Get Smart!: How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field

reacting and responding continually to what is going on around them, and within them, with very little deliberate, reasoned thought.
From the first ring of the alarm clock, they are largely reacting and responding to stimuli from their environment and to their habitual or momentary impulses and appetites. The normal thinking process is almost instantaneous stimulus, then immediate response, with no time in between.
The superior thinking process is also triggered by stimulus, but between the stimulus and the response there is a moment or more where you think before you respond. Just like your mother told you, Count to ten before you respond, especially when you are upset or angry.”
The very act of stopping to think before you say or do anything almost always improves the quality of your ultimate response. It is an indispensable requirement for success. It is also a quality of wealthy people.
Thinking Is Hard Work
Thomas J. Watson Sr, the founder of IBM, required that there be signs on every office wall that said, THINK Whenever they had a problem to deal within the early days, someone would point to the sign to remind his coworkers that the more they took time to think carefully about the subject under discussion, the more likely they were to come up with a proper solution or decision.
Thomas Edison once said, Thinking is the hardest work of all, which is why most people avoid it at all costs.”
There is a saying, There are those who think. There are those who think they think. And then there is the vast majority who would rather die than think.”
Good thinking is hard work. It must be learned and practiced over and over if you are going to truly plumb the depths of your mental powers.
Fortunately, whatever you do repeatedly soon becomes a habit. Once it becomes a habit, it functions easily and automatically. Goethe said,
“Everything is hard before it is easy This definitely applies to new habit formation.
Slow Thinking

One of the best habits you can develop is to practice thinking slowly in those areas where slow thinking is required.
As we discussed in chapter 1, the important factor is consequences.
Almost all of the mistakes we make in life come from not carefully considering the consequences of our actions beforehand.
Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a major contribution to accurate thinking. Similar to the classic Straight and
Crooked Thinking by RH. Thouless and CR. Thouless, Kahneman’s book explores and explains many of the reasons why we come to false conclusions which lead to actions that fail to achieve the results we desire.
The authors show how we accept information and make decisions based on partial information, selective statistics, or confirmation bias—seeking information that agrees with what we have already decided to believe.
The common conclusion of these studies into poor or sloppy thinking is the necessity of slowing down before we make a decision that can have significant positive or negative consequences in our lives and work.
One of the simplest ways to do this is to continually ask, How do we know this is true before we accept apiece of information as the basis fora decision.

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