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

by The School of Life

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.

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.

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

Friendship degenerates into a socialised egoism.

When considered as a tool for thinking, socalled bad books might be just as effective as the acknowledged good ones – and sometimes a lot better; as we turn their pages, they allow us to imagine our own, superior versions of what we are taking in.

If we have more or less forever, we don’t have to make any tricky changes or reforms. We can linger in a relationship that’s not really working. We might waste many evenings half-heartedly amusing ourselves in trivial ways, imagining that we’ll get around to more ambitious pursuits at some point in the future. Perhaps we don’t have the kinds of friendships we’d really like, but we can live with the dissatisfaction out of a belief that we have decades still to get our interactions right.

The good thinker is, to a large extent, first and foremost a sceptic.

Our sense of time is highly inaccurate, influenced chiefly by the novelty or familiarity of what happens rather than by its strict chronological duration. We desire excessively and inaccurately. Our sexual drives wreak havoc on our sense of priorities.

For the sceptics, understanding that we may be repeatedly hoodwinked by our own minds is the start of the only type of intelligence of which we are ever capable; just as we are never as foolish as when we fail to suspect we might be so.

The sceptical person will be drawn to deploying softening, tentative language and holding back on criticism wherever possible. They will suggest that an idea might not be quite right.