Effective questions turn your mind in directions that lead to new insights and solutions. They highlight hidden assumptions and indicate directions to take to make progress.

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.

If you want to get more out of what you hear or see, force yourself to ask questions—in

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

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.

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.

Understanding simple things deeply means mastering the fundamental principles, ideas, and methods that then create a solid foundation on which you can build. Seeking the essential creates the core or skeleton that supports your understanding. Seeing what’s actually there without prejudice lets you develop a less biased understanding of your world.

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