The book started by telling a story about how much distraction we get in our day to day work. It goes on explaining about the concept of “The flow of water”. How the water react when you throw a stone at it. It will create a splash and ripple depends on the mass of the stone. No more and no less. And after the ripples are gone, it will go back to its calm state.
This book is written to change the way you think about things. How to look at things from different perspective to trigger your imaginative thinking.
What is the similarity between School teacher and Sumo wrestlers? You probably wanted to know what the book is all about. The way the author present this is by showing the research based on the data. The data will never lie.
What causes the drop in crime rate in the 1990 in the US? where everyone is forecasting the increase in crime. Is it the effective police strategy? is it the boom of the economy? is it the gun control law? or is it due to the legalisation of abortion? the answer to this question might shock you in a way.
Another question that it pose to the reader is “If the drug dealer is rich why they are still living with their mother?”. There are in depth investigation within how the drug dealer organisation works, how the commission is being set, how the pecking order works.
All in all the book presents lots of data, and data analytics to get to the meaningful information.
The Goal achiever book stressed that Repetition is the law of learning. You will need to read the book again and again to make sure you learnt it well. It goes on explaining how the subconscious mind is in every cell of your body.
To quote from George Bernard Shaw : some people see things as they are and ask “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and ask “Why not?”
The relaxation method steps introduced by the book are:
One thing to note is never to change the Goal, you can change the date and the plan.
To end this summary with a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt :”The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
The Goal achiever book goes on explaining on how we live in 3 different plane:
Body
Consciousness
Sub consciousness
Consciousness and subconscious is in your mind. It also introduce the stick person concept.
Start with faith in your heart and climb till your dreams comes true.
The Goal achiever book start of by asking you to set the big, outrageous goal for yourself. The goal needs to be big and you need to want it. You don’t have to justify it to anyone, and you don’t even have to justify it to yourself.
Life is about the journey to the top and the enjoyment you experience to get there.
It goes on explaining that the things we want is always there, we just have to find it, to become aware of it. Take for example the law of nature, gravity. Newton didn’t invent the law of gravity or motion. It is always there since the beginning, he is the one that become aware of it.
Ultimately the last element is change itself. We need to engage change,this will allow us to transform ourselves.
We need to question all the aspects of our world. This can only be done through thinking. Adopt the concept just do it.
I certainly hope this concept had helped you to have more effective thinking.
The fourth element of effective thinking is water : seeing the flow of ideas, look back and look forward. There is always more. We need to understand that each invention is an incremental improvement of the previous one.
To adopt this, extend your idea, all idea can be extended. You will need to see the world as it is now in order to be able to look forward into the future.
The third element of effective thinking is Air :this is to say that we can create solutions out of thin air. Create a questions to challenge your own assumptions, be your own Socrates. The easiest way to learn about something is to teach them, by doing this you will need to understand the matter deep. Another important things to note is framing the question, this is a important as answering them.
Sometimes answers can lead to questions. What if, this allow us to see the world differently. Always ask yourself a question, what is the real question. This will allow you to fix the root cause and not just solving problem that will lead up to more problems later.
In this life we need to define our definition of success, this can be done by framing the question what success mean to you. Without knowing this, you will always constantly chasing you tail.
In summary we always needs to question the questions.
The second elements of the effective thinking is Fire: you need to ignite the enthusiasm, welcome accidental mistake. And have an iterative process to fix the mistake. You will need to fail fast and learn from it. Fixing mistake through iterative process will need to be second nature.
The book “The 5 elements of effective thinking” describes what fundamental elements related to effective thinking. It is a thought provoking way to provoke thought. The analogy is the hero in a movie is usually a person who change the most. To be able to reap the most out of the book, you will need the following strategy :
Listen
Do the exercise
Make it second nature
The first element is earth : ground your thinking. What it means is to understand simple things deeply. Focus on solving the simpler problem. Try to declutter and see what is possible.