Are You Collecting Thoughts and Insights?

In 2021, I want to be more consistent with how I collect Thoughts. For Christmas, my wife gave me a book journal, and the best way to gain insightful thoughts, I find, is from books. A key way that I plan to start collecting thoughts is to write down some of the most insightful ones I come across in my readings.

If you are curious, my way of doing this is to write down thought-provoking or insightful quotes in my book journal. I also write down the page, so I can go back and explore the context more deeply if I wish. Then when I finish the book, I can reflect on these great insights.

I want to stick to the habit of writing down these insights to reflect on them more deeply. When I reflect on them, I may ask myself – Is this truly insightful? Have I come across this idea before, perhaps just stated differently? Have I applied this in my own life or seen it applied? What are the limitations of this idea? Might it work under some conditions, but not in others?

Of course, insights are different for everyone. An insightful idea to me may be mundane for you, or vice versa. What is insightful for someone depends on life experience, the goals we set, and our interests. Also, many great insights may come from anywhere, not just books – it could be an experience, a conversation, observing people, a podcast, a class, and so on.

As I have already explored much of my history and life experiences and some of my own key insights in my prior posts (see some of them on the Start Here page), going into the future, I plan to discuss and site particular sources of insights. I see no reason to summarize a whole book, but rather, I may mention a key insight I gained from a book and discuss what I believe some implications may be or how the insight could be applied for our benefit. I may even aim to apply it first and then let you know how that went for me.

Keeping track of sources is important, so if you find a post especially useful, you can explore that Thought more deeply by reading the source material.

Hopefully, you can gain manifold insights this way. For example, I will share an insight I read about or experienced. Then, I will share my personal insights about that insight. Then I may ask you to reflect on this, hopefully allowing you to build new insights based on the ones I shared with you. We shall see if this works how I think it will – stay tuned to future posts to find out.

I will admit that I am often stuck in my own mind – and so it could be quite beneficial if I were to focus on applying some insightful ideas to see what true value could be gained from them. If I find some useful insights that I can apply, I will aim to do this and report back to you on how it goes. I hope this will keep the site useful, interesting, and inspiring for you.

In 2021, I wish to have more insights and share more insights and apply the best ones to help myself, and you, and everyone.

I wish you an INSIGHTFUL 2021! May you be full of great INSIGHTS.

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To discover how to read more deeply and attain more insights through your readings, I recommend: The Insightful Reader: How to Learn Deeply & Attain Life-Changing Insights from Books

As a final thought, if you have any new insights, I would be glad to hear from you in the form of a comment (on this post, or any relevant post). Keep in mind that the comments are not just for me. Usually, they can benefit many other readers who could learn from your valuable experiences. For instance, you may ask a question, share an experience, or provide your own thoughts on one of my posts.

Think Out Loud

“What were you thinking?”

Do you ever get asked that, but in a way that is judgmental and condescending, perhaps?

Well, maybe it would help to go over our thoughts out loud more often. If we shared our thoughts more openly instead of hiding them, then certain flaws in our thinking would become apparent. This is good because by seeing the flaws, we can work to correct them.

Sometimes I wonder – wouldn’t it be easy to go through life with some glaring flaw in one’s thinking? How would you realize this about yourself? If these thoughts stay trapped in the mind and we do not often share them, then we may have major problems in our thinking and not even realize it.

I believe the people who exhibit higher levels of thinking or have a very high expertise level in their field should occasionally help guide others by revealing their own thinking processes. Then other people could learn to improve their thinking abilities.

A quirk about me is that I have never been that interested in learning particular facts. I am not the person you want to see on Jeopardy – I would probably do embarrassingly bad. Rather, I have always been fascinated by the thought processes that helped people make their discoveries or solve difficult problems. I tend to think that if I have the right thought processes, then I can figure things out on my own with minimal facts. With the wrong thought processes, I could perhaps have infinite facts at my disposal and have no idea what to do with them. With the wrong way of thinking, I may even come to the wrong conclusions, which could be even worse.

