How to change the way you think?

and impact the world.

As a kid I used to play chess often with my grandpa. Like any grand parent who is so in love with his grand kid, he used to let me win a few times early on, to get me interested. He then would show me the rules of the game by trouncing me in a few steps.

Every time I used to start with the same step or be predictable he told me “you have to change the way you think. You cannot go on the same path every time.” Looking back that is the one of the amazing advice any one could give an 8 year old.

Thinking:The talking of the soul with itself — Plato.

We all have habits, patterns in our thinking. We tend to go by the comfortable path. The path well known. Unless we are forced to change by situations.

The one thing we can control

Ryan Holiday, the author of the Ego is the enemy and the obstacle is the way, talks about how stoicism as a life philosophy can help us all lead a happy and fruitful lives. For the uninitiated, Stoicism talks about focusing on parts of life that we can control rather on things we cannot.

If there is one thing that you can control, irrespective of your situation it is your thinking. What you choose to think, and there by what you choose to act upon. The self made billionaire of our times — Warren Buffet spends 80% of his time thinking and reading.

In this world ruled by impulses and reactions, thinking actively is that thin line between success and failure. A reason why some of the successful leaders today spend a lot of time just thinking.

Carol Dweck in the book The Mindset talks about how our attitude to learning and change totally impacts our ability to achieve. The belief that we can learn to improve our intelligence and become smarter is what sets the winners apart.

3 simple habits can help us actively control what we think and what we focus on in life. Habits that would help us control our actions and decision making.

Fill

This is the sensory input we feed our mind. This is the material around which your thinking is biased towards.

When you take your mobile phone first thing in the morning and look into Facebook you chose what you are putting into your head.

When you spend hours reading pulp fiction you have chosen the material around which your thoughts are going to be hovering around.

When you see the Lost for hours, do not expect innovative ideas to blast on your head when you sit to write.

There is a reason why daily practice works for people. Or reading positive stuff like the holy scriptures at 4 am in the morning and taking a bath in river at sun rise. Its about filling your head with the right kind of ideas.

What are ideas and thoughts you want your mind to be associated with? What are the concepts you find yourself attracted towards? Read and think about them first thing in the morning. And last thing at night.

Choose

Choose the mental models you choose to apply and the assumptions you make.

Choose the signals you read from outside world and patterns you see across different things.

Understand your bias towards conscious thinking and reliance on intuition.

In the book Thinking fast and slowly, Daniel Kahneman talks about how thinking slowly and deliberately can help us navigate complex situations way better than fast and intuitive reasoning.

By deliberately looking into our own thinking process, we will be able to understand and address the gaps and blind spots we all are prone to.

Analyze

This is what we all do. All the time. Look at what happened, try to recreate the scenario, run the same picture like million times in the head and try to figure out what went wrong.

Most of the times we look at the whole thing from perspective of our actions. Like what I did wrong or what I could have done better .

We seldom ask — what assumptions were made, where we started, how we arrived at the decision, what were the supporting arguments, if we have to do it again what will we do differently?

The idea is not to analyze why we did a mistake —what we are looking for is components of our decision making process. Components that we rely on to take our decisions.