The Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About How We Think

The skilful bookshop owner and the gifted editor have lessons for our professional lives as well as our pleasures. Can you make connections other people cannot? Can you identify a helpful analogy? Will you bring an outsider’s perspective? Can you reconfigure existing information in a new and original way? Can you take one position while still inhab

The most interesting thinkers in these fields—the “first-rate intelligences”—have been the ones best able to “flicker” between alternative perspectives on the same problem, paying attention to the objective and subjective while recognizing that neither can be collapsed into the other.

The person who has access to his unconscious processes and mines them without getting mired in them can try new approaches, can begin to see things in new ways, and, perhaps, can achieve mastery of his pursuits.