Chapter 7: The Clarity Method: Expand Your Options

1. Two people with opposite directions reject the same thing. #

Let’s first look at a pair of people who appear to be completely contradictory.

Duan Yongping's core concept is called "dare to be the queen of the world": don't be the first to eat crabs, wait for the market to clearly verify the direction before entering the market, and then be the first among the last in the verified direction. When Xiaobawang entered the market, the learning machine had been verified, when BBK entered the market, the VCD had been verified, and when OPPO and vivo entered the market, every step of feature phones and smart phones was based on the verified consensus.

Musk's core concept is called "first principles": not accepting any industry conventions, and re-derivating everything from physical boundaries. Why are rockets expensive? I broke down the bill of materials to the atomic level and found that the raw materials accounted for only a few percent of the selling price; the rest were practices inherited from the industry, not the laws of physics, so I redid it.

One "dare to be the queen of the world" and the other "derive from scratch" sound like the two poles of the methodology spectrum. But if you lay out what they each rejected, you will find that it is the same: Unverified industry consensus. Duan Yongping's way of rejecting it is to only bet in directions that have been verified by the market: he borrows from the demand consensus that has been verified by hundreds of millions of consumers. The way Musk rejects it is by acknowledging only the derivation of physical laws: he is borrowing the most well-proven set of standards in the universe. Neither of them acted "based on their own feelings", and both based their judgments on verified external standards. The only difference was that they borrowed from different objects: one borrowed from the market, and the other borrowed from physics.

This is the protagonist of this chapter. Chapter 6 erected the standards engine, but the feed port was still empty: where did the standards come from? The answer is a three-step methodology, which we call the Clarity Method. What it does is to expand its own options: see solutions that others cannot see, and then choose the best ones.

2. 10/10/80: Counter-intuitive ratio #

Clarity Method three steps: Refining standards (10%) + Collecting data (10%) + Using means to find optimal solutions (80%).

Numbers are where this formula shines. The actual ratio of solving problems in most organizations is closer to 40/40/20: 40% of the energy is spent arguing in the conference room about "what the standard should be", 40% is spent collecting more and more information, and only 20% is left to actually find the solution. Clarity Method reverses this ratio: standards and data combined are only worth 20%, while trial and error methods are worth 80%.

The standard is only worth 10%, not because the standard is unimportant (it was just demonstrated in Chapter 6 that it is the storage method of judgment), but because the correct way to refine the standard is to quickly borrow a verified version and run it first, rather than arguing about a perfect version in front of the whiteboard. The standard accuracy is fed by the iteration in the third step, not the debate in the first step. Data is only worth 10% because the marginal value of data decays very quickly: after the problem is clearly defined, the first few key data determine 80% of the judgment, and then the subsequent piles of data are piled for a sense of security, not the amount of information. When the meeting was held to discuss projects that were still "supplementary research" in the third round, the lack was never data, but that no one dared to press the "start trial" button.

The third step is worth 80% because any problem has N solutions, and the gap between solutions is often orders of magnitude. The only way to find a better solution is to try many times at low cost and let the methods eliminate each other in reality. The era of free execution has given this step an unprecedented subsidy: AI has reduced the cost of a single attempt to nearly zero, and the 80 in 10/10/80 can truly run to full capacity for the first time.For this ratio, I have an on-site record of the tuition I just paid. In April 2026, I started optimizing the company's logo and outsourced four designers. In more than two months, plans came out one after another, and none of them was what I wanted. Pay attention to the structure of this situation: all four designers are diligently executing, 80% is full, while the first two 10% are zero. I have done a lot of designs myself, so I default to "I know it's good when I see it." The acceptance criteria are installed in my feelings, and designers can only rely on guessing. Each round of rework is paying for the absent standards. As mentioned in Chapter 6, internal staff will quietly fix your bad standards using common sense; outsourcers won’t even have the context needed to fix them. The further away the execution is from you, the more expensive the unit price for standard absences will be. In June, I finally admitted that this was not a designer problem, but a standard problem. I spent two days with an intern to make up for the first two 10%: first, I spread out and categorized the logos on the market (collected data), and found all the logos. There are only four types of forms (lines, blocks, brand text, and personification); and then a one-page standard (refined standard) is extracted based on the classification: the first step is to refine the business consensus and determine whether your business is standardized or non-standardized; for standardized and easy-to-explain business in one sentence, go The Semantic Association route, graphics are concrete and directly express the business, with strong memory points, giving way to aesthetics; for non-standardized and complex businesses, the Text Association route is taken, with glyphs as the main body, abstract and beautiful, and sacrificing business relevance; no matter which route, the main strokes should not exceed five strokes. After the standard was established, the direction converged that day, and the desired version was quickly produced. For tasks that have been pending for more than two months, the actual workload is two days, and the difference is the matching price: **Spending 80% up front will not save the two 10%, and will only make you repurchase 80% again and again. **

