Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird
The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking
ISBN: 978-0-691-15666-8
Think back to all of the times in your life where you have felt stuck. Each of us have had problems or subjects that we just don’t understand and can’t find the answer. Perhaps you were stuck on a series of math problems in high school or college and just couldn’t quite figure out how the experts arrived at an answer. Maybe you’re a fan of word or number puzzles and feel as though you’ve reached your limit.
The authors of The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking don’t discuss thinking harder – they write about the power of thinking differently, about looking at a problem from different angles or with a different process than the one you may have been taught. The book relates the process to the original four “elements” proposed long ago – fire, earth, air, and water – with a fifth element bringing everything together.
Reading through this book, I noticed a lot of similarities between many high performers I’ve known over the years and the strategies mentioned in the text. One of the five elements is to “create your own questions” – in graduate school, there were also a couple of people who would sit in the front row and ask dozens of questions. At the time, it was incredibly frustrating to those of us who already understood the material being presented, but for those people in the front row, they were utilizing a strategy of active listening.
The authors also discussed “failing to succeed,” something I’ve always promoted in this blog and in my teaching in entrepreneurship. The best way to learn about business is to build a business of your own, and along the way, you are going to make some missteps. Sometimes, you’re bound to fail – the hope is that the failure isn’t spectacular and something that puts you off entrepreneurship for good. Errors are the best guide in this field, and most of them won’t harm you in the long run. Perfectionists don’t last long in the startup world.
The final element that ties everything together states that you’re never done learning. Self-improvement is a lifelong process. Sometimes, you might feel like you’ve made amazing progress, while you might feel yourself moving backwards other times. As long as you’re making incremental steps over time, you’re moving in the right direction. Mastering the basics, learning from mistakes, active listening, and constant self-reorientation is all part of the process. Learning is not a quick, painless process – you need to be in this for the long haul.
Just as much as this is a life-long process, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking is not meant to be a book that you read once and put away forever. The authors suggest that you read through the book, cover to cover, three separate times. It’s a very short book compared to many of the books that I’ve reviewed in this series, so reading it at least three times is not a heavy lift. I knocked out one of the readings on a four-hour train ride. For those with the shortest attention spans, the authors even include a summary section at the end of the book.
Overall, 8/10, would recommend to people who need to reframe the way they think about problems. Learning to think and learning to learn are both lifetime processes, and we all can improve in both areas. If you’re stuck or need a new way to think about a problem, this book may contain the strategies you need to get over the hump and back to creating.
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