The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, by Edward Burger and Michael Starbird explores better ways to learn, explore an idea, and brainstorm. I’ve found the principles in this book especially helpful in promoting creative thinking and understanding new concepts.
Master the Basics
The most effective way to learn something new is to understand the core concepts deeply. Strip everything down to its fundamentals and master them. This is also an important point highlighted in the book, The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin.
Understanding the fundamentals will give you a strong foundation of knowledge to help you master a topic. Drawing on these basic components will deconstruct the more complex components of a concept into basic parts. This will make it easier to learn the more complex parts.
Continuously take inventory of gaps in your knowledge of the fundamentals. Then challenge and explore assumptions to understand the core concept more deeply. This will allow you to prioritize what you need to learn next, then do your research.
As an example of breaking things down to their fundamentals, the book discusses deconstructing the moon landing in 1969. Safely landing on the moon is a very complex undertaking. But first understanding how to simply hit the moon solves the basics—getting there in the first place and touching the surface. Landing on the moon is then a refinement of hitting the moon, and breaks a tall task into simpler parts. Understanding the fundamental aspect of getting to the moon will then present a clearer picture of what needs to be tweaked to land on the moon.
Lean into Failure
Failure is the best teacher, but you must seek to understand the learning behind your failure. Find ways to have small failures frequently, and analyze what went wrong. Each time you fail, iterate, and improve, then try again.
In an example of iterating on failure, in a mathematics class, the professor asked a difficult question to students with little background in mathematics: “What is Infinity?” The professor didn’t offer a lecture. They only asked the students to give some thought to the question for five minutes, then one student would give their answer, expecting it to be wrong. One student volunteered an answer, which was indeed incorrect. The professor asked WHY it was wrong. The student answered why then provided a revised answer. The professor again asked why the new answer was wrong. The student answered, and the process continued. The student finally provided the correct answer. The student worked through the problem through trial and error and learned a great deal on the way.
Ask Questions
“Stupid” questions are often better than one would think. It helps to explore the topic and challenges basic assumptions that otherwise get overlooked. They also allow you to admit your ignorance and explore things more openly while surfacing more fundamentals.
Find a good coach who can ask you the right questions on a topic. The coach doesn’t need to be an expert, it is often better if they’re not, they need to be good at asking probing questions, then let you think through and answer. The questioner can probe deeper, based on your response. This is a great technique for identifying more gaps in your knowledge. The book, Coaching for Performance, by John Whitmore, discusses this concept in depth.
Another way of learning a topic is by teaching the subject to someone else. This forces you to think like the teacher and consider how you would explain something to a student. Forcing yourself to think things through in this way can help you learn a topic and how to present it in a simple way that other learners can understand.
The book also recommends writing questions for a “test” yourself. This helps you consider the right areas of a subject to know what’s important to understand.
Flow of Ideas
Embrace the flow of ideas as they come to you. Instead of considering each idea as static and separate, see each thought as flowing together, transforming and iterating on previous ideas before it. This can translate to some fantastic breakthroughs and is especially useful during brainstorming sessions.
Don’t re-invent the wheel. Instead, stand on the shoulders of giants. Use existing great ideas or concepts and build on those. A great example the book provides is how the invention of the lightbulb gave way to the invention of the movie projector. The movie projector used the lightbulb as a basis to project pictures on a screen. This is standing on the shoulders of giants in action, and iterating on top of them.
Similarly, try to view the world with fresh eyes. As the book suggests, many of us recall the days before smartphones and tablets were invented, so we carry certain biases in how these tools should be used. The younger generation isn’t weighed down by these same biases, as they only know a world where smartphones and tablets always existed. They may likely better conceive of new ways they can be used when compared to the older generation. So, when thinking through a concept, try to look at it with fresh eyes, and innovative ideas may come to you.
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