<ul><li>Concrete thinking is closely related to experiences that can be directly observed. It involves everyday, tangible facts and physical objects. </li><li>On the other hand, abstract thinking is a higher-order reasoning skill. It deals with conceptual ideas, patterns, and theories. </li></ul>Another way to put it is that concrete thinking asks how whereas abstract thinking asks why.

The difference between concrete and abstract thinking

It is possible to improve your abstract reasoning skills.<ul><li>Reframe the question. Go from “how?” to “why?” in order to take a step-back and tap into your abstract reasoning skills</li><li>Look for patterns. Instead of looking at each concrete element in isolation, practice networked thinking to uncover abstract patterns and underlying dynamics in the relationship between those elements. </li><li>Take inspiration from abstract thinkers. Philosophers, artists, and scientists are great abstract thinkers. </li></ul>

Three concrete ways to practice abstract thinking

As with any powerful tool, abstract thinking can be a double-edged sword.<ul><li> First, abstract thinking without concrete thinking amounts to imagination without execution. Once you have figured out why an idea needs to see the light of day, you need to think about how you will make it happen. </li><li>It can also be dangerous for your mental health to always default to abstract thinking, especially when thinking about past events. Psychology researchers explain that “abstract rumination is characteristic of depressed individuals, as is the tendency to experience post-decisional regret.”</li></ul>

A balancing game

Abstract thinking is a higher-order reasoning skill which deals with conceptual ideas, patterns, and theories.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

philosophy

Philosophy

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

problemsolving

Problem Solving

The art and science of abstract thinking

Learned optimism is the concept that a positive mindset can be cultivated, even in those with pessimistic tendencies. Heavily influenced by psychologist Martin Seligman, learned optimism is part of the positive psychology movement. By learning how to cultivate positivity in everyday life, you can improve your productivity and your mental health.

Learned optimism

<ul><li>Permanence. A pessimist may ruminate during a negative time in their life and see the darkness as permanent. </li><li>Pervasiveness. The pervasiveness of pessimism leads a pessimist to believe that failure at work is evidence of, or will lead to, failure in all other aspects of life. </li><li>Personalization. A pessimist will see their successes as being due to something external to them, and disappointments as being solely their own responsibility.</li></ul>

The 3 P’s of pessimism

<ul><li>Learned optimism leads to higher motivation. With more motivation to succeed, optimists exert more effort to guarantee achievement, in contrast with pessimists who are more likely to give up.</li><li>Optimism can predict good health, better career success, and superior social relations. </li><li>An optimists’ expectation of positive outcomes leads to upbeat feelings. Conversely, when pessimists expect a poor outcome, it can cause negative feelings including anxiety, anger, or sadness.</li></ul>

The benefits of learned optimism

The ABCDE approach to go from learned helplessness to learned optimism:<ul><li>Adversity. Start by describing a recent experience of adversity. </li><li>Belief. Then, write down all the thoughts running through your mind while thinking about this adverse experience. </li><li>Consequence. Now, consider the impact of these beliefs on your feelings and on your behaviour. </li><li>Disputation. It’s time to put your beliefs into perspective.</li><li>Energization: Use the newfound energy from the disputation step to cultivate a more positive outlook on the challenge you are facing. </li></ul>

How to learn optimism

Are you a glass half full or half empty kind of person? Positive thinking can reap significant benefits. This is the power of learned optimism.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

Learned optimism: how to cultivate a talent for positive thinking

Take driving, for example. At first, you'll be nervous, but with deliberate practice guided by a tutor, you'll get better. When you reach a base level of competence and pass a test, you'll get your license and be on the road. But for years, you'd find you haven't really gotten better at driving. You only reached a base level of competence that will get you by and that's it. The same goes for writing. School teaches us how to write until we reach a certain level of competence. But we don't get better by practicing what we already know. And that's because we are hard-wired to avoid pain.

We learn a new skill just enough to become competent.

Getting better at something means we have to know what to improve on and work on that. But It's in our nature to avoid pain. And getting better at something sure sounds like it would require a lot from us.So we resort to practicing what we already know, shying away from what we don't know that would make us be better.

We are hardwired to avoid pain.

