"How to be a smarter person", how to become an agile mind with the creators of the times

We are often envious of those smart people around us, thinking in our hearts, if I also have a naturally smart head melon, maybe academic excellence, career progression, innovation ability is no longer a dream.

This is our misunderstanding of intelligence, as long as we transform the brain's thinking path, develop the creativity behind the intuition, and make the brain go the ordinary way, this is actually not difficult, as long as the brain has agile thinking.

In the book "How to Become a Smarter Person", an evolutionary thinking that transcends critical thinking, agile thinking, includes three levels: conceptual thinking, innovative thinking and making good decisions. At each level, it provides a feasible practical solution path, helps us break through the layers of shackles of fear and habit of authority, directly attacks the essential problem, deepens thinking, and determines the height of the future.

The author, Dr. Brian Gritham, is a veteran mentor in the areas of learning methods, ways of thinking, and work skills, and has published best-selling books such as How to Write a Good Paper and Thinking Techniques That Professors Use.

We often think of higher education as a base for nurturing talent. But as everyone knows, this is often a huge shackle that binds a person to become a talent.

In 2012, UNESCO surveyed 120 employers from developed and developing countries.

The survey report found that most employers believe that graduates "do not meet the minimum employment requirements", and this has led to a serious impact on the development of the world economy.

These reports refresh our cognition to a certain extent, once we thought that the transformation of the world, the development of human talents is the people educated by these colleges and universities, in fact, this is a one-sided cognition or even unreliable intuition.

What is the employer's definition of talent?

The book presents the most important 10 items:

Communication skills, numerical reasoning, logical reasoning, conceptual thinking, teamwork, planning and organization, innovative thinking and problem solving, leadership, flexibility and initiative, self-motivation and self-awareness.

Among the 10 tips above, the core is the thinking skills, which are also the focus of our sharing in this article.

How do you let your brain break through the worldly temples and think fearlessly?

Do we dare to criticize and question what we hear about authority?

Do we realize that sometimes cognition also comes from solidified thinking?

Do we dare to say no to our instincts?

Do we dare to do something different and say something different?

All of the above, we not only have to break through the influence of the external environment, but also face the fear in our hearts, which requires us to learn to recognize, and we need to be conscious.

"College students around the world tell students that certainty exists, but after graduation they find themselves in a world of uncertainty."

Because students learn low-level cognitive skills in college, the need for innovative thinking, problem-solving skills, and the ability to make excellent decisions in the face of an uncertain society after graduation is a scarce resource.

How to make graduates turn gorgeous and become a social person with agile thinking? These are traceable in the book "How to Become a Smarter Person".

Agile thinking has two major mindsets: metacognition and counterintuitive thinking.

Metacognition requires us to develop advanced cognitive skills, generate ideas, create and analyze concepts, integrate perspectives to see problems from different perspectives, and make final decisions.

Richard Paul, the author of "Speculation and Position", put forward the theory of four levels of human cognition, which are four levels of cognition: not knowing, knowing oneself, knowing oneself, and not knowing oneself.

In the book "How to Become a Smarter Person", the author proposes that metacognition is a person's cognition of his own cognitive processes.

When we perceive the cognition of our own cognitive processes, we can monitor the thought process and be aware of unreliable intuitions.

For example, rackets and balls total 1 pound 10 pence, rackets are 1 pound more expensive than the number, how much is the ball?

Most people give a 10p answer, which is actually a wrong answer. At Harvard, MIT, and Princeton, students get 50 percent of their wrong path, and other colleges go over 80 percent, which is actually an elementary school math problem.

Because they rely on their first instincts. When we stop thinking carefully, thinking deeply, and only following intuition, it is often easy to bring about wrong results.

"All of these unreliable intuitions are stumbling blocks on our path to agile thinking. We are confined to our routines, so it is difficult for us to think logically, to process data, to assess risk and probability, and to use our imagination to create unique ideas and solutions, in short, it shackles our great potential. ”

When we know that we don't know, we can break through the known range, avoid the boundaries of the known, and cannot expand the boundaries of new cognition, which is also the meaning that metacognition wants to tell us.

"A person spends most of his life trying to stop himself from thinking," Huxley said.

Why?

Our metacognitions, our submission to authority, our inner horrors, our social environment, everything else, but none of this is insurmountable.

Now the development of enterprises generally believes that the lack of innovation ability and the lack of innovative talents lead to the inability of enterprises to break through the bottleneck of development, in fact, to a certain extent, due to our extreme desire for innovation and the recognition of innovation errors.

The rapid development of society has also led to the mentality of enterprises to be eager for success and quick profits, which to a certain extent restricts the cultivation of innovation ability.

In Chapter 8 of The Second Phase of How to Be a Smarter Person, we talk about the ten characteristics of innovative thinking:

1. Be good at emptying the brain

2. Be willing to conceive solutions, rather than simply looking for them

3. Be able to think simply

4. Be good at finding problems

5. Be willing to look for causes, consequences and possible solutions

6. Be open to new ideas

7. Be willing to question your own judgment

8. Firm and witty

9. Dare to be different

10. Optimism

Looking at the above ten points, in general, it is to maintain a childlike heart and curiosity like a child, and to think and study without preconceptions and judgments, which is also one of the important factors for the heroes and artists of the times to maintain inspiration and creative ability.

From Newton to Einstein, from Jobs to Bill Gates, they are not afraid to accept that they are different, even if they are regarded as strange people and experience isolation, but it does not affect their later fame and become heroes of the times.

From low-level cognitive skills to advanced thinking skills, you only need to break through the three stages of agile thinking, conceptual thinking, innovative thinking and making optimal decisions, step-by-step process, you can make us produce unlimited breakthrough ideas and creations, and the human development process is the best witness.

"The future is unpredictable, and today's society is becoming more and more uncertain." University of Southampton professor Stratos said so.

How to Be Smarter Helps Us Better Adapt and Evolve an Uncertain Future by Providing a Definitive, Evidence-Based Approach to "Agile Thinking" Thinking.