Most people think being smart is about having more facts. Trivia-shows like Jeopardy!
epitomize this view of knowledge. The smartest people are the people
with the most names, dates and places stored away inside their mind.
This is probably the least important and useful part of learning
though. Instead of facts, I’d prefer to focus on knowledge that acts as
tools. The more you have, the more ways you can approach different
problems.
Charlie Munger,
Warren Buffet’s long-time investing partner at Berkshire Hathaway,
calls these mental models. More mental models means you have more ways
to solve more problems.
This is a topic that has been discussed a lot before, but I’d like to take a different angle at it.
Professions as Thinking Toolkits
Most people define professions by what those professions do.
Engineers build things. Economists study money. Psychologists look into
people’s minds.
However, while this is an obvious distinction, I’m more
interested not in what types of problems professions try to solve, but
how they try to solve them. 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.
Consider economics. Although most people view this as a study of
money, it is more like a way of thinking about the world. Hence we have
books like
Freakonomics which apply the thinking tools of economics to all sorts of scenarios that have nothing to do with money.
Twenty-Five Thinking Tools
Below are twenty-five tools, I’ve abstracted from the profession I feel exemplifies them best.
Reader’s note: These are not intended to be full
descriptions of every tool used by that profession. That would be silly.
Instead, I wanted to pluck one tool which seemed unique and abstract
enough to share with others. These aren’t meant to reduce the full
complexity of a profession down to a single tool, so don’t take it as
such.
1. Artist: What if Creativity Were the Priority?
Most other professions are full of constraints upon one’s ideas.
They need to be monetizeable, mathematical, under budget and within
specifications. Artists operate in a realm where most of these
constraints are reduced, so the bigger question is, “Why is this unique
and interesting?”
This, however, is a useful thinking tool to apply to many other
concerns. Often the best companies produce things that look like art.
They are driven by uniqueness and creativity, rather than blandly
filling out a list of specs.
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?
2. Economist: How Do People React to Incentives?
There are many thinking tools native to economics, but a foundational one is simple. People respond to incentives.
Tyler Cowen, economist,
delivers this best,
explaining that a key element of economic reasoning is that by changing
a system involving people, the people do not stay in place. Instead,
they respond to the new incentives accordingly.
Almost any action you’ll take alters the perceptions of
incentives by other people you deal with. The economist in you should
ask yourself, “if I change this, how will people react?”
3. Engineer: Can I Model This and Calculate?
Engineering, being built off of the hard sciences, has some of
the most precise and accurate estimates in any profession. While your
financial advisor can only throw darts at picking which stocks will
rise, and a psychologist can only give hints at what people will do,
engineers routinely create things which don’t currently exist and need
to work 100% of the time.
The essence of doing this is to 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 actually know what will happen, instead of just guessing.
My team and I applied this recently to a problem we had
involving predicting our sales. We decided to make a model of sales
numbers based on how long people had subscribed and how often they had
been offered a chance to sign up. From there, we will be able to make
much better estimates of our sales, whereas our guesses before would
often be wildly off the mark.
4. Entrepreneur: Do a Lot of Things; See What Works
Entrepreneurs often have too little money, resources, support or
time. Yet they need to scramble together a solution that will somehow
make money. They can do this by adopting a set of thinking tools that is
often rare for normal professionals.
One major tool is
rapid prototyping.
Many people see this as a product development strategy. You make
something that just barely works to see if anyone wants it. But in
reality, it’s 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. It also
requires listening carefully for feedback, so you can get hints as to
what to do next. Speed and volume make up for making decisions in a
noisy environment full of uncertainty.
Sometimes the right way to solve a problem is simply to do a lot of things and see what works!
5. Doctor: What’s the Diagnosis?
Doctors meet patients who have an array of symptoms, some of
which they probably aren’t telling you (or can’t). From there, you need
to act like a detective to deduce the most likely disease and create a
plan to cure it. During this, a wrong move might kill your patient, so
you have to choose wisely.
A good thinking tool from medicine is the idea of using symptoms
to deduce a disease, and comparing with base rates to make
highly-accurate decisions.
While this applies to medicine, there’s a lot of places where
diagnosis is important. Your car is making a funny noise. Your computer
doesn’t work. Your business has stopped making money.
The first thing to do is see what all the possible causes could
be. This requires study and knowledge. Next, you need to rule out as
many as possible based on the symptoms you observe. Finally, of the
options that are left, which are rare afflictions and which are fairly
common? Knowing this can help you settle on a most likely diagnosis.
6. Journalist: Just the Facts
Journalists rely on a ton of different thinking tools which
allow them to write compelling stories that report the news fairly and
accurately.
One of these thinking tools is
fact-checking.
