The First Move of Clear Thinking

How many continents are on Earth?

No, that’s not a trick question. Think back to your childhood and the answer you learned.

If you’re reading this, you probably learned seven: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania (Australia), and Antarctica.

This seven-continent model is taught in most English-speaking countries — the US, Australia, Canada, the UK — and in many other places around the world. I’ve always lived in the US and thought it was the “correct” answer.

I recently learned, however, that the answer varies depending on where you grew up.

Two separate six-continent models are also taught:

A five-continent model combines the two six-continent variants: Africa, Oceania, Antarctica, Eurasia, and the Americas.

Another five-continent model drops the uninhabited Antarctica entirely: Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. The five Olympic rings symbolize this model.

Finally, some claim there are four continents — Afro-Eurasia, America, Oceania, and Antarctica — each defined as a continuous landmass naturally separated from the others by water.

In fact, there is no scientific definition of a continent. There never has been. The boundary between Europe and Asia, drawn somewhere along the Ural Mountains, is essentially a political agreement that hardened over time. The boundary between North and South America runs along the Panama-Colombia border, which looks natural on a map because it's the narrowest part of the landmass. But the line is just as arbitrary.

This is a clean illustration of something we see constantly: we use words as though they were precise, when in reality they can mean different things to different people.

And as I learned in my deep dive into thinking this past year, fuzzy definitions cause much of the confusion and conflict we live with.

When I started writing my book, I struggled with how to introduce systems thinking concepts in a logical progression. I knew I wanted to devote Part 1 to the fundamentals, but it took me a while to settle on an organizational structure.

Should I dive into the foundations of General Systems Theory as explored by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1930s? After all, he was the first to generalize these ideas across domains.

Or would it be better to jump straight into the mechanics of systems, captured in Donella Meadows’s seminal 2008 book Thinking in Systems (published posthumously, seven years after her death in 2001)? She captured behaviors common to every system — feedback loops, stocks and flows, leverage points — in simple language a practitioner could actually use.

I shuffled through several outlines, but no matter how I grouped the concepts, it always felt like I was missing the right language to describe some of the more complex applications. And then I came across the work of Derek and Laura Cabrera, and everything became clear.

The Cabreras are a husband-and-wife team of systems scientists and faculty members at Cornell. They are the authors of two books — Systems Thinking Made Simple and Connect the Dots — the lead authors of numerous research papers, the founders of Cabrera Labs, and the hosts of The Cabrera Labs Podcast.

They’ve spent the last twenty years codifying four universal patterns that underlie all organization — whether in the mind, in nature, or in human-made systems.

They call this framework DSRP: Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives. These four patterns appear everywhere — from how cells distinguish themselves from their environment, to how ecosystems organize into nested hierarchies, to how we make sense of our own lives. They are, in the Cabreras’ words, “universal to all thought.”

These patterns go far beyond systems thinking. They are foundational to all our thinking, providing the grammar we can use to define, map, and optimize systems. Master this grammar, and you gain the ability to make sense of any complex challenge you face.

Chapter 2 explores all four of these rules in depth. In this essay, I’ll dive into the first one: any idea or thing can be distinguished from the other ideas or things around it.

The Distinctions Rule states that every distinction has two parts: the identity (what a thing is) and the other (what it is not). The Cabreras call these co-implicated, meaning that the existence of one necessarily implies the existence of the other. You cannot define what something is without, by the same act, defining everything that it is not.

We are good at the “identity” half. We name our projects, goals, and roles. We tell people what we do. We tell ourselves what we want. The half we often forget is the “other.” Every time we say what something is, we are also saying what it is not. Yet we rarely say that second part out loud, even to ourselves.

Consider a kid’s birthday party. (With a 10- and an 8-year-old, this is a particularly relevant topic in my household.) If one of my daughters’ friends is having a party and invites 10 people, that list also becomes a list of everyone who wasn’t invited — a sensitive topic among 2nd- and 4th-graders. While we don’t say it out loud, that second list is real. It exists the moment the first one does.

This is true if we’re talking about birthday parties, to-do lists, or project responsibilities. The point is that a distinction is two things, not one. We intentionally create the first list to help us keep track of things and make decisions. But if we don’t acknowledge that the second list also exists, we can run into challenges.

This is what the Cabreras have been documenting for two decades. The act of drawing a boundary is one of the core moves of thought. We perform it constantly, mostly unconsciously. It is critical to get this right because the quality of our thinking is bound by the quality of the lines we draw.

I know. You get this. Of course, things have boundaries.

While it may seem obvious, we get this wrong all the time.

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union sat down to do something it had never done before: write a definition of the word planet. For most of a century, astronomers had used the word freely, the way the rest of us use continent. When the IAU finally drew the line, it included three formal criteria to qualify as a planet:

When the IAU created these rules and applied them to the planets in our solar system, it determined that Pluto — first discovered in 1930 — did not meet the third criterion. Pluto shares its orbital neighborhood with Kuiper belt objects, disqualifying it from being classified as a planet. As a result, it was demoted to “dwarf planet” status.

My daughters will grow up understanding there are eight planets. Many of us, like me, will instinctively hold onto our childhood view that there are nine.

Before 2006, that line had never been drawn. Once it was, Pluto found itself on the outside.

I’ll give you another example from a different domain.

