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

he had risen to greatness only by doubting much of the knowledge that had been built up before him and putting immense faith in the fruits of his own mind.

We tend to wall ourselves off like this because there’s so little evidence that what we know goes on in our heads may also unfold in the heads of others.

Moralistic thinkers reach their certainties swiftly; love thinkers take their time. They remain serene in the face of obviously unimpressive behaviour:

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

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.

For the sceptics, understanding that we may be repeatedly hoodwinked by our own minds is the start of the only type of intelligence of which we are ever capable; just as we are never as foolish as when we fail to suspect we might be so.

There is no such thing as a person with only strengths, but nor is there someone with only weaknesses.

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

Whenever I ask an acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of scab and arse.