Think

Conceptual thinking: this is basically learning to find patterns and connections between abstract ideas so that you can form a whole picture.

Critical thinking is when you objectively analyze a situation or information by gathering lots of information and facts from different sources. Then you evaluate the situation based on the information you’ve gathered.

This basically means not taking things based on assumptions, not assuming that someone knows what they are talking about, and investigating things for yourself.
You will also need to understand how your own biases and perspectives color things, as well as what biases and perspectives other people present. You will have to challenge the assumptions you make based on your world view.

Thinking fundamentals:

Challenge assumptions
Develop curiosity
Seek the truth
Find creative solutions

Synthesize new ideas constantly
Learn how to learn
Work backward from your goal
Always have a long-term plan
Make contingency maps
Collaborate
Make your mistakes quickly
Write up best-practices protocols
Document everything obsessively
Keep it simple

Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems. Of course, power plays a role in history, as does economics. But the same can be said of jealousy, love, hunger, sex, cooperation, revelation, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety, religion, compassion, disease, technology, hatred, and chance — none of which can definitely be reduced to another. The attraction of doing so is, however, obvious: simplicity, ease, and the illusion of mastery — and, let us not forget, the frequent discovery of a villain, or set of villains, upon which the hidden motivations of the ideology can be vented.

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

The greatest gift that teachers and mentors can give their students is the gift of freedom to think. Do not constrain their minds nor constrict their hearts. Remember that we are students and teachers at the same time. Asking question is harder than giving answers. When we think within the box, we demonstrate competence. When we think outside the box, we explore the unknown. It requires courage to do so.

Many of our examples suggest that clarity and excellent in thinking is very much like clarity and excellence in the display of data. When principle of design replicate principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight.

None of this means, however, that a business or stock is an intelligent purchase simply because it is unpopular; a contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What’s required is thinking rather than polling. Unfortunately, Bertrand Russell’s observation about life in general applies with unusual forces in the financial world: “Most men would rather die than think. Many do.”

The biggest factor that contributes to a vulnerable identity is “all-or-nothing” thinking: I’m either competent or incompetent, good or evil, worthy of love or not.

The primary peril of all-or-nothing thinking is that it leaves our identity extremely unstable, making us hypersensitive to feedback. When faced with negative information about ourselves, all-or-nothing thinking gives us only two choices for how to manage that information, both of which cause serious problems. Either we try to deny the information that is consistent with our self-image, or we do the opposite: we take in the information in a way that exaggerates its importance to a crippling degree.

Simplified paradigms or maps are indispensable for human thought and action. On the other hand, we may explicitly formulate theories or models and consciously use them to guide our behavior. Alternatively, we may deny the need for such guides and assume that we will act only in terms of specific “objective” facts, dealing with each case “on its merits.” If we assume this, however, we delude ourselves. For in the back of our minds are hidden assumptions, biases, and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality, what facts we look at, and how we judge their importance and merits. We need explicit or implicit models so as to be able to:

order and generalize about reality
understand causal relationships among phenomena
anticipate and, if we are lucky, predict future developments
distinguish what is important from what is unimportant
show us what paths we should take to achieve our goals

Failing these minitests appears to be, at least to some extent, a matter of insufficient motivation, not trying hard enough. These students can solve much more difficult problems when they are not tempted to accept a superficially plausible answer that comes readily to mind. The ease with which they are satisfied enough to stop thinking is rather troubling. “Lazy” is a harsh judgment about the self-monitoring of these young people and their System 2, but it does not seem to be unfair. Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions. Stanovich would call them more rational.

Characteristics of System 1:

Generate impressions, feelings, an inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions.
Operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control.
Can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search).
Executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training.
Creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory.
Links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance.
Distinguishes the surprising from the normal.
Infers and invents causes and intentions.
Neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt.
Is biased to believe and confirm.
Exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect).
Focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence.
Generates a limited set of basic assessments.
Represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate.
Matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness).
Computes more than intended (mental shotgun).
Sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics).
Is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory).
Overweights low probabilities.
Shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics).
Responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion).
Frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another.

