Improve Your Thinking

If there’s one skill I want my children, teammates, and colleagues to develop, it’s critical thinking. Unfortunately, many people don’t take this skill seriously because they confuse it with Intelligence. They unconsciously reason, “If I didn’t know how to think, would I be able to work in a company or get good marks in university?”

First, we must understand the difference between thinking and Intelligence. 

Thinking Vs. Intelligence

Thinking is the mental process of mulling over and reasoning about something. It involves various cognitive activities such as perception, memory, problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity. Thinking is a conscious process that can be considered a skill.

On the other hand, Intelligence is a broader and more abstract concept that refers to our ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. It involves understanding complex ideas, adapting to new situations, learning from experience, and solving problems effectively. 

Intelligence is a more general and overarching trait that involves displaying our different cognitive abilities. Thinking can be seen as one manifestation of Intelligence, which involves using cognitive processes to analyze, evaluate, and generate ideas or solutions.

Good Thinking Is A Skill

Because thinking is a mental process, we can see it as a skill we can improve with consistent practice. Improving our thinking skills means making better choices, dealing with problems more efficiently, and having more time on hand because we have fewer problems.

Thinking is deeply personal and involves concentrating on a situation, problem, relationship, or anything that will improve our situation long enough to develop an idea. It’s about developing ideas and viewpoints about everything around us. Unfortunately, thinking, like any other skill, is hard, and most people want to avoid getting stuck in the thinking process because it feels uncomfortable and meaningless. When people feel they understand something, they tend to move on without pausing to think.

What Is Involved In Good Thinking

Imagine you have to think about some issue you are grappling with and want to find a good solution, not some low-brow solution.

This is what you would have to do from a good-thinking perspective. 

• You have to concentrate on the problem or issue.
• You have to clearly articulate what the problem is through a process of mental Q&A.
• You have to be patient (without getting distracted or multi-tasking) and let other parts of your mind come into play to develop an idea of how you will want to solve the problem.
• You then allow your brain to make associations and draw connections with your past experiences.
• In this process, you have to make some hypotheses, false starts, and mistakes driven by faulty beliefs and assumptions.
• Also, you have to outlast your impulses to declare the job done, or get distracted to do something else. It is about being comfortable with this mental tug of way to get to an original(your own) view or idea.

How Can I Improve My Thinking? By Writing

Like any skill, the more time you spend practicing it, the better you will become. The same is true here: the more time you spend thinking, the better you will become.

But, how can we force ourselves to spend more time thinking?

Here is where I come to my favorite topic. Writing.

While we instinctively understand that writing is a good way to share ideas with others, we under-appreciate how much good writing helps us think about an idea for ourselves. You write to others to communicate, but you write for yourself to practice your reasoning and thinking. 

By the way, when I say writing, I mean putting pen to paper, not typing on a keyboard.

In our world today, where attention is fragmented in seconds, our thinking is becoming more reactive instead of reasoned and thought through. Writing is a good way to spend more time thinking. Writing forces us to slow down, focus,think deeply, and stick with something a little longer to develop a deeper understanding. Through the process of writing our thoughts, we realize the gaps in our understanding, which we fill either by seeking out more information or by making connections with our existing knowledge bases..

Writing forces us to create a structure for our thoughts and ideas. It acts as a drag to sift through the confusion to extract insights. Initially, the writing may represent our poor understanding of an idea, but as we write, we clarify and refine our thoughts. 

Writing becomes the practice that helps us improve our thinking skills.