Part One: Understanding (Yourself)

• Begin with the basics: Understand that you bring with you in every situation your past experience and judgement. Thus, focus on your attention and awareness.
  • “…Be skeptical of yourself and of your own mind. Observe actively, going beyond the passivity that is our default state”

• Beware the distracted mind: Making quick judgements without fully observing can create false impressions. Without awareness, these false impressions can then color any future observations or judgements, true or not. This bias to quick judgements stems from the default structure of you brain and reflects how you traditionally entertain new ideas, form impressions of new people, etc.
  • “…if we are busy, stressed, distracted or otherwise depleted mentally, we may keep something marked as true without ever having taken the time to verify it – when faced with multiple demands, our mental capacity is simply too limited to be able to handle everything at once, and the verification process is one of the first things to go. When that happens, we are left with uncorrected beliefs, things that we will later recall as true when they are, in fact, false.” 

• Understand the difference between the Holmes and the Watson brain: 
  • Holmes: Skeptical, creates space between initial impulses and judgements
  • Watson: colored by initial judgement, rationalizes contrary observations away to fit in with the initial judgement, habitual

• How to cultivate the Holmes mind: Mindfulness and Motivation
  • “…Mindfulness, in the sense of constant presence of mind, the attentiveness and alertness that is so essential for real, active observation of the world. Motivation, in the sense of active engagement and desire”

Part Two: From Observation to Imagination

• Pay attention: We remember more when we are interested and motivated, however, no amount of motivation will be efficient if the information wasn’t properly stored to begin with.
  • Attention is a scarce resource. Dividing your attention necessarily involves subtracting. We cannot allocate our attention to multiple things at once and expect it to function at the same level as it would were we to focus on just one activity
  • Lack of attention or awareness will let you slip into your default Watson mind

• The Power of Observation: Observation is not a passive process. It involves attention and effort.

• Selectivity: Be Selective
  • Being discreet with your attention will allow you to channel your limited attentional resources towards your objective
    • “…whatever the situation, answering the question of what, specifically, you want to accomplish will put you well on your way to knowing how to maximize your limited attentional resources. It will help direct your mind, prime it, so to speak, with the goals and thoughts that are actually important – and help put those that aren’t in the background”
  • Stay flexible. Your goals can become handicaps if you are not able to adapt to changing circumstances. 
• Objectivity: Be Objective
  • Be naturally skeptical of your observations as they can easily slide into judgements and opinions. Once held, reflecting back could cause you to misremember and interpret your opinion as fact. 
  • Set your goals beforehand and keep the divide between observation and deduction; observation to obtain the facts and deduction to interpret them. Fight the urge to interpret the facts as you see them
    • “…To observe, you must learn to separate situation from interpretation, yourself from what you are seeing”
  • To improve your objectivity: Describe the situation from the beginning, either out loud or in writing…gaps and inconsistencies that weren’t apparent before came to the surface
• Be Inclusive
  • Use all of your senses to the best of your ability. We are influenced by our environment whether we like it or not. Better to “take control of that influence by paying attention to everything that surrounds us”.
    • “…Attention is about every one of your senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch. It is about taking in as much as we possibly can, through all of the avenues available to us. It is about learning not to leave anything out – anything, that is, that is relevant to the goals that you’ve set. And it is about realizing that all of our senses affect us – and will affect us whether or not we are aware of the impact.”
• Be Engaged
  • When we are engaged in what we are doing we fall into a “flow state”. This state allows us “to extract more from what it is we are doing” and with this …we derive actual, measureable hedonic value from the strength of our active involvement in and attention to an activity, even if the activity is as boring as sorting through stacks of mail. If we have a reason to do it, a reason that engages us and makes us involved, we will both do it better and feel happier as a result.
  • There is nothing required of you and you can get by with minimal effort, however, if you want to grow and observe effectively you must be engaged this means, take control of your default mode.
    • “…An observant mind, an attentive mind, is a present mind. It is a mind that isn’t wandering. It is a mind that is actively engaged in whatever it is that it happens to be doing.”
• Imagination:
  • Imagination entails space to allow your mind to create connections between your observations; connections that may or may not exist in actuality.
  • “…It’s not a restatement of the facts, nor is it a simple line from A to B that can be drawn without much thought. It is your own synthesis and creation. Think of imagination as a kind of essential mental space in your attic, where you have the freedom to work with various contents but don’t yet have to commit to any storage or organizational system, where you can shift and combine and recombine and mess around at will and not be afraid of disturbing the main attic’s order or cleanliness in any way”
• Create Distance to facilitate Imaginative thinking
  • “…all of these distances have something in common: they require you to transcend the immediate moment in your mind. They all require you to take a step back.”
  • Distancing allows you to take a step back and see the problem with less reactivity and an even perspective; the Holmes mind. With a more general perspective you are able to see both the concrete specific pieces and the overall picture distinctly. Seeing how they fit together is the role of distancing. 
    • Distancing Through Unrelated Activity
      • “A Three Pipe Problem” – Switch your attention from the one you are trying to solve to something unrelated. What you attend to must be the right activity – something engaging enough to completely absorb your attention but allow your mind to relax.
      • Take a walk in nature
    • Distancing Through Actual Distance
      • Changing our location cues us to think differently. Our mind slips into habitual modes of thought, stimulated by our associated environments, thus, a change in location will allow us to find a space without these habits in place. 
    • Distancing Through Mental Techniques
      • Use visualization and meditation to imagine different situations/scenarios and create the requisite distance to connect your observations
      • “…the essence of visualization: learning to look internally, to create scenarios and alternatives in your mind, to play out non realities as if they were real”
• Sustain Your Imagination
  • Don’t fear creativity or dismiss potentially distracting facts and information. Be open minded about learning new information or connecting facts/observations in uncommon ways. Your “brain attic” should never become static.

