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

they held one another, trying to brighten the brief passage between birth and death.

There may not be an immediate solution to many of our sorrows, but it helps immeasurably to know their contours.

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

There is a fundamental distinction to be made between two kinds of thinking: figuring out what we would like to achieve, and working out how to achieve it. Put another way, there is a key difference between strategy on the one hand and execution on the other. Strategy is about determining our overall aims; execution comprises everything that follow

Our world places a high premium on good ideas but spends tragically little time planning how best to line up our minds to generate them.

Whenever I ask an acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of scab and arse.

The good thinker is, to a large extent, first and foremost a sceptic.

We tend to wall ourselves off like this because there’s so little evidence that what we know goes on in our heads may also unfold in the heads of others.

We fail to draw courage from witnessing the struggles of those we admire. What alarms us is not so much how hard the task is but how easy we imagined it might be.