Ultimately, rather than accumulating random facts, I aim to pursue a higher understanding - and I hope to help you get there too.

Something I have learned to do is to reconstruct other people’s thoughts. If you have ever seen a “true crime” show that was dramatized, these are reconstructed scenes. The dialog and interactions may be made up or intuited in some cases.

Similarly, when I see someone solve a problem, I always ask myself what they could have been thinking. I try to reverse-engineer how they got to the solution. Sometimes I feel like I have figured it out – and I have been able to decode their thought processes. But this is not always easy. Usually, I look at the actions they took. Then I ask what they would have thought that led them to take that action. If I can, I may try to confirm what they were thinking at a critical point.

I want to encourage us to see the value in thinking out loud more often. This could be especially valuable if there is a child nearby. People always say that children learn by example. But how can we have example thoughts? The thoughts are in our heads usually. In that case, we should be willing to think out loud or occasionally verbalize our thinking.

You may be thinking, of course, we all verbalize our thoughts. It’s called speaking. Yes, this is true. My point is that when solving problems, most of us don’t see the need to think out loud. If you have solved a problem before, you know what to do. You take the necessary actions and solve it. However, a problem that you have seen a hundred times may be new to someone else. They may benefit from hearing you think out loud.

Other than just with children, there may be other useful opportunities to practice thinking out loud. If you know someone who wants to learn in your field, and you are the expert, and they are the novice, consider thinking aloud through certain problems to help show them how to think through them.

I suppose some general thinking rules can be applied to anything. But I also suppose that to advance in a particular field, we will need to learn how to think through specific problems more successfully.

When I was in school, I was usually able to figure out a thought process to arrive at the solutions to problems, but often I would later learn that my way of thinking was very inefficient. I was focusing on the wrong things, perhaps. In some cases, if I arrived at the wrong solutions, I may continue to work on the problem, trying to figure out the right way of thinking through trial and error. I believe it would have been more efficient to learn the right way to think from the beginning. Or rather, to have had someone help me identify my wrong thoughts and then replace those with the correct ones.

In reality, our thoughts and actions are often intertwined. If you pay close attention, every action tends to reveal a thought process behind it. If I pick up a red rock from the ground and bring it up to my mouth and try to take a bite, you can probably guess what I was thinking.

You would guess that for some reason, I had thought this rock was a fruit. You may dig a bit deeper - how could I have thought this way? Perhaps I was distracted or dealing with a personal trauma that dampened my observational skills. Perhaps I was not wearing my glasses, and I have horrible vision. Perhaps I was starving and not thinking clearly. Some of this is guesswork, but you can be pretty sure that I had somehow imagined the rock to be an edible piece of food.

Again:

If you pay close attention, every action tends to reveal a thought-process behind it.

Much of our academic life is focused on learning facts, but perhaps we should also focus more on absorbing higher-level thinking. This could be from experts who have fine-tuned their thinking and have proven their ability to think through new problems. Someone good at solving only the problems that they are familiar with has not necessarily proved that they are thinking at a higher level.

Higher-level thinking would likely involve some of the following:

•        Experience – having sufficient knowledge and experience to approach new problems

•        Efficiency of thought – not wasting time on knowledge or thought processes that are irrelevant

•        Problem definition – knowing how to define the problem precisely

•        Questioning ability – knowing the right questions to help further define what is known and unknown

•        Reasoning ability – knowing which actions are likely to result in which outcomes

•        Creative ability – being able to use new ideas, resources, or systems to solve a problem

•        Simulation ability – using the above skills and abilities, a high-level thinker may be able to simulate problems and processes in the mind to help identify the most likely outcomes

•        Awareness of limitations – knowing when your abilities or resources are insufficient to solve a problem

Generally, a higher-level thinker will not need to use trial and error. Ideally, the thinking ability will be at a point where they can effectively solve problems in their mind and then execute the solutions.