The associative machinery seeks causes. The difficulty we have with statistical regularities is that they call for a different approach. Instead of focusing on how the event at hand came to be, the statistical view relates it to what could have happened instead. Nothing in particular caused it to be what it is — chance selected it from among its alternatives.

Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.

Under such moral and political conditions, it is not the sensitive, flexible, and versatile mind of the diplomat, but the rigid, relentless, and one-track mind of the military which guides the destiny of nations. The military mind knows nothing of persuasion, of compromise, and of threats of force which are meant to make the actual use of force unnecessary. He knows only of victory and defeat and of the concentration of a maximum of force at the enemy’s weakest point.

Nations must be willing to compromise on all issues that are not vital to them. Here diplomacy meets its most difficult task. For minds not be-clouded by the crusading zeal of a political religion and capable of viewing the national interests of both sides with objectivity, the delimitation of these vital interests should not prove too difficult. Compromise on secondary issues is a different matter. Here the task is not to separate and define interests, which by their very nature already tend toward separation and definition, but to keep in balance interests which touch each other at many points and may be intertwined beyond the possibility of separation. It is an immense task to allow the other side a certain influence in those interjacent spaces without allowing them to be absorbed into the orbit of the other side. It is hardly a less immense task to keep the other side’s influence as small as possible in the region close to one’s own security zone without absorbing those regions into one’s own orbit. For the performance of these tasks no formula stands ready for automatic application. It is only through a continuous process of adaptation, supported both by firmness and self-restraint, that compromise on secondary issues can be made to work.

In the process we had to learn the painful lesson that events can be dominated only by those with a clear set of goals. A nation gets no awards for confusion masquerading as moderation. For the adversary may mistake goodwill for acquiescence and confuse restraint with weakness. Hey may be genuinely surprised — indeed, feel tricked — when after much travail we finally and grudgingly turn to the defense of our interests. The result is a crisis.

I tried to keep track of what one moderately technical person [myself] actually did during the hours he regarded as devoted to work. About 85% of my “thinking” time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it. Throughout the period I examined, in short, my “thinking” time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight.

The risk of rash decisions lies not there but in ad hoc meetings in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, or the personal offices of Cabinet members. There the danger is real that plausibility is confused with truth and verbal fluency overwhelms cool analysis. It is there that in the absence of staff work, decisions may be made which the facts do not support, where individual talk to impress and not to elucidate at a time when precision is crucial. The temptation there is much greater than in the Situation Room to allow a fleeting and superficial consensus to ratify unexamined assumptions. There are the simultaneous risks of paralysis and recklessness. Principals cannot really know the consequences of their recommendations unless those recommendations have been translated into specific operational terms.

Rather than sketching away until things take shape, train your brain to create the image in your mind first. This involves sort of tuning out of reality and placing your attention in your visual imagination.

Trying to think. Tough task thinking. Please do not disturb.

Much of the arduous work of technology development involves solitary concentration and happens inside people’s heads. It was not only tough to think, but difficult to get away from the constant interruptions of daily work life that we now call multitasking.

Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them… Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I’ve written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.

The most difficult thing is to carve out time to think, which is probably the most important time for somebody who’s trying to shift an organization, or in this case, the country, as opposed to doing the same things that have been done before. And I find time slips away.

I like to do my high-IQ meetings before lunch. Like, anything that’s going to be really mentally challenging, that’s a 10:00 meeting. Because by 5pm, I’m like I can’t think about that today, let’s try this again tomorrow at 10am.

I create a firewall with technology, by the way, in that I try to exercise and think before I read. Because if I read, it throws me off, it’s distracting. I’m immediately thinking about usually someone else’s thoughts instead of my own. I like being alone with my own thoughts, and it gives me an opportunity to not just replenish but to organize, and it’s important.

Steve was preoccupied with the nature and quality of his own thinking. He expected so much of himself and worked hard to think with a rare vitality, elegance and discipline. His rigor and tenacity set a dizzyingly high bar. When he could not think satisfactorily he would complain in the same way I would complain about my knees.

