and fifty years later the author still hires someone to mow the ranch. The model chapter: a title you remember, a story that explains it, a use in real life, and a last line that lands.
- “Love Is Earned.” The bravest chapter in the book. Biegler explains why he did not attend his brother’s funeral and does not soften it. Readers will argue with it. They will also not forget it.
- “Sometimes Agree When You Don’t Agree.” A parking-lot collision, a party bore, and a Hawaiian hotel owner who has never trusted a computer. The funniest chapter, and the best piece of sales writing in the book.
- “The Therapy Trap.” Six subheads that a person in therapy could use as a checklist tomorrow: is there a goal, is there progress, what happens in the other 167 hours of the week. Nothing else in the book is as immediately practical.
- “You Can’t Hire Yourself” and “Don’t Decide from a List of One.” Two of twelve back-to-back management chapters, each built around a rule the author actually ran a company on: hire six to keep three, set every salary once a year in January, invent a “senior support” job so your best people never have to become managers. Unsentimental, tested, and short.
- “You’re Never Going to Remember a Layup.” The most moving chapter in the book, told at his father’s funeral and told again here. It ends with two words, and they are the right two.
- “That Is a Blue Straw Problem.” The phrase most likely to enter a reader’s vocabulary by the end of the day.
Where it falls short
The book changes audience in the middle. The introduction names its readers honestly: an eighteen-year-old trying to build a good life, and also anyone who manages people, coaches kids, is raising a family, or just sold a business. No one reader is all of those, and the book does not pretend otherwise. Roughly a fifth of the chapters are about running a company, and twelve of them run consecutively, from “Management by Wandering Around” to “Sometimes Agree When You Don’t Agree.” They are among the sharpest chapters here, but a reader who has never hired anyone will feel the book turn away for twelve chapters in a row, and the eighteen-year-old will skip “Don’t Die at Your Maximum Net Worth” and “Don’t Think of Yourself as Old” for another fifty years. The introduction gives permission to skip. It is still a visible seam.
Some phrases outrun their chapters. “Consider the Source,” “Better Late Than Never,” “Make Your Own Events,” and “Easier Said Than Done” state the idea and stop, and next to “Even Einstein Had a Limit” they read as placeholders. Nothing in them is wrong. There is just less there.
Stories repeat. The report card with four A’s and a B appears three times, once in the very first chapter and again near the end in the same words. Lee Shulman is introduced as “a therapist I worked with” in eight chapters. The Los Angeles Kings consultant gets two chapters. For a book meant to be opened at random this is the correct choice, and the author says as much. A cover-to-cover reader will notice anyway.
It will lose some readers deliberately. “Always Tell a Child the Truth,” the financial-incentive argument in “The Therapy Trap” and “Don’t Work on a Relationship All the Time,” and “People May Need to Vent but I Don’t Want to Be the Target” are stated flat, with no hedging. The book is better for it, and the author warns you. Those are the pages reviewers will quote, and the pidgin dialogue in the Hawaii story will make a few readers wince even though the hotel owner comes off as the smartest man in the room.
Ayn Rand stands at the door. Her name is in a chapter title and heads the resources page. Readers who dislike her may put the book down before reaching the chapter where the author explains that her philosophy left him angrier and no happier, which is one of the most honest pieces of writing in the book.
Who it is for
- A smart 18-to-25-year-old who wants a good life and is suspicious of anything labeled self-help. The first two dozen chapters were written for this person and it shows.
- Anyone starting or running a small company. The middle third is a compact management manual disguised as a phrase book, and it would be worth the price on its own.
- A parent or a youth coach. “Always Tell a Child the Truth,” “You’re Never Going to Remember a Layup,” and “You Can Be the Parent, Boss, or Coach—and Friend” are worth the price for that reader.
- Anyone in therapy, or paying for someone else’s, who has wondered whether it is going anywhere.
- Anyone recently retired and surprised by it.
- Not for readers who want citations, a program, or a book without swearing.
Verdict
An unusually honest phrase book with a distinctive voice, at least a dozen sayings a reader will still be using a year from now, and a management manual hiding in the middle. Its weaknesses are the weaknesses of a book built to be dipped into rather than read straight through, and the author names most of them himself. Four stars out of five, and a strong recommendation for the eighteen-year-old it was written for, the manager and the parent it was written for too, and any reader who has had enough of polished self-help.
For the back cover
“A retired founder and youth hockey coach hands you 127 sayings he actually uses, each with the story of how he learned it. Blunt, specific, and short enough to try one today.”
“The rare advice book that tells you to skip the parts you don’t like, and means it.”