What I mean by my question is: We all just pick up stuff when we're kids and our primary education, home, friends, etc. affect how we learn to think and see things or problems. As we get older this just becomes the way we see things and work with them which leads to some people being exceptiona...
How can someone learn to re-train themself and see things the way real problem solvers do? I'm talking about stuff like first principles thinking, systems thinking, mental models etc. that people often associate with individuals like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett.
I usually lurk and I know there's a ton of super smart people here who I'm sure can offer advice/suggestions on this. So thanks in advance.
Comments
By 0xCE0 2025-12-188:36 Try to dig what a thing actually is, not what people say it is. Write down your current understanding with a date, so you can see years later how wrong or right you were. True learning is ugly route. Refine your own definition/understanding to be real-world bullet-proof. You need to be less-wrong over time. Use your bullet-proof learnings to build something, and don't let all the faux renduntant new ideas or manipulative generated comments destroy it.
Try to explode different things, so you can see clear boundaries of each separate thing and to minimize redundancy.
Try to map the depencency graph of a thing. Every higher level thing is a make file / spreadsheet cell DAG.
One of the clearest thinkers I had the privilege of knowing was Dr. Eli Goldratt author of Theory of Constraints.
Fortunately for us he defined as his life's mission to teach the world to think clearly.
So I suggest you start with three of his books: The Goal, Is not luck and The Choice. After trat read "The thinking Processes".
Apart from the theory of Constraints literature you can study system dynamics. And if you like programming then "Introduction to NetLogo" is great at both.
If you don't like programming then Zenge's the "Fifth Discipline" is a great intro to system dynamics.
By jxmesth 2025-12-175:44 Thanks for replying. I'll definitely check his stuff out.
By robthebrew 2025-12-1618:23 critical thinking. Question everything (even in your head). Does this make sense, does this have valid data? Importantly: Is this actually relevant to me? If not skip it.