Part Three: The Art of Deduction

• Beware the fickleness of memory. Create a question you wish to answer and then work to separate the crucial and incidental facts.
  • “…the first step toward successful deduction: the separation of those factors that are crucial to your judgement from those that are just incidental, to make sure that only the truly central elements affect your decision”
  • Lay out the facts: Restate the facts outloud.
    • “…stating something through, out loud, forces pauses and reflection. It mandate mindfulness. It forces you to consider each premise on its logical merits and allows you to slow down your thinking so that you do not blunder…It ensures that you do not let something that is of real significance go by simply because it didn’t catch your attention enough or fit with the causal story that you have already created in your head. It allows your inner Holmes to listen and forces your Watson to pause. It allows you to confirm that you’ve actually understood, not just thought you understood because it seemed right”
• Recognize that our own personal past experiences guide our reasoning and what we perceive to be possible. This acts as a prism through which we perceive or anticipate future possibilities.
  • “…Our repertoire becomes an anchor of sorts; it is our reasoning starting point, our place of departure for any further thoughts. And even if we try to adjust from our egocentric perspective, we tend not to adjust nearly enough to matter, remaining stubbornly skewed in a self-directed approach. It’s our storytelling proclivity in another guise: we imagine stories based on the one’s we’ve experienced, not the ones we haven’t.”
• Proceed slowly, be aware of our natural tendencies of mind, and try to approach each scenario and every decision with a fresh and clear mind. 
• Beware of complacency and the dulling of the mind that comes with overconfidence
  • “…The best thing you can do is to acknowledge that you, too, will inevitably stumble, be it from stagnation or overconfidence, its closely related near opposite (I say near because overconfidence creates the illusion of movement, as opposed to habitual stagnation, but that movement isn’t necessarily taking you anywhere), and to keep on learning”
• Keep learning and take every opportunity to learn something new or refine what you have already learned
  • “Our education might stop, if we so choose. Our brain never does. The brain will keep reacting to how we decide to use it. The difference is not whether or not we learn, but what and how we learn. We can learn to be passive, to stop, to, in effect, not learn, just as we can learn to be curious, to search, to keep educating ourselves about things that we didn’t even know we needed to know. If we follow Holmes’s advice, we teach our brains to be active. If we don’t, if we’re content, if we get to a certain point and decide that that point is good enough, we teach them the opposite.”

Part Four: The Science and Art of Self Knowledge

• Know Yourself – And Your Environment
  • What am I bringing to the table? What default mode of thinking am I likely to fall into?
    • Pause and reflect and frame specific goals.
    • “What do I want to accomplish? And what does that mean for my future thought process?”
• Observe – Carefully and Thoughtfully
  • Take in all the details but refrain from judging or jumping ahead to deduction
• Imagine – Remembering to Claim the Space You May Not Think You Need
  • Take a step back from the situation whether distancing yourself mentally or physically. 
  • Take time to reflect and use your imagination prior to moving forward. Allow your mind to associate details and facts that may not be apparent in the immediate situation.
• Deduce – Only from What You’ve Observed, and Nothing More
  • Do not deduce past what the evidence suggests. Keep it simple and replay the facts outloud.
• Learn – From Your Failures Just as You Do from Your Successes
  • Reflect and recognize what default thought processes may have lead to a failure.
  • Record your decisions to illustrate this process further

• “…The most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn’t often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose”

• The Mindset of a Hunter
  • Ever-ready attention: “…always being ready to go on alert, when the circumstances warrant it, but not squandering your energy needlessly when they don’t”
  • Environmental Appropriateness: Know which methods fit the circumstances. There is no one size fits all.
  • Adaptability: Change your approach when necessary
  • Acknowledging Limitations: Recognize your limitations and adapt to mitigate them
  • Cultivating Quiet: Guard your attention in order to keep it sharp. 
  • Constant Vigilance: Beware of routine and complacency