How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity (Work series)

From a young age, we are taught to expect that truly important ideas must lie outside of us; usually very far outside of us in time and place. Someone else – cleverer, wiser and more prestigious than us – will already have hatched the crucial thoughts; it is our task to pay homage to their intelligence, to learn what they had to say, to be as faith

We are mental athletes at shrugging such things off, but there is a cost to our stoicism. From small humiliations and slights, large blocks of resentment eventually form that render us unable to love or trust.

‘The statue is already in the stone’, he wrote, ‘my work is to liberate it.’

For the sceptics, understanding that we may be repeatedly hoodwinked by our own minds is the start of the only type of intelligence of which we are ever capable; just as we are never as foolish as when we fail to suspect we might be so.

We feel envy when someone else has access to an area of happiness that eludes us. The natural response to this feeling is shame; we feel we lack the generosity of spirit to celebrate their achievement.

Not all good ideas have yet been had, and our minds are as good a place as any in which they might one day hatch.

and put into focus what we happen to think. It’s through contact with the books of others that we might come to a clearer sense of our perspectives and ideas.

To understand ourselves, we will need to discover, individually, the words that lie behind our first words.

We are ultimately simply scared; scared of doing something and getting it wrong, of making a decision and realising that it didn’t improve anything. However, our inaction is also a form of choice, and not necessarily of the optimal kind.