
By Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird
Short and ridicously simple. I read it quick, since I didn't enjoy it fully; the insights and arguments contained here you would find them in other better books.
Nevertheless, good wisdom for managers, executives, researchers and anyone interested in learning fast and become better thinkers. But if you would like to explore more in depth, you better read others.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 6 / 10
Click Here to Read My Notes
Short and ridicously simple. I read it quick, since I didn't enjoy it fully; the insights and arguments contained here you would find them in other better books.
Nevertheless, good wisdom for managers, executives, researchers and anyone interested in learning fast and become better thinkers. But if you would like to explore more in depth, you better read others.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 6 / 10
Click Here to Read My Notes
In any movie, play, or literary work, media scholars tell us how to determine who truly is the main character of the story—it’s the individual who, by the end, has changed the most. Your life is an exciting journey.
The elements and exercises provide you with an intellectual GPS to help you navigate through life.
Understanding is not a yes-or-no proposition; it’s not an on-or-off switch.
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. Once is never enough. As you revisit fundamentals, you will find new insights.
It may appear that returning to basics is a step backward and requires additional time and effort; however, by building on firm foundations you will soon see your true abilities soar higher and faster.
The whole of science is merely a refinement of everyday thinking. —Albert Einstein
The simple and familiar hold the secrets of the complex and unknown. The depth with which you master the basics influences how well you understand everything you learn after that.
To learn any subject well and to create ideas beyond those that have existed before, return to the basics repeatedly.
Great scientists, creative thinkers, and problem solvers do not solve hard problems head-on. When they are faced with a daunting question, they immediately and prudently admit defeat.
When the going gets tough, creative problem solvers create an easier, simpler problem that they can solve. They resolve that easier issue thoroughly and then study that simple scenario with laser focus.
Choose a subproblem small enough that you can give it this level of attention. Only later should you consider how your efforts could help solve the larger issue.
When faced with an issue that is complicated and multifaceted, attempt to isolate the essential ingredients.
Many real questions are surrounded and obscured by history, context, and adornments. Within that cloud of vaguely related, interacting influences, you need to pluck out the central themes.
Consider a subject you wish to understand, and clear the clutter until you have isolated one essential ingredient. Each complicated issue has several possible core ideas. You are not seeking “the” essential idea; you are seeking just one—consider a subject and pare it down to one theme.
Whenever you “see” an issue or “understand” 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 assumptions you bring, and actively work to see and understand the subject anew.
To better understand your world, consciously acknowledge what you actually see—no matter how mundane or obvious—rather than guess at what you think you are supposed to see.
Being honest and accurate about what you actually know and don’t know forces you to identify and fill gaps in your understanding. It is at the interface between what you actually know and what you don’t yet know that true learning and growth occur.
Deliberately avoid glossing over any gaps or vagueness. Instead boldly assert what is tepid or missing in your understanding. Now take the action of filling in the gaps. Identifying and admitting your own uncertainties is an enormous step toward solid understanding.
Commonly held opinions are frequently just plain false. Often we are persuaded by authority and repetition rather than by evidence and reality.
How can people, for thousands of years, believe false assertions that are easily disproved? Answer: 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. If you believe something only because another person—even a professor—told you it was so, then you should not view your understanding as rock solid.
Regularly consider your opinions, beliefs, and knowledge, and subject them to the “How do I know?” test.
... say, “For the next day (or even the next twenty minutes), I’ll pretend my opinions are the opposite of what I normally believe (even though I know it’s nonsense), and see where those new beliefs take me.
Take some opinion that you hold that other people (those who clearly are wrong) do not hold.
Try not to be judgmental. Don’t resist the alternative views. You are not committing to any change. This exercise has the goal of understanding alternatives more realistically.
Attend a meeting or dinner sponsored by a group that has a point of view different from your own. If you’re a student and a Republican, attend a Young Democrats Club event. If you’re an atheist, attend a Christian Fellowship meeting.
