The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught: How to Think Better
One great passage: "I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing." It goes on to talk about the value of writing as a way of processing your thoughts and compressing ideas to their essentials.
I especially like the part about letting time be a filter: "What has been will continue to be. The second idea is the Lindy Effect, which is just a fancy way of saying what’s been around will continue to be around. In his book Antifragile, author Nassim Taleb, who builds on the idea of Benoit Mandelbrot, writes: 'For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy. So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.'"
The Best Summary of How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler on the four levels of reading: Elementary, Inspectional, Analytical, and Synoptical Reading
Stop Reading News: One great line is, "News is a cropped photo, not the whole picture."
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