Summary of The Art of Clear Thinking By Hasard Lee: A Stealth Fighter Pilot's Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions

By Willie M. Joseph

DISCLAIMER

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The Art of Clear Thinking By Hasard Lee: A Stealth Fighter Pilot's Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions

 

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

 

The Art of Clear Thinking is a book that teaches readers to apply Hasard Lee's combat-tested techniques in everyday life. It reveals powerful decision-making principles that can be used in business and life, such as how to learn better and faster, cultivating mental toughness, and developing the skills to quickly assess, choose, and execute. It has been used and taught by CEO's, astronauts, CIA agents, students, parents, and many others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223137337

Willie M. Joseph

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INTRODUCTION

As a fighter pilot, the success of each flight hinges on the accumulation of thousands of correct decisions. To give an example of the speed at which these aircraft can fly, a fighter pilot was stationed in Korea and had to launch by himself and test the engine at multiple altitudes and power settings, with the final check being a maximum speed run. After fifteen minutes, the pilot had finished all the checks except the last one: the max speed run. To enable the afterburner, the pilot rotated the throttle outward, allowing him to push it along a separate track, activating all the boost pumps in the fuel system, which began pulling fuel at a rate that could empty a swimming pool in minutes. The narrator injected fuel into their aircraft, creating a thirty-foot flame out the back.

They quickly accelerated past Mach 1 and began a climb to the fifty-thousand-foot service ceiling. At Mach 1.5, the jet began shaking due to the extreme stress of air resistance, which caused the aluminum-alloy wings to flutter and send vibrations throughout the plane. This was not sustainable to the airframe.

AVIATION

Aviation is a highly unforgiving environment where even a single mistake can lead to catastrophic results. This has led to a deep focus on decision-making and a culture of acknowledging, understanding, and fixing mistakes. In the early days of aviation, the crash rate was incredibly high, leading to a near obsessive culture around increasing the safety of aviation. Air combat adds another layer of complexity to aviation, as pilots must fly their aircraft safely and contend with weather, terrain, and traffic, as well as an enemy trying to shoot them down. The enemy is highly skilled and adaptable, constantly seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in their tactics and technology.

This has led to a modern battlefield that is diverse and dangerous, with hypersonic missiles, stealth aircraft, and sensors that can triangulate targets out to the horizon. The margin of error is incredibly thin and the planes are skewed towards performance, often at the expense of safety.

SPEED

The F-16 was designed for 1.6 times the speed of sound, but it was twenty-five years old and had thousands of hours on the airframe. To assess the situation, the pilot looked at the heads-up display, standby airspeed gauge, sideslip indicator, and trim panel behind the seat. After centering the rudder, nothing happened, and the pilot had to adapt to the changing conditions. The F-16 was designed for a pilot who was five feet, ten inches tall, but the pilot was six feet, two inches tall and had memorized their location and adjusted them by feel. The narrator was learning how to fly the F-16 when they had a conversation with an experienced fighter pilot, Cygon, who had just finished a staff tour at the Pentagon and was getting requalified on the F-16.

Cygon told the narrator that in a clean configuration, the F-16 would begin to buffet at around Mach 1.6, but it was possible to push through it by counterintuitively going faster. The narrator was amazed at how longforgotten information can instantly come to them when there is a life-or-death decision to make. The most important details in this text are the decisions the pilot had to make when their wings began buffeting. The default decision was to leave the aircraft in its current setting, and the pilot elected to slowly push forward on the stick, steepening their dive to increase their acceleration while not putting unnecessary stress on the aircraft. At Mach 1.9, everything smoothed out and the jet became eerily calm as it crossed 1,500 miles per hour.

The narrator was flying a fighter and was able to take in the view of cargo ships dragging their wakes across the ocean. The cockpit felt warm due to the friction of the air, and the jet decelerated below the sound barrier after pulling the throttle out of afterburner. It took nearly fifty miles for the aircraft to decelerate.

DECISIONS

Fighter pilots are responsible for making thousands of decisions each flight, often with incomplete information and lives on the line. Decision-making theory has been developed since Air Force Colonel John Boyd developed the OODA loop during the Korean War, and other fighter pilot greats have made significant contributions to the field. The ability to make a correct decision with incomplete information and a limited amount of time is a universal skill, and it is important to find the best long-term value for the given cost. Technology has now automated many of our lower-level tasks, making the stakes for our decisions ever higher. The most important details in this text are that decision-making is one of the most fundamental skills to master, but it is not taught in most schools.

To develop judgment and consistently make good decisions, fighter pilots have poured tremendous resources into finding ways to optimize a human's ability to make decisions. This book is a distillation of those lessons and how modern U.S. fighter pilots think about decision-making. The author has gone through the training twice to fly the F-16 and then again when he was selected to fly the F-35. This book teaches the techniques of applied decision-making to pilots around the world, as well as to surgeons, Super Bowl-winning coaches, CIA