The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking

The authors' point of view is that effective thinking is not an inborn trait and can instead be learned.
It's compact and provides exercises to get you started with the strategies explained in it.
The book presents 5 strategies to trigger effective thinking:

- build a solid foundation
- use mistakes to gain new insight and avoid getting stuck
- build a habit of asking yourself good questions and answering them
- understand how concepts relate to each other, instead of learning isolated facts
- be open to constantly change yourself

Nothing groundbreaking here, but it's funny how most of the things book authors are speaking of seem to be a common-sense, yet we still need a reminder to follow these rules (suggestions?) to at least some extent.

II took a look at other reviews, and there are many other people that simplified this book into several lines, so I'll just copy some of these, just for sake of reminding me:

* P. 47 Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill
* P. 56 A man's errors are his portals of discovery. James Joyce
* P. 58 The way to get good ideas is to get a list of ideas and throw the bad ones away. Linus Pauling
* P. 92 There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not have been done at all - Peter Drucker
* P. 125 In a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks. Warren Buffett

1. Earth: Strive for Rock-Solid Understanding - Understand basic ideas deeply

2. Fire: Fail and learn from missteps (mistakes)

3. Air: Constantly create and ask meaningful questions

4. Water: Consciously consider and follow the flow of ideas

5. Learning is a lifelong journey - Embrace change

If you know what the word “agency” means with respect to your life, you're not going to get anything out of this book. Thankfully it's short, but what I wished I had known is that the last three pages are literally an entire recap of the important concepts in the book. Don't read this book, but if you do, just read the synopsis and save yourself an hour of wishy-washy advice for highschool students.