If you wish to go the route of learning higher-level thinking skills, it can be worth the effort to learn some bad thinking as well. For example, what mistakes did Albert Einstein make in his thinking? Wouldn’t it be interesting to learn that? For a physicist, at least, this may be valuable to know.

Something I have learned is that often the novice will focus on things that are not so important. Part of what the novice needs is to gain experience, of course. But when a novice learns the right things to think about and focus on, this can make all the difference in helping to learn and to think more effectively.

Today, I am simply encouraging you to ask yourself if your thinking abilities could benefit from learning how others at a higher level think through problems. You may consider pursuing a mentor or teacher to show you not just what to do but also how to think through new problems. As you learn what to do and how to do it, remember to focus on the why or the thought processes you can use to help you advance further. To learn those thought processes, it helps if you can listen to someone think out loud.

Also, if you believe you could be a higher-level thinker, please realize that not everyone has this ability. If you take a moment here and there to reveal your thinking processes to those around you, it could be a great help to them.

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Here are some books that reveal the thinking processes of experts, if you are interested:

• Thinking Allowed by Jeffrey Mishlove (and many other authors)

• Think Like a Grandmaster by Alexander Kotov (about Chess)

• Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen (about Poker)

• Think Like a Rocket Scientist by Ozan Varol

• Think Like a Programmer by V. Anton Spraul

Think One Step Deeper

It puzzles me sometimes that many of us oversimplify the world in our minds.

I would challenge you to consider that when you think you have something figured out, to continue to search one step deeper.

Often when we think we understand something, we really don’t.

Much of our thinking goes: A causes B, and I want B, so A is good. This may be true, but what if B causes C, which is a terrible outcome? Many of us don’t think this deeply, but we should.

This seems obvious when laid out in abstract form, but this is a common error in our thinking, where we did not think deeply enough. Of course, we cannot always predict what will happen so easily, but at least take the time to consider what the likely outcomes will be. Then, what will the outcomes of those outcomes be?

For example, a political science professor at Purdue taught me that it is quite easy to think superficially and fail to see the bigger picture.

He once discussed that, of course, we all want to be good and help to feed the starving, especially in different nations that are not able to provide this assistance to their own citizens. Yet, I was left in disbelief when he explained a rational outcome of feeding them, at least on a mass scale. As we feed them and nourish them, they tend to reproduce more, and then because there are probably not good systems in place for them to get jobs, we end up with even more poor and starving people than we began with. Eventually, at this pace, we cannot continue to feed the starving.

By feeding the starving, we end up creating more starving people eventually.

I do not claim to have all the solutions – I am not someone who would say we should not feed the starving. Clearly, it is very human to want to help the people who need it. But we have to admit it is quite odd to have goals where even if we accomplish them as we hoped, we will cause new problems that refute the original goal.

Human thinking is often shortsighted, where we tend to have one goal in mind. Yet, we fail to understand that by accomplishing that goal in the way we wanted, we will create new circumstances that contradict our original goals.

Here are some examples that could apply to you:

• If you pay someone to help you with simple favors, they may happily do favors for you when you pay for them. Yet, the one time you ask for a favor and cannot pay for it, they may refuse to help. They have come to view their role as performing a job rather than as performing favors.

• If you always pursue what makes you feel ecstatic, you may find your life highly enjoyable and pleasurable. But when something happens that does not go your way, you may not manage it and fall into a depression or anxious state.

• If you comment on a child’s weight frequently, you may get him to lose weight as you would like. But eventually, the child may become obsessive about his weight and develop an eating disorder.

• If you study hard just with the motivation of getting good grades, you may perform very well in your classes. Yet, you may find that you do not have a solid understanding of the material in time. You only memorized exactly what was supposed to be on the exams, but you never truly understood it.

• If you dislike a particular bug that often invades your house, you may hire exterminators to kill it. This makes you happy because the bugs are gone. Yet you may find in years that the exterminators killed some exotic and rare bugs critical to the ecosystem. The lives of multiple species may be threatened because many residents such as yourself exterminated these bugs.

