How to Think More Effectively Quotes

“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.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“The most necessary tool for thinking is also the simplest: the notebook. We need a notebook because we can’t contain what is important within the bandwidth of active memory. We can’t keep in view what is significant within our amnesiac, misty, temperamental consciousness. The paper has to function as a secondary memory to pool us together; it will end up knowing more of who we are than we can ourselves actively bring to mind in the moment.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“These are all issues in search of clarity. The good listener knows that, via conversation with another person, we’d ideally move from a confused, agitated state of mind to a calmer and more focused one. Together, through talking, we would work out what is really at stake. But, in reality, this tends not to happen because few of us are sufficiently aware of how to achieve this clarity from our conversation. There aren’t enough good listeners. People tend to assert rather than analyse. They restate in many different ways the fact that they are worried, excited, sad or hopeful, and their interlocutor listens but does not help them to discover more. Good listeners fight against this with a range of conversational gambits. They hover as the other speaks; they offer encouraging remarks; they make gentle positive gestures: a sigh of sympathy, a nod of encouragement, a strategic ‘hmm’ of interest. All the time, they are egging the other to go deeper into issues. They love saying: ‘Tell me more about…’; ‘I was fascinated when you said…’; ‘Why did that happen, do you think?’ or ‘How did you feel about that?”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“The good listener doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“In the minds of geniuses, we find – once more – our own neglected thoughts.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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 School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“difference between vagueness and focus is what separates great from mediocre art.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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 School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“… they were blind to each other’s failings, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the floor they were dancing on. Neither was particularly kind, both were selfish, each had many secrets; yet there was something sweet about watching them together: their hopes were muddled and naive – but he was murmuring playfully in her ear; the scent on her hair was delightful; they were mortal creatures, for whom death was still an abstract, distant notion; they held one another, trying to brighten the brief passage between birth and death.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“Marcel Proust’s astonishing ability to catch so many butterfly thoughts and put into words the subtler concepts and tentative feelings that most of us register only in the outer airy zones of consciousness but cannot reach up to and turn into solid words:”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“Our notebooks are the forum for a second, third and hundredth chance; they end up doing greater justice to our thoughts than our minds themselves.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“We tend to label the psychological capacity that allows us to penetrate the minds of other people in a remote way as empathy.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“Analogy works by picking out a feature that is clear and obvious in one area and importing it into another field that is more confusing and intangible.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“We are in danger of forgetting that the qualities we admire don’t just belong to one specific, attractive life. They can be pursued in lesser, weaker (but still real) doses in countless other places, opening up the possibility of creating more manageable and more realistic versions of the lives we desire.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“The book frames the topic for us; it puts the right question to us; it functions as the three dots that start us off … and we do the rest.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but that they are superficial articulations of very good ones.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“It is an implicit faith in their own perfection that turns people into unbearably harsh judges.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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 School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“As we read, we should become interested not only in what the author says but, as importantly, in what we might think.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“What we call depression is sadness and anger that have for too long not been paid their dues.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“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.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“The difference between vagueness and focus is what separates great from mediocre art.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity