How To Be a Top Thinker in Your Field: The Complete Guide in Only 500 Words!

If you want to be a top thinker in your field, there are three things you must do:

Thing Number 1: You must be hungry to learn all the time.

Thing Number 2: You must have the courage to question industry standards.

Thing Number 3: You must cultivate the humility to know your limits.

The best thinkers in any field, across the board, have a big appetite for knowledge, question everything and have the intellectual maturity to appreciate their own information blind-spots.

To be at the edge of thinking in your field of expertise is as easy as knowing these three things. Please allow me to dig a little deeper into this big thinker concept.

Superior decision-making is a big deal for all professionals.

Naturally, the better your problem-solving ability, the more efficient your workflow is. And of course, the more effective your solutions. And with time it all pays off as a hefty bottom line – professionally, financially, socially.

Society pays the biggest thinkers well. In whatever currency of their choice. Whether that currency is money, prestige, accolades – whatever. It truly pays to be a big thinker.

But to be a truly big thinker, you must go above and beyond the average for your industry standards.

You must spend time building up your data points in your field of expertise. We all know that the more data points you have at your fingertips, the better the decisions you make. And that is where the challenge normally is. Allow me to explain.

Any field of endeavor already has standard guidelines and principles in place. All you have to do to become good in that area of expertise is get access to that knowledge base, learn it and put it into practice.

And even though you sacrifice your time and effort to learn that knowledge, the reality is, there is nothing special about acquiring that knowledge. You are only regurgitating what has been produced before.

Now there is nothing wrong with learning what is already in existence. I mean, why re-invent the wheel? Doesn’t make sense, right?

But if you want to be a super thinker in your field of expertise … if you want to make the most brilliant decisions … you must go beyond regurgitating what’s already known.

If you want to make genius-level decisions, then your problem-solving abilities must be top-gun stuff. And that means continuously gathering as many data points as possible within and without your area of expertise, and synthesizing these into new meaning. Crafting all the emerging information into new ways of thinking about a concept. New practical ways of doing things.

Reminds me of a quote attributed to Albert Einstein:

Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.

And finally, you must have the humility to accept that you don’t know everything. The courage and maturity to know that your decision-making doesn’t necessarily work in all contexts.

The best thinkers in any industry know when their expertise will be useless. They acknowledge they are not fountains of wisdom. They know their limits.

And they are acutely aware that they can use their knowledge for good or bad, but intentionally choose to use it for good. A truly big thinker uses their skills to benefit everyone; not to manipulate others.

And that, exactly, is what makes them the best of the best.

Why?

Because they know when they must call in and defer to another expert. They don’t pretend to know it all.

?And because they don’t pretend to know it all:

·????????They stay hungry.

·????????They ask questions.

·????????They know their limits.

#decisionmaking #problemsolving #questions