Are You Collecting Thoughts and Insights?

In 2021, I want to be more consistent with how I collect Thoughts. For Christmas, my wife gave me a book journal, and the best way to gain insightful thoughts, I find, is from books. A key way that I plan to start collecting thoughts is to write down some of the most insightful ones I come across in my readings.

If you are curious, my way of doing this is to write down thought-provoking or insightful quotes in my book journal. I also write down the page, so I can go back and explore the context more deeply if I wish. Then when I finish the book, I can reflect on these great insights.

I want to stick to the habit of writing down these insights to reflect on them more deeply. When I reflect on them, I may ask myself – Is this truly insightful? Have I come across this idea before, perhaps just stated differently? Have I applied this in my own life or seen it applied? What are the limitations of this idea? Might it work under some conditions, but not in others?

Of course, insights are different for everyone. An insightful idea to me may be mundane for you, or vice versa. What is insightful for someone depends on life experience, the goals we set, and our interests. Also, many great insights may come from anywhere, not just books – it could be an experience, a conversation, observing people, a podcast, a class, and so on.

As I have already explored much of my history and life experiences and some of my own key insights in my prior posts (see some of them on the Start Here page), going into the future, I plan to discuss and site particular sources of insights. I see no reason to summarize a whole book, but rather, I may mention a key insight I gained from a book and discuss what I believe some implications may be or how the insight could be applied for our benefit. I may even aim to apply it first and then let you know how that went for me.

Keeping track of sources is important, so if you find a post especially useful, you can explore that Thought more deeply by reading the source material.

Hopefully, you can gain manifold insights this way. For example, I will share an insight I read about or experienced. Then, I will share my personal insights about that insight. Then I may ask you to reflect on this, hopefully allowing you to build new insights based on the ones I shared with you. We shall see if this works how I think it will – stay tuned to future posts to find out.

I will admit that I am often stuck in my own mind – and so it could be quite beneficial if I were to focus on applying some insightful ideas to see what true value could be gained from them. If I find some useful insights that I can apply, I will aim to do this and report back to you on how it goes. I hope this will keep the site useful, interesting, and inspiring for you.

In 2021, I wish to have more insights and share more insights and apply the best ones to help myself, and you, and everyone.

I wish you an INSIGHTFUL 2021! May you be full of great INSIGHTS.

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To discover how to read more deeply and attain more insights through your readings, I recommend: The Insightful Reader: How to Learn Deeply & Attain Life-Changing Insights from Books

As a final thought, if you have any new insights, I would be glad to hear from you in the form of a comment (on this post, or any relevant post). Keep in mind that the comments are not just for me. Usually, they can benefit many other readers who could learn from your valuable experiences. For instance, you may ask a question, share an experience, or provide your own thoughts on one of my posts.

Think Out Loud

“What were you thinking?”

Do you ever get asked that, but in a way that is judgmental and condescending, perhaps?

Well, maybe it would help to go over our thoughts out loud more often. If we shared our thoughts more openly instead of hiding them, then certain flaws in our thinking would become apparent. This is good because by seeing the flaws, we can work to correct them.

Sometimes I wonder – wouldn’t it be easy to go through life with some glaring flaw in one’s thinking? How would you realize this about yourself? If these thoughts stay trapped in the mind and we do not often share them, then we may have major problems in our thinking and not even realize it.

I believe the people who exhibit higher levels of thinking or have a very high expertise level in their field should occasionally help guide others by revealing their own thinking processes. Then other people could learn to improve their thinking abilities.

A quirk about me is that I have never been that interested in learning particular facts. I am not the person you want to see on Jeopardy – I would probably do embarrassingly bad. Rather, I have always been fascinated by the thought processes that helped people make their discoveries or solve difficult problems. I tend to think that if I have the right thought processes, then I can figure things out on my own with minimal facts. With the wrong thought processes, I could perhaps have infinite facts at my disposal and have no idea what to do with them. With the wrong way of thinking, I may even come to the wrong conclusions, which could be even worse.

Ultimately, rather than accumulating random facts, I aim to pursue a higher understanding - and I hope to help you get there too.

Something I have learned to do is to reconstruct other people’s thoughts. If you have ever seen a “true crime” show that was dramatized, these are reconstructed scenes. The dialog and interactions may be made up or intuited in some cases.

Similarly, when I see someone solve a problem, I always ask myself what they could have been thinking. I try to reverse-engineer how they got to the solution. Sometimes I feel like I have figured it out – and I have been able to decode their thought processes. But this is not always easy. Usually, I look at the actions they took. Then I ask what they would have thought that led them to take that action. If I can, I may try to confirm what they were thinking at a critical point.

