Contents

Introduction
Publisher’s acknowledgements

Think for yourself

1 Avoid echo chambers
2 Don’t be scared
3 Consider the motive
4 Beware self-interest
5 Keep hold of your heartstrings
6 Don’t be gullible

Resilient thinking
7 Know who you are
8 Seek out support
9 Take control
10 Be flexible
11 Be self-aware
12 It is what it is
13 Don’t get over-distracted
14 Like yourself
15 Be ready to cope
16 Better out than in
17 Cut yourself some slack

Healthy thinking
18 Think yourself happy
19 Focus on other people
20 Be in the present
21 Stress is optional
22 Normality isn’t normal
23 Evaluate your emotions
24 Laugh at yourself
25 Keep learning
26 No one likes to be incompetent
27 Practice makes progress
28 Turn off the action replays
29 Sidestep bad habits
30 Appreciate semantics
31 Keep the bar steady
32 Look for the spin

Organised thinking
33 Believe in being organised
34 Learn to love a list
35 Think outside your head
36 Don’t overload your RAM
37 Make deadlines your friend
38 Don’t indulge decision making
39 Get creatively organised

Thinking creatively
40 Train your brain
41 Feed your mind
42 Get in the mood
43 Open up
44 There are no rules
45 Spot the box
46 Think like someone else
47 Make connections
48 Make mistakes
49 Forget about other people

Problem solving
50 Clear your emotions out of the way
51 Make sure there’s really a problem
52 Check you’re solving the right problem
53 Loosen up
54 Don’t settle for your first answer
55 If it’s plausible, it’s worthwhile
56 Find a way in
57 Don’t get bogged down
58 Try a new angle
59 Don’t panic
60 Get help

Thinking together
61 You’re better together
62 Play to everyone’s strengths
63 Think like a hive
64 Leave your ego behind
65 Keep an eye on the quiet ones
66 Question groupthink
67 Conflict is OK
68 Think up a storm
69 Have stupid ideas
70 Keep in synch

Making decisions
71 Decide what you’re deciding
72 Don’t start at square two
73 Set yourself boundaries
74 Untangle the knots first
75 Go for Goldilocks
76 Vet your advisors
77 Be your own advisor
78 Don’t jump to conclusions
79 Understand your emotions
80 Balance logic and emotion
81 Learn to compromise
82 Find option C
83 Assess the cost of a bad decision
84 Regret is a waste of energy
85 Be honest about procrastinating

Critical thinking
86 Read John Donne
87 Don’t be played for a fool
88 Stand back and take in the view
89 Look for what comes next
90 Don’t bother your pretty little head
91 Consider the odds
92 Facts are neutral
93 Don’t trust statistics
94 Understand cause and effect
95 If you can’t prove it’s true, that doesn’t mean it isn’t
96 Don’t believe it just because everyone else does
97 Don’t believe it just because you want to
98 Be devil’s advocate
99 Don’t go into lockdown
100 Opinions aren’t facts

These are the Rules

101 How to use the rules
Introduction

‘I think, therefore I am’, as the French philosopher Descartes famously

wrote. By which he meant that we know we exist precisely because we
have the ability to question whether we exist. All very philosophical,
however it underlines the fact that thinking is at the very root of who we
are.

So it follows that the more clearly, effectively and coherently we think, the
better we are able to live. Happiness and success can flow from good
thinking in a way we struggle to achieve if our thought processes are
muddled, messy, incoherent. Our thoughts influence our feelings, so it is
important to get this foundation right. Once you can think well, you have
the basis on which to build the rest of your life.

This is not a book of tips and ...

Publisher’s acknowledgements

7 René Descartes: French philosopher: René Descartes (1596-1650) 29

Edward Fitzgerald: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (as translated by
FitzGerald) 56 Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Alfred, Lord Tennyson his poem,
Ulysses. 1842 71 Robert J. Hanlon: Robert J. Hanlon 89 Thomas
Edison: Thomas Edison 92 William Shakespeare: William Shakespeare
98 Linus Pauling: Linus Pauling 103 Teena Marie: “Marry Me”, Teena
Marie Album Congo Square. 180 Henry Ford: Henry Ford 190 John
Donne: John Donne
 THINK FOR YOURSELF

If you want to be a top-notch thinker, you have to do the

work yourself. That is to say, you have to do the thinking.
You can’t let anyone else do it for you. That might sound
obvious, but you’d be surprised how often we take the
convenient shortcut of adopting other people’s thinking.

