The rules of thinking, p.1
The Rules of Thinking, page 1
Contents
Introduction
Publisher’s acknowledgements
Think for yourself
1 Avoid echo chambers
2 Don’t be scared
3 Consider the motive
4 Beware self-interest
5 Keep hold of your heartstrings
6 Don’t be gullible
Resilient thinking
7 Know who you are
8 Seek out support
9 Take control
10 Be flexible
11 Be self-aware
12 It is what it is
13 Don’t get over-distracted
14 Like yourself
15 Be ready to cope
16 Better out than in
17 Cut yourself some slack
Healthy thinking
18 Think yourself happy
19 Focus on other people
20 Be in the present
21 Stress is optional
22 Normality isn’t normal
23 Evaluate your emotions
24 Laugh at yourself
25 Keep learning
26 No one likes to be incompetent
27 Practice makes progress
28 Turn off the action replays
29 Sidestep bad habits
30 Appreciate semantics
31 Keep the bar steady
32 Look for the spin
Organised thinking
33 Believe in being organised
34 Learn to love a list
35 Think outside your head
36 Don’t overload your RAM
37 Make deadlines your friend
38 Don’t indulge decision making
39 Get creatively organised
Thinking creatively
40 Train your brain
41 Feed your mind
42 Get in the mood
43 Open up
44 There are no rules
45 Spot the box
46 Think like someone else
47 Make connections
48 Make mistakes
49 Forget about other people
Problem solving
50 Clear your emotions out of the way
51 Make sure there’s really a problem
52 Check you’re solving the right problem
53 Loosen up
54 Don’t settle for your first answer
55 If it’s plausible, it’s worthwhile
56 Find a way in
57 Don’t get bogged down
58 Try a new angle
59 Don’t panic
60 Get help
Thinking together
61 You’re better together
62 Play to everyone’s strengths
63 Think like a hive
64 Leave your ego behind
65 Keep an eye on the quiet ones
66 Question groupthink
67 Conflict is OK
68 Think up a storm
69 Have stupid ideas
70 Keep in synch
Making decisions
71 Decide what you’re deciding
72 Don’t start at square two
73 Set yourself boundaries
74 Untangle the knots first
75 Go for Goldilocks
76 Vet your advisors
77 Be your own advisor
78 Don’t jump to conclusions
79 Understand your emotions
80 Balance logic and emotion
81 Learn to compromise
82 Find option C
83 Assess the cost of a bad decision
84 Regret is a waste of energy
85 Be honest about procrastinating
Critical thinking
86 Read John Donne
87 Don’t be played for a fool
88 Stand back and take in the view
89 Look for what comes next
90 Don’t bother your pretty little head
91 Consider the odds
92 Facts are neutral
93 Don’t trust statistics
94 Understand cause and effect
95 If you can’t prove it’s true, that doesn’t mean it isn’t
96 Don’t believe it just because everyone else does
97 Don’t believe it just because you want to
98 Be devil’s advocate
99 Don’t go into lockdown
100 Opinions aren’t facts
These are the Rules
101 How to use the rules
Introduction
‘I think, therefore I am’, as the French philosopher Descartes famously wrote. By which he meant that we know we exist precisely because we have the ability to question whether we exist. All very philosophical, however it underlines the fact that thinking is at the very root of who we are.
So it follows that the more clearly, effectively and coherently we think, the better we are able to live. Happiness and success can flow from good thinking in a way we struggle to achieve if our thought processes are muddled, messy, incoherent. Our thoughts influence our feelings, so it is important to get this foundation right. Once you can think well, you have the basis on which to build the rest of your life.
This is not a book of tips and ...
Publisher’s acknowledgements
7 René Descartes: French philosopher: René Descartes (1596-1650) 29 Edward Fitzgerald: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (as translated by FitzGerald) 56 Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Alfred, Lord Tennyson his poem, Ulysses. 1842 71 Robert J. Hanlon: Robert J. Hanlon 89 Thomas Edison: Thomas Edison 92 William Shakespeare: William Shakespeare 98 Linus Pauling: Linus Pauling 103 Teena Marie: “Marry Me”, Teena Marie Album Congo Square. 180 Henry Ford: Henry Ford 190 John Donne: John Donne
THINK FOR YOURSELF
If you want to be a top-notch thinker, you have to do the work yourself. That is to say, you have to do the thinking. You can’t let anyone else do it for you. That might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how often we take the convenient shortcut of adopting other people’s thinking.
