8 tips to think clearly and solve life puzzles.

If you struggle to think and understand clearly, you find it stressful to make better decisions in  your day to day life. You are not alone, here are the 8 keys to use in order to articulate your thoughts; understand, think and make better decisions.

In this article, we are going to explore 8 tips I am using to tackle-decision making fatigue. make sure you read to the end because i'm going to share an actionable guide to help you scale through. To get the full gist and more about effective thinking I recommend you to read 5 elements of effective thinking by Edward B. Burger and Michael starbird for more insight. Feel free to jump to any subtopic you feel like.

1. Reflect on the basics.

2. Ask: What do you know?

3. Distill to the essence.

4. Start small 

5. See what's missing. 

6. How do you know?

7. Don't believe it because everybody says it is true.

8. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses.

Reflect on the basics. 

Always go back to the basic skills, knowledge and fundamental concepts of anything you do. Reinforce yourself on the fundamental theorem periodically. Just going through it once is not enough. Schedule time to revisit it. As you go through it you will find new ideas and insights you may have forgotten.

Consider a skill, maybe coding, podcast or a content creator you want to understand. Your understanding of the basics of anything you want to learn cannot be undermined. It is easy to know, but if you can not explain it to a child, it means you don't understand it. Spend three minutes or more writing down the specific component of the skill or part that is basic to it. Schedule thirty minutes to study the basics in your routine. This act makes it possible for you to hone your skills or deepen your knowledge at the higher level you are trying to attain.

Ask: What do you know?

Honestly evaluate your knowledge or level of understanding on any skill or anything you want to improve by asking yourself questions like

Do you struggle to think of core examples? Do you fail to see the overall big picture that puts the pieces together? 

Now compare your effort to external sources or people that share their experience from books, YouTube, experts, even your boss and so on. 

When you discover weaknesses in your own understanding, take action. Methodically learn the fundamentals. Thoroughly understand any gap you fill in as well as its surrounding actions. Make these new insights part of your base knowledge and connect them with the parts that you already understood. Repeat this exercise regularly as you learn more advanced aspects of the subject. Save your earlier attempts so that you can look back and see how far you’ve traveled. Every time you return to the basics will deepen your understanding of the entire subject.

Distill to the essence.

When faced with an issue that is complicated and multifaceted, attempt to isolate the essential ingredients. The essence is not the whole issue. There is a further step in understanding how the other features of the situation fit together; however, clearly identifying and isolating essential principles can guide you through the morass. The strategy of clearing the clutter and seeking the essentials involves two steps:Step One: Identify and ignore all distracting features to isolate the essential core.Step Two: Analyze that central issue and apply those insights to the larger whole.

Consider a subject you wish to understand and clear the clutter until you have isolated one essential ingredient. Each complicated issue has several possible core ideas. You are not seeking the essential idea; you are seeking just one idea.

 As parents, bringing up children requires making many decisions on a daily basis. Instead of focusing on all the decisions, identify one or two essential goals and use them to guide your actions. For example, one goal may want to raise children to become independent thinkers who take personal responsibility for life decisions. That goal would influence your decision if your children repeatedly fail to complete homework assignments. Do you embrace the easier, short-term solution of finishing their homework; or do you take the more difficult approach of encouraging your children to learn for themselves? Having essential goals in mind makes daily decisions clearer. Whether or not you are a parent, this same perspective can help everyone: teachers, students, professionals, business people, and even politicians make daily decisions that aim toward long-term goals rather than toward short-term goals.

Start small.

When you are trying to fix a complex issue. Instead of pushing to fix it at once, find an element of it and solve it completely. Understand the subissue and its solution around it, and understand all its connection and implications.

Consider the small piece from many points of view and in detail. Choose a subproblem small enough that you can give it this level of attention. Your efforts could help solve the larger issue. 

 

Illustration: if your problem is not just procrastination but focus, start by controlling your environment, turn off  your computer and cell phone and spend that short uninterrupted time on the task allocated.

If time management is an issue for you, just focus on getting your allocated task done. That’s still big, so just focus on starting the task. You should use the three minutes rule. Convince yourself to do the task for three in order to activate your energy and gear your momentum.

See what’s missing.

