How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

by The School of Life

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.

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. In every case, we prefer to zero in on the mechanics, on the means and the tools rather than on the guiding question of ends. 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?

Preguntas de primer orden: Que es lo que quiero lograr en ultima instancia? Que es lo que mejor sirve a mi felicidad? Por que cosas deberia de preocuparme? Considerar hacerme estas preguntas cada vez quiera iniciar un nuevo proyecto, se presente un oportunidad o cuando me establezca metas.