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Lessons on Thinking: Learn from James Clear, Scott Young, Shane Parrish and More

by Andreea SerbFebruary 3rd, 2020

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The idea of understanding and practicing how to best live our lives has ignited the greatest minds for centuries. To achieve eudaimonia, by which the Greeks meant “flourishing” or “the good life”, we can tap on philosophies like Stoicism, famously practiced by thinkers like Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, which asserts that happiness and judgment should be based on behaviour, rather than words. In this guide, I have come up with some pillars, which I consider the very foundation of a good life.

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The idea of understanding and practicing how to best live our lives has ignited the greatest minds for centuries.

Looking back at great philosophers and thinkers, we see how they fully dedicated their lives constructing and deconstructing ideas, understanding behaviours and building better habits to improve and optimize their lives.

One memorable dictum that has remained imprinted in my memory is:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates

I love examining life in an attempt to live the best way I can.

This means analysing the ‘why’ behind whatever I do, questioning actions, understanding what my values are and creating the principles and actions that I want to guide my life after.

In a nutshell, the result would be what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia.

In the modern world, to achieve eudaimonia, by which the Greeks meant “flourishing” or “the good life”, we can tap on philosophies like Stoicism, famously practiced by thinkers like Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, which asserts that happiness and judgment should be based on behaviour, rather than words.

Epicurus’ philosophy can also teach us how to bring our attention to the present moment, limit our desires to what is easy to get, and not increase our needs with artificially stimulated desires.

In Zen Buddhism, the concept of beginner’s mind or shoshin refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject and tackling it from a fresh perspective, just as a beginner would.

Today, thinkers and authors Nir Eyal, James Clear, Shane Parrish, Darius Foroux, Scott H.Young and Anne-Laure Le Cunf have succeeded to illuminate through their ideas, knowledge, research and experience the ins and outs of productivity, behavioural psychology, habit formation, and performance improvement — and their teachings are extremely valuable to me.

In this guide, I have come up with some pillars, which I consider the very foundation of a good life — and shared a comprehensive list of articles and bonus books to help you access them anytime and learn about some of the best ideas, perspectives, research and studies from some of the most amazing minds of our times.

Thinking about Thinking
Building Better Habits
Learning to Focus
Hacking Productivity
Honing Skills
Fuelling Creativity
Philosophy & Health
Elevating Relationships

This article will focus on the first chapter (Thinking about Thinking) and it is part of a series where I share the best resources needed to live a better life.

Thinking about Thinking

We generally lack self-awareness when it comes to understanding our own thought process.

We consider ideas from the point of view of our own biases and preconceived notions without questioning or analysing them properly.

We quickly form opinions without putting in the effort to substantiate views or by disregarding sources of evidence.

We make decisions without fully understanding why or without a proper framework that defines what we know and how to access that knowledge systematically.

So how can we learn to think more clearly?

Clear thinking is tied to how much we know about the world, our ability to learn continuously and building a latticework of mental models.

The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and their usefulness in the situation at hand. — Shane Parrish, Farnam Street Blog

Let’s dig in.

1. Decision-making: A Guide to Making Smarter Decisions and Fewer Errors

We spend an inordinate amount of time and a tremendous amount of energy trying to make decisions and the results are not always what we wish them to be.

The truth is making decisions is difficult and no one taught us this subject in school. But the good thing is making better decisions isn’t a skill but rather a series of tools and frameworks.

In this insightful article, Shane Parrish shares a framework anyone can apply to make the best decisions. By learning about big time-tested ideas from multiple disciplines and with general thinking frameworks will dramatically improve your decision-making skills.

2. How to Make Hard Life Decisions — Scott Young — Pocket

According to Scott Young, “it’s often easy to frame a decision when there are only two options: quit or stay, left or right, more or less.”

Methods proposed by Scott Young:

Find a model. Formalize the decision.
Go with your gut. Then double-check it.
Simulate the decision. Do your research.
Would the person who made this decision do it again?
Ask future-you whether it’s a good idea.

The result? If all five methods point to one direction, then you’ve probably got a strong signal that one choice is the best. But if two or three methods point in one direction, and two or three point in another, you may have some conflict in which case you may need to weigh the relative strengths of each method.

3. First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself

The First-Principle approach was used by the philosopher Aristotle and is now used by Elon Musk. It’s one of the best ways to learn to think for yourself. Without data, it can get difficult to figure out if a problem is real or not. Many times, the decision simply ends up not being solved when things cannot be properly measured.

First-Principles thinking is the best way to rethink the fundamental blocks of a problem to decide what’s the best way forward.

4. First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge

The best way to develop new ideas is to start stripping things to the basics. Even if you aren’t trying to develop innovative ideas, understanding the first principles of any field is essential.

Without a firm grasp of a foundation, there is little chance of mastering the details that make the difference.

5. Mental model examples: How to actually use them | Elon Musk

In this comprehensive article, Julian Shapiro gives examples of mental models like Regret Minimization, Pareto’s Principle, ICE, Eisenhower Matrix, Theory of Constraints, etc that are easy to apply and needed to achieve better outcomes.

