Master The Art Of Thinking

I came across a statistic that you've seen, it said that the average person only uses about 10% of their potential, and the other 90% is left unused throughout their lifetime. Well, recent research shows that that statistic is not true. The average person only uses about 2% of their potential, and the other 98% is stored, like a treasure buried in the ground. And it's never used. And what do people use their 2% for? Well, they use it mostly for conversation, at work. And with their friends, they use it for messaging and tweeting, and they use it for watching television, average person watches a screen three to five hours per day is they're watching a screen of some kind, whether it's a computer, an iPhone, an iPad, or a television. And most of what they're watching is in Category Two, it's completely irrelevant and unimportant. It makes no difference in their lives at all. But whatever you do, over and over again, becomes a habit. So today, we have an entire generation of people who have the habit of watching screens all the time. And as a result, their lives go very, very slowly. So, therefore, have you have to ask yourself, Is this a good use of my time? Does this this work have tremendous consequences for me? So when it came to studying thinking, I said, What is the activity that has the greatest potential consequences for you in your life? And the answer is thinking, because the way you think and the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your decisions and choices, your decisions and choices determined the actions you take, the actions you take, determine your results, and your results determine the quality of your life. And it all starts with your thinking. You know, sometimes you've heard me ask what is the highest paid work in America. What's the most important work in any job or any company? And the answer is thinking, thinking is the most valuable work. I began studying time management about 30 years ago, and I came across a word in my studies: the Word was consequences. And what it said is it something is important if it has big potential consequences, and something is unimportant if it has low or no potential consequences. The number one reason for success is people focus on things that have high potential consequences. The number one reason for failure is people focus on things that have low or no potential consequences. very worst use of time is to work intently on something that needs not to be done at all. And one of the things that are holding back entrepreneurs, and business owners are killing them, by the way, and it's wiping out an entire generation is this obsession with technology, I see people that are walking with their phone, it's almost like drug addicts that are mainline, they cannot stop staring at their screen, they cannot stop pushing their buttons. The fact is that this obsession with looking at the screen and staying connected is killing people because then it stops them from focusing. You cannot focus if you?are distracted, like an attention deficit disorder dog. So you're constantly ringing and responding to bells, almost like a crazy person in a toy factory. What do most people do in the morning, most people in the morning turn on their computers and check their email for a few hours. And they turn up their belts or goes bing, bing, bing, bing, and they're like attention deficit disorder children, are they thinking answering their phone, ding, ding, ding, by the end of two or three hours there. But the brain is so flooded with dopamine, that they're incapable of concentrating on anything. And so distraction. Technological distraction today is killing you. It's destroying your hopes for your future. It's keeping you busy. And at the end of the day, you've accomplished nothing, and you're exhausted. According to a recent report, every time you respond to a new impulse and new distraction, it burns up part of your brain energy. At the end of the day of a typical day to day, the average person's IQ has decreased by 10 points. That means throughout a distracting day, you get stupider all day long. And by the end of the day, you're just plain stupid. You've gone from college you got from college level to driving a truck in terms of intelligence. And this is serious. There are very in-depth, scientific articles on this. Some tried to say it's good because it stimulates your mind. The others will point out that it stimulates your mind so much that what happens every stimulus triggers dopamine and dopamine has?good has the same effect as cocaine on your brain. It's a stimulus and you get addicted to this dopamine stimulus and you cannot surround yourself with stimuli. You cannot watch your computer. I mean, many people get up in the middle of the night and go and check their computer to see if there's any email, any spam. Then they go back to bed they can't sleep anywhere.

Do you know the average business owner today spends only 11% of their time in marketing and sales, all the rest is a distraction? And they don't even realize it until somebody follows them around with a camera and a stopwatch. The average business owner today is so distracted, that they're distracted away from what they do. So I'll give you a very simple way to double your income, increase the size of your business, become eventually wealthy, live in a big house with, a big car, and retire to Switzerland. Here it is, are you ready, is when you start in the morning, leave things off. Don't check your computer or your iPhone or your anything else. There's nothing there this important. A friend of mine in New York wrote a book two years ago, called Don't check your email in the morning. And then she just goes on to explain why checking your email in the morning starts the addictive process. And then you're addicted all day long. You just can't get out of it. It's like, it's like an alcoholic or a drug addict, that takes a drink, they can't stop drinking, take a shot, you can't stop. So don't turn it off, leave it off. And the rule for success today is to leave things off. Leave things off anyway. And so if thinking is the most important thing you do, because the consequences of thinking, determine the entire quality of your life, then the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. So the more time that you spend thinking and thinking well and thinking clearly, the more successful you are. Over the years, I've worked with some very powerful people, billionaires and multimillionaires, people who are on the Forbes 400 list, repeatedly, you over and over. And I've had a chance to be with them during crises.?And what times were something was happening that was serious was it a major problem? And I noticed that they all had one quality in common they all went calm. It's just they went people around them were angry and upset, and worried about what happened and who did it and so on. And they would just call almost like a pawn would go con. And they knew and I learned later I didn't know why this was I admired it but didn't know why it was that when your mind is calm, you're tired cerebellum, the thinking and deciding brain functions at its highest level, like turning up all the lights on a dimmer switch. It's functioning like a Christmas tree. But when you get upset and angry, what happens is your thinking reverts to your limbic or emotional system. And your ability to think diminishes dramatically, and you make a lot of mistakes. That's why when you are facing a difficult situation, you have to use every skilled trick game, whatever it is to stay calm. And that's why they teach you to meditate. Now I'm going to write a book on this whole subject of thinking because I think it's very exciting. But I want to give you three types of thinking practiced by the most successful leaders. And they're very simple. And they're based on many decades of research, and Nobel Prize-winning results. Number one is called short-term thinking versus long-term thinking. Average people think short term, they think for immediate gratification. They think about what they want to do now they watch television, and they do things that give them immediate pleasure. Top people think long-term. They make long-term plans. They have long-term goals. They study and take courses and read books and come to courses to develop skills for the long term. So the more you think long term, the more guaranteed you are to move up in your life and your work and your income. 50 years of research at Harvard, transferred worldwide and I began studying this many years ago. I love this research. Most people missed it when it came out. And it just kind of faded away. But what it said is it doesn't matter where you come from in life. All that matters is how far ahead you think. So if you think five or 10 years ahead, and you're willing to sacrifice, and this turned out to be the word in the research if you're willing to sacrifice pleasure TV, watching fun in the present, working and preparing yourself for the future, then you will have a wonderful future. So people who think long term are the ones who move up faster on the ladder of success. The second type of thinking is called uninformed thinking versus informed thinking. And we'll come back to this later. But uninformed thinking is where we act without enough information. And if we do that, the probability the consequences are they will probably make mistakes. Informed thinking is where we gather all the information in advance before we make our decision. And it requires patience, and it requires discipline. It requires slow thinking. It requires long-term thinking to be an informed thinker. People who rise to the top are people who make the best decisions and get the best results. And they are also people with 50 years of research who take the time to get more information. They keep asking questions, they keep studying, and they keep learning. They hire consultants, they ask other people for advice. Sometimes one piece of advice from one person with experience in a particular area can change your thinking completely.

So Thinking, as Thomas Edison said, thinking is the most important thing that we do. And yet it is the most difficult, which is why most people won't do it. Most people do not think it's too hard. And thinking requires that you stop the clock, turn off your cell phone, shut off the phone, and spend some time thinking, in psychology, they call it mindfulness, you think you take some time and you think quietly, about a big decision before you make it. Now the third type of thinking, the third type of thinking is fast thinking versus slow thinking. Now fast thinking is what you do when you are driving through traffic, you think fast, you have to think fast, or you will be cut off or have an accident. Slow thinking is the thinking that is required when you are engaging in activities that have long-term consequences. When you're thinking about your career, when you're thinking about how to use your time, when you're thinking about your projects, when you're thinking about upgrading your skills, you use slow thinking, when you're thinking about business decisions that take a lot of time and money, then you use slow thinking. So the big mistake they found in this Nobel Prize-winning material is that people use fast thinking when they should use slow thinking. They don't take enough time to think carefully about things before they do them. And then the consequences turn out to be very negative.

