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

and put into focus what we happen to think. It’s through contact with the books of others that we might come to a clearer sense of our perspectives and ideas.

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

Life, properly felt, is an infinitely alarming process even in its apparently calmer stretches.

To understand ourselves, we will need to discover, individually, the words that lie behind our first words.

This concept of one thing needing to combine with others in order to fulfil its potential value and of being unappetising in isolation is simple to understand in the kitchen, but it can be harder to grasp in other areas.

In reality, there can’t be such guarantees, but holding our fears aside for a certain amount of time helps us to identify our areas of real enthusiasm, longing and ambition that we would otherwise push out of our minds too soon.

Love thinking believes in the existence of tragedy; that is, in the possibility that one can be good and still fail.

We envy certain individuals in their entirety, when, if we took a moment to analyse their lives, we would realise that it was only a small part of what they have or had done that really resonates with us.

they held one another, trying to brighten the brief passage between birth and death.

They bring to listening an ambition to clear up underlying issues. They don’t just see conversation as the swapping of anecdotes.