Armed with this insight and his desire to enable his customers to buy more, Mr. Goldman took some wooden folding chairs, and affixed wheels to their legs and a basket to their seats. Goldman invented the shopping cart. Not only did the cash start rolling in, but this innovation also led the way for department, retail, electronic, and home-improvement stores of the future to move lots and lots of merchandise. By just describing what was there, he was led to see the invisible.
See the invisible Select your own object, issue, or topic of study and attach an adjective or descriptive phrase (such as “the First” before “World War”) that points out some reality of the situation, ideally some feature that is limiting or taken for granted. Then consider whether your phrase suggests new possibilities or opportunities.
“Understand deeply” is great advice, but what does it really mean? The truth is that most of us never understand anything deeply.
“If you can’t explain it, you don’t know it.
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.
And seeing what’s missing helps you to identify the limits of your knowledge, to reveal new possibilities, and to create new solutions to complex problems.
When you look at your own familiar world with unaccustomed depth and clarity, that world will open up to show richness, structure, and meaning that you never saw before.
Among the goals of this book are to describe how you can construct original ideas, to show how you can solve old problems, and to reveal how you can create new worlds.
Clear away the distractions, see what’s actually there, and make the invisible visible.
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. —Winston Churchill
If we have the healthier attitude that failure is a potent teacher and a scheduled stop along the road to success, then we find ourselves liberated to move forward sooner, because mistakes are actions we definitely can take at any time. If you’re stuck, a mistake can be just the thing to unstick you.
Failure is a critical element of effective learning, teaching, and creative problem solving.
The next time you face a daunting challenge, think to yourself, “In order for me to resolve this issue, I will have to fail nine times, but on the tenth attempt, I will be successful.” This attitude frees you and allows you to think creatively without fear of failure, because you understand that learning from failure is a forward step toward success.
failing productively involves two basic steps: creating the mistake and then exploiting the mistake.
A specific mistake is an excellent source of insight and direction, because a mistake gives you something specific to think about: “This attempt is wrong because ——.” When you fill in the blank, you are forcing yourself to identify precisely what is wrong with your attempted solution. This process shifts the activity from trying to think of a correct solution, which you don’t know at the moment, to the activity of correcting mistakes, which is often something you can do.
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery. —James Joyce
First drafts are not just for writers. Thomas Edison was famous for his incremental approach to intentional invention: try something; see what’s wrong; learn from the defect; try again.
The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away. —Linus Pauling
You may not know how to do it right, but you can certainly do it wrong.
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.
You may not feel that writing down bad ideas is a worthwhile start, but one thing is certain: writing down bad ideas is something anyone can do.
Now read what you wrote and focus on two features: what’s right and what’s wrong. When you just write down ideas without worrying about correctness, structure, or elegance, your thoughts about the subject often flow out freely and clearly.
Students often say, “I got an 80% on this homework; that’s good enough and I’m moving on.” Bad idea. By not exploiting this great opportunity to learn from their mistakes, they’re essentially throwing away—on average—20% of their grade on their next exam before they’ve even taken it, and they’re building future work on a cracked foundation. Why not learn from your current missteps today and give yourself a 20% bonus in your future?
Seeing a mistake as possibly a correct answer to a different question puts our thinking on its head. We look at a mistake not as a wrong answer, but instead as an opportunity to ask, “What is the question to which this is a correct answer?
Two reactions to mistakes. So 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.
Some viewers might look upon the results as mistakes, although the artists might view the results as plumbing the depths of artistic expression.
Mistakes and failure are not signs of weakness; instead they are opportunities for future success.
Let’s be honest: failure can be frightening and uncomfortable—a true trial by fire.
Thus it is with the element Fire that we associate the strategy of failing on the way to succeeding. Problems that require truly creative solutions are problems that you simply do not yet know how to solve. This book is all about being successful—even if and often because you fail first.
Many people view questions as irksome—they associate questions with being ignorant, being lost, or, even worse, being tested.
In fact, the very act of creating questions, for yourself, is a profound step toward understanding—even if the questions are neither asked nor answered.
