Teach Yourself to Think
Five easy-to-follow steps to
clear, productive thinking
Thinking is the most
fundamental skill. Your happiness and your success depend upon your thinking. The main
enemies of good thinking are:
1. Confusion and trying to do
everything at once.
2. Not knowing what to do
next.
3. The belief that thinking
is the same as intelligence and that you can do nothing about it.
This book puts forward a
clear and effectively simple five-stage framework for thinking:
1. The TO stage: where am I
going to? With what do I want to end up?
2. The LO stage: looking
around at the situation. What information is available and needed? What are the
perceptions?
3. The PO stage: generating
possibilities. Setting up alternatives and new ideas.
4. The SO stage: choosing
from among the possibilities. Reducing the choices to a line of action.
5. The GO stage: going ahead
and putting thinking into action.
Edward de Bono's masterly
book offers a structure that broadens our ability to respond to and cope with a vast range
of situations. Teach Yourself to Think is software for the brain, turning it into a
successful thinking mechanism, and, as such, will prove of immense value to us all.
256 pages