By the way, let me tell you what the final version will look like, because the design itself is also a statement: use the numbers 1 and 0 to spell out a letter b, which is the first letter of bioby. The vertical pen is a 1 with a serif; the 0 in the circle is specially written with a slash, which is the zero with a slash in the programmer font so as not to be confused with the letter O. This choice has its semantic layer: the bottom layer of the computer is 0 and 1, two characters that generate all complexities; the bottom layer of our company is Clarity Method and Interference Method (the latter will be discussed in the next chapter), two technologies that generate all playing methods. A logo that was finalized in two days according to the standard has the company's underlying structure written on its face.

[Figure 7-x: bioby logo (assets/bioby-logo.png) - inserted with this paragraph during typesetting]

3. The core is borrowing: the default optimal starting point #

There is a common core of action hidden in the three steps: borrowing.

Why borrowing is the default optimal starting point has been demonstrated at the individual level in Chapter 3 (the second action of the four actions of adaptive insight). This chapter will not repeat it, but only calculates the organizational accounts: a person groping from scratch means repaying the trial and error cost that others have already paid; an organization groping from scratch means that the repeated tuition is magnified by the number of people: a company with 100 people develops a set of methods that have been verified elsewhere, which is equivalent to organizing 100 people to collectively retake a course that others have completed.

The organizational version of the borrowing standard action chain has six links:

Discover gaps → Find standard holders → Borrow standards and boundaries → Check migration conditions → Low-cost verification → Solidify into your own standards

These two links are the most vulnerable to work-stealing. The first is the third link: borrowing standards must also borrow boundaries. Under what conditions does someone else’s play style be established and under what conditions fails? Boundaries are not borrowed, only stories are borrowed. The second is the fourth ring: Check the migration conditions. Chapter 3 Johnson used seventeen months and more than 200 million dollars to demonstrate the cost of skipping it. Here is the organizational version of the same knife edge. Borrowing is the default starting point, not the absolute end point: only when you can't borrow or test something can you enter the experiment and explore and create new standards at the minimum cost. The order of borrowing first and creating later (the first item in the standard level of thinking in Chapter 6) must not be reversed.

Looking back at the case of the twins, they actually stood at both ends of this action chain. Duan Yongping's "dare to be the queen of the world" is to take the third and fourth rings to the extreme: even the boundaries of the market's proven directions are clearly visible, and the risk of migration is minimal, so he dares to put all his resources into the implementation of "the last to be the first". Musk is working on the "unborrowable" branch: the recyclable rocket has no standard holder to borrow, so he retreats to the standard with the highest level of verification (the laws of physics) and re-derives it from there. Borrowing first and creating later is not a strategy for conservatives, it is a common strategy for all people who treat judgment as asset management. Radicals such as Musk are no exception. He just borrows deeper.

4. Sorting problem of N solutions: the judgment criteria are forced out #

After the third step of "seeking the best solution by means" is in operation, you will encounter an unavoidable problem: after trying five feasible solutions by means, whose advice should you listen to?