Socrates is perhaps the most famous philosopher in human history because of his method of generating ideas. He challenged his students, friends, and even enemies to make new discoveries by asking them uncomfortable, core questions.
You can become your own Socrates.
Traditionally people believe that it’s in the answering of questions that progress is made. In fact, creating questions is as important as answering them, if not more so, because framing good questions focuses your attention on the right issues.
A transformative but challenging personal policy is to never pretend to know more than you do. Don’t build on ambiguity and ignorance. When you don’t know something, admit it as quickly as possible and immediately take action—ask a question.
One profound habit of thinking individuals is to first acknowledge their biases and then intentionally overcome them.
If an exam is looming in your future, prepare by writing the test itself. Well beforehand, compose a list of good exam questions, put it away for a few days, and then later dig it out and take that mock test.
Do you know the material so well that you know what the good questions are? If you don’t, then you do not understand the material well enough, and you need to go deeper.
Remember: If you can’t create the questions, you’re not ready for the test.
Consider an idea or topic you are trying to better understand, and create a list of fundamental questions that will guide you to a complete explanation, including motivation, examples, overview, and details, of that subject. With those questions (and their corresponding answers) in hand, prepare a minilecture and consider delivering it to some audience—family, friends, or even a teacher.
Creating questions enlivens your curiosity.
People who ask lots of probing questions outperform those who don’t engage with the ideas. Constantly generate questions and then ask them—that mind-set will lead to a richer appreciation of the issues.
That is, instead of asking whether there are questions, tell your listeners that they are to create questions—an important habit to develop for lifelong learning and curiosity.
If you are constantly engaged in asking yourself questions about what you are hearing, you will find that even boring lecturers become a bit more interesting, because much of the interest will be coming from what you are generating rather than what the lecturer is offering.
When someone else speaks, you need to be thought provoking!
Effective questions lead 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
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. —Peter Drucker
Every subject is an ongoing journey of discovery and development. It is not just a laundry list of disconnected topic, topic, topic, but a flow of ideas that build upon each other.
Whenever you face an issue—whether an area of study or a decision about a future path—consider what came before. Wonder how the issue at hand landed in front of you. Ask where and what it was yesterday, a month ago, a year ago, and so forth.
Students who embrace the mind-set that better ideas are literally right next door and that “one more small step will get me there” outperform those who believe that only the great minds make great progress.
The elements and exercises provide you with an intellectual GPS to help you navigate through life.
Understanding is not a yes-or-no proposition; it’s not an on-or-off switch.
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. Once is never enough. As you revisit fundamentals, you will find new insights.
It may appear that returning to basics is a step backward and requires additional time and effort; however, by building on firm foundations you will soon see your true abilities soar higher and faster.
The whole of science is merely a refinement of everyday thinking. —Albert Einstein
The simple and familiar hold the secrets of the complex and unknown. The depth with which you master the basics influences how well you understand everything you learn after that.
To learn any subject well and to create ideas beyond those that have existed before, return to the basics repeatedly.
Great scientists, creative thinkers, and problem solvers do not solve hard problems head-on. When they are faced with a daunting question, they immediately and prudently admit defeat.
When the going gets tough, creative problem solvers create an easier, simpler problem that they can solve. They resolve that easier issue thoroughly and then study that simple scenario with laser focus.
Choose a subproblem small enough that you can give it this level of attention. Only later should you consider how your efforts could help solve the larger issue.
When faced with an issue that is complicated and multifaceted, attempt to isolate the essential ingredients.
Many real questions are surrounded and obscured by history, context, and adornments. Within that cloud of vaguely related, interacting influences, you need to pluck out the central themes.
Consider a subject you wish to understand, and clear the clutter until you have isolated one essential ingredient. Each complicated issue has several possible core ideas. You are not seeking “the” essential idea; you are seeking just one—consider a subject and pare it down to one theme.
Whenever you “see” an issue or “understand” 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 assumptions you bring, and actively work to see and understand the subject anew.
