The ART of THINKING
Two minds are better than one. But Catastrophic Thinkers have trained themselves to think with ten or more minds. They analyze every problem from many different angles. The Art of Thinking poster featured here is available on this site at the Store. It serves as a guide for reminding you to approach a problem from many different ways. Using different forms of thinking and brainstorming are truly art forms. Approach problems with the attitude that you will “think outside your box.”
To illustrate the art of thinking, I recall a valuable lesson that spanned many years, because I was and still am so slow and stupid. When I was eighteen and starting college, there was a span of a few days before classes started, so I decided to read a book The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam. The book explains how the Eastern intellectual elites got it so wrong about Viet Nam. On one level, Halberstam, either intentionally or unintentionally, painted them as insufferable, arrogant, overbearing snobs who thought highly of themselves and not so much of the rest of America. There were many anecdotes about how smart they were. One in particular depressed me because I realized no matter how long I went to college I would never be that smart. With minor changes here is the relevant excerpt:
If (McNamara) was tense and driven, (his) mind was mathematical, analytical, bringing order and reason out of chaos. Always reason. And reason supported by facts and statistics—he could prove his rationality with facts, intimidate others. He was marvelous with charts and statistics. Once, sitting at CINCPAC for eight hours watching hundreds and hundreds of slides flashed across the screen showing what was in the pipeline to Vietnam and what was already there, he finally said, after seven hours, “Stop the projector. This slide, number 869, contradicts slide 11.” Slide 11 was flashed back and he was right, they did contradict each other. Everyone was impressed, and many a little frightened.
McNamara was a brilliant man, so the book tells us. He was not an idiot savant, knowing an answer but not having the mind to be able to explain the reasoning process to anyone else. No, he was articulate, the best, the brightest America had to offer. So, I was greatly depressed going into college knowing no one could train my mind to retain or memorize such detail. I was, am, and always will be stupid in comparison. But I resolved then and there to learn as much as I could about the thinking process to overcome my deficiencies. Over the years I have collected many books about all types of thinking and amassed a library of several hundred books on thinking, hundreds more on catastrophes, and many books about dinosaurs, military stupidity, and other super smart persons, to try and learn how they thought. In the course of these studies, I developed Catastrophic Thinking as a framework to help assimilate the knowledge I was acquiring. Other frameworks I came to appreciate were my law school education and “thinking like a lawyer,” accounting and taxes which have a kind of alien thinking contrary to all forms of reason and common sense, economics as a discipline, physics, and even algorithms and computer logic.
Sometime after this framework was emerging in my mind, I revisited the McNamara passage. But now my mind was trained to see things many different ways. It came to me in a flash, when I mentally asked the probing question, “What was on slide 11?” It was a small leap to realize that McNamara thought there was something important on that slide and he made a mental note of it to ask about it later. Then it hit me. Some information on that slide did not ffit into his mental framework. Maybe he had read something different. Or maybe he thought it was an error and did not want to embarrass the presenter. But then along comes slide 869, about seven hours later, and it confirms what he had believe. So, he pretends to be confused by a “contradiction” and poses the “innocent” observation. Yes, he was brilliant, but in a far different way than memorizing endless data and slide numbers. My new theory on how he was thinking makes so much more sense to me. It is something I could do.
But what really sets McNamara apart is the art of his thinking. His brilliance was how he presented his thinking. Understated.
Mind-boggling.
No one else could even guess his train of thought and he had kept it hidden by the way he posed the observation. He was showing off.
That is not my intent here. I want you to develop your own mental frameworks or steal mine. I want you to increase your intelligence by following my findings on this website, by buying my future books, and by watching my videos. I want you to become smarter in how you think. You can do it. Just like I did and am doing. Thinking about thinking, learning HOW to think, is not a foolish quest. This blog can be to share your ideas on the Art of Thinking. Please share your thoughts and make me smarter.
If you want to develop your own framework for thinking, to help organize your thoughts, here are a few suggestions for how to do it:
Follow the guidance of existing frameworks.
1a. Educational frameworks. Thinking Like a Lawyer, by Colin Seale, Prufrock Press: Waco, Texas, 2020.
1b. Disciplines like military thinking. Good Strategy Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt, Penguin Random House: New York, 2011. This book applies military strategy to business and politics
Study the very smart people and how they think.
2a. Dead ones. How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, by Michael Gelb, Delacorte Press: New York, 1998.
2b. Living ones. The Power of Logical Thinking, by Marilyn Vos Savant, St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1996.
Use acronyms and mnemonic devices like CAVEAT to provide you with a quick way to organize your thoughts.
3a. Like SHARP. (Stop, Hone, Accumulate, Reason, Perspective) “Rebooting Critical Thinking,” by Julia Lavarnway, p.18, Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, 46:5, October 2022.
3b. Like PROACT. (Problem Identification, Objective clarification, Alternative expansion, Consequences of alternatives, Trade-offs) Make Smart Choices, by Som Bathla, 2019.
Adopt generic organizational techniques to approach problems.
4a. Systems. Think in Systems, by Zoe McKey, 2019.
4b. Models. The Model Thinker, by Scott Page, Basic Books: New York, 2018.
Vary your approaches to a problem.
5a. Using different forms of thinking. How Successful People Think, by John Maxwell, Center Street/Hachette Book Group: New York, 2009.
5b. Using paradigms. Good Thinking and Bad, by KJP Sheedy, WritersWorld: Oxfordshire, 2018.
Question everything.
6a. Beware of misinformation. “A Life Preserver for Staying Afloat in a Sea of Misinformation,” by Melanie Trecek-King, p.44, Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, 46:2, March/April 2022.
6b. Don’t ignore the outliers. Think Like a Rocket Scientist, by Ozan Varol, Public Affairs/Hachette Book Group: New York, 2020. Like a Black Swan, but this book in Chapter 4 calls it “Moonshot Thinking.”