The longer that you take to make an important decision, the better the decision will be the higher quality decision. And Lord Acton once said when it is not necessary to decide it is necessary not to decide. In other words, he, the professor said, Buy as much time as you can, for a decision, put it off, if you can put it off for a day, a weekend, a week, I might put it off, some of the best decisions that you make will be decisions that you will allow to steep for a while, like water and tea. So remember, anything that is important that has long-term consequences, is a candidate for slow thinking. The rule is that fast decisions are usually wrong decisions, especially fast decisions involving people or money are usually wrong decisions. So if you're going to make a decision that has long-term consequences, then you have to give it a lot of thought you have to sort of look at it like a beautiful piece of porcelain, you look at it from every single side, and think about it carefully. And the more carefully you think about a decision, the better the quality of that decision will be when you finally make it. How many times have you said you know, if I just thought about that a little bit more, I wouldn't have done it? Or if I just thought a bit better by just taking time to think with superior people through experience and painful experience, learn to take their time in making important decisions. So one of the very best ways that you can develop the?discipline of clear thinking is to sit in solitude, for 30 to 60 minutes when you have a major problem or a major issue in your life. Solitude has been discovered, and rediscovered throughout the history of man, as the most powerful of all thinking tools. You see if you can imagine a bucket of water with silt in it. And it's all churned up and you can't see anything. But if you leave the bucket of water to sit for a while, all the silt will drop to the bottom and the water will become clear. This is what happens to you in solitude. If you sit calmly by yourself with no noise, no distractions, and nothing to read, just sit quietly, which takes tremendous discipline, the first few times you do it at about 25 or 26 minutes, your mind goes clear. And any problem that you've been working on, the solution just pops into your mind. Any issue that you've been dealing with, the answer just comes to you. It's almost like a miracle. When you practice solitude, you activate your superconscious mind and your intuition. And something that you've been having trouble with or wrestling with suddenly becomes clear and you know exactly what to do. Here's the wonderful thing about solitude. Everybody who practices it will tell you it's incredible. And if you've never done it before, just practice it once.?Sometime today, take 2530 minutes, take an hour if you can, and just sit quietly by yourself and allow your mind to calm. Sometimes it's called Mind commie. And just allow yourself to calm down and think and the most amazing things will happen you'll start to make better decisions, and you'll start to hear what is called the still small voice within and is still small voice who sometimes will shout at you so loudly, you will be amazed. Now here's another way to think better when you're dealing with any kind of a situation. Write down every detail of the problem or situation. Take a sheet of paper and the rule is to think on paper and write down every detail how would happen, what's going on the problems that concern the cost who is involved, just write it down, write it down, write it down. And the most amazing Same thing happens between the head and the hand. As you're writing out all the details, sometimes exactly the right choice pops out at you, and it becomes clearer, but you would not have triggered that superconscious solution. If you hadn't taken the time to think on paper. You see better decision-making comes from better thinking habits, and better thinking habits come from practical experience, learning both what to do and what not to do. Becoming a more effective thinker on paper is a sure way of becoming a more effective person.

In practice, There is something magical about writing down a problem. It is almost as though in the very act of writing what is wrong, you start to discover ways of making it right.

Perhaps the source of this magic lies in the objective perspective that writing affords you. Even though you are describing your problem, your challenge in your life, your uncertainty, and your indecision, the fact that you are writing about it, as opposed to mentally pondering, creates a space between you and the problem. It is within this space that solutions have room to grow.