So instead of practicing what you already know, you'd be practicing on areas you need to improve. But to do that:<ul><li> You first need to switch your perspective and see yourself through the eyes of others. This would help you recognize the areas you need to improve on.</li><li>Set aside dedicated time to work on the specific area you need to improve on.</li><li>You need feedback. Feedback from an expert, for example, will help you gauge your improvement because they know what the next level looks like. </li></ul>

But with deliberate practice, you get better.

habits

Habits

education

Learning & Education

timemanagement

Time Management

The Seductive Path of Good Enough

Tolkien is most famous for writing the Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings books, each of which is fantastic in it’s own right.However, there is a fair amount of wisdom in the pages of his writing, and some of it can be used to help us through different challenges and adversities in life.For many, good philosophy is practical philosophy, and the best practical philosophy are those concepts that transcend the situations in which they’re written and apply broadly across multiple areas of life.Here are some of the best quotes of Tolkien:

J. R. R. Tolkien

All that is gold does not glitter,Not all those who wander are lost;The old that is strong does not wither,Deep roots are not reached by the frost.From the ashes a fire shall be woken,A light from the shadows shall spring;Renewed shall be blade that was broken,The crownless again shall be king.

I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.

“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future."

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

The wise speak only of what they know

“Darkness must pass, a new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer."

“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater."

A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.

“Little by little, one travels far."

Courage is found in unlikely places.

J. R. R . Tolkien is famous for his books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Here are some of his best philosophical quotes

J.R.R. Tolkien Quotes - Philosophy For Life

<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Identifying the leadership roles needed to transform your company for the future. For your company to remain relevant, it will need distinct capabilities that allow it to deliver on its purpose, along with leaders who can envision its new place in the world and mobilize it to get there. What positions do you need on your executive team to make that happen? </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Assembling the right people. Having identified the roles your team needs, you next have to think about who will best fill them. Which individuals should you bring together so that you have the necessary talent and diversity in the C-suite </li></ol>

How (1/2)?

<ol><li>Focusing your leadership team on driving the company’s transformation.What structures and mechanisms will help you lead the company to its new destination? </li><li>Taking ownership of your leadership team’s behavior. Building the distinctive capabilities that will allow you to create real advantage requires a high degree of collaboration and a commitment to developing a team mentality so that the disparate parts of your organization operate as a harmonious whole. How can you build trust and a culture that powers the organization’s collective success?</li></ol>

How (2/2)

<ol><li>Look for people with varied experiences, who have worked within different ecosystems and understand the capabilities, technologies, channels, and transformational approaches you will be deploying. </li><li>You want leaders who have demonstrated that they can build and scale up the capabilities you aim to perfect. </li><li>Your team should reflect the diverse voices of your total ecosystem—including the customers you seek to serve, your workforce, and your partners. Very likely, those voices will cover a range of gender identities; national, racial, and ethnic origins; abilities.</li></ol>

Details Steps!

We talk about the need to both perform and transform. If you only transform but don’t perform, you have no here and now. If you only perform but don’t transform, you have no future. Therefore, in our scorecards we measure both. In our reviews we talk about both. And the targets that I give to all my executives…always [include] some transform objectives.

The role of the leadership team does not stop with making big choices; senior executives must also see that their decisions are successfully implemented. That’s what the “strategic executor” leadership paradox is all about. Your top people will need to get their hands dirty working through the implementation details and making sure that the activities of disparate parts of the organization add up to a coherent whole.

Strategic Executor

<ol><li>How much of your time is spent running the day to-day versus shaping the future</li><li>How much of your time is spent reacting to what others in the organization bring to you, rather than driving the top team’s agenda? </li><li>How often do your strategic discussions lead you to make hard choices about your company’s future? </li><li>When your team spends time on strategy, do you focus on the external environment or the bold choices that your organization must make? </li><li>How much time do you spend reviewing actions after the fact versus proactively shaping actions and a direction? </li></ol>

How to tell is team is actually leading? (1/2)

<ol><li>How often do you ask people to come back with more-detailed proposals because your team doesn’t quite have the energy or the clear vision to be decisive? </li><li>How often do you spend time debating who is responsible for solving an issue rather than addressing it? </li><li>How often do you and other members of the leadership team work together on issues? </li><li>How well do you know your colleagues on the leadership team? </li><li>Do you get the feeling that they care about your success, and do you care about theirs?</li></ol>

How to tell is team is actually leading? (2/2)

Your organization’s future depends on getting this right.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

teamwork

Teamwork

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Reinventing Your Leadership Team

Research shows that comprehend and connect information best when we read physical pages. There are no distractions in physical pages, which e-reading and audiobooks inherently invite (there is nothing wrong with these modalities, but they are not the same as deep reading). Also, the brain retains information better when it’s associated with the tactile experience.

Use a hardcopy book

Even if the phone is facedown on silent, or laptop is closed and asleep, the mere sight of these devices and everything they represent — not to mention the willpower it takes not to check them — is a huge distraction.

Have no devices in the room

The more you engage with a book, the better. There is a big difference between passive reading (being read to) and active reading (being in conversation with). The latter promotes further absorption in the material and more associative thinking and subsequent creative insight. It's better to highlight the important lines or points while reading any book.