In 1893, the United States Supreme Court took up a case. A New York produce importer named John Nix had been paying a tariff on imported tomatoes under protest for a decade. The Tariff Act of 1883 taxed imported vegetables and let fruit in for free. While we don’t eat tomatoes the same way we would eat an apple, botanically, a tomato is a fruit. Nix argued that since a tomato was a fruit, it shouldn’t be subject to the tax.

Justice Horace Gray, writing for a unanimous court, conceded the botany — yet still ruled against Nix. He wrote that tomatoes are commonly served with dinner, not dessert, and that the law would follow common usage rather than established biology. The court made a precedent-setting distinction that ran counter to science and redrew the boundary of what a tomato is, at least in the eyes of the US government.

Distinction errors do not announce themselves. They show up as confusion and conflict, or, in Nix's case, as money changing hands.

The Distinctions Rule is universal. The same pattern shows up at much smaller stakes — including in our own lives. Here are two more from mine.

My career is in analysis. To analyze anything, I have to describe it. And to describe it, I have to draw distinctions. A marketing campaign is focused on a specific product, not the others in the portfolio. It runs on digital channels, but not on television. The ads are served to soccer moms, not retirees. Each tag is a boundary. Each boundary determines which questions I can ask later and which I cannot.

The cost of fuzzy tagging is invisible at the time. But as any analyst can tell you, if it’s not done properly, it shows up months later, when someone asks, “Did this work?” and the answer is unknowable because the boundaries were never clean.

Distinction patterns scale. Consider the common issue of interteam conflict. At every company I have worked with, recurring people problems turn out to be distinction problems in disguise. Two managers both think they own the same job. Both get frustrated. Leadership reads it as a personality conflict rather than doing the hard work of drawing the boundary of who is responsible for what. Until that happens, no amount of communication training will help.

Now flip it to the personal side.

One boundary I draw on purpose is that the hours from 5-9 pm on weekdays are family time. That’s the line I draw — the time of the day when I stop acting as an analytics executive and clock in for my job as a dad. From the moment I close my laptop at five until the moment my girls go to bed at nine, they are the priority. Weekends carry the same boundary more broadly. The line is only clear because I have made it clear to myself first.

I should be transparent — that line has texture. When my girls are watching TV after dinner, I’ll sometimes sneak off to my office to answer a few emails. When they are asleep at nine, I’ll pick up work I left unfinished earlier in the day. But once that TV goes off or when one of them wanders into my office asking to play, my rules dictate that I close the laptop and focus on them. The boundary is a clear declaration of which side any moment is on, and what each side owes me.

The situation changed when I drew that line. Telling myself that I want to “spend more time with my kids” is a wish. Stating that “from five to nine, they always take priority over my laptop” is a distinction. The first is something I want. The second is something I can do.

Distinctions are how aspirations become systems. The line itself is small. The change it produces is not.

Two thousand years ago, in a small classroom in Nicopolis, a freed slave named Epictetus drew a single distinction and called it the foundation of a good life. Some things, he said, are up to us. Other things are not.

That statement is a paraphrased opening line of the Enchiridion, the short handbook of Epictetus’s teachings. It’s known as the Dichotomy of Control, one of the foundational pillars of Stoicism. When you look at it through the lens we have been building, it’s a near-perfect application of the Distinctions Rule.

Look at the structure of what Epictetus did. He took a fuzzy category — the things in life we have to deal with — and drew a line through it. On one side is the identity: our judgments, choices, attention, and actions. On the other side is the other: the weather, the traffic, others' opinions, the outcome of our decisions, and so on. The Stoics had been quietly practicing the Distinctions Rule within the human head for centuries before the Cabreras named it.

The cost of blurring this line is one every reader of this newsletter has paid. We spend energy on outcomes we cannot influence. We absorb anxiety about events that have not happened. We argue, in our own heads, with people who are not in the room. The blur is a distinction failure, and it produces the same symptoms as every other fuzzy boundary: confusion, exhaustion, and conflict.

What the Stoics figured out, and what systems thinking confirms, is that the first move of clear thinking is the same as the first move of agency. You draw the line. You name what you can control. By definition, you also name what you cannot. And you act on the side that is within your power.

Every time you ask, “Is this in my control?” you are practicing DSRP. Every time you exhale and let go of what is not, you are practicing Stoicism.

This is the thread my book sits on. My suspicion when I started — which has become my conviction after a year of writing — is that the ancient and the modern are the same conversation, held two thousand years apart, about the same human problem.

The good news is that the rule travels well. The Cabreras wrote a paper, which I cite in the book, showing that purposeful practice with these four rules improves measurable thinking ability by 380%.

Don’t take my word for it, or theirs. Try it out this week for yourself:

Distinctions are one of the four rules. Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives compound on top of this one. Together, they make up the cohesive grammar of thinking I have spent the last year living inside.

A quick update on my book.

Everything is done! In the last week, I’ve approved my layout and the back cover of the paperback. My publishing team is packaging everything and will send it to the printer this week. I do not yet have an exact date, but I expect to have the first physical copies in my hands by early June. And right after that, The Stoic Systems Thinker will be officially live on Amazon.

If you participated in the pre-sale campaign, thank you. I will send a separate email soon with specific dates for when to expect your copy.

For everyone else, I will share the order details as soon as I have them. Today's essay is one rule from Chapter 2. The book covers the rest, and I cannot wait to put it in your hands.

All the best,
Michael

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