Useful thinking

Page 57. Useful thinking. To function well in the modern world you need to differentiate what’s working for you from what’s working against you. While it’s sometimes. Feels that all of our thoughts are an incessant stream of useless blabber, the reality is that our most useful thoughts are usually silent. There are three types of thought that our brain produces; insightful – used for problem-solving, experiential – focused on the task at hand, and narrative – chatter.

— from The Mind in the Cockpit · Solve for Happy, Engineer your Path to Joy. By Mo Gawdat

In the book

When you catch yourself wanting something to be true, deliberately flip the question from "can I believe this?" to "must I believe this?" And ask the plainest precaution of all: am I taking real steps to avoid fooling myself? - Choose to think, on purpose. A thousand times a day you choose between thinking and not thinking — you are genuinely free to think, to not bother, or to actively avoid it, so choose the harder option more often. But also learn useful thinking: distinguish what is actually worth your thought from what is not, and refuse to spend the instrument on noise. Run a thinking checklist, and keep good company. Borrow Kipling's six honest servants — what, why, when, how, where, and who — and let them interrogate any hard problem. — The Mind in the Cockpit

The mind can hold only one dominant thought at a time, so the real skill is choosing, deliberately, what to put there — and, just as importantly, what to leave out. Learn the difference, too, between useful and useless thinking: most of our mental noise is narrative chatter, while the truly useful thoughts — the ones that solve a problem or stay with the task — are usually quiet. Forget what is neither urgent nor important, and be fully present with the one thing in front of you, because a split mind learns and decides poorly. — Decisions & Choices (Decision/Choice/Focus/Forethought/Consequences)

Also belongs to

Related