The 5 elements of effective thinking

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1. ChuckMcMMar 2025
   Always great to hear from people on the far side of the valley of despair. I don't think it is pointed out enough that people who fall off of "mount stupidity" can sometimes get really really stuck. In my experience when they do that at work it is quite traumatic.

   Another good book for the author and others is "5 Elements of Effective Thinking" by Burger & Starbird. It thinks about thinking which can sometimes side step the depression of suddenly not thinking you know anything about anything that accompanies that big drop off mount stupid.

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2. kickahaDec 2022
   The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Burger and Starbird.

   https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691156668/th...

   Defies categorization, difficult to summarize. A tutorial for effective and fulfilling learning, grappling with challenging intellectual problems, and for cultivating creativity.

   It’s easy to read it superficially. The authors recommend reading it three times through. I read it again with first semester college students every fall. In actual fact, returning to it always reveals more insights (at least for me).

   Most students roll their eyes and miss the value. But every year students come back and tell me that it changed the way they think when they got to college.

   I’ve gotten some colleagues hooked on it too.

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3. rasmOct 2022
   "The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking" by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird
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4. catwind7Sep 2020
   > I've come to realize I'm not very good at it and thats unlikely to change.

   I may be wrong here but my impression from this comment is that you _want_ to improve, have a sense of where you can improve, but you have not found an improvement plan that works for you.

   I can relate to the frustration of seemingly not being able to move the needle for your skills. One thing that has helped me over the years is adopting more effective learning strategies.

   I highly recommend the books "A Mind for Numbers" by barbara oakley and "5 elements of effective thinking" (don't remember the authors) for some ideas on how to deepen your knowledge (so that you don't just feel like you possess purely surface level knowledge).

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5. cottonseedSep 2020
   You might like 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, too.
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6. csnewbFeb 2019
   The books that I've read that have helped me immensely: How To Solve It, Problem Solving 101, 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, and Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Trying to improve my problem solving ability in coding forced me to look inwards and analyze my thought process to understand why I'm able to solve some problems and unable to solve others. Ultimately I've realized the root cause of my inability to solve hard problems was poor problem decomposition. Every hard problem can be broken down into subproblems, and those can be further broken down until they become easy enough to solve. Then you just connect all the pieces together. It takes a lot of deliberate practice with many problem types to be able to recognize how to decompose problems, however.
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