Thinking About Thinking

Kelly's insight about wine applies perfectly to how we think about personal growth. Just as mindlessly drinking more wine doesn't make us better wine connoisseurs, frantically doing more doesn't make us more successful humans. When we apply Type 2 thinking to our lives, it shifts everything - from how we parent (quality time over scheduled... See more

If you did a lot of maths at school you are used to being given problems of the first type, and when you see a problem you want to find the analytic solution. It’s a good instinct, since analytic solutions are efficient. As long as you have the right method you can quickly reach an exact answer.

Lots of being smart is working out when you’re... See more

This advice may sound familiar; it lies at the heart of books like Blink and Gary Klein’s The Power of Intuition, which promise to help readers harness their gut feelings. But for executives taught to methodically frame problems, consider alternatives, collect data, weigh the options, and then decide, cultivating emotional self-awareness may seem... See more

But that’s physics, and physics deals with the natural. Engineering, on the other hand, is a science of the artificial , and it would be downright strange to insist that engineering artifacts have no purpose or telos.

Can you rationalize why a piece of art moves you? Why you have chemistry with one person over another? Why you like one piece of software more than another that does the same thing? Our decisions are not driven by logic, they are driven by emotion.