Thinking Tools

Do you sometimes feel stressed out or overwhelmed by life, like other people don’t always get you, or like you don’t know where you’re headed in life?

The examples above are consequences of the way you think. The good news is that you can learn to think better. Thinking is not something that happens to us — it’s a skill. Like any human activity, better ways of thinking can be learned and refined. In Thinking Tools, you will learn practical science-driven tools to improve your thinking, creativity, productivity, well-being, and quality of life.

What Thinking Tools is about

Thinking is at the root of all human activities. Yet we spend surprisingly little time thinking about or working out ways to improve our thinking. In addition to the long tradition in philosophy, that has always been at the forefront of improving thinking, a more pragmatic approach to developing thinking has taken root in recent decades.

Understanding the human mind, its processes and functions, has developed in leaps through the last five decades or so. We now understand that humans don’t only have one mind, but two. While we have some influence on our conscious thought, there is a whole wonderland of non-conscious thought that we can only influence if we learn the proper tools to do so. Understanding how your non-conscious mind works helps you alleviate work-related stress, generate creative ideas, eliminate writer’s block and communicate more clearly. Your non-conscious mind can also inform you of how to find a clear direction to head towards in your life — which can sometimes be a surprising one once you’re freed of the constraints of your presuppositions.

How the course works

In this intensive course, we’ll go through a generous toolbox of ways to influence and improve your thinking. We’ll examine how to reduce work-related stress by externalizing thought. We’ll learn about creative thinking and how to leverage the full firepower of your mind to get things done, whether in everyday life or your creative endeavors.

In Thinking Tools, we’ll learn about how to communicate with others, both online and offline, and what the classical Greeks and Romans can teach us about social media communications. We’ll learn how to kill writer’s block once and for all. Ultimately, we’ll learn about what science says about well-being and the good life and how to apply this to discover your North Star — the unique direction best suited for you to start building a good life in the classical Aristotelic sense of eudaimonia.

The course will give you insights into how the human mind works and practical tools and methods to develop yours that you can apply immediately.

Learning goals

• Learn to identify your core values, intrinsic motivation factors, and how to build toward a life rooted in your personal strengths
• Learn to externalize and structure activities and goals in everyday life
• Learn to set clear goals and create a regular routine of prioritization and re-prioritization
• Learn to set up an online database for externalizing thought and a tag structure to access any information stored in the database even years later in a matter of seconds
• Learn to improve the quantity and quality of creative ideas and how to overcome writer’s block
• Learn to argue convincingly, identify typical argumentation fallacies, and support and engender dialogue, especially in situations involving conflict