HOW TO THINK OF THAT FASTER: A few quick, scattered, incomplete and wholly unsatisfactory list of observations and hunches:
- First, notice when you’re stuck in a rut. When you’re beating your head against a wall. - Second, having noticed you’re in a rut try twice more. My TAP is—“Failed once? Try 2 more—then stop” - “Why am I doing it this way?”—I keep coming back to this quote from Wittgenstein:
“To look for something is, surely, an expression of expectation. In other words: How do you search in one way or another expresses what you expect.”
In the context of thinking of things faster, we can build an analogy to searching for something: if I look in the cupboard for an onion, then I expect that’s where they are stored. Similarly, the tool or method I use to search for a solution to an idea is suggestive of my expectations about the nature of the solution.
Stop and ask: Why do I expect to find a solution in this manner? Does this problem solving method make sense?
- the common refrain is that most expertise is really negative expertise—what not to do: when it comes to problem solving this means deliberate narrowing your answer search to narrow spaces where you expect there to be more probability of finding answers. -Quota filling is the enemy: it is a waste of time when you can’t find a solution to spending more time thinking or coming up with (even more) further inane answers under the mistaken premise this increases the probability space, and therefore by sheer brute-force one of them has to be the answer. Since there are probably infinite possible ideas, and only a tiny tiny infantisimal amount of them any good—you actually want to pre-filter - Most “a-ha” moments are ruled by the Availability Heuristic: there’s something you saw or thought about in the last 24, 48, 100 hours that is still fresh enough in your mind that it comes back into the front of your mind while solving this problem. This means that most breakthroughs and insights are pure luck based on what you’ve happened to be perusing for the last week. --> That suggests that the way to have more insights, more often, is to constantly be stimulating yourself with wildly unrelated thoughts, propositions, concepts. -Building on from that point and the Wittgenstein Quote: the manner that you search for a solution to a problem is probably indicative not of the best method you have, or the best method you know, but a cached thought—the first method you thought of.
HOW TO THINK OF THAT FASTER: A few quick, scattered, incomplete and wholly unsatisfactory list of observations and hunches:
- First, notice when you’re stuck in a rut. When you’re beating your head against a wall.
- Second, having noticed you’re in a rut try twice more. My TAP is—“Failed once? Try 2 more—then stop”
- “Why am I doing it this way?”—I keep coming back to this quote from Wittgenstein:
In the context of thinking of things faster, we can build an analogy to searching for something: if I look in the cupboard for an onion, then I expect that’s where they are stored. Similarly, the tool or method I use to search for a solution to an idea is suggestive of my expectations about the nature of the solution.
Stop and ask: Why do I expect to find a solution in this manner? Does this problem solving method make sense?
- the common refrain is that most expertise is really negative expertise—what not to do: when it comes to problem solving this means deliberate narrowing your answer search to narrow spaces where you expect there to be more probability of finding answers.
-Quota filling is the enemy: it is a waste of time when you can’t find a solution to spending more time thinking or coming up with (even more) further inane answers under the mistaken premise this increases the probability space, and therefore by sheer brute-force one of them has to be the answer. Since there are probably infinite possible ideas, and only a tiny tiny infantisimal amount of them any good—you actually want to pre-filter
- Most “a-ha” moments are ruled by the Availability Heuristic: there’s something you saw or thought about in the last 24, 48, 100 hours that is still fresh enough in your mind that it comes back into the front of your mind while solving this problem. This means that most breakthroughs and insights are pure luck based on what you’ve happened to be perusing for the last week. --> That suggests that the way to have more insights, more often, is to constantly be stimulating yourself with wildly unrelated thoughts, propositions, concepts.
-Building on from that point and the Wittgenstein Quote: the manner that you search for a solution to a problem is probably indicative not of the best method you have, or the best method you know, but a cached thought—the first method you thought of.