How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity (Work series)

by The School of Life

We are taught to obsess about passing exams: that is, trials marked by people who feel confident that they already know the existing truths and are merely checking whether we have learnt to submit to them too.

But genuine adult achievement relies on a capacity for originality and authenticity of thought.

Effective thinking isn’t about ‘working hard’ in any brute or rote sense; it is about learning to spot, defend, nurture and grow our fleeting, tentative periods of insight.

There is a fundamental distinction to be made between two kinds of thinking: figuring out what we would like to achieve, and working out how to achieve it. Put another way, there is a key difference between strategy on the one hand and execution on the other. Strategy is about determining our overall aims; execution comprises everything that follows once we’ve decided – the practical activities required to put our plans into action.

Our results can only be as good as the aims that first led to them.

We appear to have an innate energy for working through obstacles to our goals and an equally innate resistance to pausing to understand what these goals should rightly be.

Humanity is vastly better at engineering than philosophy: our planes are a good deal more impressive than our notions of what we should travel for; our abilities to communicate definitively outstrip our ideas of how to understand one another.

We are almost allergic to the large first-order enquiries: what are we ultimately trying to do here? What would best serve our happiness? Why should we bother? How is this aligned with real value?

We need a new collective sense of what hard work might involve and even what it might look like. It won’t necessarily be the person who runs from meeting to meeting or juggles international phone calls who is genuinely engaged in working hard; it might be the person sitting at the window, gazing out at the clouds, occasionally cupping their head in their hands and writing something down in a little notebook.

To think more effectively, we need to build ourselves monasteries of the mind.

The point is as basic as it is key: our minds do not disclose their more elaborate and best thoughts in one go.

Our misfortune is to look always at the final results of the thinking efforts of others, while knowing our own efforts primarily from the inside.

We are all incapable of bringing the best of ourselves to the fore in any compact span of time. No single moment offers us the opportunity to consider an idea with complete adequacy or from a sufficient number of angles.

We need time to pass so that we can return with a mindset imbued with multiple qualities.

In order to carry off any moderately complicated thinking task, we should understand that, at any single moment, we won’t have access to all the ideas we need. We’ll have to set down what we can, then wait and return with the distinctive intelligence of a new mood.

There seems to be a devilish correlation between how important and necessary a thought is to us and how likely it is to elude our command.

Great ideas may pass through our minds, yet, as Plato knew, it is another matter to persuade them to land.

The core reason why we can’t hold onto our bigger, more essential ideas is because, even though they are frequently crucial to our development, they also tend to induce intense anxiety.

Our world places a high premium on good ideas but spends tragically little time planning how best to line up our minds to generate them.

the background impulse automatically to mine the ideas of others before asking ourselves what we think is ruinous

ipsissima verba

the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our own; a life whether imperial or plebeian is always a life affected by everything that can happen to a person.

Just like Michelangelo’s stone, there are already all kinds of great thoughts in our heads: we merely need to liberate them from the inert block of our own hesitancy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82): In the minds of geniuses, we find – once more – our own neglected thoughts.

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but that they are superficial articulations of very good ones.

The more the artist moves from generalities to specifics, the more the scene comes alive in our minds.

What marks out good thinking is that it is precise. We start with ore; we should end up with a refined metal. We start with a block of stone; we should end up with a sculpture.

We are rarely without a sizeable backlog of worries, far greater than we tend consciously to recognise.

From small humiliations and slights, large blocks of resentment eventually form that render us unable to love or trust.

During a Philosophical Meditation, we can throw off our customary and reckless bravery and let our sadness take its natural, due shape. There may not be an immediate solution to many of our sorrows, but it helps immeasurably to know their contours.

Du musst dein Leben ändern

‘Mad’ thinking is not, as we might first suppose, at odds with reality; it is an imaginative mechanism for revealing less obvious but important possibilities in the real world.

it is by formulating visions of the future that we more clearly identify what it is we might be missing, and so need, and thus set the wheels of change in motion.

the good listener makes their own strategic confessions so as to set the record straight about the meaning of being a normal (that is, muddled and radically imperfect) human being. They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that being a bad parent, a poor lover or a confused worker are not malignant acts of wickedness, but ordinary features of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles.

reading provides us with the chance to unearth and put into focus what we happen to think.

Most valuably, we are privileged to disagree with a book, and are rewarded for doing so.

Assisted by the author’s ploughing of the intellectual landscape, our personal thoughts can germinate in authentic and vivid directions.

Our argument with the author powers our own reflections. By not saying what we quite wished to hear, the author brings us into newfound contact with what we actually believe and does us the service of releasing us from our intellectual under-confidence and languor.

envy, while uncomfortable, provides us with a message from confused but important parts of our personality about what we should be doing.

envy is a call to action.

we are each of us like a fountain, configured out of diverse, separate impulses, desires, attitudes and concerns that from a distance (seen by another person) give off an impression of being unified and coherent.

The grown-up world is painfully dishonest or at least edited, so it requires a leap of faith by us to dare to imagine that, despite evidence to the contrary, the most likely scenario is that the stranger will be like ourselves in most of the areas where it counts.

despite the beard or different skin colour or gender or degree of wealth or geographical origins, what we’re faced with is someone who is, first and foremost, a human like us.

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 we need to when we forget that the clearest guide to the secrets and psychology of strangers is that most unexpected source: ourselves.

The major obstacle to rigorous thinking is the feeling that we are immortal.

Love thinking accepts a remarkable, frightening and still-too-seldom-accepted possibility: that failure is not reserved for those who are ‘evil’.

One of the stranger moves we all have to practise 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 sceptic.

The instrument through which we interpret reality, our 1260 or so cubic centimetres of brain matter, has a treacherous proclivity for throwing out faulty readings.