HOW TO BUILD SOLUTIONS AND PERCEPTIONS

Once you have abandoned ‘what to think’, in the beginning, you will feel

clueless. It’s the same cluelessness that you felt as a kid when looking at an

elaborate puzzle for the first time. You do not know a pattern with which to

solve it immediately. But once you believe you can do it and take up the

challenge, you end up solving it. Three things happen afterwards:

• The second time you solve the same puzzle, you might end up solving it in a different way from the first time. Your memory may have failed to capture all the steps in your first success, so you can’t repeat them. But, after several repetitions, you would learn to solve the puzzle with some definite patterns. Similarly, as you apply your thinking to solve a problem or create your perception of something, you would, by repetitions, at some point discover a few patterns which would loyally serve your mental faculties in solving similar puzzles in an efficient manner.
• These patterns might not solve all puzzles.
• The more elaborate the problem, the more evolved the patterns are forced to become. The same applies to perceptions. With an issue that has more complexities, you might have to rethink the entire pattern.

Most of all, ‘how to think’ means allowing the data to make you think; not your preconceived notions dictating to you how to feel about data. You learn only when you are open to learning. To develop how to think, you would have to focus on the contents of the problem with absolute disregard for your personal judgements, biases and prejudices. Only then can a new pattern and a new understanding take birth.

How to think differently is an ability that has to be personally developed by you with your own thinking. You’re going to come up with your own patterns. This doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have existed before; it would mean that the patterns you have come up with would serve you the most and the best.