Forcing yourself to see what’s actually in front of you rather than what you believe you should see is a difficult task. However, an even greater challenge is to see what’s missing. One of the most profound ways to see the world more clearly is to look deliberately for the gaps in the negative space, as it is called in the art world; that is, the space surrounding the objects or issues of interest. In our daily and intellectual experiences, there are gaps of many sorts. If you’re studying some body of material, ask yourself to identify those concepts that you truly do not fully understand. Those concepts may be ideas that you were supposed to have mastered at an earlier point in your life. Don’t despair. Honestly admitting those gaps in knowledge and understanding is the first important step in attempting to fill them. Of course, a harder question is this: How can you see what’s truly invisible?

Add the adjective and uncover the gaps. Let’s return to a time in which photographs were not in living color. During that period, people referred to pictures as 'photographs' rather than “black- and- white photographs'  as we do today. The possibility of color did not exist, so it was unnecessary to insert the adjective “black-and-white.” However, suppose we did include the phrase “black-and-white” before the existence of color photography. By highlighting that reality, we become conscious of current limitations and thus open our minds to new possibilities and potential opportunities. As curl jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and will call it fate. We become conscious of issues when we explicitly identify and articulate them.

How do you know? 

Becoming aware of the basis of your opinions or beliefs is an important step toward a better understanding of yourself and your world. Regularly consider your opinions, beliefs, and knowledge, and subject them to the “How do I know?” test. What is the evidence that your understanding is based upon? Become aware of the sources of your opinions. If your sources are shaky, then you might want to be more open-minded to the possibility that your opinion or knowledge might be incorrect. Regularly find cases in which you need to rethink your views.Opening our minds to counterintuitive ideas can be the key to discovering new solutions and building deeper understanding. 

We have to be open-minded and see the world with less bias. First, we can simply try out alternative ideas hypothetically and temporarily. In other words, don’t say, “Okay, I’ll change my opinions on my beliefs about Christianity right now.” Instead, say, “For the next day or even the next thirty minutes, I’ll pretend my opinions are the opposite of what I normally believe (even though I know it’s nonsense), and see where those new beliefs take me.” This strategy allows you to explore ideas and learn from what you do not believe in. Even following ideas that you know are wrong can be illuminating. Because in following the consequences of those “wrong” ideas, you might be led to better understand why your original belief is indeed correct, or you might be led to new and unexpected insights that run counter to your original beliefs.

Don't believe it because everybody says it is true. 

Train yourself to believe things with evidence, fact and logic. Commonly held opinions are frequently just plain false. Often we are persuaded by authority and repetition rather than by evidence and reality. This tendency to accept what surrounds us makes it difficult to separate what we really know from what we just believe we know. 

Let’s consider the downfall of gravity, Aristotle asserted that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. People accepted this assertion because Aristotle said it and it sounded reasonable. Until almost two thousand years later Galileo challenged Aristotle's theory. He demonstrates that heavier bodies do not fall faster. In fact, except for air resistance, bodies fall at the same rate regardless of their weight.  People tend to accept ideas if it is being said by an authority or if they know or respect the individual who said them.

 

Recognize your strengths and weaknesses.

When you want to improve or increase your understanding of any skill. Make a list of what you need to know, highlight and order them according to the scale of importance and preference. Ask yourself what you know.

Honestly write what you know, don't pretend you know or undermine your level of understanding of any skill. Write down your weaknesses as well as your strengths of what you know or don’t know. Deliberately avoid glossing over any gaps or vagueness. Instead boldly assert what is missing in your understanding. Now take the action of filling in the gaps. Identifying and admitting your own uncertainties is an enormous step toward solid understanding. 

Illustration: if you want to start to shoot videos and upload them to YouTube. Make a checklist of the entire process of filming and uploading your video. Highlight one or two of the most important tasks. Start doing the task you highlighted and focus on the important one which is filming. Forget about the mistake you make, learn to film why you are still getting better at it. focus on shooting more videos, quantity, consistency and keep moving.

If you are writing an essay, read literally what you have written— not what you intended to communicate. Pretend you don’t know the argument you are making and read your actual words. What’s confusing and what’s missing? If you think you know an idea but can’t express it clearly, then this process has identified a gap or vagueness in your understanding. After you admit and address those weaknesses, your exposition will be clearer and more directed to the actual thing you are doing. 

When delivering an address or making a presentation, apply this same process of deliberately listening to the actual words you are speaking rather than what you imagine you are saying.

Conclusion

Understanding simple things deeply means mastering the fundamental principles, ideas, and methods that then create a solid foundation on which you can build. Seeking the essential creates the core or skeleton that supports your understanding. Seeing what’s actually there without prejudice lets you develop a less biased understanding of your world. And seeing what’s missing helps you to identify those concepts you do not fully understand. Learn how to think with framework.