Shreyas Doshi on Clarity: Understanding Thought Processes and Cognitive Biases

In a recent LinkedIn post, Shreyas Doshi offers ten insights aimed at fostering greater clarity in professional and personal decision-making. Doshi, a recognized product leader and advisor, emphasizes that true mastery and success stem not just from accumulating knowledge, but from a deep understanding of human cognition and the pitfalls of our own thinking.

The Foundation of Success: Action vs. Thinking

Doshi begins by drawing a critical distinction between storytelling and achievement. While recounting past successes requires focusing on the actions taken, achieving future success demands a focus on the underlying thought processes. This highlights a core theme in Doshi’s post: the primacy of understanding ‘how people think’ over simply collecting frameworks and tactics.

“You can keep chasing 100s of frameworks, mental models, tactics, playbooks, success stories, tools, and templates throughout your career, and yet the fundamental capability that will unleash your product mastery across domains and companies is this: understanding how people think.”

As Shreyas Doshi points out, this fundamental capability is often overlooked in favor of more superficial knowledge acquisition. The sheer volume of available information can be a distraction, preventing individuals from developing the core skill of understanding cognition.

The Seduction of Feeling Smart

A significant portion of Doshi’s insights addresses the psychological barriers that impede sound decision-making. He argues that the desire to feel intelligent while making a decision, and to articulate that decision convincingly to others, can often override the rational pursuit of the correct outcome.

The “I Already Know That” Barrier

Doshi also identifies the common reaction of dismissing new information with a mental shrug of “I already know that.” According to Shreyas Doshi, this self-satisfaction acts as a significant, though often invisible, impediment to genuine growth and the achievement of long-stated goals.

“The default reaction of “I already know that” (and the smug satisfaction from saying it and believing it) is the greatest invisible barrier keeping many otherwise-smart people from actually achieving their often-stated but ever-elusive career goals.”

This tendency, Doshi suggests, prevents individuals from truly internalizing and applying potentially valuable insights.

Cognitive Biases and Their Impact

Further elaborating on cognitive flaws, Shreyas Doshi touches upon the illusion of mind-reading as a common source of conflict. He also critiques the reliance on clever analogies, noting that while intelligent individuals acknowledge their limitations, they are often swayed by them in practical settings.

The Art of Logic and Decision-Making

Doshi posits that applying logic to important decisions is more an art than a science, not because logic itself is artistic, but because the human user is inherently flawed. Overcoming these personal limitations requires significant skill and finesse, he argues.

“We explain everything by what is visible, sophisticated, and recent, while the truth is found in what’s invisible, inscrutable, and predetermined. This is our most fundamental cognitive bias.”

This fundamental cognitive bias, as Doshi describes it, leads us to prioritize the apparent and the novel over the underlying and the enduring, often obscuring the true drivers of outcomes.

The Teacher vs. The Master

Concluding his reflections, Doshi differentiates between consultants, teachers, and masters. A consultant sells their answer, a teacher guides one toward the right question, and a master reveals that the answer resides within the individual. This distinction underscores Doshi’s overarching message: true clarity and mastery come from introspection and understanding the internal mechanisms of thought, rather than external validation or readily available solutions.