Because journalists often need to interview sources who may be
misleading (or even hostile), it’s important to corroborate what was
said from independent sources. Fact-checking may be time consuming, but
it results in a much more accurate world-view than simply blindly
following a stray comment.
How would your life looked if you dug around to check the
veracity of key pieces of information you’re depending on to make
decisions? Imagine if you had to report what you know in the New York Times. Would it need to be retracted later?
7. Scientist: Make a Hypothesis and Test It
Scientists discover truths about the world. To do this, they need thinking tools.
A basic thinking tool of science is the
controlled experiment.
Keep all the variables the same, except the one you want to test, and
see what happens. This requires meticulous preparation and design to
prevent outside contamination from breaking your results.
Too many people draw inferences from “experiments” that are
anything but. They have many conflicting variables that make drawing
conclusions about their experiences much more difficult. What if you
approached your diets like a scientist? Your working routines? Would you
still believe them after?
How many of your beliefs about work and life withstand such
scrutiny? Undergo such testing? Maybe you could benefit from a little
more scientific thinking tools in your life.
8. Mathematician: You Don’t Know Until You Can Prove It
The thinking tools of a mathematician depend on having a much
higher standard of what constitutes a proof of something. 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.
One way you can see this thinking tool influence
non-mathematical domains is in an adjacent field such as programming.
During my
MIT Challenge,
I heard lecturers talk about the MIT style of programming versus the
one originating out of Bell Labs. MIT, which was more mathematical and
academic, tended to be more rigorous in proving its programs worked,
while Bell Labs was often happy with an algorithm which seemed to do the
job, even if they couldn’t guarantee it.
Mathematical thinking tools help you be more rigorous, and spot mistakes which may turn out to be relevant.
9. Programmer: What’s the Pattern I Can Automate?
Programming encompasses a lot of thinking tools, but the most basic one is the
algorithm.
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, simplified or refactored. Programmers can
spot repeated code and try to abstract out the essence of what is
redundant into something that can do what you need automatically.
Beyond just being able to write code yourself, you can think
more like a programmer in many other domains of life. What things do you
repeat often in your work which could be automated? What ambiguous
process could you convert into a foolproof set of steps?
10. Architect: Envisioning the Future
Architects need to design buildings. These are large structures
which may take years to build, and nonetheless meet all the criteria of
clients, contractors, city planners and building codes. Oh, and they
should also be beautiful.
To do this, architects need a suite of thinking tools (and
software) to take an idea, and envision what it will be like, exactly,
on a large scale, after millions of dollars have been spent. 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.
11. Salesperson: Understand Their Minds Better than They Do
Selling often gets a bad rap. People think it’s all about
trickery and deceit as you try manipulating someone into buying
something they probably shouldn’t.
Although this is the stereotype, the actual reality is rarely
like this. Instead, salespeople work to deeply understand what the
customer actually needs, and then match them with products and services
that fill that void. This is incredibly hard to do, as you may recognize
that you have the solution to a customer’s problem, before they do.
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). What language do they use? How do their actions
differ from their stated intentions? What can you infer about this?
This is a tool you can apply far beyond making an extra
commission. What does your spouse really want, rather than what they’re
telling you? What about your friends? Your boss?
12. Soldier: Routine and Discipline Prevent Deadly Mistakes
The discipline embodied by military personnel is a very useful
thinking tool, even outside of combat situations. Discipline and routine
become a safeguard against careless mistakes which could cost lives. By
demanding conformity to those protocols, even when there is no danger,
there is much less room for slip-ups.
Making your bed every morning may not prevent casualties, but if
you can follow that procedure perfectly, you’ll also be more likely to
follow the ones that may save your life. This kind of discipline is also
present in another live-endangering field: medicine.
The Checklist Manifesto takes this idea of military routine and applies it to mundane things like hand-washing, which save lives by avoiding infection.
Once you know the best way to do something, do it precisely and exactly, without sloppiness or somebody might get hurt.
13. Chess Master: See The Moves In Your Mind’s Eye
Chess has long been considered a game to improve one’s thinking.
While it’s doubtful that years of chess study will necessarily make you
smarter, there are plenty of thinking tools which can be mined from the
game.
One is the ability to simulate the game in your mind’s eye. A common trick of grandmasters is playing
blindfolded games.
While this amazes spectators, it actually reinforces a useful
practice—being able to see the game in your head, so you can calculate
future moves your opponent makes.
This is often helpful in other domains outside of chess. Trying
to visualize what might happen, and then compare that prediction to
reality. This can hone your simulation abilities, so when you’re in a
tight spot you’ll be able to predict what happens next.
14. Designer: The Things You Make Communicate For You
One of my favorite books is
The Design of Everyday Things.