Read with a pen or highlighter

Even if you are fully engaged in what you are reading, random thoughts will pop into your mind: emails to write, groceries to get, conversations to have, ideas for your next big project, etc. Jot these thoughts down so you do not lose them but can offload your brain from trying to hang on to them.

Keep a notebook nearby

It takes time to get into a groove. There is nothing wrong with reading in the nooks and crannies of your day. Try to manage 30 minutes for reading from your schedule.

Read for at least 30 minutes

The ability to pay full attention and get absorbed in a book is built over time. It may be hard at first (especially if you are rusty), but it gets easier. Eventually, it becomes enjoyable. Be patient and stick to it. It’s worth it.

Think of deep reading as a muscle: You’ve got to train it

Books are the best bargain there is. There is no better place to get a rich distillation of insights and wisdom. The individuals whom people tend to deem wise and discerning all read a heck of a lot.

Read as much as you can 

Here are some principles about how to engage in reading. Pay attention to developing the reading habit, understanding the topics, and the enchantment of creative thinking.

Deep reading, or full engagement in a book, is an absolute joy. It is good for mind and spirit, and it is also a competitive advantage in today’s knowledge-based economy. Increasingly, people…

productivity

Productivity

writing

Reading & Writing

A Guide to Developing a Deep Reading Habit

<ul><li>The Feynman technique can be used to learn anything.</li><li>It was devised by the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman.</li><li>The idea is that when you can teach something in the simplest way possible, you will master it.</li></ul>

Feynman Technique

The goal of learning is to understand the world better. But more often than not, the way we learn doesn't help us to achieve this.You end up memorizing something exactly as it's written in a book or as the teacher explained it to you, so it doesn't take long for this knowledge to disappear.This is where the Feynman technique comes in.The idea is to make things simple enough for anyone to understand. In doing this, you can acquire a deep understanding of the topic you're studying.It includes 4 steps:

Need For Feynman Technique

Feynman's technique isn't limited to mathematics or physics. You can apply it to anything.

1. Choose a topic and start studying it

This step allows you to establish whether you've learned what you studied or you just thought you had.Explain the concept in your own words as if you were trying to teach it to a child.When you try to break things down into simple ideas with plainer vocabulary, you'll realize whether or not your knowledge of the subject is sufficient.This makes it easy to identify any gaps in your knowledge.

2. Explain the topic to a child

Only when you can explain the subject in simple terms will you understand it.This means the knowledge will stick with you and not disappear, as it can when you try to memorize something.Review your notes and study material for anything you still don't understand.Try to explain it to yourself in an easy way. If it's too difficult or if you have to use terms from a textbook, then you still haven't got it.

3. Go back to the study material when you get stuck

Don't stop until you can deliver a simple, natural explanation.Go back to steps two and three as many times as you need.It probably won't take as long as you think.

4. Organize and review

"You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman's  technique to learn and understand concepts deeply and easily includes 4 steps ; check them out

Richard Feynman thought simplicity was key to learning: you truly understand a topic when you can explain it in the simplest way possible.

strategy

Strategy

A Nobel Prize winner's simple technique for learning anything quickly and effectively

"All things are difficult before they are easy."

Doing what's right tells people that you care instead of when you always take the shortcuts.

Do what is right, not what is easy

How are you going to learn if you're the one that's talking? When you're a good listener you learn a lot more than you think you would.

Listen to learn

When you make a decision you should have a clear and conscious mind because that is when the best decisions are made.

Don't make decisions when you're in a bad mood

"One bad chapter doesn't mean your story is over"

You might think that life is fair and there are no problems but this mindset is what causes unhappiness because you are tricking yourself into thinking it's fair.

Life is good, but not fair

Advice to get tasks done

Although it is totally necessary at times to go through prescribed motions or instructions to get results- especially as a beginner- it is all the more satisfying to craft your own unique routine. The key to structuring your own routines is finding an intention- that is, a concrete goal or motivation- which you intend to fulfill. Being intentional helps us structure our actions towards our personal goals and values while helping us to avoid mindlessly sacrificing our time with nothing to show for it.

Intentionality Is King

Before you can set intentions, you must have values. Values tend to be less concrete than intentions, and they represent concepts closer to your core identity. For example, if you choose to value fitness or health, then you will have the drive or motivation to set intentions that provide or fulfill this value. Maybe, when going to work, you will set the intention to only use stairs instead of elevators. Alternatively, if you value learning, you may set an intention to read a book at night or read 3 deepstash articles each morning.

Intentions Begin With Values

Now that you have values, you may create intentions that maximize your ‘value fulfillment’ throughout your daily routines. These intentions always have an element of strategy that contains some sort of recipe towards fulfilling some specific intention.

