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

The most profound thoughts we need to grapple with also have the most potential to disturb.

From a young age, we are taught to expect that truly important ideas must lie outside of us; usually very far outside of us in time and place. Someone else – cleverer, wiser and more prestigious than us – will already have hatched the crucial thoughts; it is our task to pay homage to their intelligence, to learn what they had to say, to be as faith

Not all good ideas have yet been had, and our minds are as good a place as any in which they might one day hatch.

we go around feeling that our thoughts are clear, but if we submit them to further questioning, we realise that they suffer from a grave vagueness.

Vagueness is a problem because it means failing to pick out what really matters to us

Montaigne was criticising the impulse to think that the truth must always lie far from us, in another climate, in an ancient library, in the books of people who lived long ago.

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.

‘The statue is already in the stone’, he wrote, ‘my work is to liberate it.’

We suffer from excessive respect. We are taught to admire the minds of astonishing figures such as Michelangelo, Aristotle, Plato, di Lampedusa or Montaigne. We are invited to stand in awe at the achievements of these geniuses, but we are also made to feel that their thought processes must be quasi-magical and their ability to produce the ideas for