How to Think More Effectively

How to Think More Effectively Plot Summary

Introduction

In our rapidly changing world, the quality of our thinking determines the quality of our lives. Yet most of us have never been taught how to think effectively. We navigate through life making decisions, solving problems, and forming opinions without understanding the mental tools that could dramatically improve these processes. Our minds are variable instruments - brilliant and insightful one moment, clouded and confused the next. The most remarkable aspect of this situation is that while we invest enormous resources in the results of good thinking - in education, careers, and relationships - we pay surprisingly little attention to the thinking process itself. We rarely examine how our best ideas emerge or why our mental clarity fluctuates. By understanding the patterns that produce our most satisfying and necessary thoughts, we can learn to harvest rather than sporadically forage our mental landscape. The pages that follow offer practical approaches to release the better parts of our minds and help us identify and hold onto our prime mental moments.

Chapter 1: Strategic Thinking: Focusing on the Why Before the How

There exists a fundamental distinction between two types of thinking that shapes the quality of our decisions and ultimately our lives. Strategic thinking focuses on determining what we want to achieve, while execution thinking concentrates on how to achieve it. Though logic would suggest we should spend considerable time on strategy before moving to execution, human nature often pushes us in the opposite direction. Our minds possess an innate energy for working through obstacles but an equally innate resistance to pausing and determining what our goals should rightfully be. We excel at execution but falter at strategy. This imbalance manifests across many areas of life. We concentrate more on making money than figuring out how to spend it optimally. We put tremendous effort into becoming "successful" without assessing whether dominant notions of success would actually make us content. At a collective level, corporations commit more resources to efficiently delivering existing products than stepping back to reconsider what customers truly need. Marcel Proust, the renowned French novelist, demonstrated this principle in his approach to writing. When his friend Gabriel de la Rochefoucauld sent him a manuscript for review, Proust noted that while the novel had "fine big landscapes," they needed "more originality." The problem wasn't that the descriptions contained false ideas but that they were superficial articulations of good ones. When Proust published his own novel years later, he avoided ready-made descriptions in favor of authentic metaphors that captured genuine experience. Where others might simply say the moon "shines discreetly," Proust wrote that it "creeps up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to 'come on' for a while." To practice strategic thinking, begin by growing conscious of how you currently allocate your mental energy. Most people devote 95% of their waking hours to execution and merely 5% to strategy. Strive to ensure at least 20% of your efforts focus on the deeper "why" questions. Notice your discomfort around questions like: Why is this worthwhile? Where will I be in a few years if this goes right? How is this connected with what fulfills me? Create space and time for strategic thinking by redefining what "hard work" looks like. It might not be the person running from meeting to meeting who is genuinely working hard, but rather the person sitting quietly, occasionally writing in a notebook. Accept that strategic thinking feels uncomfortable and forgive yourself for the strength of your wish to avoid large first-order questions. Remember that we are as lackadaisical about strategy as we are assiduous about execution. By shifting this balance and daring to move the emphasis of our thinking away from execution and towards strategy, we open ourselves to more meaningful pursuits and ultimately more satisfying results.

Chapter 2: Cumulative Thinking: Building Ideas Over Time

The point is as basic as it is key: our minds do not disclose their more elaborate and best thoughts in one go. The mind is an intermittent instrument whose ideas emerge in dribs and drabs. It is capable of a few inspired moves, then falls silent and needs to rest for bewilderingly long periods. We cannot think for two hours at a stretch, let alone an entire day. The mind can't neatly follow office hours. When we encounter the thoughts of others, we tend to miss this reality. Because their ideas often sound composed and can be digested effortlessly, we imagine they emerged in a coherent burst. We forget that a lake of ideas had to be pooled together with painful effort from spoonfuls of thinking arduously collected over long days and nights. As a result, we become dismayed at our own desultory first efforts, comparing our inside view of the thinking process with others' polished final products. Marcel Proust, who reads as one of the most polished and fluent writers of any age, left behind manuscripts that tell a different story. His notebooks are filled with multiple layers of changes, side notes, reminders, and suggestions - sections moved about, crossed out, revised, abandoned, taken up again and ultimately rejected. The Proust we read represents an artificial voice assembled over years, not spontaneously generated in the hours required to read him. To think cumulatively, we must first accept that at any single moment, we won't have access to all the ideas we need. Our thinking is constrained by countless variables - what we've eaten, the time of day, what we've recently read, the people we've been around, our physical state, and even the season. Each mental moment favors certain ideas while pushing other potentially important insights into the background. The most necessary tool for cumulative thinking is the humble notebook. We need notebooks because we can't contain what's important within the bandwidth of active memory. The paper functions as a secondary memory to pool our thoughts together; it will end up knowing more of who we are than we can actively bring to mind in any moment. On its pages, an idea from Monday morning in November will meet its logical counterpart that comes to us only in January during a turbulent night. Writing our thoughts down allows us to return to ideas when we've forgotten what we were trying to say and to see with greater clarity whether we've said it properly. We can re-encounter an idea "cold," without the flattering energy of our initial enthusiasm, and perceive it as a less forgiving stranger might. Our notebooks become the forum for second, third, and hundredth chances, doing greater justice to our thoughts than our minds themselves ever could.

