By The School of Life
Practical techniques for better thinking
Subject
Themes
The quality of our thinking varies enormously, yet most people treat good ideas as mystical gifts rather than the products of deliberate effort. Education systems compound this by rewarding rote learning over original perception, training us from childhood to submit to pre-existing truths rather than cultivate our own. Fifteen distinct mental manoeuvres offer a way out of this passivity, each addressing a specific obstacle to effective thought.
The quality of our thinking varies enormously, yet most people treat good ideas as mystical gifts rather than the products of deliberate effort. Education systems compound this by rewarding rote learning over original perception, training us from childhood to submit to pre-existing truths rather…
The School of Life, founded by the philosopher and author Alain de Botton in 2008, operates as a global organisation dedicated to emotional education. Its publications, films and workshops aim to make philosophical and psychological insights accessible to a general audience, translating academic…
One of the most striking and counterintuitive claims running through the fifteen mental manoeuvres is that the mind is not a reliable instrument. Far from being a precision tool that can be deployed at will, it is intermittent, anxious, easily distracted and prone to cognitive malfunctions that…
A persistent thread across the fifteen manoeuvres is that good thinking is not the preserve of geniuses or professional intellectuals. It is available to anyone willing to take their own mental life seriously. This amounts to a democratisation of intellectual confidence, a challenge to centuries of…
A radical proposition runs through several of the mental manoeuvres: emotions that we habitually suppress or condemn, including anxiety, envy, excitement and even the fear of death, can serve as powerful instruments of self-knowledge when examined rather than repressed. This reframing challenges the…
A recurring argument across the manoeuvres is that imagination is not a luxury or a distraction from practical thinking but a precondition for meaningful change. Before any reform, invention, career shift or personal transformation can take place, someone must first envision what does not yet exist.…
Although thinking is commonly imagined as a solitary activity, several of the mental manoeuvres reveal that it is fundamentally social and relational. Other people, whether present as listeners, authors or even as objects of envy, play indispensable roles in helping us access our own minds. The…
A fundamental distinction separates two kinds of thinking: strategy, which determines our overall aims, and execution, which carries them out. Most people devote far more energy to execution than to strategy, despite the fact that results can only ever be as good as the aims that produce them. We…
The most important thoughts are also the most elusive. A devilish correlation exists between how valuable an idea is and how likely it is to escape our grasp. Precious thoughts have something airborne about them, flitting away at the slightest approach of conscious attention. Great thinkers have…
Our minds habitually produce thoughts that are vague rather than wrong. We say we want a "creative" job, that we lack "fun", or that a meal was "brilliant", but these generalities cannot guide us towards accurate or satisfying destinations. Without specificity, we cannot formulate exact plans or…
We routinely banish thoughts on the grounds that they are "mad", yet many dismissed ideas could have been highly valuable if we had dared to examine them further. The greatest achievements in art, business and politics all contain eccentric, unconventional elements that protested against the settled…
Reading is conventionally valued for giving us access to other people's good ideas. But it serves a second, equally important purpose: it helps us unearth and focus what we ourselves think. Contact with another's intelligence can draw out our own hesitant, disjointed notions and bring them into the…
One of the most striking capacities of the human mind is its ability to clarify vague or intangible ideas by drawing analogies. Analogy works by picking out a feature that is clear and obvious in one area and importing it into another field that is more confusing. The phrase "papering over the…
Thinking seriously about the meaning of our lives is extraordinarily difficult. Day-to-day deadlines and immediate pressures prevent us from gaining the altitude needed to consider the course we are plotting through our limited years. The major obstacle is a tacit feeling of immortality. We may not…
One of the stranger but most essential moves we must practise to think effectively is regularly imagining that we might be wrong. The good thinker is, above all, a sceptic. Scepticism originated as a philosophical movement in 4th-century BCE Greece, taking its name from the Greek word skepsis,…
By The School of Life
Subject
Themes
The quality of our thinking varies enormously, yet most people treat good ideas as mystical gifts rather than the products of deliberate effort. Education systems compound this by rewarding rote learning over original perception, training us from childhood to submit to pre-existing truths rather than cultivate our own. Fifteen distinct mental manoeuvres offer a way out of this passivity, each addressing a specific obstacle to effective thought.