The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking

Asking yourself challenging questions can help you reveal hidden assumptions, avoid bias, expose vagueness, identify errors, and consider alternatives. Generating questions can help direct your next steps toward deeper understanding and creative problem solving.

The defects as well as the strengths of our first effort aren’t available for us to examine until they exist.

He said that during the job interview with Einstein, he admitted that he did not know much about relativity, to which Einstein replied, “That’s okay. I already know about relativity.”

You don’t need an army of thousands of individuals to struggle a thousand years to address a challenge. The only person who needs to move forward little by little is you. Engineer your own evolution. Take a homework assignment, essay, or project that you’re facing and quickly just do it; that is, tackle the questions, draft the essay, or move forwa

You have probably heard of the “10,000-hour rule,” which encapsulates the idea that a person needs 10,000 hours of practice to become world-class at anything, from art to music to sports to zoology. This book is about what to do during hours 1 through 9,999. The magic of the 10,000-hour rule does not happen at the 10,000th hour. The magic is an acc

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do? Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you? Hemingway: Getting the words right.

Creativity is not a matter of magical inspiration.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. —Samuel Beckett

When the going gets tough, creative problem solvers create an easier, simpler problem that they can solve. They resolve that easier issue thoroughly and then study that simple scenario with laser focus. Those insights often point the way to a resolution of the original difficult problem.