I want to encourage us to see the value in thinking out loud more often. This could be especially valuable if there is a child nearby. People always say that children learn by example. But how can we have example thoughts? The thoughts are in our heads usually. In that case, we should be willing to think out loud or occasionally verbalize our thinking.

You may be thinking, of course, we all verbalize our thoughts. It’s called speaking. Yes, this is true. My point is that when solving problems, most of us don’t see the need to think out loud. If you have solved a problem before, you know what to do. You take the necessary actions and solve it. However, a problem that you have seen a hundred times may be new to someone else. They may benefit from hearing you think out loud.

Other than just with children, there may be other useful opportunities to practice thinking out loud. If you know someone who wants to learn in your field, and you are the expert, and they are the novice, consider thinking aloud through certain problems to help show them how to think through them.

I suppose some general thinking rules can be applied to anything. But I also suppose that to advance in a particular field, we will need to learn how to think through specific problems more successfully.

When I was in school, I was usually able to figure out a thought process to arrive at the solutions to problems, but often I would later learn that my way of thinking was very inefficient. I was focusing on the wrong things, perhaps. In some cases, if I arrived at the wrong solutions, I may continue to work on the problem, trying to figure out the right way of thinking through trial and error. I believe it would have been more efficient to learn the right way to think from the beginning. Or rather, to have had someone help me identify my wrong thoughts and then replace those with the correct ones.

In reality, our thoughts and actions are often intertwined. If you pay close attention, every action tends to reveal a thought process behind it. If I pick up a red rock from the ground and bring it up to my mouth and try to take a bite, you can probably guess what I was thinking.

You would guess that for some reason, I had thought this rock was a fruit. You may dig a bit deeper - how could I have thought this way? Perhaps I was distracted or dealing with a personal trauma that dampened my observational skills. Perhaps I was not wearing my glasses, and I have horrible vision. Perhaps I was starving and not thinking clearly. Some of this is guesswork, but you can be pretty sure that I had somehow imagined the rock to be an edible piece of food.

Again:

If you pay close attention, every action tends to reveal a thought-process behind it.

Much of our academic life is focused on learning facts, but perhaps we should also focus more on absorbing higher-level thinking. This could be from experts who have fine-tuned their thinking and have proven their ability to think through new problems. Someone good at solving only the problems that they are familiar with has not necessarily proved that they are thinking at a higher level.

Higher-level thinking would likely involve some of the following:

•        Experience – having sufficient knowledge and experience to approach new problems

•        Efficiency of thought – not wasting time on knowledge or thought processes that are irrelevant

•        Problem definition – knowing how to define the problem precisely

•        Questioning ability – knowing the right questions to help further define what is known and unknown

•        Reasoning ability – knowing which actions are likely to result in which outcomes

•        Creative ability – being able to use new ideas, resources, or systems to solve a problem

•        Simulation ability – using the above skills and abilities, a high-level thinker may be able to simulate problems and processes in the mind to help identify the most likely outcomes

•        Awareness of limitations – knowing when your abilities or resources are insufficient to solve a problem

Generally, a higher-level thinker will not need to use trial and error. Ideally, the thinking ability will be at a point where they can effectively solve problems in their mind and then execute the solutions.

If you wish to go the route of learning higher-level thinking skills, it can be worth the effort to learn some bad thinking as well. For example, what mistakes did Albert Einstein make in his thinking? Wouldn’t it be interesting to learn that? For a physicist, at least, this may be valuable to know.

Something I have learned is that often the novice will focus on things that are not so important. Part of what the novice needs is to gain experience, of course. But when a novice learns the right things to think about and focus on, this can make all the difference in helping to learn and to think more effectively.

Today, I am simply encouraging you to ask yourself if your thinking abilities could benefit from learning how others at a higher level think through problems. You may consider pursuing a mentor or teacher to show you not just what to do but also how to think through new problems. As you learn what to do and how to do it, remember to focus on the why or the thought processes you can use to help you advance further. To learn those thought processes, it helps if you can listen to someone think out loud.

Also, if you believe you could be a higher-level thinker, please realize that not everyone has this ability. If you take a moment here and there to reveal your thinking processes to those around you, it could be a great help to them.

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Here are some books that reveal the thinking processes of experts, if you are interested:

• Thinking Allowed by Jeffrey Mishlove (and many other authors)

• Think Like a Grandmaster by Alexander Kotov (about Chess)

• Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen (about Poker)

• Think Like a Rocket Scientist by Ozan Varol

• Think Like a Programmer by V. Anton Spraul