All right, I’ll let you off working out the theory of relativity for yourself. There are specialist areas where you don’t have the skills to do the relevant thinking, and you’re allowed to let scientists, mathematicians, top-flight economists and statisticians and engineers do your thinking for you.2 Even so, don’t take their word for anything until you’ve established in your own mind that they know what they’re talking about and have no ...
RULE 1
Avoid echo chambers
When you’re a child, you don’t know any better than to think as your parents tell you to. If they say it’s bad to put your elbows on the table or good to change your underwear every day, you believe them. It’s part of being a child to absorb your parents’ values and systems. As you get older, you start to find that your teachers have a slightly different set of rules, and your school friends may have values or opinions that are different again. So you start to modify your earlier views and incorporate others that you acquire from fellow students or friends who might think very differently from your parents. And when you’re young you probably think about these quite carefully.
Of course, it’s easy and comfortable to hang out with other people who broadly think the same way as you. As you form your values, you look for other people who are like-minded. It means you have plenty in common and you don’t have endless arguments. When someone else says what you were already thinking, it makes you feel validated, makes you feel you must be right, reinforces your view, makes you feel like you belong. It’s a good feeling and you can all spend time together validating each other’s beliefs and making yourselves feel right and valued. You can find a partner who thinks the same as you, can have friends like you, can work in a place where there are other people who think the way you do.
And this is what we call an echo chamber. Yes, it’s comfortable and affirming, but it makes it very difficult to be your own person. Everyone in your world votes the same way, supports the same causes, has the same beliefs, prejudices and values, and all belong to social media and online groups that reinforce them.
And it gets harder and harder to think in any other way. For one thing, you’ve virtually cut yourself off from being exposed to different ways of looking at the world, except perhaps so you and your friends can all agree on how wrong they are, in a self-congratulatory way. And that means you don’t want to change your views or, presumably, your friends will all agree how wrong you are, and that’s not going to feel very nice.
And yet, and yet … the world is full of people, lots of them lovely people, who don’t agree with you about everything. You may rarely encounter them, but can they really all be wrong? Some of them are just as clever as you and have arrived at their beliefs in as valid a way as you have. Maybe more valid – because you’ve stopped thinking for yourself and moved in to a groupthink where your views are the collective ones, where you don’t really ever have to challenge yourself any more. You’re no longer an independent person. You’ve unwittingly become a bit of a sheep.
If you want to be a Rules thinker, you need to change this, shake things up, force yourself to broaden your views, listen to other ideas with a genuine open mind. About the best way to do this is to cultivate friends based on who they are, not what they believe. Aim to have friends of all ages, from other cultures, varied backgrounds, different classes from your own. Between them, they’ll make you see the world in a more nuanced way and, if your beliefs can’t match up with all of them – because they’re not all the
CULTIVATE FRIENDS BASED ON WHO THEY ARE, NOT WHAT THEY BELIEVE
RULE 2
Don’t be scared
It can be frightening to start thinking for yourself. Who knows where it could lead? You could end up with any number of principles and beliefs that don’t sit comfortably with the people you spend your time with. You could find yourself out on a limb. You could have to face up to realising you’ve been wrong about things, or at least not been right about them. One of the barriers to being an independent thinker is the fear of being different.
Look, that’s understandable, of course it is. But you can take things gently. There are no thought police out there – not yet anyway. No one else has to know what you’re thinking until you’re ready to let on. You don’t have to sit your whole family down and say, ‘I need you all to ...
RULE 3
Consider the motive
Some people are more persuasive than others. Whether they’re trying to sell you a car, persuade you to adopt their plan at work, convince you to come to their party, or point out why plastic bags are bad for the environment. You need to avoid being sucked into following their line of thought blindly without engaging your own brain.
Now, that car might not be what you need at all. On the other hand, plastic bags really are bad for the environment. So if someone wants you to adopt their belief or follow their advice, you can’t deduce from that alone whether it’s a good idea. You have to know why they’re seeking to persuade you.
It’s always a good idea to understand what this person wants you to believe and why. Sometimes they want you to do something as a result of their persuasive efforts – buy something, join something, agree to something, attend an event, sign a petition. Not always though. Sometimes they’re simply passing on an opinion and would like your agreement – maybe they want to persuade you it’s a good thing the council are building a new car park. It’s a nice bonding feeling when someone agrees with you, but beyond that they may not be after much at all.
Once you’ve established clearly in your mind what they want, it’s much easier to decide whether you want it too. Your friend is telling you how great the party will be because they want you to go. They’re only guessing it will be great. Do you agree? Do you want to be there? If so, do you want to be there because it will be great or because you want to support your friend? It’s much easier to inure yourself to your friend’s persuasive methods once you can see them for what they are.