To explore / understand / explain dynamic flowing information, stop-action images adjacent in space are helpful — and often better than continuous video, where the quick pace and high autocorrelation blurs analytical thinking.

Chúng ta không thể suy nghĩ mà không có hình ảnh. Làm thế nào người An Nam có thể rút ra những ý tưởng cụ thể và đa dạng từ những hình ảnh hiếm hoi và không nhất quán?

5 thinking styles:

Synthesists tend to enjoy conflict (they like to “play devil’s advocate”) and they tend towards asking “what if” type of questions. However, they use that conflict to fuel their own creativity and can often do better seeing the whole picture.
Ideaists more often look at the whole of a picture rather than just one component. They tend to be more interested in people and feelings than facts and numbers, and they prefer to think and plan for the future.
Pragmatists are the type that prefer to do “whatever works.” They do well with quick thinking and short term planning and are usually creative and quite adaptable to change. Sometimes they seem to do things “on the fly” without any sort of planning whatsoever.
Analysts tend to try to break down problems into their specific components rather than dealing with it as a whole. They make lists and organize things and use lots of detail, so that their lives and problems remain orderly.
Realists are no-nonsense. They ask hard questions and tends to do whatever is required to solve a problem. They have a good grasp on the problem at hand and the tools with which they can solve it. They also tend to be more aware of what their limitations are. Most people have at least some measure of realist in them.

A habit is at work when users feel a tad bored and instantly open Twitter. They feel a pang of loneliness and before rational thought occurs, they are scrolling through their FB feeds. A question comes to mind and before searching their brains, they query Google. The first-to-mind solution wins.

One continual weakness of American “social science” has been its assumption that a mere enumeration of a plurality of causes is the wise and scientific way of going about understanding modern society. Of course it is nothing of the sort: it is a past-pot eclecticism which avoids the real task of social analysis: that task is to go beyond a mere enumeration of all the facts that might conceivably be involved and weigh each of them in such a way as to understand how they fit together, how they form a model of what it is you are trying to understand.

The good policy paper laid out the issue and then provided a lot of good detailed background and technical background and political background and then it stated assumptions and stated goals so that if people quibbled about those assumptions or goals you could have a debate. But at least you knew where the rest of the paper was coming from — it was coming from a certain set of assumptions. There was always a good intelligence tab or appendix that provided all the data that the intelligence community knew. And then there were options, and under each of the options there was either a pro-con list or a list of evaluative criteria to evaluate each of the options on the same set of criteria: how would the allies react, how would the Congress react, would the Russians agree to it, how would it get us to our goals, and how close it would get us to our goals. And it was all very transparent. You could see the flow of thought.

The best way to improve your ability to think is to actually spend time thinking.

Your decisions do the talking for your thinking.

You can’t simply take a few minutes here and there, get the gist of the problem, and expect to make good decisions.

“It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise.”

One heuristic to tell how good someone is at making decisions is by how much time they have. The busiest people are often the ones who make the worst decisions. Busy people spend a lot of time correcting poor decisions. And because they’re so busy correcting past decisions, they don’t have time to make good decisions.

Good decision makers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time.

If you want to think better, schedule time to think and hone your understanding of the problem.

Rationalist decision makers simply need to know much more than ever before. Of course, with computers our capacity to collect and to semi-process information has grown, but information is not the same as knowledge. The production of knowledge is analogous to the manufacture of any other product. We begin with the raw material of facts (of which we often have a more than adequate supply). We pretreat these by means of classification, tabulation, summary, and so on, and then proceed to the assembly of correlations and comparisons. But the final product, conclusions, does not simply roll off the production line. Indeed, without powerful overarching explanatory schemes (or theories), whatever knowledge there is in the mountain of data we daily amass is often invisible.