"Excellent" means sorting, and sorting requires a basis. Without solving the organization of the sorting basis, the Clarity Method is only half complete: the options have been successfully expanded, but the optimal solution cannot be converged. The review will become N plan holders competing for voice, qualifications, and who is closer to the boss. The more options there are, the more paralyzed this organization becomes, and Clarity Method becomes the enemy of efficiency.The basis for sorting can only be value: what value does this solution create, for whom it is created, when it will be cashed out, and what kind of limiting resource is consumed (the ledger in Chapter 5 is reused here). This is the origin of the judgment standard "Judge by Value". Please pay attention to this causal direction: It is not a value clause established in advance, but a necessity that is forced out when the Clarity Method reaches the third step. Chapter 4 talked about its form as a ruler, and this chapter adds its birth certificate: when the methodology reaches the sorting stage, it has to grow a ruler. This is also a recurring pattern in this book: organizational standards are not promulgated from the sky, but are forced out when the methodology reaches a certain point (you will also see the Interference Method forcing out behavioral standards in the next chapter).

5. Bilateral sample mirror: Winners look for mechanisms, losers look for boundaries #

There is also a mirror that must be installed in the standard-borrowing link: the same standard must reflect both winners and losers.

The winner sample answered "What solution may be effective under what conditions", and the loser sample answered "Under what conditions this solution fails, what is the cost, and where is the stop line?" Both sides are indispensable. If you only look at the winners, you will mistake the survivors' stories for the cause and effect: a hundred companies used the same strategy, the three survivors were used as business school cases, and the 97 dead companies have no biographies; if you only look at the losers, you will misjudge feasible opportunities into unbearable risks, and the organization will not dare to try anything from now on.

There are five operating rules for installing this mirror: Define the outcome criteria of "win" and "lose" first, and then find cases. You are not allowed to add definitions after reading the story; use the same industry, stage, resource constraints, and time window on both sides to form a comparable comparison; record the sample denominator and missing cases, and do not use stars or disasters to represent the population; calculate the medians on both sides separately, and do not mix them into an average (the iron law in Chapter 6 is here); when the standard is written, the effective conditions, failure conditions, exceptions, and stop lines must be written at the same time.

These five points are not academic mysophobia. The standard extracted with one-sided samples is not a standard, but a belief. Faith can also inspire people, but it cannot answer "when to stop". Most of the ways organizations die are not because they have no direction, but because they don't know where the stop line is.

6. Loser sample: Analogy lesson bought with 100 billion yuan #

In 2020, community group buying is booming, and Meituan launched Meituan Select. The reasoning path of the decision-making is very clear from the public information: this is another "takeaway war": high frequency, rigid demand, money-burning subsidies, rapid expansion, and the leftover is king. If you have won a takeout fight, follow suit.

The problem is that the first condition of fresh food is different from that of takeout: takeout fulfills the contract of standardized cooked food, while fresh food competes with the three mountains of high loss, low gross profit, and cold chain cost; the scale effect of takeout increases with the order volume, and the loss of fresh food increases with the scale. These differences are not afterthoughts (contemporary entrants and industry research have repeatedly reminded), but "successful experience in takeaways", as the most weighted sample within the organization, overwhelms external boundary evidence. Results: Meituan’s new business segment has a cumulative operating loss of approximately 105.1 billion yuan from 2020 to 2024 (this caliber includes Meituan’s grocery shopping and other businesses, and the accounting must be honest). In June 2025, it shut down operations in eighteen provinces and ended nationwide in December. Wang Xing's review at the earnings call only said: "A lot of resources were invested, but the results did not meet expectations."

Analyze using the framework of this chapter: This is a double-cutting of work by borrowing the third and fourth links of the standard action chain. The analogy of "this is like the takeaway from back then" is tantamount to borrowing only the story but not the boundaries. The applicable conditions for the takeout approach (standardized goods, fulfillment costs diluted with scale) have not been shown from beginning to end and compared with the reality of fresh food. The analogy is an elevator speech, not a business plan: It can get everyone excited for thirty seconds, but what it skips is precisely the most valuable link in the Clarity Method: checking the migration conditions. Duan Yongping borrowed the market-proven consensus and boundaries, while Meituan Youxuan borrowed the script of his last war; it was the same borrowing, but one link was missing, and the difference was 100 billion.

7. Head-on battle: experience is not the criterion #

Meituan’s preferred focus, if you press deeper, you will find the old gene that this chapter will replace: empiricism.

