"The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking" by Burger & Starbird

• The root of success in everything, from academics to business to leadership to personal relationships and everything else, is thinking--whether it's thinking disguised as intuition or as good values or as decision-making or problem solving or creativity, it's all thinking.
• Brilliant students and brilliant inventors create their own victories by practicing habits of thinking that inevitably carry them step by step to works of greatness. No leaps are involved--a few basic strategies of thought can leave to eat effective learning, understanding, and innovation. More importantly, you yourself can master and apply those strategies.
• Remember: Extraordinary people are just ordinary people who are thinking differently--and that could be you
• You only need to recall the classical elements that were once believed to be the essential part of all nature and matter. Those elements are earth, fire, air, and water. So to help trigger your memory and enable you to apply these techniques, we associate each classical element with one of our strategies for effective thinking, learning, and creating:
• earth = understands deeply
• fire = make mistakes
• air = raise questions
• water = follow the flow of ideas
• quintessential element = change
• When you learn anything, go for depth and make it rock solid.
• You can understand anything better than you currently do. Setting a higher standard for yourself for what you mean by understanding can revolutionize how you perceive the world.
• The most fundamental ideas in any subject can be understood with ever-increasing depth.
• True experts continually deepen their mastery of the basics.
• Deep work on simple, basic ideas helps to build true virtuosity--not just in music but in everything.
• In everything you do, refine your skills and knowledge about fundamental concepts and simple cases.
• Many of the most complicated, social, and profound ideas arise from looking unmercifully clearly at simple, everyday experiences.
• To learn any subject well and to create ideas beyond those that have existed before, return to the basics repeatedly.
• great scientist, creative thinkers, and problem solvers do not soft heart problems. when they are faced with a daunting question, they immediately and prudently admit defeat. They realize that there is no sense in wasting energy mainly grappling with complexity when, instead, they can productively grapple with simpler cases that will teach them how to deal with the complexity to come.
• When the going gets tough, creative problem solvers create an easier, simpler problem that they can solve.
• Apply this mindset to your work: when faced with a difficult issue or challenge, do something else. Focus entirely on solving a subproblem that you know you can successfully resolved.
• When faced with an issue that is complicated and multi-faceted, attempt to isolate the essential ingredients.
• The strategy of clearing the clutter and seeking the essential involves two steps: step 1 - identify and ignore all distracting features to isolate the essential core. Step 2 - analyze that central issue and apply those insights to the larger whole.
• Often you may be surprised that after you pare down a complex issue to its essentials, the essentials are much clearer and easier to face. By systematically ignoring one distraction after another, you can turn your attention to more central ( often initially invisible ) themes.
• By systematically cutting away peripheral parts, we force ourselves to appreciate what's important.
• Find what at the center and work out from there.
• Whenever you quote on quote an issue or quote understand unquote a concept, be conscious of the lens through which you're viewing the subject. You should assume you're introducing bias. The challenge remains to identify and let go of that bias or the assumption you bring, and actively work to see and understand the subject a new.
• To better understand your world, consciously acknowledge what you actually see double - no matter how mundane or obvious Double Dash rather than guess at what you think you are supposed to see. Saying what you actually see forces you to become conscious of what it what is there and also what is missing. If you see it, then say it semicolon if you don't see it, then don't claim to see it.
• Being honest and accurate about what you actually know and don't know forces you to identify and fill gaps in your understanding.
• Identifying and admitting your own uncertainties is an enormous step toward solid understanding.
• What everybody believes is not hallways what's actually true. Commonly-held opinions are frequently just plain false. Often we are persuaded by authority and repetition rather than by evidence and reality.
• Individuals tend to accept ideas if people they know or respect state or believe those ideas. You need to be very clear about the foundations of your opinions.
• Becoming aware of the basis of your opinions or beliefs is an important step toward a better understanding of yourself and your world. Regulate consider your opinions, beliefs, and knowledge, and subject them to the quote how do I know quote test.
• Become aware of the sources of your opinions.
• One of the most profound ways to see the world more clearly is to look deliberately for the gaps--the negative space, as it is called in the art world; that is, the space surrounding the objects or issues of interest.
• Select your own object, issue, or topic of study and attach an adjective or descriptive phrase that points out some reality of the situation, ideally some feature that is limiting or taken for granted. Then consider whether your phrase suggest new possibilities or opportunities.
• Understanding simple things deeply means mastering the fundamental principles, ideas, and methods that then create a solid foundation from 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.
• Clear away the distractions, see what is actually there, and makes the invisible visible. Failure is a critical element of effective learning, teaching, and creative problem solving. Mistakes are attention productive ways by forcing us to focus on the specific task of determining why the attempt it and fail. Effective failure isn't important, positive step towards success.
• Once you are open to the positive potential of failure, failing productively involves two basic steps: creating a mistake and then exploiting the mistake.
• The defects as well as the strength of our first ever aren't available for us to examine until they exist.
• Iteration allows us to see what is there and how we can improve - a little bit at a time.
• Success is about persisting through the process of repeatedly failing and learning from failure.
• A good way to generate useful mistakes is simply to tackle the issue at hand by quickly constructing the best solution you can with little or no effort.
• Allow work to grow and evolve through iteratively identifying and improving on previous drafts and miss them.
• Understanding what doesn't work and why is valuable knowledge.
• Seeing a mistake as possibly a correct answer to a different question put our thinking on its head. We look at a mistake and not as a wrong answer, but instead as an opportunity to ask, “What is the question to which this is a correct answer?”
• When you see or make a mistake, you have at least two actions to take: (1) let the mistake lead you to a better attempt, and/or (2) ask whether the mistake is a correct answer to a different question.
• One profound way to make new discoveries is to intentionally fail along the way. Deliberately exaggerating or considering extreme, impractical scenarios often frees us to have an unforeseen insight.
