Tools for Thought

Thinking about something more than once usually represents an improvement opportunity. It means that something isn’t getting captured, evaluated, acted on or consciously dismissed. Wouldn’t it be nice not have to think about the same things over and over — things that usually start with “I should . . .”? Having the same thought twice [...]

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Time for some backpedaling. For years I’ve been a proponent of studying in long, uninterrupted blocks — ideally a couple of hours at a time. Since I’ve been experimenting with segmented reading, I’m starting to doubt that longer is better — not the amount of overall time per se, but the length of uninterrupted time. [...]

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In John Medina’s awesome book, Brain Rules, the chapter on attention caught my attention. Medina, a professor, would ask new students each semester the following: Given a lecture that’s not too dull or too interesting, how long would it take for them to stop paying attention to the instructor and start looking at the clock? [...]

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The human mind is brilliant, but also brilliantly inefficient. We often get our best ideas where we can’t implement them. The classic example is in the shower, but it happens everywhere, anytime. You’re shopping in the produce section of the supermarket, and all of a sudden, you realize you need to add an important topic [...]

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The word “po” is a term coined by Edward de Bono in the sixties as a grammatical shorthand for a number of alternative thinking operations. The word has no magic powers in itself, but once you’re accustomed to using the operations it’s meant to invoke, their usage is less cumbersome, just as converting mathematical word [...]

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Many decisions we make during the day are easy. What do I want for dinner? Should I get gas now or later? What’s the best route to get to my destination? Easy decisions typically involve a very finite number of variables, low enough to manage them in our heads. The moment we have to compare, [...]

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The Pareto Principle — the concept that 20% of what contributes to an outcome accounts for 80% of that outcome — can be easily misunderstood on a few grounds. The ratio can vary. 10% of a collector’s paintings might account for 90% of the collection’s value. 50% of a meal might alleviate 100% of a [...]

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I normally don’t suggest things I haven’t tried for long, but I’m too encouraged by the results to let this pass without comment. A few days ago I had lunch at Phillippe in downtown Los Angeles (the best sandwich shop in God’s country). Whenever I eat there, my self-discipline invariably goes out the window, and [...]

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Just as most of us are better at talking than listening, most personal development discourse is more adept at setting goals than finding them. They advocate building your motivation to achieve a goal over questioning the motivation behind that goal. There’s no dialectic for asking if we really want what we want. The rhetoric of [...]

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In any situation, certain givens define the range of how we perceive it. By expanding the scope of considerations with a conscious effort, we can increase the span of our attention to aspects that might have otherwise been missed. Consider All Factors (CAF) is an attention directing tool designed to do this. During a defined [...]

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