Let’s be fair first: experience is not the enemy. Experience is an implicit rule formed by a person based on limited samples. It is the most important raw material for standards. The only problem is skipping verification and going straight to work. The characteristic of empiricism is not "using experience", but because experience belongs to oneself and has happened many times, skipping comparison, data and boundary verification, and directly granting it the status of universal truth. It has three iconic phrases, each of which is the terminator of the discussion: "I have done it this way before", "The industry has always been like this", and "You can't go wrong by feeling". Chapter 3 talked about its personal form (repeat the first year ten times), and this chapter deals with the organizational form: when the person who said these three sentences has a high enough rank, the Clarity Method of the entire organization stops: his limited sample becomes the ceiling of the entire company.

The Clarity Method rearranges the position of experience as the starting point rather than the end point of the judgment chain:

The chain of empiricism: personal experience → direct execution

The chain of Clarity Method: Personal experience → Candidate standards → Comparison with external standards → Winner/loser two-sided test → Low-cost verification → Organizational standardsAn experience must go through four gates before it can be upgraded to an organizational standard: Can the mechanism be explained clearly in terms without jargon, instead of just operating by feeling? Has it been tested on both winner and loser samples? Can you write down applicable conditions, failure conditions and stop lines? Can it be reused by another person in a similar context and run out of results? None of the four gates is making things difficult for experience. They are extracting the truly valuable parts of experience and throwing away only the parts that "just happen to be alive". **Clarity Method does not oppose experience, it opposes experience obtaining the final right of interpretation without verification. **

8. Two tools at the personal level: reflection and Feynman #

The organization's Clarity Method is assembled from the personal Clarity Method. There are two supporting tools at the personal level, which is the entire content of the learning standards in the eight-level ladder.

Reflection (Three self-examinations) Responsible for discovering "what is not clear": Look back at the day's events every day and ask three questions: Is there a standard for this matter? There are standards, do I follow them? Observed, is there a better solution? The acceptance criterion for reflection is the output: a new standard, a standard revision, a hypothesis to be tested, or a clear next action. Reflection without output is an emotional review, which is the same thing as writing a diary to move yourself.

Feynman Technique is responsible for verifying "whether it is really clear": explain the concept you think you have mastered to a person who does not understand it at all in a language without jargon, mark all the stuck and vague places (that is, the places you have not really understood), go back to the data and practice to fill in the gaps, and explain it again until the other person can repeat it and apply it. Acceptance is not "I understand", but the other party can make a correct judgment based on it. **What you can’t explain clearly is that you judge that it doesn’t really belong to you yet. **

The two tools are connected end to end to form a closed loop: experience → reflection and discovery of gaps in standards → Feynman’s explanation exposed blind spots → supplementing data and practice → updating standards → acting again. The faster this closed loop turns, the closer the individual decade will be to the first type of decade mentioned in Chapter 3.

By the way, let me tell you a sample closest to you: This book was produced by me on 10/10/80. I first froze the seven criteria for book titles at once (10%), checked competing book titles and title occupancy in one round (10%), and then searched for the optimal solution through eight candidates, multiple rounds of scoring, and repeated iterations (80%). The title that finally won was not on my original short list. The methodology works for me, which gives me the confidence to print it out.

9. Boundaries of Judgment #

Three things to prevent the Clarity Method from being used incorrectly.

First, borrowing does not mean copying, and innovation has not been cancelled. What is borrowed are standards and boundaries, not the product itself; innovation occurs in 80% of optimization solutions: finding an order of magnitude better solution in a verified direction is an innovation that is more difficult and more valuable than "doing something no one has done before". OPPO and Vivo have become the top five in the world in the mobile phone market that has been proven beyond verification. They do not rely on being the first to enter the market.

Second, 10/10/80 is a resource discipline, not a precise scale. It's constrained by orders of magnitude: don't spend a lot of time arguing and heaping data. The reasonable ratio will fluctuate in different industries, but the inversion of 40/40/20 is a disease in any industry.