Chapter 3: Independent Thinking: Trusting Your Own Intelligence

From a young age, we are taught to expect that truly important ideas must lie outside of us, usually very far outside of us in time and place. Someone else - cleverer, wiser, and more prestigious - will already have hatched the crucial thoughts. Our task is to pay homage to their intelligence, learn what they had to say, and align our perspective with theirs. The best way to convince anyone of anything is to hide that we formulated the idea ourselves and instead add copious footnotes showing we got it from someone with a prestigious name and long publishing record. This readiness to submit to outside expertise has its merits, but the background impulse automatically to mine the ideas of others before asking ourselves what we think is ruinous in its own way. It leads to stagnation, conformity, and a woeful number of minds with their riches untapped. Not all good ideas have yet been had, and our minds are as good a place as any in which they might one day hatch. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne was especially irked by this tendency to underrate our own minds. He objected to the habit of manically footnoting and quoting others: "Whenever I ask an acquaintance to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of scab and arse." In Pisa, Montaigne met a man who believed that "the touchstone and measuring-scale of all sound ideas and each truth must lie in conformity with the teachings of Aristotle, outside of which all is inane and chimerical." Montaigne was criticizing the impulse to think that truth must always lie far from us, in another climate, in an ancient library, in books of people who lived long ago. He wanted to point us to an unexpected source of wisdom: our own craniums. If we attend properly to our ideas and consider ourselves plausible candidates for a thinking life, it is open to all of us to arrive at insights no less profound than those in great ancient books. To practice independent thinking, imagine that the truth does not lie outside of you. Put aside external authorities and ask yourself what you think. Stay faithful to what you have felt and believe that it is within your capacity to know. Learn to catch your unthought thoughts and examine - as Montaigne might say - your own experiences directly. The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this idea perfectly: "In the minds of geniuses, we find - once more - our own neglected thoughts." The genius doesn't have different kinds of thoughts from the rest of us; they simply take them more seriously. We ourselves often have sketchy, hesitant versions of their ideas, which is why their works can have such a distinct impression on us. Their ideas feel surprising yet obvious once pointed out. Genius can be defined as paying closer attention to our real thoughts and feelings and being brave enough to hold onto them even when they find no immediate echo in the world.

