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How to Think
If you want to think better...
- Become better at probing other people’s thinking. Ask questions. Simple ones are better. “Why” is the best.
- Slow down. Make sure you give yourself time to think.
- Probe yourself. Try and understand if you’re talking about something you really know something about or if you’re just regurgitating something you heard.
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Thinking is not IQ
We often make the mistake of thinking that people with high IQs think better. But it's not true. That's not the type of knowledge or brainpower that makes you better at life, happier, or more successful.
Principles for seeking wisdom
- Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.
- "I’m not smart enough to figure everything out myself, so I want to master the best of what other people have already figured out."
Mental models
They are a representation of an external reality inside your head.
Mental models are concerned with understanding knowledge about the world, they put knowledge in a usable form.
Focus on the big, simple ideas
When learning, we should focus on ideas that change slowly.
When we chase the latest thing, we’re really jumping into an arms race. Despite our intentions, learning in this way fails to take advantage of cumulative knowledge. We’re not adding, we’re only maintaining.
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Tools for Thinking Better
You don't need to master every detail of every subject to become a world-class thinker.
If you can master the fundamentals of each discipline, then you can develop a remarkably accurate and u...
Mental Models: Out of Box Thinking
Mental models are the various thinking frameworks that are used to understand life, make decisions, and solve problems.
Just raw intelligence is not enough to solve problems. A different or a broader set of mental models can provide a different view of the problem, leading to an unconventional, new solution not thought of before.
Mental Models: Examples
A mental model is an explanation of how something works. They are beliefs, worldviews or frameworks of thinking. You carry a certain kind of thinking in you to arrive at a solution to a problem.
Some examples:
- Demand and Supply: to understand the economy
- Game Theory: to understand trust and relationships
- Entropy: to understand disorder and decay
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Meta-Learning
It's knowing how to learn. Learning itself is a skill, and knowing how to do it well is an incredibly valuable advantage.
Merely acquiring information is not learning....
Learning has 2 phases
Learning is a two-step process:
- Read/listen: feeding ourselves new information.
- Process and recall what you’ve just ‘learned’: connecting new materials to what we already knew.
Remembering the right things
You should not waste your time by committing unimportant details to memory.
Your focus should be on understanding the bigger picture, on how things relate to each other.
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Think like Sherlock Holmes
“What Sherlock Holmes offers isn’t just a way of solving a crime. It is an entire way of thinking."
"Holmes provides... an education in improving our faculty of mindful thought...
Engagement
As it does so, we become less and less able to know or notice our own thought habits and more and more allow our minds to dictate our judgments and decisions, instead of the other way around.
Pitfalls of the Untrained Brain
Daniel Kahneman believes there are two systems for organizing and filtering knowledge:
- System one is real-time. This system makes judgments and decisions before our mental apparatus can consciously catch up.
- System two, on the other hand, is a slow process of thinking based on critical examination of evidence. Konnikova refers to these as System Watson and System Holmes.
To move from a System Watson- to a System Holmes-governed thinking takes mindfulness plus motivation.
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