22. Novelist

• Tradespeople don’t get enough credit for having unique problem-solving tools and strategies. 
• Yet those professions often out-earn those with a college degree
• The essence of plumbing, just like many other trades, 
• is to get yo...

• Politics offers its own set of tools, politician may do a great job, and still get kicked out because of bad PR.
• Therefore the thinking tools possessed by politicians are about calculating 
• Not only the effect of some action but also on how that actio...

• Money is the blood of a business. 
• Accounting is the work that watches how it flows around, checking to make sure it isn’t getting clogged up.
• The idea of ratio analysis. for instance, is the debt th...

• Anthropology is the study of cultures.
• Unlike economics, which tends to focus on mathematical models, or psychology, which tends to do a lot of careful experiments, 
• A...

• Salespeople work to deeply understand what the customer actually needs,
• And then match them with products and services that fill that void. 
• This is incredibly hard to do, as you may recognize that you have the solution to a customer’s problem before...

• Architects need to design buildings. 
• These are large structures that may take years to build, 
• and has to meet all the criteria of clients, contractors, city planners and building codes.
• Oh, and they should also be beautiful.

• Programming encompasses a lot of thinking tools, but the most basic one is the algorithm. 
• Algorithms are a set of steps that can be defined precisely so that they require no intelligence

• The thinking tools of a mathematician depend on having a much higher standard of what constitutes proof of something. 
• While an engineer may tolerate precision within some bounds, and an entrepreneur may be satisfied with a hunch,

• A basic thinking tool of Scientists is the controlled experiment.
• Keep all the variables the same, except the one you want to test, and se...

• Journalists rely on a ton of different thinking tools which allow them to write compelling stories that report the news fairly and accurately.
• One of these thinking tools is fact-checking

• There are many thinking tools native to economics, but a foundational one is simple. 
• People respond to incentives.
• Tyler Cowen, the economist, delivers this best, explaining that a key element of econ...

• Chess has long been considered a game to improve one’s thinking. 
• There are plenty of thinking tools that can be mined from the game.
• One is the ability to simulate the game in your mind’s eye.
•  A common trick of grandmasters is playing

• Entrepreneurs often adopt a set of thinking tools that are often rare for normal professionals.
• One major tool is rapid prototyping. Many people see this as a product development strategy. 
• But in ...

• A useful tool here is how something is made suggests how to use it. 
• A well-designed door handle suggests push or pulls, without needing to say it. 
• A well-designed light switch should already tell you which rooms will be illuminated when you flip it.
• What if you desi...

• The discipline embodied by military personnel is a very useful thinking tool.
• By demanding conformity to those protocols, even when there is no danger, there is much less room for slip-ups.
• This kind of discipline is also present in another ...

• A popular thinking tool for acting is called method acting. 
• This technique involves trying to actually feel the emotions of the character you’re portraying, rather than just faking it.

one of the philosophers powerful tools is being able to see the unexpected consequences of stretching an idea to its limits.

This has two benefits.

1. it can reveal flaws in the original idea, by reductio...

• How do you create knowledge inside someone else’s mind? 
• Most of us take for granted how amazing teaching actually is, and our own ability to learn from it. 
• To be effective, teachers need to have a model of how their pupil's minds see the wo...

Many critics go beyond telling you which books to read and which movies to watch.

They build analysis, interpretation and discussion that goes well beyond the original work.

The thinking tools involved are quite important, even for people who don’t analyze li...

• Doctors meet patients who have an array of symptoms.
• From there, you need to act like a detective to deduce the most likely disease and create a plan to cure it.
• During this, a wrong move might kill your patient, so you hav...

• Most other professions are full of constraints upon one’s ideas. 
• Artists operate in a realm where most of these constraints are reduced,
•  so the bigger question is, “Why is this unique and interesting?”
•  Often the best companies produce things that look like art. 

• Psychology has different thinking tools embedded both in its assumptions about human nature, as well as in its methods for discovering it.
• On the subject of psychology itself, there are countless tools.
• Which can help you understand ...

• While your financial advisor can only throw darts at picking which stocks will rise, 
• And a psychologist can only give hints at what people will do, 
• Engineers routinely create things that don’t currently exist and need to work 100% of the time.
• The essence of doing t...