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1-Page Summary of The Five Elements of Effective Thinking
Overview
After reading these key points, you’ll be able to take on challenging endeavors fearlessly. You’ll embrace failure as a way of learning new things that you can then apply elsewhere too. You will become more inquisitive and critical thinkers by asking more questions and finding outside-the-box solutions to problems.
Big Idea #1: Earth: True mastery isn’t about doing difficult things, but about mastering the basics.
The best way to gain a true understanding of something is to master the basics. This is because the basics are essential for developing any skill or talent, just like the element Earth represents solid ground underneath our feet.
People who want to become experts often try to cram as much information into their brain in one sitting.
Experts aren’t concerned with the most difficult things. Instead, they focus on perfecting their basics. In a master class for accomplished musicians, Tony Plog requested that they play their hardest piece. As you’d expect, everyone played well.
Rather than give advice on how to improve, Plog asked the soloists to play a simple beginner’s exercise. The group played it well, but not impressively. Once they finished, Plog himself performed the exercise in such a way that it amazed everyone because he had so mastered the basics. What happened? Mastery of any skill requires constant attention and understanding of the fundamentals because mastery is built upon mastering those fundamentals.
When we face a difficult task, it’s best to break the problem down into its constituent parts. Then solve each part, and then put them together to form a solution for the entire problem.
NASA didn’t immediately send a man into space. Instead, they sent an unmanned rocket to the moon first.
Once NASA accomplished their first step, which was to get a man into space, they were able to accomplish their goal of landing on the moon.
Big Idea #2: Earth: To find a problem’s true essence, look only at what you can see, and identify what is missing.
For a long time, people have observed birds and bats fly. They concluded that flapping their wings must be what allows them to fly. However, airplanes don’t flap their wings; they use a different method altogether. Flapping is not the secret to flight after all.
To understand a problem, we need to identify its core. This is often obscured by extraneous details. The element of Earth represents the foundation of a problem.
Let’s think about flying. It’s understandable that people were distracted by the mechanics of flapping wings and didn’t realize the real reason why a body could fly was its particular curvature. If we look at only what we can see, we’ll understand how to fly better.
We often have preconceived notions about things, and therefore we don’t question what others tell us. For example, Aristotle believed that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. It wasn’t until later, when people tested the theory with their own eyes, that they discovered it was wrong.
Another way to identify the essence of a problem is to focus on what’s missing.
Today, we describe old photographs as being “black and white,” because that’s the only color they contain. However, before the invention of color film, people didn’t think about it in that way. They simply called them photos. Had there been a word to describe these pictures at the time other than just calling them photos, people would have had a better understanding of what they were looking at in those older pictures.