• Failure is a sign of a creative mind, original thought and strength.
• Constantly formulating and raising questions is a mind opening habit that forces you to have a deeper engagement with the world at a different in experience.
• Asking yourself challenging questions can help you reveal hidden assumptions, avoid bias, exposed Agnes, identify errors, and consider alternatives.
• Generating questions can help direct your next steps toward deeper understanding and creative problem solving.
• Confident leaders in every profession are not afraid to ask stupid questions.
• A transformative but challenging personal policy is to never pretend to know more than you do.
• Challenge everything and everyone including your teachers. Don't be intimidated. You are the best authority on what you don't understand - trust yourself: don't be afraid to ask the questions you need to ask, I'll be brave enough to change your thinking when you uncover a blind spot.
• Try to bridge ideas from one discipline or area to another. Ask whether the skills, attitudes, techniques from one subject might be applied to another subject and to your work or life.
• As a student, challenge yourself to attempt homework as quickly as possible.
• If you want to get more out of what you hear or see, force yourself to ask questions - - in a lecture, at a meeting, while listening to music, watching TV, or viewing art. People who ask lots of probing questions outperform those who don't engage with the ideas. Constantly generate questions and then ask them - - that mindset will lead to a richer appreciation of the issues.
• Before you succumb to the temptation to immediately spring to work on the answer, always stop and first ask, “What is the real question here?” Often the question that seems obvious may not be the question that leads to effective action.
• Effective question leads to action and are not vague.
• The right questions clarify your understanding and focus your attention on features that matter.
• Effective questions expose the real issue.
• Seeking the right question forces you to realize that there are at least two kinds of ignorance: cases in which you know the right question but not the answer, and cases in which you do not even know which question to ask.
• Ideally, the goal of education should be to develop critical thinking and communication skill and other such mind strengthening abilities.
• Solutions to little problems generate solutions to great problems.
• To truly understand a concept, discover how it naturally evolves from simpler fall. Recognizing that the present reality is a moment and continuing evolution makes your understanding fit into a more coherent structure.
• It is more realistic and healthier to view our world as one and which construction is always under way - - everything is a work in progress.
• Don't be afraid to change any part of yourself - - you will still be there, only better.
• Instead of thinking, “do it better”, thanks, “do it differently”. If you want to learn a subject, instead of memorizing rules and facts, concentrate on truly understanding the fundamentals deeply. If you want to think of new ideas, don't sit and wait for inspiration. Instead, apply strategies of transformative thinking such as making mistakes, asking questions, and following the flow of ideas.
• Don't you voices that challenge your beliefs.
• when you discover weaknesses in your own understanding of the basics, take action. Methodically, slowly, and throat learn the fundamentals. Repeat this exercise regularly as you learn more advanced task facts of the subject. Every return to the basics will deepen your understanding of the entire subject.
• Identifying and admitting your own uncertainties is an enormous step toward solid understanding.
• Bad days often include uncomfortably clear lessons about how to grow, learn, or reassess. So the next time you are having a bad day, make the conscious effort to find an extract positive lessons from those not so positive experiences.
• There is no better way to learn anything than to actually teach it, because to teach something you have to confront many fundamental questions. These questions for you to discover the heart of the matter and to see exactly what you truly understand and what you still need to work on.
• The flow of information will lead to a refined final product.
• Adopt the habit of improvement, whether using our four elements or by any other methods that you find. If the ability to change is part of who you are, then you are liberated from worry about weaknesses or defects, because you can adapt and improve whenever you like.
• The five elements of effective thinking:
• Earth - strive for rock solid understanding.
• Fire - fail and learn from those missteps.
• Air - constantly create and ask challenging questions.
• Water - consciously consider the flow of ideas.
• Quintessential element - remember that learning is a lifelong journey semicolon the each of us remains a work in progress - - always evolving, ever changing - - and that's quintessential living.
• Understand deeply: Don't face complex issues had on semi colon first understand simple ideas deeply. Clear the clutter and explode what is really important. Be brutally honest about what you know and don't know. Then see what's missing, identify the gaps, and fill them in. Let's go of bias, prejudice, and preconceived notion. There are degrees to understanding and you can always hide and yours. Rock solid understanding is the foundation for success.
• Grounding your thinking: Understand deeply
• Understand simple things deeply
• Clear the clutter--seek the essential
• See what's there
• See what's missing
• Make mistakes: Fail to succeed. Intentionally get it wrong to inevitably get it even more right. Mistakes are great teachers--they highlight unforeseen opportunities and hole in your understanding. They also show you which way to turn next, and they ignite your imagination.
• Igniting insights through mistakes: Fail to succeed
• Welcome accidental missteps--let your errors be your guide
• Finding the right question to the wrong answer
• Failing by intent
• Raise questions: Constantly create questions to clarify and extend your understanding. What's the real question? Working on the wrong questions can wait a lifetime. Ideas are in the air--the right questions will bring them out and help you see connections that otherwise would have been invisible.
• Creating questions out of thin air: Be your own Socrates
• How answers can lead to questions
• Creating questions enlivens your curiosity
• What's the real question?
• Follow the flow of ideas: look back to see where ideas came from and then look ahead to discover where those ideas maybe. A new idea is a beginning, end. Ideas are rare--milk them. Following the consequences of small ideas can result in big payoffs.
• Seeing the flow of ideas: Look back, look forward
• Understanding current ideas through the flow of ideas
• Creating new ideas from old ones
• Change: The unchanging element is changed--by mastering the first four elements, you can change the way you think and learn. You can always improve, row, and extract more out of your education, yourself, and the way you live your life. Change is the universal constant that allows you to get the most out of living and learning.
• Engaging change: Transform yourself