To better understand your world, consciously acknowledge what you actually see—no matter how mundane or obvious—rather than guess at what you think you are supposed to see.
Being honest and accurate about what you actually know and don’t know forces you to identify and fill gaps in your understanding. It is at the interface between what you actually know and what you don’t yet know that true learning and growth occur.
Deliberately avoid glossing over any gaps or vagueness. Instead boldly assert what is tepid or missing in your understanding. Now take the action of filling in the gaps. Identifying and admitting your own uncertainties is an enormous step toward solid understanding.
Commonly held opinions are frequently just plain false. Often we are persuaded by authority and repetition rather than by evidence and reality.
How can people, for thousands of years, believe false assertions that are easily disproved? Answer: 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. If you believe something only because another person—even a professor—told you it was so, then you should not view your understanding as rock solid.
Regularly consider your opinions, beliefs, and knowledge, and subject them to the “How do I know?” test.
... say, “For the next day (or even the next twenty minutes), I’ll pretend my opinions are the opposite of what I normally believe (even though I know it’s nonsense), and see where those new beliefs take me.
Take some opinion that you hold that other people (those who clearly are wrong) do not hold.
Try not to be judgmental. Don’t resist the alternative views. You are not committing to any change. This exercise has the goal of understanding alternatives more realistically.
Attend a meeting or dinner sponsored by a group that has a point of view different from your own. If you’re a student and a Republican, attend a Young Democrats Club event. If you’re an atheist, attend a Christian Fellowship meeting.
Armed with this insight and his desire to enable his customers to buy more, Mr. Goldman took some wooden folding chairs, and affixed wheels to their legs and a basket to their seats. Goldman invented the shopping cart. Not only did the cash start rolling in, but this innovation also led the way for department, retail, electronic, and home-improvement stores of the future to move lots and lots of merchandise. By just describing what was there, he was led to see the invisible.
See the invisible Select your own object, issue, or topic of study and attach an adjective or descriptive phrase (such as “the First” before “World War”) that points out some reality of the situation, ideally some feature that is limiting or taken for granted. Then consider whether your phrase suggests new possibilities or opportunities.
“Understand deeply” is great advice, but what does it really mean? The truth is that most of us never understand anything deeply.
“If you can’t explain it, you don’t know it.
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.
And seeing what’s missing helps you to identify the limits of your knowledge, to reveal new possibilities, and to create new solutions to complex problems.
When you look at your own familiar world with unaccustomed depth and clarity, that world will open up to show richness, structure, and meaning that you never saw before.
Among the goals of this book are to describe how you can construct original ideas, to show how you can solve old problems, and to reveal how you can create new worlds.
Clear away the distractions, see what’s actually there, and make the invisible visible.
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. —Winston Churchill
If we have the healthier attitude that failure is a potent teacher and a scheduled stop along the road to success, then we find ourselves liberated to move forward sooner, because mistakes are actions we definitely can take at any time. If you’re stuck, a mistake can be just the thing to unstick you.
Failure is a critical element of effective learning, teaching, and creative problem solving.
The next time you face a daunting challenge, think to yourself, “In order for me to resolve this issue, I will have to fail nine times, but on the tenth attempt, I will be successful.” This attitude frees you and allows you to think creatively without fear of failure, because you understand that learning from failure is a forward step toward success.
failing productively involves two basic steps: creating the mistake and then exploiting the mistake.
A specific mistake is an excellent source of insight and direction, because a mistake gives you something specific to think about: “This attempt is wrong because ——.” When you fill in the blank, you are forcing yourself to identify precisely what is wrong with your attempted solution. This process shifts the activity from trying to think of a correct solution, which you don’t know at the moment, to the activity of correcting mistakes, which is often something you can do.
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery. —James Joyce
First drafts are not just for writers. Thomas Edison was famous for his incremental approach to intentional invention: try something; see what’s wrong; learn from the defect; try again.
