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

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

We are not terrified enough for our own good. We are behaving like gods or superhuman entities who have centuries to get it right. We are alternately too timid and too arrogant.

Their approach to the chat you’re having over pizza is allied with the philosophical ambitions of Socrates, whose dialogues are records of his attempts to help his fellow Athenians understand and examine their own underlying ideas and values.

It is a distinctive quirk of our minds that few of the emotions we carry in them are properly acknowledged, understood or truly felt.

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

Effective thinking isn’t about ‘working hard’ in any brute or rote sense; it is about learning to spot, defend, nurture and grow our fleeting, tentative periods of insight.

Looking at the world through the eyes of love, we conclude that there is no such thing as a simply bad person, and no such thing as a monster. There is only ever pain, anxiety and suffering that have coalesced into unfortunate action.

Love is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.

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