“When you view the world as a series of outputs, you form opinions. But when you view the world as a series of systems, you form strategies.” — Channing Allen

Read More: Mental models

6. 30 mental models to add to your thinking toolbox

Mental models represent the thought process about how something works in the real world. Mental models help us navigate through life by guiding our thoughts and behaviours to help us understand life better.

According to Ness Labs, mental models are thinking tools for your brain. And guess what? The smartest people in the world use them to make intelligent decisions.

7. Mental models for designers | Dropbox Design

In our work, we will often be challenged by new problems, making decisions and communicating with clarity. While this article specifically caters to designers, I believe the models highlighted in it can be applied universally.

As a writer and marketer, I often need to prepare long-form content, which is why the diamond model described in the article can work great for putting a structure around the main idea.

Read More: Mental models for designers

8. Mastery: The Complete Guide to Achieving Greatness

How do you gain mastery? Now, that’s not an easy feat.

But most of the exceptional and remarkable people throughout history seem to have a few things in common:

strong foundations
an inclination for life-long learning
building a deliberate practice
ignoring distractions
finding mentors
often accepting failing

“Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.” — Robert Greene

This outstanding guide is an intricate journey that takes you through every aspect of what it takes to choose your path and commit to a lifelong learning expedition to capture greatness for ourselves. I recommend this to everyone who wants to become great at something.

Read More: The Complete Guide to Mastery

9. The Spacing Effect: How to Improve Learning and Maximize Retention

Learning to learn is an art in itself. In school, it used to be about memorising and cramming information in our minds before exams, but today, we need to be better learners in order to be better workers.

In this Farnam Street article, I learned about the spacing effect, an effective way to learn and retain information through repetitions that are spaced over time to help us produce better long-term remembering than the exact same repetitions spaced over a shorter amount of time or massed all together.

10. The Pot-Belly of Ignorance

What we put into our minds is just as important as what we put into our bodies.

As Shane Parrish himself says, we should think of our minds as a library. What type of information do we store in it? How can we quickly retrieve it? And are we able to apply it the way we want?

These are just some of the questions the article tackles and it’s a great resource if you want to learn how to build a repository of knowledge in your mind and properly filter it and apply its contents.

Read More: The Pot-Belly of Ignorance

11. How to Improve Critical Thinking — Scott Young — Pocket

We depend on experience, knowledge, frameworks, and methodologies to make decisions, analyse problems and develop strategies. But what is the right way to develop critical thinking to make better decisions?

According to Scott Young, there are two approaches:

Creating a context that will lead to better decisions, in light of what we know about human reasoning.
Absorbing knowledge about the world and integrate it through practice making decisions.

I love this article because it sheds light on the idea that critical thinking is correlated with how much you know about the world and how the world works to rule out certain possibilities as being unlikely.

12. How to Think Better | Scott H Young

Scott Young says that writing your thoughts is the key to thinking better.

I believe the same goes for writing — writing clearly is thinking clearly.

The correlation between thinking and writing runs deep.

Researchers say that writing your ideas down helps you go through your thoughts systematically and ultimately think clearly, solve problems at multiple levels of depth, and make complex decisions.

Read More: How to Think Better

13. Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong

Humility is defined by traits like sincerity and honesty but intellectual humility has more to do with understanding the limits of one’s knowledge.

Intellectual humility is a state of openness to new ideas, a mental model that helps people to engage in discourse and be better learners.

The article talks about the need for intellectual humility to stop promoting a culture of overconfidence and arrogance.

14. Aristotle and the Importance of First Principles

As one of the greatest philosophers of all time, Aristotle contributed greatly to the fields of ethics, logic, epistemology, and metacognition. Despite his breadth of influence, every new thought he had started in the same place, with first principles.

In essence, when Aristotle worked in philosophy, he was always looking for ‘the first basis from which a thing is known’ or first principles.

Bonus Books

• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

In his famous book Predictably Irrational, Ariely taps on his background in behavioural economics, the science of analysing what people actually do when they buy things, choose jobs, and make real-life decisions to shed light on people’s behaviour and give us a glimpse into why we do the things we do.

His work refutes the common assumption that we behave in rational ways or that we are influenced directly by the marketplace.

According to the professor, our behaviour is neither random nor senseless — on the contrary, it’s rather systematic and predictable, making us, well, predictably irrational.

• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a must-read if we want to dive deep into behavioural economics to improve our decision-making.

In the book, Kahneman introduces two fictitious characters: the intuitive System 1 and the effortful and slower System 2. The first is in charge of fast thinking while the latter does the slow thinking, monitoring System 1, and maintaining control as best as it can within its limited resources.

As written by Maxime Lagresle,

“Daniel Kahneman brings us on a fascinating journey to better understand the operation of our mind and the many biases of intuition we are prone to.”

If you enjoyed reading this, let’s connect on Twitter to get updated on my future posts. Stay tuned to read my next article from this series on Building Better Habits.

Previously published at https://medium.com/@andreeaserb/lessons-on-living-better-from-james-clear-scott-young-shane-parrish-and-more-e6b21dfd1fc6