The purpose of our sensations and related powers of imagination, Descartes ultimately concludes, is not to show our souls the true natures of things as they are in themselves (that job is reserved for the intellect); rather, sensations serve the interests of the body and soul taken together. Sensations like hunger, pain, scent, and color help to ensure our bodily survival, which is itself something that a benevolent God could, of course, have wanted to protect. We can avoid being misled by our sensations if we keep in mind that they are not designed to show the true nature of things; rather, their deliverances need to be checked against and interpreted in the light of our clear and distinct ideas. We can separate dreams from walking life by observing the consistency and coherence of what we really experience, reassured by the thought that a benevolent God would not have left us trapped in a lifelong dream. Knowledge is possible when we coordinate our mental powers carefully, subjecting our confused sensations to the discipline of our innate rationality.

The fact that thought represents objects in a “disengaged” and “stimulus-independent” manner allows us to think about objects in their absence. We can think about events that have not yet occurred and we can think about events that will never occur; indeed, we can think about events that could never occur. This capacity allows us to anticipate the consequences of certain events in advance of their happening and to prepare for them. If the anticipated consequences of an event are positive then one might attempt to bring it about; and if those consequences are negative then one can take steps to prevent it from occurring. Thus, a creature with the capacity for thought can control its environment in a way that a creature that is reliant only on perception cannot.

The brain has muscles of thinking as the legs have muscles for walking.

The presence of number words in a society can have a profound impact on the mathematical capacities of its members, but words are not the only tools that extend the reach of thought, for human thought is scaffolded in many ways. Thought is scaffolded by culturally transmitted practices, such as the habit of using one’s fingers to enumerate the members of a set, or the practice of remembering a list by imaginatively placing each of its members in a separate room of one’s house. Thought is scaffolded by social institutions, such as schools, scientific communities, and publishing houses. And thought is scaffolded by artefacts of various kinds, such as the sextant, the slide rule, and the smartphone. Thus, even if the basic cognitive capacities of human beings are fundamentally unchanged from one setting to another, the thoughts that are readily available to the members of one society may differ in radical ways from those of another society, for the regions of cognitive space that are accessible to a person depend not only on their basic cognitive capacities but also on the ways in which those capacities are scaffolded, and the scaffolds of thoughts are not everywhere the shame.

Suppose that I ask you why democracies tend not to wage war against other democracies. If you have not already considered this question, you may need to think about it. What precisely does that involve? Well, if your experience is anything like mine, you put the question to yourself and wait for something to come to mind. Sometimes nothing much comes to mind and the question sits there unanswered; on other occasion, one’s unconscious comes up with something intelligible. Either way, there is no algorithm or recipe that one can consciously follow in order to generate the required thoughts.

On the whole, thinking does not seem to extend much beyond putting questions to oneself and waiting for the unconscious to get around to answering them. The role of consciousness in such cases seems to be restricted to that of a minder charged with ensuring that one’s mind does not wander off topic.

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

The greater part of our intellectual activity goes on unconsciously, and unfelt by us; conscious thinking is the weakest. Because instinct is the direct operation of the will to power, undisturbed by consciousness, instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered. Indeed, the role of consciousness has been senselessly overestimated; consciousness may be regarded as secondary, almost as indifferent and superfluous, probably destined to disappear and to be superseded by perfect automatism.

In strong men there is very little attempt to conceal desire under the cover of reason; their simple argument is, “I will.”

Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work harder to get your thinking clean.

It requires a sense of proportion; it thrives on a feeling for style. All these intangibles are negated where problems become isolated cases each of which is disposed on its “merits” by experts in the particular difficulties it involves. It is as if in commissioning a painting, a patron would ask one artist to draw the face, another the body, another the hands and still another the feet simply because each artist is particularly good in this particular category. Such a procedure would be thought ludicrous. In stressing the components it would lose the meaning of the whole. It is not different with policy. To attempt to conduct policy as a science leads to rigidity. It wastes intelligence on non-essentials.

On those walks, when we were away from the office interruptions, we did our thinking, talking, and planning together.

My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place had taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress.

Self-consciousness is thinking about our experience. To think about something implies a quality of separation, in the same way that looking at something requires some separation between observer and object.

Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.

He has one goal: to have a head as clear as water. For this, you don’t need to have your whole life sorted into tidy compartments. But it does mean that you need a detailed plan for dealing with the messier areas. This plan must be divided into step-by-step tasks and preferably written down. Only when this is done can your mind rest. The adjective “detailed” is important. “Organize my wife’s birthday party” or “find a new job” are worthless. Allen forces his client to split such projects into 20 to 50 individual tasks.

It’s worth noting that Allen’s recommendation seems to fly in the face of the planning fallacy: the more detailed our planning, the more we tend to overlook factors from the periphery that will derail our projects. But here is the rub: if you want peace of mind, go for Allen’s approach. If you want the most accurate estimate on cost, benefit, and duration of a project, forget your detailed plan and look up similar projects. If you want both, do both.

Here is Plato’s analogy: a rider steers wildly galloping horses; the rider signifies reasons and the galloping horses embody emotions. Reason tames feelings. If this fails, irrationality runs free.

Thought is creative. You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are. As you systematically and deliberately change your thinking about yourself, your outer reality changes to conform with it. Your thoughts create your life, including and especially your thoughts with regard to your feelings of self-confidence.

You inevitably attract into your life the people, ideas, circumstances and opportunities that are in harmony with your dominant thoughts. You attract whatever is consistent with what you are thinking about most of the time.

Not only have you made yourself into the person you are today, but you are continuing with the job of construction with every thought you think. Because this is an unavoidable fact of life, the smartest thing that you can do is to persistently think the thoughts that are consistent with the kind of person you would like to be.

As in chess, American global planners must think several moves ahead, anticipating possible countermoves. A sustainable geostrategy must therefore distinguish between the short-run perspective (the next five or so years), the middle term (up to twenty or so years), and the long run (beyond twenty years). Moreover, these phases must be viewed not as watertight compartments but as part of a continuum. The first phase must gradually and consistently lead into the second — indeed, be deliberately pointed toward it — and the second must then lead subsequently into the third.

About the only thing that constant human contact cannot facilitate is thought. The weight of society’s pressure to conform, and the lack of distance from other people, can make it impossible to think clearly about what is going on around you. As a temporary recourse, then, isolation can help you to gain perspective. Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think. Machiavelli could write The Prince only once he found himself in exile and isolated on a farm far from the political intrigues of Florence.

The danger is, however, that this kind of isolation will sire all kinds of strange and perverted ideas. You may gain perspective on the larger picture, but you lose a sense of your own smallness and limitations. Also, the more isolated you are, the harder it is to break out of your isolation when you choose to — it sinks you deep into quicksand without you noticing. If you need time to think, then, choose isolation only as a last resort, and only in small dose. Be careful to keep your way back into society open.

Because most people are too imprisoned in the moment to plan with this kind of foresight, the ability to ignore immediate dangers and pleasures translates into power. It is the power of being able to overcome the natural human tendency to react to things as they happen, and instead to train oneself to step back, imagining the larger things taking shape beyond one’s immediate vision. Most people believe that they are in fact aware of the future, that they are planning and thinking ahead. They are usually deluded: What they are really doing is succumbing to their desires, to what they want the future to be. Their plans are vague, based on their imaginations rather than their reality. They may believe they are thinking all they way to the end, but they are really only focusing on the happy ending, and deluding themselves by the strength of their desire.

Slowing time down will give you a perspective on the times you live in, letting you take a certain distance and putting you in a less emotionally charged position to see the shapes of things to come. Hurriers will often mistake surface phenomena for a real trend, seeing only what they want to see. How much better to see what is really happening, even if it is unpleasant or makes your task harder.

Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often discount it. Politicians, generals and scholars treat the world as a great chess game, where every move follows careful rational calculations. This is correct up to a point. Few leaders in history have been mad in the narrow sense of the word, moving pawns and knights at random. General Tojo, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il had rational reasons for every move they played. The problem is that the world is far more complicated than a chessboard, and human rationality is not up to the task of really understanding it. Hence even rational leaders frequently end up doing very stupid things.

