How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity
A guide to identifying, nurturing and growing our insight and creativity for more effective thinking.

We know that our minds are capable of great things. But they are also unpredictable. Our thoughts tend to wander and our minds are either distracted or idle. This book teaches us how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential.

We learn how to hold on to fleeting thoughts before they disappear through anxiety and fear, what time of day is best for constructive work, and how to avoid predictable approaches to our largest problems. The result is a user's manual to that most wondrous, intermittent, and always baffling, organ: the human mind.

  • WITH CHAPTERS ON CUMULATIVE, EMPATHETIC, AND SKEPTICAL THINKING
  • A PRACTICAL AND INFORMATIVE GUIDE for individuals and businesses alike.
  • INFORMED BY RESEARCH FROM THE SCHOOL OF LIFE FOR BUSINESS whose clients include Facebook, Google, Nike, and Sony Music.
  • PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S ESSENTIAL SKILLS SERIES other titles include The Emotionally Intelligent Office and How to Get on With Your Colleagues.
1137460501
How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity
A guide to identifying, nurturing and growing our insight and creativity for more effective thinking.

We know that our minds are capable of great things. But they are also unpredictable. Our thoughts tend to wander and our minds are either distracted or idle. This book teaches us how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential.

We learn how to hold on to fleeting thoughts before they disappear through anxiety and fear, what time of day is best for constructive work, and how to avoid predictable approaches to our largest problems. The result is a user's manual to that most wondrous, intermittent, and always baffling, organ: the human mind.

  • WITH CHAPTERS ON CUMULATIVE, EMPATHETIC, AND SKEPTICAL THINKING
  • A PRACTICAL AND INFORMATIVE GUIDE for individuals and businesses alike.
  • INFORMED BY RESEARCH FROM THE SCHOOL OF LIFE FOR BUSINESS whose clients include Facebook, Google, Nike, and Sony Music.
  • PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S ESSENTIAL SKILLS SERIES other titles include The Emotionally Intelligent Office and How to Get on With Your Colleagues.
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How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

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

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

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

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Overview

A guide to identifying, nurturing and growing our insight and creativity for more effective thinking.

We know that our minds are capable of great things. But they are also unpredictable. Our thoughts tend to wander and our minds are either distracted or idle. This book teaches us how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential.

We learn how to hold on to fleeting thoughts before they disappear through anxiety and fear, what time of day is best for constructive work, and how to avoid predictable approaches to our largest problems. The result is a user's manual to that most wondrous, intermittent, and always baffling, organ: the human mind.

  • WITH CHAPTERS ON CUMULATIVE, EMPATHETIC, AND SKEPTICAL THINKING
  • A PRACTICAL AND INFORMATIVE GUIDE for individuals and businesses alike.
  • INFORMED BY RESEARCH FROM THE SCHOOL OF LIFE FOR BUSINESS whose clients include Facebook, Google, Nike, and Sony Music.
  • PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S ESSENTIAL SKILLS SERIES other titles include The Emotionally Intelligent Office and How to Get on With Your Colleagues.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781912891139
Publisher: The School of Life
Publication date: 12/01/2020
Pages: 144
Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 6.90(h) x (d)

About the Author

The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. Through our range of books, gifts and stationery we aim to prompt more thoughtful natures and help everyone to find fulfillment.

The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions.

The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 7 million YouTube subscribers, 389,000 Facebook followers, 174,000 Instagram followers and 166,000 Twitter followers.

The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.

Read an Excerpt

2. Cumulative Thinking


The point is as basic as it is key: our minds do not disclose their more elaborate and best thoughts in one go. The mind is an intermittent instrument whose ideas come out in dribs and drabs. It is capable of a few inspired moves, then falls silent and needs to rest and to lie fallow for bewilderingly long periods. We cannot think for two hours at a stretch, let alone an entire day. The mind can’t neatly follow office hours. One paragraph might be the work of a morning; an entire book of three slow years.

We tend to miss this when we encounter the thoughts of others. Because they frequently sound so composed and can be digested in an effortless stretch, we too readily imagine that these thoughts emerged in a coherent burst. We forget that a lakeful of ideas had to be pooled together with painful effort from spoonfuls of thinking arduously collected over long days and nights.

As a result, we are often dismayed at our own desultory first efforts. 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. The contrast is so great that we tend to conclude that we are incapable of anything valuable rather than that we are – quite normally and understandably – stuck. We fail to draw courage from witnessing the struggles of those we admire. What alarms us is not so much how hard the task is but how easy we imagined it might be.

To calm us down and reassure us of the inevitability of humiliation, we should pay special attention not to the books but to the manuscripts of great thinkers. The French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922) reads as one of the most polished and fluent writers of any age; his thoughts appear to flow ceaselessly from one point to the next. But his manuscripts suggest a different genesis. These densely packed notebooks are filled with multiple layers of changes, side notes, reminders, suggestions; sections moved about, crossed out, revised, abandoned, taken up again and ultimately rejected. The Proust we read is an artificial voice assembled over years, not spontaneously generated in the hours that are required to read him.

Whatever his genius, Proust was not unique in his process of mental assembly. 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.

At any single point, we are hemmed in in terms of what we can think by what we’ve just had to eat (as St Benedict knew, we’ll be in a different mental state depending on whether we’ve had a veal escalope or some tomatoes in olive oil); the time of day (the way we think at 8 a.m. is utterly unlike the reflections of 11.30 p.m.); what we’ve recently been reading; the outlook of the people we’ve been around; the progress of our digestion; whether things have been going well or badly in a relationship, and the axis of the earth at the specific time of year (spring has its thoughts as well as its weathers). Each mental moment is favourable to certain ideas and pushes other potentially important insights into the background.

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.

What we witness in authors’ jottings is a reminder of the delays we all have to endure before we can assemble ideas into the sequence that their underlying logic demands. When we have a more accurate picture of how our thinking processes work, we will have a more helpful perspective on the difficulty of what we’re asking our brains to do. Instead of feeling that we must be fools for finding the task so hard, we will see that our troubles around building up our thoughts are not the result of any special failing on our part, but rather derive from the basic architecture of the mind. We have to counter this failing, as Proust did, with many stages of revision, addition, deletion and correction before we can arrive at the seemingly obvious, neat and clear final version. In every office or above every desk there should be an image from the messy early stages of a masterpiece to keep this basic, consoling and encouraging truth where it belongs: at the front of our sporadic, time-bound minds.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1 Strategic Thinking

2 Cumulative Thinking

3 Butterfly Thinking

4 Independent Thinking

5 Focused Thinking

6 Philosophical Meditation

7 ‘Mad’ Thinking

8 Friend Thinking

9 Reading Thinking

10 Envious Thinking

11 Analogical Thinking

12 Empathetic Thinking

13 Death Thinking

14 Love Thinking

15 Skeptical Thinking

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