25 Useful Tools for Thinking - Part 1

Most people think that being smart means knowing more facts, and that the smartest people are the ones who know the most names, dates, and places, but this is the least important and useful part of learning. Instead of facts, you should focus on knowledge that can be used as a tool. The more of it you have, the more ways you can deal with different problems. This is called mental models. This topic has been discussed a lot before, but in this article, we are going to discuss it from a different angle.

Occupations as Thinking Tools:

Most people define professions by what those who do them do. Engineers build buildings, economists study money, and psychologists research people's minds. But while these are clear differences, try to think instead of the kinds of problems that professions are trying to solve in how they're trying to solve. Here we can reveal the different tools of thinking that are characteristic of them and can be applied outside the scope of the profession.

For example, in economics, although most people view it as the study of money, it is very similar to the way the world is thought, and as a result, books such as Freakonomics apply the thinking tools used in economics to all kinds of scenarios that have nothing to do with money.

Here are 25 tools drawn from 25 professions:

Note: It is not intended here that every tool is the only one used in every profession, but rather we chose one tool that looks unique and distinctive enough to be repurposed in everyday life.

1. The artist: creativity is a priority

Most other professions have constraints placed on one's ideas, for example, they are valued, governed by the laws of mathematics, and have budgets and specifications, while artists work in a world where most of these constraints are removed. So the bigger question is, “What makes this so unique and interesting?

It is a useful thinking tool that can be applied to many other areas. The best companies often produce art-like products with a desire for excellence and creativity, not a list of specifications.

How would your business change if you made creativity your priority? How would your goals and projects be different if your priority was to be cool, have interesting ideas, or improve the original idea?

2. The Economist: People's response to incentives

There are many thinking tools that economists have, but the basic tool is easy and is based on the concept that people respond to incentives. The economist Tyler Cowen explains that a key element of economic thinking is that when you change a system that includes people, people don't stay in their places, but they respond to new stimuli.

Almost any action you take will change the response of the people you interact with to incentives, so you should ask the economist in you: “If you changed this, how would people react?”

3. Engineer: Modeling and Computation

Engineering is built on science, which is why it offers the most accurate estimates of any profession. Whereas your financial advisor can only guess which stocks will go up and a psychiatrist can only guess what people will do, engineers create things that don't exist from scratch and have to work efficiently all the time.

The essence of doing this is to create a model of what you're trying to make, measure the variables that affect it, and know how wrong you can expect in those measurements, so you can actually see what's going to happen instead of just guessing.

4. Entrepreneur: Experiment until you find what works

Entrepreneurs often have little money, resources, support, or time, yet they need to find a solution that will make them money in some way, and they can do so by adopting a set of thinking tools that ordinary professionals rarely use.

One of the main tools is the creation of rapid prototyping. Many people see this as a product development strategy. It makes something that hardly works to see if anyone wants it, but it's actually a thinking tool that applies to a much broader field than product research and development.

The essence of this thinking tool is that you try a bunch of things, without waiting for a perfect answer, and it takes careful listening to feedback so you can get ideas for what to do next, and so speed and the number of things you try make up for the downsides of making decisions in an environment full of uncertainty. Sometimes the right way to solve a problem is to do a lot of things and see what works.

5. Doctor: Diagnosis

Doctors meet patients who have a set of symptoms, which they may not tell some of, and according to which they must deduce the most likely disease and develop a plan to treat it, during which any wrong movement may kill the patient, so they must choose wisely.

The reasoning tool here is the idea of using symptoms to infer a disease, comparing the current situation with what it should be like to make accurate decisions, and while this applies to medicine, there are many places where the diagnosis is important.

For example, if your car is beeping, your computer is not working, or your company has stopped making money, the first thing to do is to find out all the possible causes, and this requires studying, and then you must rule out as many possibilities as possible according to the symptoms you have noticed. Finally, classify the remaining options into rare and common causes, knowing this can help you arrive at the most likely diagnosis.

6. Journalist: Searching for the facts

Journalists rely on a large number of different thinking tools that allow them to write compelling stories that convey the news fairly and accurately. One of these thinking tools is fact-checking, because journalists often need to interview sources that may be misleading, it is important to confirm what they say from independent sources, and while fact-checking can be time-consuming, it results in a more accurate view of the world than just blindly following what they say.

What would your life look like if you dug into the core pieces of information you rely on to make decisions? Imagine if you had to write a report with the information you know and publish it in a newspaper, would you back out later?

7. Scientist: Develop a hypothesis and test it

Scientists discover facts about the world, and to do that they need thinking tools. The most important thinking tool in science is a controlled experiment, you save all the variables except for the one you want to test, and then wait to see what happens, and this requires careful preparation and design to prevent external factors from affecting your results.

Too many people draw conclusions from unscientific “experiments”. They have several conflicting variables that make drawing conclusions from their experiments difficult. But what if you treated your diet like a scientist? And with your work routine? Will you follow up with them after that? How many of your beliefs about work and life will remain after being subjected to such scrutiny? It may be useful to have more scientific thinking tools in your life.