The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away. —Linus Pauling
You may not know how to do it right, but you can certainly do it wrong.
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.
You may not feel that writing down bad ideas is a worthwhile start, but one thing is certain: writing down bad ideas is something anyone can do.
Now read what you wrote and focus on two features: what’s right and what’s wrong. When you just write down ideas without worrying about correctness, structure, or elegance, your thoughts about the subject often flow out freely and clearly.
Students often say, “I got an 80% on this homework; that’s good enough and I’m moving on.” Bad idea. By not exploiting this great opportunity to learn from their mistakes, they’re essentially throwing away—on average—20% of their grade on their next exam before they’ve even taken it, and they’re building future work on a cracked foundation. Why not learn from your current missteps today and give yourself a 20% bonus in your future?
Seeing a mistake as possibly a correct answer to a different question puts our thinking on its head. We look at a mistake not as a wrong answer, but instead as an opportunity to ask, “What is the question to which this is a correct answer?
Two reactions to mistakes. So 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.
Some viewers might look upon the results as mistakes, although the artists might view the results as plumbing the depths of artistic expression.
Mistakes and failure are not signs of weakness; instead they are opportunities for future success.
Let’s be honest: failure can be frightening and uncomfortable—a true trial by fire.
Thus it is with the element Fire that we associate the strategy of failing on the way to succeeding. Problems that require truly creative solutions are problems that you simply do not yet know how to solve. This book is all about being successful—even if and often because you fail first.
Many people view questions as irksome—they associate questions with being ignorant, being lost, or, even worse, being tested.
In fact, the very act of creating questions, for yourself, is a profound step toward understanding—even if the questions are neither asked nor answered.
Socrates is perhaps the most famous philosopher in human history because of his method of generating ideas. He challenged his students, friends, and even enemies to make new discoveries by asking them uncomfortable, core questions.
You can become your own Socrates.
Traditionally people believe that it’s in the answering of questions that progress is made. In fact, creating questions is as important as answering them, if not more so, because framing good questions focuses your attention on the right issues.
A transformative but challenging personal policy is to never pretend to know more than you do. Don’t build on ambiguity and ignorance. When you don’t know something, admit it as quickly as possible and immediately take action—ask a question.
One profound habit of thinking individuals is to first acknowledge their biases and then intentionally overcome them.
If an exam is looming in your future, prepare by writing the test itself. Well beforehand, compose a list of good exam questions, put it away for a few days, and then later dig it out and take that mock test.
Do you know the material so well that you know what the good questions are? If you don’t, then you do not understand the material well enough, and you need to go deeper.
Remember: If you can’t create the questions, you’re not ready for the test.
Consider an idea or topic you are trying to better understand, and create a list of fundamental questions that will guide you to a complete explanation, including motivation, examples, overview, and details, of that subject. With those questions (and their corresponding answers) in hand, prepare a minilecture and consider delivering it to some audience—family, friends, or even a teacher.
Creating questions enlivens your curiosity.
People who ask lots of probing questions outperform those who don’t engage with the ideas. Constantly generate questions and then ask them—that mind-set will lead to a richer appreciation of the issues.
That is, instead of asking whether there are questions, tell your listeners that they are to create questions—an important habit to develop for lifelong learning and curiosity.
If you are constantly engaged in asking yourself questions about what you are hearing, you will find that even boring lecturers become a bit more interesting, because much of the interest will be coming from what you are generating rather than what the lecturer is offering.
When someone else speaks, you need to be thought provoking!
Effective questions lead 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
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. —Peter Drucker
Every subject is an ongoing journey of discovery and development. It is not just a laundry list of disconnected topic, topic, topic, but a flow of ideas that build upon each other.
Whenever you face an issue—whether an area of study or a decision about a future path—consider what came before. Wonder how the issue at hand landed in front of you. Ask where and what it was yesterday, a month ago, a year ago, and so forth.
Students who embrace the mind-set that better ideas are literally right next door and that “one more small step will get me there” outperform those who believe that only the great minds make great progress.