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How to Think Better: The Skill You've Never Been Taught

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No skill is more valuable and harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems. If you can think through things better than others, you’ll have fewer problems and more free time. If you can’t, you’re going to spend a lot of time fixing your mistakes. Good decisions make the future easier, bad ones make it harder. But how can we learn to think better? For part of the answer, we turn to Solitude and Leadership, a lecture given by William Deresiewicz. The entire essay is worth reading (and re-reading), but here is the relevant excerpt: Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the inve

Thinking | Reading Time: 4 minutes The Busy Person’s Guide to Thinking No skill is more valuable or harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems. Thinking better than others means you’ll have more free time and fewer problems. If you can’t think well, you’ll spend a lot of time fixing avoidable mistakes. If you stop thinking when most people stop thinking, you’ll come to the same conclusions most people come to. Thinking is hard, so it’s natural that most people stop as soon as possible. We get the gist of something and move on to

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