Twenty-Five Useful Thinking Tools
The smartest people are the people with the most names, dates and places stored away inside their mind. This is a topic that has been discussed a lot before, but I’d like to take a different angle at it. The more you have, the more ways you can approach different problems.
Actor: The Best Way to Pretend is to Be Real
Feel the emotions of the character you’re portraying, rather than just faking it
- Past struggles can stand in place for the struggles of the role you play
- Fear, happiness, confidence, and passion all look better when you’re really experiencing them
Does Your Story Make Sense?
Novelists understand better than anyone that what actually happens is often not a good story
- Stories have characters with fixed traits that make their actions predictable
- Reality is a continuous stream of events without an arc
- You need to package up the histories you want to tell people in a way that they can interpret
Soldier: Routine and Discipline Prevent Deadly Mistakes
Military discipline and routine become a safeguard against careless mistakes which could cost lives.
- Once you know the best way to do something, do it precisely and exactly, without sloppiness or somebody might get hurt.
Hacker: What’s Really Going on Underneath?
Hacking is mostly about understanding that there is often a more complicated layer of instructions which a simpler layer is built on top.
- Everything you see is usually a simplification of a deeper reality. Which can mean that the underlying system may be broken in a way you wouldn’t naively expect.
Philosopher: What are the Unexpected Consequences of an Intuition?
Being able to see the unexpected consequences of stretching an idea to its limits
- This can reveal flaws in the original idea, by reductio ad absurdum
- Help you recognize the fundamental principles behind your vague intuitions
Designer: The Things You Make Communicate For You
How something is made suggests how to use it.
- A well-designed door handle suggests push or pull, without needing to say it.
- A light switch tells you which rooms will be illuminated when you flip it.
Anthropologist: Can You Immerse and Join Another Culture?
Anthropology is the study of cultures
Engineer: Can I Model This and Calculate?
Create a model of what you’re trying to work with, measure the relevant variables, and know to what degree of error you can expect in those measurements.
- From there, you can know what will happen, instead of just guessing.
Programmer: What’s the Pattern I Can Automate?
Algorithms are a set of steps that can be defined precisely, so that they require no intelligence to perform each one, yet the net result is a useful product.
- A useful application of this is to look at the things you do and see which could be automated or simplified.
Accountant: Watch the Ratios
Ratios are a fraction with a numerator and denominator of two different measurements inside a business.
- Leverage ratio is the debt the company owes to the equity put in by the owners
- Price-earnings ratio tells you how expensive a stock is based on its profits
- This is useful in non-accounting domains as well
Critic: Can You Build on The Work of Others?
Many critics go beyond telling you which books to read and which movies to watch. They build analysis, interpretation, and discussion that go well beyond the original work.
- They have the ability to pay close attention to creative works and connect knowledge to a web of other ideas.
Architect: Envisioning the Future
To do this, architects need a suite of thinking tools
- One of those tools is simply making a model
- Making a scaled down version of the thing you want to create, so you can see how it looks, and then envisioning how it will be on a larger version is difficult, but it often lets you see how reality will be before it’s too late to change it.
Artist: What if Creativity Were the Priority?
The best companies produce things that look like art because they are driven by uniqueness and creativity
- How would your work change if you made novelty the biggest priority? How could your goals and projects be different if coolness, interestingness or refinement of an original idea were your priority?
Teacher: Can You See What it is Like Not to Know Something Obvious?
To be effective, teachers need to have a model of how their pupils minds see the world, as well as a game plan for changing it
- Identify what knowledge they lack and say the right things to get them where they are now
Doctor: What’s the Diagnosis?
Use symptoms to deduce a disease, and compare with base rates to make highly-accurate decisions
- During this, a wrong move might kill your patient, so you have to choose wisely
- Rule out as many possible causes as possible, and of the options that are left, which are rare afflictions and which are fairly common?
Psychologist: Test Your Understanding of Other People
Psychology has different thinking tools embedded both in its assumptions about human nature as well as in its methods for discovering it.
- Like all scientists, this involves creating experiments where you can control all but the variable you want to study. Unlike other scientists, however, your object of study are human beings.
Plumber: Take it Apart and See What’s Broken
The essence of plumbing is to get your hands dirty and take something apart to see what’s broken.
- To do this, you need a model of what’s in there-otherwise you might get water spilling everywhere or a dangerous shock.
See the Moves in Your Mind’s Eye
Being able to see the game in your head allows you to calculate future moves your opponent makes.
- This can hone your simulation abilities, so when you’re in a tight spot you’ll be able to predict what happens next.
Politician: What Will People Believe?
Politicians calculate the effect of an action on how that action will be perceived by the voting populace and allies and enemies.
- Sometimes the right decision is not possible because other people won’t see it as such, and you don’t have the power to convince them.
Do a Lot of Things; See What Works
Entrepreneurs often have too little money, resources, support, or time.
- Rapid prototyping is an abstract thinking tool that applies to a lot more than product R&D
- The essence of this thinking tool is that you go out and try a bunch of things, without waiting around for a perfect answer
Make a Hypothesis and Test It
Scientists discover truths about the world using thinking tools
- Controlled experiment
- Keep all variables the same except for the one you want to test, and see what happens
- This requires meticulous preparation and design to prevent outside contamination from breaking your results
Economist: How Do People React to Incentives?
People respond to incentives
- By changing a system involving people, the people do not stay in place, they change incentives accordingly
- Almost any action you’ll take alters the perceptions of incentives by other people you deal with
Twenty-Five Thinking Tools
Twenty-five tools abstracted from the profession I feel exemplifies them best.
- These are not intended to be a complete description of every tool used in the profession.
- Instead, I wanted to pluck one tool which seemed unique and abstract enough to share with others.
Professions as Thinking Toolkits
Most people define professions by what those professions do
- Economists study money
- Psychologists look into people’s minds
- Here, we can uncover a wealth of different thinking tools that are often abstract enough to apply well outside the typical interest of the profession
Mathematician: You Don’t Know Until You Can Prove It
While an engineer may tolerate precision within some bounds, and an entrepreneur may be satisfied with a hunch, a mathematician’s statements must be irrefutable or they don’t count
- Mathematical thinking tools help you be more rigorous, and spot mistakes which may turn out to be relevant
Creative Work Requires Diverse Thinking Tools
Think of the box as a container for the tools, not a tool in and of itself
- Many of these tools may allow for creative solutions to problems you might not have considered
- For example, if you’re an entrepreneur, what would your business look like if you approached it like an artist, a teacher, or a novelist?
Understand Their Minds Better Than They Do
Salespeople work to deeply understand what the customer needs, and then match them with products and services that fill that void.
- A key thinking tool for success in this profession is to be able to infer what people’s worries and needs are by their (often contradictory behavior).
Final Thoughts on Thinking Tools
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of thinking tools for each domain of skill.
- The problem is that people often have a difficult time recognizing the skill and abstracting it away from where it was generated.
- If you can state what the pattern is, you can start to see how you could apply it elsewhere
Journalist: Just the Facts
Fact-checking
- Because journalists often need to interview sources who may be misleading or hostile, it’s important to corroborate what was said from independent sources.
- This results in a much more accurate world-view than simply blindly following a stray comment.