Chapter 4: Focused Thinking: Moving from Vagueness to Precision

A central problem of our minds is that they tend to throw out thoughts that are vague. They aren't wrong so much as imprecise - which means we don't have a secure handle on what we truly feel or want and are unable to steer our lives to accurate and satisfying destinations. The mind likes to point in general terms to sensations and wishes without delving into their specific characters. When we are young and thinking about what sort of job we'd like to do, what may come to mind is that it should be "creative" or involve "working with people." When we reflect on what's missing from our lives, we might point out a lack of "fun." Someone might ask how we found a recent restaurant meal and we might capture our impressions with the term "brilliant." Such accounts aren't false, but they lack the specificity required to properly understand ourselves and our situation. The first person to spot this arduousness, and to pioneer focused thinking, was the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. He became famous in Athens for standing around the marketplace asking what seemed like simple questions about what his fellow citizens were trying to achieve with their lives. They would tell him with great confidence that they cared about "justice" or admired "courage" or were keen on "beauty." Socrates would respond by asking what they meant by these terms. After a few minutes of discussion, it would always turn out that they couldn't say clearly what they meant. Socrates was getting at something fundamental: we go around feeling that our thoughts are clear, but if we submit them to further questioning, we realize they suffer from grave vagueness. However, there is no inner warning system to alert us to this; no intellectual alarm in our brains to shout "watch out, you're being vague!" We don't easily realize how out of focus our minds are and how at risk we will be of hitting reefs and shallows. To practice focused thinking, consider what you find exciting, desirable, beautiful, or regrettable. Note how your first answers are large and general - not so much wrong as vague, pointing to the general area without touching on live details. Circle the vagueness and chip away at it with further questions: What do you really mean? What is this unlike? When have you felt this before? How might you put this in different terms? The difference between vagueness and focus is what separates great from mediocre art. Marcel Proust objected to his friend's novel not because the descriptions were false but because they were superficial articulations of good ideas. A talented artist takes us into the specifics of valuable experiences. They don't merely tell us that spring is "nice"; they zero in on particular contributing factors: leaves with the softness of a newborn's hands, the contrast between warm sun and sharp breeze, the plaintive cry of baby blackbirds. What marks out good thinking is that it is precise. We start with ore and end up with refined metal. We start with a block of stone and end up with a sculpture. By moving from woolly first impressions to authentic details, we give ourselves the best chance of reaching what we actually seek.

Chapter 5: Empathetic Thinking: Understanding Others Through Yourself

We're often in a position of needing to know what is happening in the minds of other people, whose thoughts and feelings we don't have direct access to. At work, we may have to imagine what our customers would like to buy more of; as a host, we may have to guess what our friends would like to eat or talk about; as a parent, we may have to picture what is happening in the mind of a pre-verbal child. We tend to label the psychological capacity that allows us to penetrate the minds of other people as empathy. It's typically assumed that the principal enemy of empathy is the ego; that what stops us from being able to read other people properly is self-centeredness and self-absorption. To nurture a more empathetic mindset, we should put ourselves aside, forget our ingrained way of seeing things, and dissolve our habitual narcissism. The great enemy of understanding other people in this account is our excessive focus on ourselves. However initially persuasive this thesis feels, it fails to diagnose what empathy truly involves. The way properly to enter the mind of another person is not to forget about oneself entirely; rather, it is to use one's knowledge of oneself to penetrate the consciousness of another. The best way to unearth the secrets of complete strangers is to look honestly into our own hearts. What goes wrong in many attempts to read other people isn't that we're too focused on ourselves, but that we aren't bringing enough of our own experience to bear on another's unstated thoughts and feelings. We routinely end up displeasing or misreading others because we forget to apply our sense of what we want, feel, desire or worry about to a given situation. We imagine that other people are more alien than they actually are. When entertaining, for example, we often panic about what might please our guests. We imagine we need to serve something fancy and rifle through cookery books we'd never use for ourselves. We forget to tap into the most powerful resource we have for serving a pleasing meal: our existing knowledge of what gives us pleasure when we're alone and peckish. Out of misdirected modesty, we cook a weird meat dish in an over-rich sauce when we might all have been happier with fried eggs, toast, and ice cream. Becoming more empathetic will often involve going into the less familiar and sometimes less easy to accept parts of our own minds. The task of empathizing with a thief, for example, can involve recognizing our more expedient and compromised sides. Empathizing with an unfaithful person will mean accepting our own buried promiscuous desires. The unempathetic person isn't usually selfish so much as not fully alive to the darker, more weird recesses of themselves. Other people are always likely to be more like you than like the alien, unfamiliar, puzzling people they appear. In the absence of clear evidence, imagine that the other echoes your needs, fears, hopes, and doubts. Use yourself as a guide to unlock the secrets of others. The opposite of empathy isn't just thinking of yourself; it's thinking of yourself in limited ways. Understanding other minds will always be a hurdle, but we make it harder than necessary when we forget that the clearest guide to the secrets and psychology of strangers is that most unexpected source: ourselves.