Third, tell the truth about the quality of the sample. Duan Yongping and Musk have first-hand material on their conceptual texts and mechanisms, which are of sufficient quality; however, the evidence that the two are "Clarity Method winners" is at the mechanism level, and I have not yet established a quantitative comparison of the same caliber (the distribution of success or failure of a standard company vs. a company that explores from scratch). This is a gap exposed when the two-sided sample mirrors itself in this chapter. The figures of Meituan Preferred come from financial reports and public reports, and the caliber limit has been noted. The logo case is self-reported by me and cannot be verified externally. The quality is the same as the financing sample in Chapter 3. Please listen to it at a discount based on self-report. There is another slot: the case of a medium-sized company that relied on "borrowing external solutions" to overcome capability bottlenecks. There is a sense of distance in the story of a large company. I am looking for this space. Once I find it, this chapter will be more relevant.

What to Do Monday Morning (No. 1 perspective) #

Three steps, within half a day:

Write one sentence and establish two definitions: Write the company's most difficult problem in one sentence. First define what winning and losing are. Do not read the case first and then make up the definition.
Mandatory borrowing from five sources: Find at least one precedent that has solved similar problems from the five directions of peers, inter-industry, papers, products, and history, and at least one winner and loser. Rules: No evaluation is allowed until the list is full. When evaluating, only two questions are asked: Which of its applicable conditions hold true for me, and which have changed?
Feynman Acceptance: Choose the solution you want to borrow the most, and explain it to a person who doesn’t understand the business at all without jargon (new employees or family members are fine). Make a list of things that are unclear. That's your data collection list for next week, and it's also how close this plan is to "can be tried."

Note (individual and team perspective): Install a closed loop of reflection for yourself. The minimum feasible version is to ask three questions ten minutes before leaving get off work every day (Is there a standard? Have you followed it? Is there a better solution), and the output is written in a document; after a week, you will have a list of your own candidate standards. That's the first page of your personal standard library.

Quotable Lines1. The core of the Clarity Method is borrowing: Most of the answers you need already exist in the world, just not in your company. #

Standards and data are only worth 20%, while trial and error methods are worth 80%.
Those with expanded options will do multiple-choice questions, and those with no options will do true-false questions - it is still closed book.
What you can’t explain clearly means that you judge that it doesn’t really belong to you yet.
Experience does not automatically become experience, only experience that is reflected upon and updated to standards.
The winner tells you why the solution is possible, and the loser tells you when the solution must stop.
One-sided samples can only create beliefs, while two-sided samples can refine standards.
Exploring from scratch is not independent thinking. In many cases, it is just paying the tuition fees that others have already paid.
When borrowing standards, you must also borrow boundaries. Boundaries are not borrowed, only stories are borrowed.
An analogy is an elevator pitch, not a business plan.
Everything has N solutions. Organizations without ranking standards can only compete with who has the loudest voice.
Judge by Value is not a value slogan, but a sorting standard forced out when seeking optimal solutions.
Clarity Method does not oppose experience; it opposes experience obtaining the final right of interpretation without verification.
Borrowing first and creating later is not a strategy for conservatives, and radicals like Musk are no exception - he just borrows deeper.
Reflection without output is emotional review, which is the same thing as writing a diary to move yourself.
Spending 80% upfront will not save the two 10%, but will only make you repurchase 80% again and again.

Chapter Acceptance Self-Check (compare with the five acceptance standards of the chapter) #

The assertion can be restated in one sentence ✓, and is an inference of the core assertion (judgment of scarcity → methodology of production judgment, first production line).
Whiteboard frame chart ✓ (10/10/80 vs 40/40/20 inverted histogram + borrowing the standard six-ring action chain + personal reflection - Feynman closed loop + two-sided sample mirror).
External comparison and data ✓: Winner side twin case Duan Yongping "dare to be the queen of the world" ( has been verified) × Musk's "first principles" ( mechanism has been verified); loser Meituan Preferred (the loss caliber of about 105.1 billion yuan has been verified and noted); author logo The sample has been written into Section 2 (2026-07-26, the quality of the self-report has been stated in the judgment boundary); the quantitative comparison gap and the space for the medium-sized company case have been truthfully marked.
Candidate 16 golden sentences ✓.
"What to Do Monday Morning" Three steps from the No. 1 perspective + personal notes ✓.