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

What this tells us is that the genius doesn’t have different kinds of thoughts from the rest of us; they simply take them more seriously.

When we are around small children who frustrate us, we don’t declare them evil; we don’t bear down on them to show them how misguided they are. We find less alarming ways of understanding how they have come to say or do certain things. We don’t readily assign a negative motive or mean intention to a small person; we reach around for the most benevo

1. In the privacy of the mind, allow yourself time for some ‘mad’ thinking. • What is the biggest version of your current ambitions? • If you could not fail, what would you do? • If others would never laugh, what would you do? • If there were no financial pressures, how would you approach things? • If you could be the absolute ruler for a while, how w

They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that being a bad parent, a poor lover or a confused worker are not malignant acts of wickedness, but ordinary features of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles.

The consolation comes in refusing to view defects in isolation.

we are each of us like a fountain, configured out of diverse, separate impulses, desires, attitudes and concerns that from a distance (seen by another person) give off an impression of being unified and coherent.

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.

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

We put a lot more effort into becoming ‘successful’ than into assessing how dominant notions of success could make us content.

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