Chapter 6: Sceptical Thinking: Embracing Doubt as a Pathway to Wisdom

One of the stranger moves we all have to practice if we are to learn to think effectively is more regularly to imagine that we might be wrong. The good thinker is, to a large extent, first and foremost a skeptic. Skepticism began as a polemical philosophical movement in ancient Greece in the 4th century BCE (named after the Greek word skepsis, meaning questioning or examination). It concentrated on showing how unreliable our minds could be, in both large and small ways. Pyrrho, the plain-speaking founder of the skeptical movement, liked to point out that the average pig is cleverer, sharper, kinder, and happier than its human counterpart. The skeptics identified a range of cognitive malfunctions and blind spots that afflict our species. We are notoriously bad judges of distances, they argued, wildly misreading how far away a distant island or mountain might be. Our sense of time is highly inaccurate, influenced chiefly by the novelty or familiarity of what happens rather than by its strict chronological duration. Our sexual drives wreak havoc on our sense of priorities. For the skeptics, understanding that we may be repeatedly hoodwinked by our own minds is the start of the only type of intelligence of which we are ever capable. We take the first steps towards effective intelligence by determining some of the ways in which our minds deny, lie, evade, forget, obsess and steer us toward goals that won't deliver the satisfaction we initially expect. Part of thinking effectively is knowing the likelihood that we might not be thinking well and so proceeding with humility and an appreciation of our mind's characteristic tricks: this mind may be tired but unaware that it is so; it may be under the sway of emotion but certain it is calm; it may be judging a situation in the present according to a bias unconsciously picked up in childhood. A commitment to skepticism will affect how we behave around others. The non-skeptical person has a high degree of faith in their ability to judge relatively quickly and for the long term what is right and wrong about a given situation. This is what gives them the energy to get angry with what strikes them as rank stupidity, or to blow up bridges with people they've become vexed with, or to state a disagreement emphatically. The skeptical person has learned to be careful on all these fronts. They are conscious that what they feel strongly about today might not be what they think next week. They recognize that ideas that sound strange or misguided can be attempts to state concepts that are genuinely important to other people and that they themselves may come around to with time. They see their own minds as having great capacities for error and as being subject to imperceptible moods that will mislead them. To practice skeptical thinking, imagine always and sincerely that everything you believe to be right might be wrong. Sleep on decisions; never be too certain; distrust your own mind. Stay alive to the momentous impact of low blood sugar on any idea. Build a broad margin of error into every thinking move you make. The skeptical person will be drawn to deploying softening, tentative language and holding back on criticism wherever possible. They will suggest that an idea might not be quite right. They will say that a project is attractive but that it could be interesting to look at alternatives as well. They will consider that an intellectual opponent may well have a point. Their behavior is symptomatic of a nuanced and intelligent belief that few ideas are totally without merit, no proposals are completely wrong, and almost no one is entirely foolish. We will have learned to be good skeptics, and better thinkers, when we always maintain a position of doubt with regards to the troubling and devilishly unreliable tool with which we're trying so hard to think well.

Summary

The journey to mastering effective thinking is not about acquiring more information but about developing a more conscious relationship with our own minds. Throughout these pages, we've explored various approaches that can help us think more strategically, cumulatively, independently, precisely, empathetically, and skeptically. Each approach offers a different pathway to accessing the best of our mental capabilities while avoiding the pitfalls that so often derail our thinking. As Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us, "In the minds of geniuses, we find - once more - our own neglected thoughts." The difference between ordinary and extraordinary thinking often lies not in having different thoughts but in how seriously we take the thoughts we already have. Begin today by setting aside time for strategic thinking about what truly matters in your life, keeping a notebook to capture your cumulative insights, trusting your own intelligence, pushing vague ideas toward precision, using self-knowledge to understand others, and maintaining a healthy skepticism about your own certainties. In doing so, you'll be well on your way to harvesting rather than sporadically foraging your most satisfying and necessary thoughts.

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The School of Life

The School of Life is a global organisation helping people lead more fulfilled lives. We believe that the journey to finding fulfilment begins with self-knowledge. It is only when we have a sense of who we really are that we can make reliable decisions, particularly around love and work.Sadly, tools and techniques for developing self-knowledge and finding fulfilment are hard to find – they’re not taught in schools, in universities, or in workplaces. Too many of us go through life without ever really understanding what’s going on in the recesses of our minds.That’s why we created The School of Life; a resource for helping us understand ourselves, for improving our relationships, our careers and our social lives - as well as for helping us find calm and get more out of our leisure hours. We do this through films, workshops, books and gifts - as well as through a warm and supportive community.

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