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

by The School of Life

Even in daily life, raising strategic questions can feel tiresome and odd. To ask ‘what’s the point of doing this?’ is easy to mistake for a piece of provocative negativity. If we challenge our acquaintances with any degree of seriousness with questions such as: ‘What is a good holiday?’, ‘What is a relationship for?’, ‘What is a satisfying conversation?’ or ‘Why do we want money?’, we risk coming across as absurd and pretentious – as though such large questions were by definition unanswerable.

But, as Montaigne recognised, other people – even clever ones – will be silent on many important themes that circulate in our minds. If we allow existing thinkers to define the boundaries of our curiosity, we will needlessly hold back the development of our minds.

The thought is not easy. We are educated to associate virtue with submission to authorities rather than with an exploration of the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our perceptual mechanisms. Montaigne tried to return us to ourselves. We know how to say, ‘This is what Cicero said’; ‘This is morality for Plato’; ‘These are the ipsissima verba of Aristotle.’ But what have we got to say? What judgements do we make? What are we doing? A parrot could talk as well as we do.

It is only, proposed Montaigne, an intimidating scholarly culture that has made us doubt the rich insights of our own minds.

In the minds of geniuses, we find – once more – our own neglected thoughts.

We all have very similar and very able minds; where geniuses differ is in their more robust inclinations to study them properly.

The difference between vagueness and focus is what separates great from mediocre art.

During our meditative sessions, we need to give every so-called small anxiety a chance to be heard: what lends our worries their force is not so much that we have them but that we don’t allow ourselves the time to know, interpret and contextualise them adequately. Only by being listened to in generous, almost pedantic detail will anxieties lose their hold on us.

What we call depression is sadness and anger that have for too long not been paid their dues.

The good listener doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness.

As we read, we should become interested not only in what the author says but, as importantly, in what we might think.

However initially persuasive this thesis feels, it fails to diagnose what empathy truly involves. The way properly to enter the mind of another person is not to forget about oneself entirely; rather, it is to use one’s knowledge of oneself to penetrate the consciousness of another. The best way to unearth the secrets of complete strangers is to look honestly into our own hearts.

The unempathetic person isn’t usually selfish as not fully alive to the darker, more weird recesses of themselves; the parts that are a little criminal, or wild or vulnerable or sad.

A picture of us from our childhood could be the ideal companion to this skull. When we were little, we had no sense that we might be an adult one day. At five, turning twenty or thirty was an impossible supposition. Yet it has happened sure enough. And just as this has come to pass, so our death will happen too. The childhood picture and the skull combine to force the reality of our end powerfully to the front of our recalcitrant brains, not to make us miserable but to render us more active, strategic, focused and determined in the precious present; in short, to help to save us.

The loving interpreter holds on to the idea that sweetness must remain beneath the surface, along with the possibility of remorse and growth. They are committed to mitigating circumstances and to any parts of the truth that could cast a less catastrophic light on folly and nastiness.

Love thinking refuses to believe that there is anything such as evil pure and simple. Bad behaviour is invariably the consequence of hurt: the one who shouts did not feel heard; the one who mocks was once humiliated; the constant cynic had hope snatched from them. This is not an alternative to responsibility; it is a rightful awareness that acting badly is invariably a response to a wound and never an initial ambition. The fundamental step of love is to hold on, in challenging situations, to a distinction between a person’s overt unpleasant actions and the sympathy-worthy motives that underlie them.

To consider others with love means forever remembering the child within them. Our wrongdoer may be fully grown, but their behaviour will always be joined up with their early years. We’re so keen to treat others like the adults they are that we overlook the need occasionally to perceive, and sympathise with, the angry and hurt infant lurking inside.

This is the reverse of what tends to happen around adults; here we imagine that others have deliberately got us in their sights. But if we employed the infant model of interpretation, our first assumptions would be quite different. Given how immature every adult necessarily remains, some of the moves we execute with relative ease around children must forever continue to be relevant when we’re dealing with another so-called grown-up.

It is an implicit faith in their own perfection that turns people into unbearably harsh judges.

We will have learnt to be good sceptics, and better thinkers, when we always maintain a position of doubt with regards to the troubling and devilishly unreliable tool with which we’re trying so hard to think well.