5 Elements of Effective Thinking

I recently finished reading The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking. Before you roll your eyes, the book doesn't attempt to convince you that you can be the next Einstein. On the contrary, its claim is that most people aren't anywhere near their "total addressable smarts", and it provides a framework for how to think in order to realize your potential. This is a short summary of the 5 key ideas in the book.

UNDERSTAND SIMPLE PROBLEMS DEEPLY

Understanding simple problems, deeply, reveals a lot of details about relatively simple concepts. Very often, complex phenomena is created by applying simple concepts. For example, the original treatise on calculus was a handful of pages, and a high school calculus textbook today is ~ 1000 pages. This implies 990+ pages are merely applications of the same fundamental concept. From my personal experience, I still haven't found a complex problem that can't be broken down to its essential elements, given enough time. I try to explain concepts to others because this reveals a lot of gaps in my understanding. I have seen enough complex problems (hello statistical thermodynamics) that couldn't break down to fundamentals, and hence they escaped me (Don't ask me to explain statistical thermodynamics)

Here is the legendary Terry Tao (Mozart of Math) on the importance of understanding deeply & teaching.

EMBRACE FAILURE AS A WAY OF LEARNING

Instead of trying to find a perfect answer, get started with an approach. If you fail (which you most certainly will), study failure closely. This method allows you to learn more about the nature of the problem. Once more detail is revealed by your review of failure, modify your solution. Keep going till you aren't failing anymore.

A classic example here is the fatal failure of Apollo 1, where all astronauts perished. Here is a speech that the legendary Gene Kranz gave his team after the fire.

ASK A LOT OF QUESTIONS

Walk into a new problem or a discussion on an old problem pretending you know very little, and with the most basic of questions. Culturally, we have swung too far on the spectrum of having all the answers, and the illusion of knowledge stops us from becoming better thinkers. Asking naive questions forces us to push the boundaries of what we know revealing new insight.

Here is Richard Feynmann on the importance of asking fundamental questions.

UNDERSTAND THE ARC OF KNOWLEDGE

Try to learn where concepts come from, with the intent of knowing where we are going. A simple example here is the light bulb. The fundamental technology that led to a light bulb pervades our life today. Computer monitors, televisions, car ignition are all variants of a light bulb. It would have been difficult for most to imagine this arc but its important to use this context when imagining the future.

Great thinkers are able to visualize such a trajectory. They often uncover universals, and then look at technology from the lens of that universal. For Jeff Bezos, the universals are the customer's need for the best deal and faster delivery. For Mark Zuckerberg, it is the need to share and connect with friends and family. Mark, therefore, examines technology from this lens to understand where future is headed.

CHANGE IS THE CONSTANT THAT BRINGS INSIGHT

Great thinkers are capable of changing the way they think about a problem. A lot of smart people understand problems deeply but fail at imagining new ways to think about the same problems. The latter requires us to stay plastic & imaginative. As the book says, great people don't do the same things better, they do different things. A great tennis player isn't trying to hit the ball perfectly by timing his shot, he is observing the ball way better than an average tennis player. Everything else follows from his superior ability to "watch the ball".

Here is an experiment which shows what the great Cristiano Ronaldo is doing differently (starting at 16:10)