Your first thought is what everyone else thinks. Your best thought comes after you've thought long enough to forget what everyone thinks. The difference between good and exceptional isn't hours worked – it's the depth of thought applied to the right problems.

Here are a couple of exercises to inspire critical thinking:

1. Teach something you don’t know : Based on the Feynman learning technique – part of the mental models for learning. The best way to learn something is to teach it. Consider something you want to understand and arm yourself with the task to teach it to a group of people. What do you need to

... See more

It’s taken me a while to warm up to the idea that thinking is working, and that what is actually work can at first look lazy. I love Naval [Ravikant’s tweet], “Be too busy to do coffee while keeping an uncluttered calendar.” More often than not, spending two hours thinking about a problem is a much better use of my time than taking two calls withou... See more