While this book is meant for designers, it is really a book of thinking
tools designers should cultivate. As such, it’s something you can pick
up and read even if you’ve never made anything in your life.
A useful tool here is how something is made suggests how to use
it. A well-designed door handle suggests push or pull, without needing
to say it. A well-designed light switch should already tell you which
rooms will be illuminated when you flip it.
What if you designed your speeches so that they automatically
caused the audience to shift their thinking where you need them to go?
What if you designed your habits so that you automatically applied them?
The scope of this thinking tool is really quite broad.
15. Teacher: Can You See What it is Like Not to Know Something Obvious?
How do you create knowledge inside someone else’s mind? How can you give them abilities they didn’t have before?
Most of us take for granted how amazing teaching actually is,
and our own ability to learn from it. 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.
To succeed in most professions, you need to be able to make
other people see the problems as you do. This involves identifying what
knowledge they lack and saying the right things to get them where you
are now. While this is an obvious skill for teachers, it also benefits
programmers trying to explain their code, doctors trying to articulate
the reasons for a medical procedure or a leader who wants employees to
follow a vision.
16. Anthropologist: Can You Immerse and Join Another Culture?
Anthropology is the
study of cultures.
Unlike economics, which tends to focus on mathematical models, or
psychology, which tends to do a lot of careful experiments,
anthropologists learn about cultures by actually immersing in them.
How could you immerse yourself in groups to which you don’t
belong? Groups of different nationalities or languages? Politics or
professions? Hobbies, sports, religions or philosophies? How could you
learn how those groups of people function, have them accept you as you
live alongside them?
17. 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.
On the subject of psychology itself, there are countless tools.
Cognitive biases, models of attention, morality, preferences, instincts,
memory and more. Dozens of books could be written on how to think
better about other people by using these tools and there have been.
Interestingly, psychology is also a profession with its own set
of tools for discovering psychology. 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, which means you often can’t let them know what you’re
trying to adjust.
18. 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.
The thinking tools involved are quite important, even for people
who don’t analyze literature for a living. For starters, there is the
ability to pay quite close attention to creative works. Experiencing
something much more deeply than just a shallow consumer. Second, there’s
the tool of being able to connect that knowledge to a web of other
issues and ideas. This builds on an original creation to add more
insight and ideas than were there originally.
19. Philosopher: What are the Unexpected Consequences of an Intuition?
Philosophers, at least the
analytical kind,
tend to have a similar style and toolkit as mathematicians, except
often in dealing with things that are based in words that are imprecise.
As a result, there’s a lot of useful thinking tools for dealing with
things that can’t be reduced to numbers.
One powerful tool is being able to see the unexpected
consequences of stretching an idea to its limits. This has two benefits.
First, it can reveal flaws in the original idea, by
reductio ad absurdum.
Second, this can help you recognize the fundamental principles behind
your vague intuitions of things. By exposing your ideas to stronger,
hypothetical critiques, you can see the real mechanisms by which they
work.
20. Accountant: Watch the Ratios
Money is the blood of a business. Accounting is the work that
watches how it flows around, checking to make sure it isn’t getting
clogged up.
There’s a number of useful thinking tools from accounting that
allow the diagnosis of problems which are hidden on the surface. One of
these is the idea of
ratio analysis.
Ratios are a fraction with a numerator and denominator of two different
measurements inside a business. Leverage ratio, for instance, is the
debt the company owes to the equity put in by the owners. Get too high,
and there’s a greater risk of default. Price-earnings ratio tells you
how expensive stock is based on its profits.
This kind of analysis (and many others from accounting) is useful to non-accounting domains. In health,
BMI
is a kind of fancy ratio analysis, in this case it’s your weight
compared to your height squared. But you could also imagine tracking
many other numbers and their ratios: output per hours worked, bugs per
lines of code, dates per hours spent on online dating.
Organizing the data, keeping track of the details and seeing the
patterns beneath the surface are all accounting tools you can exploit
outside of a spreadsheet.
21. Politician: What Will People Believe?
Politics offers its own set of tools. A major difference between
politics and business is that while both are aimed at achieving some
kind of objective in the world—the former depends highly on the
impression of voters. A business can simply work, whereas a politician
may do a great job, and still get kicked out because of bad PR.
Therefore the thinking tools possessed by politicians are about
calculating not only the effect of some action, but also on how that
action will be perceived. Both by the voting populace, and one’s allies
and enemies.
The thinking tools here mean that sometimes the right decision
isn’t possible, simply because other people won’t see it as such, and
you don’t have the power to convince them. This may be frustrating, but
it applies to many parts of reality we’d rather it didn’t.
22. Novelist: Does Your Story Make Sense?
Many people see stories as the linguistic embodiment of history.