• If you tell yourself positive lies to yourself to motivate yourself to do better, this may help you to succeed and give you a motivational boost in the short run. But in the long run, you may find that you are good at making people think you are highly skilled, yet in reality, you struggle to accomplish basic tasks in your field.

Train yourself to think at least one step deeper than you normally would. Do not settle for the type of thinking that goes: If A leads to B, and B is good, then A is good. The reality may be much much more complicated.

Ask yourself: Does A cause other problems? Does B cause other problems? Is there some C variable we haven’t even considered, which would cause other problems? Do some of these problems refute the original goal we were striving for?

Stop Thinking on Autopilot – 8 Tips to Wake Your Mind

Thinking is an interesting activity because it seems to be done on our own, yet we also borrow thoughts from the people around us. Sometimes if we are not careful, we may be borrowing other people’s thoughts too heavily, rather than thinking on our own.

One of the worst things we can do is assume that our thinking is already perfect. There is always something we can do to improve the way that we think. And, of course, the way that we think tends to influence our actions in the real world.

Our thoughts and the way we think are quite important, yet often we don’t give this idea much thought - the irony.

If you think on autopilot, you may also take action on autopilot, and you may be barely conscious of your life and not fully even realize this. This autopilot life is something we must learn to overcome by focusing on our thinking.

I believe we all think on autopilot at least some of the time – but fortunately, this post will help us to snap out of it.

Initially, I wanted to make this post about Critical Thinking – but I believe these are actually some of the fundamental thinking principles you need before you can develop into a critical thinker.

Let’s begin.

1. Get a Different Point of View

By being in your mind and body, you usually have your own point of view to judge things. This can lock you into one way of thinking. Rather, it will help grow your thinking abilities if you expose yourself to different cultures, backgrounds, and belief systems. You should seek to empathize and try to deeply understand how different people work and think. In time, you will find that your way of thinking is not the single right way to think.

Example: If your friend tells you that Native Americans exhibit a wide variety of negative qualities, you can assume that he is correct or read stories and view documentaries that are told from the perspective of Native Americans. You may even choose to interview or communicate with a Native American – but only do so if you are open to new ways of perceiving.

2. Test Your Assumptions

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again - we all make assumptions. I assume every day that the floor I walk on will not break under me. We must make some assumptions to live a normal life. However, for important parts of our lives, we should learn to test our assumptions.

Even when you have information from a reliable source or a source that you trust, test it anyway. Avoid assuming that something is true just because one person or one source told you. You can test it by comparing it to other reliable sources, or perhaps by checking for yourself if the information is actually valid.

Example: If my wife tells me that she turned off all the stove burners, I may check on them to make sure before going to bed. For information that can impact your life, it’s worth checking on those assumptions.

3. Ask Yourself – Who Does This Information Benefit?

Nations build up convenient stories that view themselves in a positive light and view their rivals in a negative way. This may be the same with rival groups or organizations. This can also happen with individuals who end up developing animosity toward each other.

Understand that people tend to focus on information that makes them feel good. When you read information, and it seems to make someone feel good, likely at the expense of others, then you have to start thinking for yourself.

When it is clearly in someone’s benefit that you believe something, you should take extra caution, take a step back and reconsider how accurate this source is.

Example: Next time you hear biased reporting, where every word seems to benefit one group and somehow puts down another group, ask yourself who this is benefiting. Is the information coming from a place where people want to feel good about themselves (or get their audience to feel good about themselves), or are they truly focused on accurate reporting?

4. Come to Your Own Conclusions

When you read or listen to the news the next time, don’t listen to the conclusions that writers or reporters come to. Pretend that you can’t hear it, or simply skip over it. Instead, listen to the facts and the line of reasoning. Then, come to your own conclusions.

You may find that often enough, the conclusions you hear are there to gain people’s attention. The world operates in a way where the more eyes you get on your material, the more money you make. So it is in the news or different agencies benefit if they come to wild conclusions. Those wild conclusions tend to get shared more, incentivizing these agencies to make wilder statements more and more often. Basically, stop trusting the conclusions so much, and stick to the facts.