8. Mathematician: There is conclusive evidence

The thinking tools of a mathematician depend on there being definitive proof of everything. Whereas an engineer may tolerate accuracy within some limits, and an entrepreneur may be satisfied with their intuition, a mathematician's statements must be irrefutable or not be taken for granted.

One of the ways in which you can see the impact of this thinking tool in non-mathematical fields is in programming, for example, the MIT programming style is more mathematical and academic. It tends to be more strict in demonstrating the success of its programs. Compared to the way Bell Labs accepts algorithms that seem to work even if it is not guaranteed to do so. Mathematical thinking tools help you be more strict and spot errors.

9. Coder: note patterns and automate processes

 Programming includes many thinking tools, but the easiest is the algorithm. Algorithms are a set of steps that can be precisely defined so that they do not require any intelligence to perform each of them, and yet the end result is a useful product. One useful implementation for that is to look at the things you do and see which ones can be automated. Programmers can discover redundant code and try to extract its core, strip it, and then use it to program something that can do what you need automatically.

In addition to being able to write code yourself, you can think more as a programmer in many other areas of your life, for example, what are the things you frequently repeat in your work that can be automated? What process is not fixed results that you can turn into a foolproof set of steps?

10. Architect: making models

Architects need to design buildings, which are large structures that can take years to build, and yet they meet all the standards of clients, contractors, city planners, and building codes, and also be beautiful. To do this, architects need a set of thinking tools and software to get an idea of what exactly it will be like on a large scale after spending millions of dollars, one such tool is model making.

Creating a scaled-down version of the thing you want to create so that you can see what it looks like and then visualize how it would be on a larger scale is difficult, but it often lets you know what it would look like before it's too late to change it.

11. Salesperson: Understand the needs of the other party

Salespeople often have a bad reputation. People think it's all about cheating and trying to manipulate someone into buying something they might not need, and although that's the stereotype, but the actual reality is seldom like this. Instead, salespeople work to deeply understand what the client really needs, and then match it with the products and services they cater to. This is very difficult, you must have the solution to the client's problem before they realize the problem exists.

A key thinking tool for success in this profession is the ability to infer people's fears and needs from their contradictory behaviors, asking, "What language do they use? How do their actions differ from the intentions they express? What can you infer from this?" This is a tool that you can apply to achieve goals greater than just getting an additional commission, you can follow to find out for example what your wife wants instead of what she tells you, or what your employer needs.

12. Soldier: Routine and discipline to avoid fatal mistakes

The discipline that the military embodies is considered a very useful tool for thinking, even outside of combat situations. Discipline and routine become a safeguard against negligent errors that could cost lives, and by requiring compliance with those protocols, even in the absence of danger, there is much less scope for error in situations of risk.

For example, making your bed every morning may not prevent injuries, but if you can follow this procedure perfectly, you are also more likely to follow procedures that may save your life. This type of discipline is also found in another life-threatening area, which is medicine. If you take this idea of military routine and apply it to ordinary things like hand washing, you will save lives by avoiding infection. Once you know the best way to do something, do it carefully, without any carelessness or someone might get hurt.

13. Chess Player: Imagine Moves

Chess has always been considered a game of improving thinking, and while there is no guarantee that years of studying chess will necessarily make you smarter, there are plenty of thinking tools that can be gleaned from the game.

The first: Is the ability to visualize the game in your mind. The common trick for top players is to play games blindfolded, and while this astounds the onlookers, it actually promotes a useful practice, which is to be able to visualize the game in your mind so that you can anticipate your opponent's future moves.

14. Designer: Designing the product to fit the desired result

The Design of Everyday Things talks about the thinking tools that designers should develop, which is why this is a book that you can read even if you haven't made anything in your life, and one of the useful tools it mentions is to reflect on how something is made to how to use it. A well-designed door handle shape suggests push or pull without having to say it, and a well-designed light switch should tell you which rooms will light up when pressed.

What if you designed your speeches to automatically change the audience's thinking as you would like? What if you designed your habits to implement them automatically? The scope of application of this thinking tool is very wide.

15. Teacher: Changing the thinking of others

How do you communicate knowledge to someone else? How can you give them abilities they didn't have before? Most of us take teaching and our ability to learn from it for granted, but to be effective teachers must understand how their students see the world, and they must have a plan for how to change that.

To succeed in most professions, you must be able to get others to see problems as you see them. This includes identifying the information they lack and saying the right things to guide them to where you are now. While this is an obvious skill for teachers, it also benefits programmers trying to explain code, clinicians trying to explain the reasons for a medical procedure, or a leader who wants employees to follow the vision.

In conclusion:

In this part, we talked about 15 thinking tools that are extracted from 15 professions and that we can apply in our daily lives, and we will continue in the second part with 10 other tools.