Many a serious thinker has been produced in prison where we have nothing to do but think.

Brains love control. It’s their heaven. They’re constantly battling to get there.

“Recognize” refers to the act of perceiving or identifying something or someone as familiar or known. It involves the ability to associate sensory information or patterns with stored knowledge or memory. Recognition often occurs when something is encountered again, and there is a sense of familiarity or recollection.

On the other hand, “think” refers to the process of mental deliberation, reasoning, or forming thoughts and opinions. Thinking involves higher cognitive processes such as analysis, evaluation, judgment, problem-solving, and decision-making. It encompasses the ability to contemplate, reflect, imagine, and engage in abstract or logical thought processes.

Thinking can occur in various contexts, such as considering different options, weighing pros and cons, generating ideas, forming beliefs or attitudes, and engaging in critical or creative thinking. It is an active mental process that involves conscious thought and mental engagement.

While recognition often involves a quick and automatic process of associating stimuli with stored information, thinking is a more deliberate and intentional cognitive activity that involves deeper reflection and analysis.

In summary, “recognize” pertains to perceiving or identifying something as familiar based on previous experience or memory, while “think” involves deliberate mental activity, reasoning, and processing of information to form thoughts, opinions, or solutions.

Intuition is an essential aspect of human cognition and decision-making, working alongside logical reasoning and analysis. It often complements and enhances our ability to navigate complex situations and make swift choices when faced with uncertainty. While intuition can be a valuable tool, it is essential to balance it with critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, especially in situations that require careful analysis and consideration of all available information.

Intuition can be developed and refined over time, particularly as individuals gain more experience and knowledge in specific domains. Many successful professionals, including artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs, attribute some of their most profound insights and breakthroughs to intuitive thinking.

At the core of everything is text, because it is the closest to thinking.

Đó là công việc kiên nhẫn và tỉ mỉ nhưng khuyết đi ý thức phê phán, thiếu đi trí tưởng tượng sáng tạo và tinh thần khoa học. Đối với họ, trí nhớ là tất cả trí thông minh; khoa học chỉ là uyên bác, triết học chỉ là thể thức.

The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, deep, sustained reasoning is difficult. Unaided memory, though, and reasoning are all limited in power. Human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities. How have we increased memory, thought and reasoning? By the invention of external aids: it is the things that make us smart. Some assistance comes through cooperative, social behavior: some arises through exploitation of the information present in the environment; and some comes through the development of tools of thought — cognitive artifacts — that complement abilities and strengthen mental powers.

A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

All fundamentalists think this way, not just terrorists and hipster. Religious fundamentalism, for example, allows no middle ground for hard questions: there are easy truths that children are expected to rattle off, and then there are the mysteries of God, which can’t be explained. In between — the zone of hard truths — lies heresy.

Social elites have the most freedom and ability to explore new thinking, but they seem to believe in secrets the least. Why search for a new secret if you can comfortably collect rents on everything that has already been done? Every fall, the deans at top law schools and business schools welcome the incoming class with the same implicit message: “You got into this elite institution. Your worries are over. You’re set for life.” But that’s probably the kind of thing that’s true only if you don’t believe in it.

When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.

Mental models refers to ingrained ways of thinking, which should be challenged so that individuals become aware of why they think in a particular way, and of the effect this has on behavior.

“Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”

Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.

Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

Born in France in 1596, Descartes received a traditional Jesuit education, steeped in the classical ideas of Aristotle and his medieval interpreters. When he was later exposed to the newly emerging ways of studying nature, he had second thoughts about what he had learned in school. His Meditations begins with the confession that he had swallowed a “large number of falsehoods” as a child. “I realized that it was necessary to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.”

Decks are easier to prepare than documents, however. Documents require coherence, thinking, sentences. But convenience in preparing decks harms the content and the audience. Optimizing presenter convenience is selfish, lazy, and worst of all, replaces thinking.