You can come up with your own conclusions since you have your own mind.

Example: Watch YouTube clips of news reporting - just the part where they focus on facts. List out any mentioned facts, and then come up with your own conclusions based on those facts. Then listen to their conclusions. Compare your conclusions to the ones they come up with. Then ask yourself if you had not done this exercise, would their conclusions have left a greater impact on you? (Perhaps they resorted to name-calling or personal attacks that were not relevant based on the facts.)

5. Be Open to the Possibility of Being Wrong

Many of us make up our minds about something and refuse to consider that we could be wrong. But we should be more open to that idea.

We should learn to pay more attention to whether the “facts” are actually true and correct, whether the line of reasoning is actually correct, and whether the conclusions someone comes to make sense based on the facts and the line of reasoning.

At any point in the process, anyone could be wrong. Are your facts wrong? Is your line of reasoning wrong? Are your conclusions wrong? Even if parts of this chain or process are exaggerated or mistaken, it calls everything into question.

Example: Practice listening to people who have different beliefs or points of view – you can do this with blogs or YouTube. Instead of dismissing their perspective entirely, try to listen to it and consider it fairly. Begin with sources or people you may generally disagree with and who are open, fair, and reasonable in how they talk about issues. Avoid sources that are overly biased and vitriolic – at least when you are beginning.

6. Learn How to Separate Fact from Fiction

To avoid thinking on autopilot, you should develop better systems for figuring out what is true and what is untrue. This can involve asking yourself a variety of questions such as: “Could your senses be deceiving you?”, “Is the source biased,” and “Are they speaking without substance?”

Fortunately, you can learn these tips and much more via a short Free eBook titled What is True? (and What is NOT True) if you sign up here.

7. Learn Something Every Day

A great way to avoid autopilot thinking will be to get into the habit of learning something regularly. There is no good excuse to avoid learning. Most of us make time to get on social media and watch TV and keep up with the news, so we can probably make time to learn something new and meaningful every day.

When you learn more, it becomes difficult for someone to influence you with “facts” that have no basis in reality, a line of faulty reasoning, or conclusions that do not make sense. The more you learn, the more you will realize when you have been given information that doesn’t seem right and deserves to be more properly investigated. If you do not know very much, any piece of information will seem plausible, so you will not know what is worth investigating more deeply.

Example: You can learn by reading blogs or books, engaging in new activities, visiting museums, taking a course (there are plenty of free ones online), listening to podcasts, or finding a tutor or mentor. There are so many ways to learn that you should be able to find something that appeals to you. I would urge you to learn from expert sources based on experience, science, or reason.

8. Don’t Base Your Whole Identity on Another Person or Organization

I often see that people begin to base their whole identity on a particular person, group, or organization. This can be problematic because you will feel the need to agree with everything that this person or group believes in if this happens. Instead, consider that just because you agree or believe in many things that someone else does, does not mean that you are the same. You are allowed to be the same in some ways and different in some ways.

We should always maintain some independence in our thinking. The way we think should be our own – we can be influenced or guided by others – but there is no reason why you must automatically absorb all the ways of thinking from a particular person or group.

Example: If you want to join a group, make it clear that you think for yourself and do not need anyone else to do your thinking for you. You should not feel pressured into agreeing or believing everything that they do. If they are unhappy with this, then it is not a group that you need in your life. If a group wants control over everything you do, including your thoughts, then the connotations here are quite negative – this can be associated with cults or brainwashing, for example.

Otherwise, if you follow someone or a group too closely, take a step back and ask yourself what you really think. Do you truly agree with everything they do, or was it just convenient for you to agree so you wouldn’t need to think things through on your own.

Recommended Readings

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward Burger and Michael Starbird

Teach Yourself to Think by Edward de Bono

The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg

The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker

Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre

Blindspot by Mahzarin Banaji

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Influence by Robert Cialdini

The 7 Levels of Change by Rolf Smith

The Neurogenesis Diet and Lifestyle by Brant Cortright

The Secret Principles of Genius by I. C. Robledo

The Insightful Reader by I. C. Robledo

How Do You Respond to Challenging Questions?