Of course, that might be the perfect car for you, whatever the salesperson’s motive for telling you so. You can’t dismiss it out of hand just because they have a vested interest in you buying it (if that ruled it out, no one would ever buy a car from any dealer). Identifying the motive isn’t a reason to reject someone else’s thinking. The point of doing it is to give yourself a sensible dose of wariness, of where you should double-check their assertions and make sure their arguments are the ones that matter.
A car salesperson might get you really excited with their infectious enthusiasm about how fast this car is or how comfortable it is in the back seats, but don’t get swept along mindlessly. Are those things actually important to you? Your colleague might persuade you that this exhibition is just the way to reach all those small engineering businesses out there. But how big a proportion of your customers are they ever going to be? So why does your colleague care so much about reaching them? Only by recognising the motive can you know how much importance to attach to the facts you’re being fed.
IDENTIFYING THE MOTIVE ISN’T A REASON TO REJECT SOMEONE ELSE’S THINKING
RULE 4
Beware self-interest
Never mind other people’s motives for a moment – what about your own? What do you stand to gain from thinking as you do? It’s easy to think in a way that feeds your own self-interest without ever being aware that you’re doing it. It’s possible that your way of thinking will lead you to a decision that will make you better off financially, or give you higher status, or enable you to live in a better area. This is something that I notice often affects politicians, who are very good at thinking in a way that is likely to get them re-elected. Most of them find it quite hard to reach conclusions that won’t sit comfortably with the voters.
We’ve all met vegetarians who stopped eating meat because of their ethical views, ...
RULE 5
Keep hold of your heartstrings
If you’re serious about resisting other people’s manipulations and thinking for yourself, it helps to be alert to how they’re trying to influence you. If you can spot it, it’s much easier to resist. So next time someone seeks to persuade, convince, cajole you round to their perspective, think about the strategies they’re using. Generally speaking, they’ll use emotion rather than logic. Your job, as a clear thinker, is to resist.
From the other person’s perspective, empathy is a good starting point. If someone can convince you that you both feel the same way, it seems like a much shorter step to thinking the same way. So a natural persuader will try to convince you that you’re both coming from the same point. They’ll emphasise similarities in your situation or values. They’ll tell you they know what it’s like to have kids, or work in an office, or struggle to pay the rent, or enjoy buying clothes, or own a cat. The shared experience puts you both in the same place, so now they can metaphorically take you by the hand and lead you to the conclusion they’ve chosen. Listen to them, but don’t let them lead you blindly. Question the route and the destination to be sure it’s really where you want to go.
If they can get you emotionally engaged, they will. For one thing, emotion is a powerful force, so they’ll want to get you angry about the injustice they’re campaigning against, or excited about the clothes they want to sell you, or anxious at the idea of overstretching your budget. And for another thing, it’s much harder for you to think rationally once you start to become emotional. So the higher they can crank up your emotions, the more you shut down your rational response to what they’re saying. Aim to resist the emotional response so your thinking stays rational and measured. You’ll be a much better judge of how valid their point is.
Another favourite ploy is to use weighted words. This can be more insidious and subtle, and tends to work at an unconscious level. We all do it – yes, you too – and it’s wise to recognise it in yourself. There’s more than one way to describe most things, and the adjectives you use can be powerful. Suppose you read two newspaper descriptions of the same politician. If the papers are from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they’re inclined to use different words to depict them. One might describe them as brave while the other says they’re foolhardy – both descriptions of the same thing, but they give a very different impression. Is the politician firm or hardline? Are they socially aware or woolly? These word choices can build up to create a persuasive picture that suits the person (or newspaper) in question. I’m always interested in how the media decide who to describe as terrorists, who are rebels, who are freedom fighters, who are resistance forces. Often the only difference between these terms is the way the person using them wants you to respond. So notice the word choices the other person is making and substitute your own, neutral words in your head so you can think more clearly.
Bear in mind that, consciously or unconsciously, you employ these same techniques yourself when you want to persuade someone else. So not everyone who tries to convert you to their way of thinking is knowingly manipulating or tricking you. Whether you agree with them or not, they’re entitled to hold their view and they’re entitled to express it. And you are entitled to resist it, or not, once you’ve thought it through rationally for yourself.
IF YOU CAN SPOT IT, IT’S MUCH EASIER TO RESIST
RULE 6
Don’t be gullible
If you believe everything I’ve told you so far, just because it’s written down in black and white, then think again. Yes, I believe it all, but you should be thinking it through for yourself. How do you know you can trust me? You’ve never met me, you don’t know who I am, you don’t even know what I look like. Just because I’ve had a book published doesn’t mean I know everything.
