Mastermind

if you remember Holmes’s early admonitions; you want to keep it as clean as possible.

The act of speaking forces you to slow down and catch those errors that are invisible to your eyes. Your ear notes them when your eye does not. And while it may seem a waste of time and effort to reread mindfully and attentively, out loud, it hardly ever fails to yield a mistake or flaw that you would have otherwise missed.

Most effectively, if we are made to feel accountable in our judgments, we will spend more time looking at angles and possibilities before making up our minds—and so will expend the correctional effort on any initial impressions, to make sure they are accurate. Our minds won’t “close” (or, as Kruglanski calls it, “freeze”) in their search until we a

Creativity can be taught. It is just like another muscle—attention, self-control—that can be exercised and grow stronger with use, training, focus, and motivation. In fact, studies have shown that creativity is fluid and that training enables people to become more creative:

It’s about seeing the full picture, noting the details that matter, and understanding how to contextualize those details within a broader framework of thought.

Think of imagination as a kind of essential mental space in your attic, where you have the freedom to work with various contents but don’t yet have to commit to any storage or organizational system, where you can shift and combine and recombine and mess around at will and not be afraid of disturbing the main attic’s order or cleanliness in any way.

We also know, more definitively than we ever have, that our brains are not built for multitasking—something that precludes mindfulness altogether.

Never forget that Holmes was a renegade—and a renegade that was as far from a computer as it gets. And that is what makes his approach so powerful.

It means realizing that the world is three-dimensional and multi-sensory and that, like it or not, we will be influenced by our environment, so our best bet is to take control of that influence by paying attention to everything that surrounds us. We may not be able to emerge with the entire situation in hand, and we may end up making a choice that,