Children can sometimes question endlessly, can’t they? They have been known to ask what something is, and then when you explain it, they may ask “Why?” over and over to try to learn more deeply.

As adults, we have often reached a point where we stopped questioning. This is unfortunate as I can see that this habit of not questioning has taken a toll on society.

On a routine basis in my interactions with experts, I will ask a question that could be challenging – for example, it could be unique or considering things from a different perspective. Usually, I feel that they should know the answer because I am asking an expert in their field. I feel that I am just asking them to think through problems in a slightly more complex way, rather than just giving me the solution they may find in their work manual or a Google search.

Often when I ask these questions, I am met with some of the following responses:

“I’m really not sure – maybe the reason is...”

When I hear this, usually they make something up, where often it is obvious to me that their answer is not correct. The problem with this approach is that they are more concerned with appearing to be helpful rather than actually being helpful. Sometimes, I also have the impression that they are worried about looking foolish or unknowledgeable – they want to hide the fact that they do not know certain things. With their approach, they are not learning anything new from my questions.

“I have no idea. That isn’t what we focus on here.”

Often, they will tell me this in an annoyed tone, as if I shouldn’t be asking questions. The problem here is that I have asked a question somehow related to their field. Yet, they are drawing clear lines as to what they will not think about. With that approach, their knowledge will forever remain limited as they refuse to learn new things. I understand that some things are outside of a person’s professional domain, but I still think people should be more curious about how different domains are related. Divisions between fields are often just imaginary lines or boundaries that we draw. In reality, everything is interrelated.

 “What’s important actually is that….”

After saying this, they focus on something else, more concerned with selling a product or guiding me to do what they want me to do rather than answer my question. In this case, they do not place value on questions. They view questions as a distraction from meeting their goal. This is a mistake because if they actually learned how to answer some questions, they could better help their clients and better meet their goals. In this case, they seem to be refusing to acknowledge that anything they don’t already know could be important.

The above responses are the most frequent ones that I get. The ones below are less common.

 “That is a good question. I don’t know the answer, but I will have to look it up and get back to you.”

Although they probably have good intentions, they usually never get back to me. Usually, this is someone who is interested in learning or in helping their clients. Still, they are very focused on meeting their immediate goals, and they will probably not invest time in looking up answers unless they think it is necessary. Although this is better than some of the above options, they are still failing to learn from new questions that they receive. And most of the time, they have still not actually answered the question I presented.

“I will look this up now,” or “I will ask my supervisor and get back to you in a moment.”

Usually, with this approach, they can give me a helpful response. Typically, even if they do not know the answer, they can help me understand why they do not know. Perhaps they will explain that there are several possible reasons that something has happened. Or they may need to run extra tests or perform extra services to answer some of my questions. The person who responds with the above phrase (in bold) will place value on new questions and seek to answer them. They will understand that questions present an opportunity for learning and growth. This response is fairly rare, and I am glad to see that some people (or the organizations they belong to) value answering potentially challenging questions.

“The answer is:” (and they proceed to give a good and reasonable answer.)

This is the part that saddens me. When I ask unique, thoughtful, or detailed questions, I don’t expect to receive good answers anymore. This is because of my experiences in having seen that most of the time, I will not receive useful answers to my questions. Usually, I am met with one of the top 4 phrases mentioned above – which results in me getting no answers.

The person who knows the answer to my question right away usually has a lot of experience is highly talented, or places a lot of value on learning new things and trying to answer new questions effectively. Someone who answers my question with reasonable solutions has probably thought through this question already. They have been asked similar questions in the past, but rather than avoid the question, they learned what they needed to answer it appropriately.

