Thank you to the publisher for the copy - all opinions are my own,

This is actually a fascinating book that straddles somewhere between action hero stories and practical self help strategies when it comes to making decisions and trusting your gut. I did not expect to be so fully drawn in and glued to the page with this one, but here we are. Well worth picking up!

The Art of Clear Thinking is a book about Lee’s learnings during his career in the Air Force. He talks about how to learn better and faster, cultivate mental toughness, and develop skills to quickly. Assess, choose, and execute. Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for and ARC.

I enjoyed this book even more than I expected! It was heavy on the fighter pilot stories and examples of how and why they are taught to make clear and decisive decisions. The reader is left to then apply these lessons to their own life, which I appreciated. I found the “wind the clock” strategy to be very applicable to my own decision making. Fighter pilots are taught to wind a small analog clock in the cockpit once something goes wrong and they have to make a quick decision. The few seconds it takes to wind that clock helps them to focus and avoid making a panicked and impulsive decision. This was such an interesting book and I took away several useful lessons.

As someone who has served in the Air Force, although in a different profession/occupation, this not only made me appreciate those who are truly on the front lines, it also solidified what was constantly drilled into our minds and that is the importance of our mission and our wingmen. Not many people can relate nor probably handle the stressors that are experienced while one is in the armed forces, let alone the stressors experienced by a uniformed pilot.

Hasard Lee gives incredible insight about the difficulties he faced and the "mental toughness" it takes to make vital decisions while serving. I highly recommend this book for those who have served or are currently serving, as well as those who are employed in high-stressed jobs. I'm sure they'd be able to relate, understand, and appreciate a viewpoint that is sometimes overlooked or taken for granted.

Thank you NetGalley and St.Martin's Press for the gifted copy.

The focus of this book was on fighter pilots and the military, which I could not relate to, but understood how the training in these environments, and the high stakes situations you may get into as a result, can be conducive to training the mind to think clearly under pressure. Overall, this book was mostly about decision-making, fighter pilots, and leadership, so if you are looking for those three components in a story then this is the book for you!

3.5 rounded up to 4 stars

My thanks to @stmartinspress and @netgalley for this #gifted copy.

The Art of Clear Thinking by Hasard Lee is available on May 23, 2023.

In this book, Hasard Lee distills what he’s learned during his career flying some of the Air Force’s most advanced aircraft. With gripping firsthand accounts from his time as a fighter pilot and fascinating turning points throughout history, Hasard reveals powerful decision-making principles that can be used in business and in life, including:

• HOW TO LEARN BETTER AND FASTER
• CULTIVATING MENTAL TOUGHNESS
• DEVELOPING THE SKILLS TO QUICKLY ASSESS, CHOOSE, AND EXECUTE
And more

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book, a memoir, or a learning-type textbook. I had no idea, but I knew I was excited to find out.

And for the most part, it didn’t disappoint. It held exciting and informative examples demonstrating what worked and things that needed improvement in quickly summing up a situation. It didn’t feel like memoirs I’d read nor did it hold the elements of a non-fiction teaching book.

This book gave me a glimpse into many things I would never have experienced. But situations that called for quick thinking.

I did find certain areas of the book a little disjointed and thought it could have flowed a little better. However, what I learned from this story, gave me a great appreciation for various aspects of Lee’s life, and I believe many will enjoy reading it.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the eARC in exchange for my honest review!

The description of this book really appealed to me because my husband's cousin was a fighter pilot in the Air Force. I love to learn about other people's views on decision-making, so I had to request this book!

I enjoyed Hasard Lee's story about becoming a fighter pilot, the difficult training, and his powerful decision-making principles. Really interesting and one of my favorite chapters was "mental toughness". There was a lot of useful information that I could definitely apply to my own life. I know I lack mental toughness and try to teach it to my boys.