You see, writing about events and circumstances that occur helps you to clarify exactly what is happening. When we describe life to ourselves only in our minds, our imaginations tend to feed false or distorted information about how things are positive or negative. When we describe the situation in writing, however, we become more factual, more accurate, and certainly more realistic.

Then as we reread what we have written, we create a new picture in our minds to replace the distorted picture we have been working with. And once we finally see things as they are, rather than as we think they are, we can then see our way clearer to make them better.

Right about a current dilemma you are facing, perhaps it is a personal problem of business matter, family issue, or financial problem, whatever it is, take the time to capture it on paper, the way it is.

As you begin to develop the habit of writing down your problems and recording your observations, emotions, and reactions to life's events, you will undoubtedly find yourself both posing and responding to a whole new set of questions about your past, present, and future. Why did I say that? Why does he always make me feel that way? If I follow this course, where will I be five years from now?

As you begin to both ask and answer yourself on paper, you will be amazed at the incredible leaps in personal understanding and self-awareness you will experience and remember, any positive change which occurs within you will ultimately manifest itself in a positive result outside of you, in your social or professional world, your attitude, your bank account, your habits, and even your appearance.

As you begin to both ask and answer yourself on paper, you will be amazed at the incredible leaps in personal understanding and self-awareness you will experience and remember, any positive change which occurs within you will ultimately manifest itself in a positive result outside of you, in your social or professional world, your attitude, your bank account, your habits, and even your appearance.

You know, Aristotle once said that wisdom is the greatest of all human desires, wisdom is the ability to make good decisions is a combination of experience, plus reflection, experience plus reflection. In other words, you have an experience and then you reflect on the experience and you think about what does that experience mean? To me? How can I use that? What can I learn from it? And I love the line from Socrates that says, The unexamined life is not worth living, which means that in a life where you do not take the time to reflect on your experiences, Aristotle said that wisdom is an equal measure of experience, plus reflection.

And the reason so few people have wisdom is what they have is experience, experience experience, but they never take the time to sit back and reflect on what's happening to them reflect on what they're learning. How many people here have seen people get out of bad relationships and get immediately back into bad relationships, or get out of a lousy job and immediately join a company and get into another lousy job? What is the natural thing that people do they get fired or laid off from a job they quit? They go down the street they look for

another job exactly just act like learn from their setbacks. This is one of the characteristics of high-performing men and women is that every single time they have a problem or a difficulty, they sit back and they dissect it, and they learn everything possible from it. They try to develop general principles. From each setback. They say what is the valuable lesson I can learn? So you take a look at everything that has happened to you take a look at the very most difficult experience that you're in right now. And ask yourself what is the most valuable lesson I can learn from this experience? And believe me, if you look for the lesson in the Bible, it says Seek and ye.

To find, it doesn't say seek. And occasionally you might find something. It's a seek. And you shall find if you look for the valuable lesson, or the seed of an equal or greater advantage or benefit in every difficulty, you will find it. It's always there. So reflecting on your experiences, and the best way to do that is to go for a walk, just going for a walk, where you can't listen to anything, don't take an iPod or anything, just go for a walk 30 or 60 minutes and just walk. And while you're talking and reflecting upon something that's going on, at work or home, you'd be amazed at the quality of ideas that will come into your mind, to improve your thinking, talk it over with someone else whom you like and trust. And give them the details and ask them to give you their feedback and give you their perspective. Sometimes, especially if you're in a great relationship, the other person can give you a perspective that completely changes your ideas. A good way to think better is to ask, especially if you're frustrated or having difficulties ask, what are my assumptions? What am I assuming about the situation that may not be correct? What if my basic assumptions about this relationship about this job about this product or service or this investment? What if my assumptions were wrong, then what would I do? And here's the key to good thinking, be open to doing something completely different. Be open to admitting the possibility that you could be wrong and doing something completely different. And what that does is it opens up your mind and your perspective. So you can see all kinds of possibilities that you may not have seen?before. So clear thinking is the disciplined practice by the most successful, happiest, and wealthiest people in our society.