We take what actually happened and weave it into some words so others
can see it for themselves.
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. In real life, people are
more influenced by context. Stories have beginnings, middles and ends. Reality is a continuous stream of events without an arc.
Unfortunately, people understand stories much better than
realities. So often you need to package up the histories you want to
tell people in a way that they can interpret. Who is involved? When did
those things happen? Give information to make it easier for the listener
to follow.
While this applies to writing novels or making movies, telling
stories is a part of everyone’s life. From “Why do you want to work at
this job,” to, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” These are all
stories, and we need to understand their structures.
23. Actor: The Best Way to Pretend is to Be Real
A popular thinking tool for acting is called
method acting. This technique involves trying to actually feel the emotions of the character you’re portraying, rather than just faking it.
This may seem to be a contradiction: how can you feel something
you know is fake? However, this belies how powerful the imagination is
to conjure up situations to create empathy. 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
it.
Which also suggests a powerful thinking tool, although this one
is more affective than cognitive: changing your emotional state to get
the results you want. Feeling insecure, but know you need confidence?
Why can’t you summon that up in yourself as if you’re playing a part?
But don’t fake it–feel it.
24. Plumber: Take it Apart and See What’s Broken
Tradespeople don’t get enough credit for having unique problem
solving tools and strategies. Many academic and intellectual types would
never consider a career in plumbing, carpentry or electrical work. Yet
those professions often out-earn those with a college degree, and for
good reason: they are hard skills which are in-demand.
The essence of plumbing, just like many other trades, 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. But you also need to take
things apart to understand them.
How many of us avoid understanding things because we’re afraid
to get our hands dirty? We don’t want to risk breaking something, so we
never really understand how it works?
25. Hacker: What’s Really Going on Underneath?
Hacking is one of the most commonly misunderstood skills.
Television shows portray it as a kind of computer magic, with flying
cubes and firewall health bars which go down to zero.
In practice, however, hacking is mostly about understanding that
there is often a more complicated layer of instructions which a simpler
layer is built on top. Computer sit in hierarchies, so each level of
abstraction simplifies and reduces the layer below to make it easier to
understand. However, sometimes this can allow you to do things which
look impossible to a higher level, but are an unintended feature of how
the lower level works.
One example of this is a memory overflow exploit. Many programs
work on a higher level whereby memory is accessed in restricted silos.
Ask for something outside of memory and you’ll get an error. However, in
practice, the memory all sits on a big line, with memory for different
things next to each other. If you can write memory “outside of the
bounds” you can get the computer to do things you’d naively expect were
impossible.
Consider this glitch in a Mario game whereby a series of inputs
write code to an unintended section of the game, allowing you to win by
inputting a strange sequence of actions:
This thinking tool works for computers, but also other areas of life.
Remember: 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.
Final Thoughts on Thinking Tools
These are just summaries of a key tool from different professions. In
reality, however, there are dozens, if not hundreds of thinking tools
for each domain of skill. Not just professions, but hobbies, subjects
and general life skills also develop thinking tools.
The problem is that people often have a difficult time recognizing
the skill and abstracting it away from where it was generated. This is a
problem of far transfer, and it’s not easy to resolve.
However, if you can state what the pattern is, you can start to see
how you could apply it elsewhere. Most of these tools won’t work best in
domains far outside their starting zones. A novelist trying to use
storytelling to diagnose medical problems will be in big trouble. But
often we get so stuck using our favorite tools that we don’t even
consider which ones could apply. Creative solutions require divergent
thinking, causing us to think of one tool when we need others.
Creative Work Requires Diverse Thinking Tools
A
classic experiment
shows the need for tools like these. Subjects were asked to use a box
of tacks to affix a candle to the wall. The solution was to use the box
as a base—trying to apply tacks directly to the candle only made a mess.
This is hard because we think of the box as a container for the tools,
not a tool in and of itself.
Similarly, many of these tools may allow for creative solutions to problems you might not have considered. For instance:
- If you’re an entrepreneur, what would your business look like if you approached it like an artist, or a teacher, or a novelist?
- If you’re a programmer, how would your code improve if you took the tools of a salesperson or accountant?
- If you’re a journalist, what would change about your pieces if you acted like a scientist, economist or plumber?
Not every combination will be useful, but many might just give you the solution that will lead to a breakthrough.
This article was originally published on
December 4, 2018, by Scott Young, and is republished here with
permission.
Join Scott’s newsletter and get a free ebook “7 Must-Know Strategies to Learn Anything Faster”
This article was originally published on June 4,
2018, by BBC Travel, and is republished here with permission.
This article was originally published on April
18, 2017, by Outside, and is republished here with permission.