This book was not for me. I did not finish it. The focus of the book was on fighter pilots and the military which I could not relate to. I was hoping the focus of the book would be more on the life lessons rather than technicalities of being a fighter pilot. Do not recommend unless you have an interest in this area! Thank you for the Advanced Readers copy!

This is not something I typically read but the title got me. I am grieving and have a high-stress job and my thoughts can become muddled and overwhelming, so this book spoke to me.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the fighter pilot's mind and how they have to make split second life and death decisions.

If you are looking for a book about decision making, leadership and stories about fighter pilots, well look no further.

An informative & eye opening read that was thought provoking and exactly what I needed to - clear my mind! I would definitely recommend this.

If you’re fascinated by the way the human mind works, then the fighter pilot’s mind is worth studying. They learn to make life-and-death decisions in uncertain situations, and never rest on their “results” but always analyze the decision-making.

This book offers a useful framework for decision making, as practiced by fighter pilots. It’s also a fascinating window into how pilots train, think, and learn, and teach each other. If you enjoy stories about flight and combat, you'll enjoy this book.

Lee gives us an exciting read about decision-making. It’s easy to get lost in the Top Gun stories and miss his important lessons about clear thinking. Many of us don’t face life-death situations that require split second decision making. Thus, the author intersperses business and other examples to elucidate his points. He teaches us that the fighter pilot’s mantra applies to all of us: “No situation is so bad I can’t make it worse.” Especially if I don’t follow the author’s guidelines. Those who have studied leadership response mechanisms might be familiar with Boyd’s OODA Loop or Deming’s PDCA and such. Lee simplifies these mechanisms into a more easily remembered key.

His experience complements the teaching while adding an important aspect that cripples a lot of us: the lack of mental toughness, which can be taught. We might find ourselves in traffic situations or business situations where things are spiraling out of control. Everything we try fails. All we can foresee is disaster. Stress is maxed. Our clear thinking is diminished. We get “tunnel vision” and become so desperate to gain an edge that we actually can sabotage our desired result: more money, more time, more social connections, etc because we become asset wasters, time wasters and socially awkward in our desperation. Hasard Lee gives us some tools to identify and counter stress that clouds our thinking.

For those of us who have evolved workplace cultures into high performance, highly reliable teams understand many of the key elements here: get input from diverse thinkers, get as much info as you can and then execute well. As importantly, also debrief the implementation with everyone being equal. I learned this from seeing flight deck crews on aircraft carriers chide a superior officer for poor orders or decisions. In a manufacturing workplace, we incorporated this by making sure our machine operators had the opportunity and encouragement to voice not only what they knew but what they thought the decision should be and then what worked and what didn’t from their perspective, which was just as valid as any manager’s or engineer’s.

If you’re familiar with General McChrystal’s book “Risk” many of the principles in Lee’s book will resonate. McChrystal would add a phase of detection before Lee’s first stage. McChrystal acknowledges the many forms of bias that can fog our ability to detect—we see what we believe. The work by the authors of “Invisible Gorilla” have pointed this out. If we’re not expecting something, we don’t see it, whether it’s a gorilla in the midst of basketball players or a motorcycle in traffic. If we don’t expect to see the small, industry-disruptive and indirect competitor, we’ll miss the threat. Biases can prevent us from detecting the threat and our own vulnerabilities in our organizations. Even if we detect it, we might categorize the other “foe” based on past experience—Nokia did this when confronted with the first smartphones and the fragile screens—and not notice the important details and overlay unobserved but assumed details, like consumers were willing to risk screen fracture to obtain immense functionality with their nano-computer-in-a-pocket.. Lee doesn’t help us much with learning to overcome our observational biases, except to advise us to better understand the potential failure in thinking phenomena follow a linear path when many can be exponential. Scaling up a small distinction can lead to tremendous results if we recognize this.

I would use Lee’s book as the foundation to teaching good decision-making to my “apprentices.” It is a worthwhile addition to any leadership library.