With this type of person, sometimes I will continue to ask more questions. My curiosity is endless, and I am fascinated by the opportunity to learn more about topics from people who are truly experts in their fields. Often, someone who can answer one challenging question is also quite capable of handling other challenging questions. After a few questions, I will often get to a point where we find a limit to their knowledge. But this type of person will always think about my questions more deeply and seek the answers for their own benefit.

It is frustrating to see that many people on a daily basis are on autopilot. They are going through certain motions. They do not expect any challenges in their day, nor do they want them. Any new question is assumed to be pointless or a distraction. For many of us, we see questions as child’s play. We think of the child who annoyed us with endless questions, or the person who makes a fool of himself asking questions with obvious answers, or we think of the teacher who scolded us for “wasting” classroom time with questions. Questions have a bad reputation for many of us, but we need to focus on bringing them back into our lives.

In my life, questions are the primary thinking tool I use for everything. The trick isn’t just to ask questions but to ask good ones. How do you ask good questions? By developing the habit of questioning so that you learn to ask better and better questions. What is a good question? The good question is that which helps you to accomplish your goals.

I want to be challenged with new, interesting, and even difficult questions. Actually, I think we should all want this.  

Do you really want to think the same thoughts every day, do the same things every day, and not be pushed into becoming anything better every day?

Is that what we are truly after? This seems quite meaningless to me, as I hope it does to you as well.

Today, I ask you to challenge me, to push me further.

Ask me any question, even if you are sure I will not know the answer.

You can do so in the comments section below.

I am the type of person who cannot let it go. When I am asked something, it will roll around in my mind until I find a solution. If I go to sleep concerned about something, I wake up with the solution in my mind.

I cannot guarantee that I will know the answer to your question, but I will try to figure it out and give you a helpful response.

In your life, seek to ask more questions and encourage people to ask you more questions. When you are asked new and challenging questions, search deeply for the answers. You will become more and more confident every day in your ability to solve problems if you do this.

Eventually, you may reach a point where you can craft the right questions for yourself, and you can seek your own answers to these questions.

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If you could use some example questions to help get you into the questioning mindset, consider reading the following (written with co-author Dave Edelstein):

Question Yourself: 365 Questions to Explore Your Inner Self & Reveal Your True Nature

Default Thoughts vs. Reflective Thoughts

There are two types of thoughts. Default Thoughts are those you arrive at as a natural consequence of your prior thinking and your prior actions. For example, as a Hispanic American, if I arrive at a store and a clerk looks at me with disgust and walks away from me rather than greeting me, my immediate thoughts may be that the clerk is a disgusting, racist person. (While this has happened to me, it is infrequent, thankfully.)

Every day we have the option of whether we will stick with our default thoughts and assume them to be true or whether we will engage in more reflective thinking.

Reflective Thoughts are when we choose to more deeply process our default thoughts. Some of my reflections in this particular situation may be as such:

Okay – this clerk appears to not like me and is perhaps a prejudiced person, but what do I gain if I purposely look for confrontation with him? If I do that, then if I am correct about thinking he is a racist, I am just reinforcing his beliefs, “proving” to him that people like me have attitudes, are unlikeable, and cause trouble.

So if I act according to my default thoughts, causing me to get an attitude with this person, then I am making the world a worse place, losing this opportunity to positively impact the people and environment around me.

Please bear with me through this mental exercise. I just want you to understand that it is quite easy to form default thoughts, assume they are the truth, and allow them to affect our whole day. Meanwhile, our default thoughts often represent great falseness in our lives. This case example may not be one you relate to – that is fine, just imagine any scenario where someone appeared to have a distaste for you, without a good reason.

My trick in many life situations (I’m sure I did not invent this) is to pretend that I am not aware of certain things I am actually aware of. I believe this technique is used much more by women than men, but it can be quite useful. If I perceive that someone is in a horrible mood or seems to be prejudiced against me, I will simply behave as I always do, pretending that I did not notice their mood or attitude. Of course, I may quickly look for a way to give them their space.