Almost all jobs during Rockefeller’s time required doing things with your hands. Few professions relied on a worker’s brain. You didn’t think; you labored, without interruption, and your work was visible and tangible.

That’s because a good portion of the trait we call confidence resides in the subconscious parts of the brain. Our subconscious is very susceptible to suggestion. That’s why advertising can be so effective. Your subconscious monitors all the thoughts you have about yourself, and it does so uncritically. If your conscious mind thinks, “I’m a very good salesman because people like me,” your subconscious doesn’t evaluate, deconstruct, or analyze. It simply records. It accommodates the input you’ve provided.

You can think of your self-image as an archive of all the thoughts you have ever had about yourself. However, all thoughts are not equally important. Recent thoughts are more influential than thoughts that occurred further in the past. Thoughts associated with powerful emotions are more memorable, and thus more influential, than thoughts to which you attached no emotion.

It’s important to keep your goals in mind as much as you can. Most New Year’s resolutions fall by the wayside when people lose sight of their goals. The conscious brain is engaged when we think about goals. The subconscious takes over when we stop thinking about them.

This means deciding which aspects of the system are most important, and being able to ignore the low-level details and think about the system only in terms of its most fundamental characteristics. This is the essence of abstraction (finding a simple way to think about a complex entity), and it’s also what you must do when writing higher-level comments.

Imagine that the mind is like a lake. When its surface is calm, reflections of trees, clouds, and birds can be seen clearly and in rich detail, as can whatever is in its depths. Quieting the mind is the first step in concentration.

Models are a way of seeing, and better seeing comes from better models.

Models summarize, show, and explain something relevant. Their purpose is to lead to consequential actions. Some models are better than others.

Do not go lazy into default models, justified by “we’ve always done it this way” — words that end thoughts, censor deviations, block searches for alternatives. Nonetheless, many conventions and standards have got it right, or at least good enough, but fresh seeing and attempted remodeling can confirm their continuing righteousness.

thinking annotates the world

fresh seeing challenges old conventions

A sure sign of trouble is an inability to write a paragraph explaining:

What the problem is.
Why it is relevant, why anyone should care.
What you’re going to do to solve the problem.

“Writing helps you organize your thoughts more clearly”: everyone and their grandmother know that! Writing a plan, writing a diary? People keep listing how transformative that’s been for them. I’m not proposing a new framework. I’m just saying - every movie has a scientist recording themselves on one of these shitty little cassette recorders. They might be onto something. Write notes of what you’re doing and what you’re thinking. When you drop the pen and get back at it, read the last bit. That’s it.

I’ve just been too lazy to ever do it. Or not necessarily lazy, but more: I didn’t trust the tool enough to think it was a good use of my time, and instead just mash on the keyboard till it works. After all, I’m writing pages of text, of which I will never read more than a fraction. But that’s not the point. The point is structure, and the point is caching.

The benefit of journaling is not just reentry, but that you begin to solidify the mental model into a concrete branching of possibilities that is tightly coupled to the specific problem. Your work becomes traversal and mutation of this tree. Several benefits accrue: you begin to see gaps in the tree, and can fill them in. You begin to have confidence in your mental model, recovering the time you used to spend going over the same nodes again and again in a haphazard way. In distributed systems in particular, the work is often detailed, manual, error prone and high latency - with a solid mental model you can get through a checklist of steps with minimum difficulty and high confidence that you didn’t miss anything. This ability to take something abstract and make it more concrete on the fly is a critical skill.

To become an effective strategist requires constant practice in strategic thinking. It is a daily discipline, not a resource that can be left dormant in normal times and tapped at will in an emergency.

You have to invest in your mind. It’s a muscle and it needs to be trained.

Thinking analytically is a skill like carpentry or driving a car. It can be taught, it can be learned, and it can improve with practice. But like like many other skills, it is not learned by siting in a classroom and being told how to do it. Analysts learn by doing.

Erroneous thinking:

Black and white thinking
Catastrophization
Cognitive bias
Cognitive distortion
Emotional reasoning
Exaggeration
Fallacies
Groupthink
Linguistic error
Magical thinking