Intentions Necessitate Strategy

Good strategy requires you to break down a routine into its components and then, using your intention, rearrange, modify, or augment the routine to better your outcome. Often, this takes form in identifying the tools of your craft. This could be breaking down an essay into an outline and asking yourself questions such as ‘what do I want to communicate?’ or ‘who is my target audience?’. The tools here are the questions. Or, it could be planning activities into your day, week, or year that help fulfill your value. The point is, good strategy necessitates planning at different levels of detail.

Good Strategists Work On Various Timescales

To fulfill your intentions and come up with new intentions to fulfill your ever-evolving values, you must exercise your creativity in order to optimize your strategies for success. By trial-and-error and systematic study, you will learn the best methods to plan and accomplish increasingly complex routines. I argue that this element of creativity combined with fulfilling your own original intentions is a recipe for a satisfying daily, weekly, or yearly routine. So long as you identify and focus on the elements that are under your control, you will live in harmony with your surroundings.

Intentionality Is Ultimately A Creative Endeavor

Simply going about ‘choosing values’ is a fool’s errand. Whether you are aware of them or not, you have values, and those values structure your decisions about which actions to take. If you are always eating takeout and watching TikTok, for example, you may overvalue instant gratification. Values are something we learn about ourselves and actively cultivate- they should be based on some a priori experimental data- that is, your direct experiences, emotions, and surest knowledge.Our emotions are flagposts for the quality of our values. What activities do you find intrinsically satisfying?

How Do We Craft Appropriate Values? 

Values are complicated. I will explore some pitfalls and better ways to explore your values as well as different strategy techniques in future posts!

More On Values 

Although these ideas are somewhat rough, I find that these concepts have been extremely useful! 

What makes life satisfying? 

We are all inevitably doomed to experience grief. Whether it’s a death, lost love, loss of a job, or any type of change in our diurnal lives. Grief, as described by a quick Google search is; a mental or emotional suffering or distress caused by loss or regret. That being said, there is no right or wrong way to grieve any sort of loss. Healing that comes after the storm is in all ways linear, with absolutely no time limit. We often hear about grief when a person passes, and we are left to carry the weight of their absence in our hands. But how do we grieve those who are still alive?

What They Don’t Tell You About Grieving A Person Who Is Alive 

The 5 stages of grief were first introduced in the late 60s by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross by publishing "On Death and Dying". Kübler summarized that there are typically 5 stages of grief that come after a death or in terminally ill patients. The 5 stages of grief as Kübler examined were: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This of course is not written in stone, we all go through our own stages of grief, staggered and at times not in order but it is a process that we all must endure. You too my friend, soon after the heartbreak will start on your journey to the 5 stages of grie

5 Stages Of Grief 

You will often hear, that getting up from bed and continuing on with your day will be the best thing you could do. This as a fact is true, aside from the many health benefits it offers, it creates a rise in serotonin which in moderate amounts, lifts up your mood. Before you can get up and walk towards the end of the rainbow and dance until there’s no tomorrow, you must accept and become one with your feelings. Cry if you have to, be angry, let your sadness consume you for as many days as it takes. You must feel a certain feeling in order to get past it.

Take Refuge In Your Bed 

In your healing journey, you will have to make sacrifices, often ones that hurt and are uncomfortable. The first step is becoming used to the feeling of change, adapting your thoughts to warp up and flex in all sorts of directions, even if your mind perceives it as a threat. Block them on Instagram, Facebook, block their number, realize that you cannot heal in the same environment that got you sick in. Sometimes a connection has to be severed in order for growth to happen.

Cut Off Contact Indefinitely 

When a relationship takes so much space in our lives, after it ends we often realize just how much we put ourselves last. This loss you have suffered will aid you in opening new doors, and healing properly will be your right hand man, that means allowing for your mind to love your body in all aspects.

Slowly Prioritize What You Were Putting Last 

There will be left over anger, sadness, and every ugly feeling that humans spend their entire lives avoiding. It’s important to sit and feel your anger, write it down, and use creative outlets as a way to express it.

Don’t Push Away Your Anger 

It’s actually a beautiful thing seeing the way your heart can recuperate from things you thought it could never come back from. Fall in love with the way that your chest doesn’t freeze when you hear their name. Fall in love with the freedom you feel when you retell the story and tears don’t fall from your face. Lastly, you are not alone in this journey, and surround yourself with people who will lift you up throughout the passage.

Finally, Fall In Love With Acceptance

How to mend a broken heart. 

Find  Self Improvement Tips - Curated from popular Books like Atomic Habits, 48 Rules of Power, Deep Work, Rich Dad Poor Dad and way more!