My default mode of behavior is to be polite with everyone, to treat everyone as if they have some internal importance that I may not be aware of. Every person you see every day is more important than you think. This person may have saved someone’s life, may be managing a multi-million-dollar company, may have raised a family of doctors and teachers, or may have had the potential to do all the above things if he had ever simply been given the opportunity.

When people assume that you are a certain way, and then you show them that you are not like they had assumed, hopefully, this helps to change their perceptions. Hopefully, they can begin to see that they do not need to assume everyone of a certain race, religion, or political party is bad.

Most people are good, or they aspire to be good most of the time. Sometimes, of course, we think we are doing good, but the effects are actually bad. Ultimately, it is our default thoughts that poison us all against each other. And to be frank, often this is driven by news media, social media, and all the people who are stuck in “us vs. them” thinking to an extreme level, who forever blame someone else for all the ills of the world. Many of these people and media have the loudest voices, reminding us over and over that our group hates that group. Or their group hates our group. Or this group started this, and the other group needed to get revenge.

This creates and spurs endless psychological and even physical warfare. Because these are the loudest voices, many of us assume that we live in a scary world, but it can’t possibly be as bad as it is portrayed to be. For instance, the news is built to report mostly negative news – positive stories are rarely reported.

The major caveat here is that the more we think the world is a scary place, the more closed off we all become, afraid to get involved with anything we see, afraid to help, afraid to ask for help, and as you may guess, these thought processes will probably make the world a scarier place to live in.

By thinking we live in a scary world, we make it so.

Something I wish all of us to learn is that our thoughts are potent. We don’t understand the power of a simple thought in this age. And the collective thoughts of masses of humans are incalculably powerful – they are responsible for inventions, religions, philosophies. Still, they are also responsible for needless vitriol and toxicity, misinformation, and warfare.

We must take our thoughts seriously.

How can you help make the world a better place? Do this.

Start thinking about your thinking. Take note of the types of thoughts you often have. Here are some common thoughts people tend to have:

• I am not as good as my peers

• I can never seem to attract any good, successful people into my life

• Everything I do seems to fail.

• Many people don’t like my personality.

• If I had more money, things would work out.

• I’m not smart enough.

I did specifically choose mostly negative thoughts, as these are the ones that tend to cause the most harm in our lives.

Let’s take the thought, “Everything I do seems to fail.”

We have to examine this more carefully.

Everything you do cannot possibly be failing. You are breathing, and your heart is beating, so your body’s systems seem to work just fine. Perhaps you mean that much of what you do at work isn’t going well. Then we can examine certain projects you worked on and see that perhaps there is a pattern of failure. Then we should examine the parts of the projects more carefully. Perhaps 90% of the tasks in your projects went quite well, but that 10% that did not were critical enough to cause big failures. Fine – you can use this information to improve and stop being so hard on yourself. Achieving 90% is an A in school, but sometimes it is a failure in a real-life project.

Be very cautious with general, all-encompassing words, such as Everything / Nothing, Everyone / No one, Always / Never. If you use such words in your thoughts, this should be a big signal that your default thinking is flawed.

As a general rule, we can assume that our default thinking is indeed flawed. This means that if you do not engage in reflective thinking, that most of your thinking is probably flawed. And if most of your thinking is flawed, your whole life may be headed on a path that is not best for you.

You do not need to think reflectively about every single thought you have, but at least try it out for your most common thoughts. If you are not aware of your thoughts, try this exercise. Set the alarm for every hour of the day (at 8:00, then 9:00, and so on). Every time the alarm goes off, write down what you were thinking at that moment. Later on, look for patterns in your thoughts. Then, think reflectively about your thoughts. Scrutinize them carefully. You will find mistakes, fallacies, incorrect assumptions, and you will see that you can improve your thinking.

If you find it difficult to properly examine your thoughts, it may help to read about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, or other books in the psychology / self-development domains.

When you improve your thinking, you will improve your behaviors, which will help create more positive and fruitful thoughts, and you will create a virtuous positive cycle of thoughts and actions in your life and possibly others’ lives.