All right, I’ll let you off working out the theory of relativity
for yourself. There are specialist areas where you don’t
have the skills to do the relevant thinking, and you’re
allowed to let scientists, mathematicians, top-flight
economists and statisticians and engineers do your thinking
for you.2 Even so, don’t take their word for anything until
you’ve established in your own mind that they know what
they’re talking about and have no ...
 RULE 1
Avoid echo chambers

When you’re a child, you don’t know any better than to think as your
parents tell you to. If they say it’s bad to put your elbows on the table or
good to change your underwear every day, you believe them. It’s part of
being a child to absorb your parents’ values and systems. As you get older,
you start to find that your teachers have a slightly different set of rules,
and your school friends may have values or opinions that are different
again. So you start to modify your earlier views and incorporate others
that you acquire from fellow students or friends who might think very
differently from your parents. And when you’re young you probably think
about these quite carefully.

Of course, it’s easy and comfortable to hang out with other people who
broadly think the same way as you. As you form your values, you look for
other people who are like-minded. It means you have plenty in common
and you don’t have endless arguments. When someone else says what you
were already thinking, it makes you feel validated, makes you feel you
must be right, reinforces your view, makes you feel like you belong. It’s a
good feeling and you can all spend time together validating each other’s
beliefs and making yourselves feel right and valued. You can find a
partner who thinks the same as you, can have friends like you, can work in
a place where there are other people who think the way you do.

And this is what we call an echo chamber. Yes, it’s comfortable and
affirming, but it makes it very difficult to be your own person. Everyone
in your world votes the same way, supports the same causes, has the same
beliefs, prejudices and values, and all belong to social media and online
groups that reinforce them.

And it gets harder and harder to think in any other way. For one thing,
you’ve virtually cut yourself off from being exposed to different ways of
looking at the world, except perhaps so you and your friends can all agree
on how wrong they are, in a self-congratulatory way. And that means you
don’t want to change your views or, presumably, your friends will all
agree how wrong you are, and that’s not going to feel very nice.

And yet, and yet … the world is full of people, lots of them lovely people,
who don’t agree with you about everything. You may rarely encounter
them, but can they really all be wrong? Some of them are just as clever as
you and have arrived at their beliefs in as valid a way as you have. Maybe
more valid – because you’ve stopped thinking for yourself and moved in
to a groupthink where your views are the collective ones, where you don’t
really ever have to challenge yourself any more. You’re no longer an
independent person. You’ve unwittingly become a bit of a sheep.

If you want to be a Rules thinker, you need to change this, shake things
up, force yourself to broaden your views, listen to other ideas with a
genuine open mind. About the best way to do this is to cultivate friends
based on who they are, not what they believe. Aim to have friends of all
ages, from other cultures, varied backgrounds, different classes from your
own. Between them, they’ll make you see the world in a more nuanced
way and, if your beliefs can’t match up with all of them – because they’re
not all the same – you’ll have to think for yourself.
CULTIVATE FRIENDS BASED ON WHO THEY
ARE, NOT WHAT THEY BELIEVE
 RULE 2
Don’t be scared

It can be frightening to start thinking for yourself. Who knows where it

could lead? You could end up with any number of principles and beliefs
that don’t sit comfortably with the people you spend your time with. You
could find yourself out on a limb. You could have to face up to realising
you’ve been wrong about things, or at least not been right about them. One
of the barriers to being an independent thinker is the fear of being
different.

Look, that’s understandable, of course it is. But you can take things gently.
There are no thought police out there – not yet anyway. No one else has to
know what you’re thinking until you’re ready to let on. You don’t have to
sit your whole family down and say, ‘I need you all to ...
 RULE 3
Consider the motive

Some people are more persuasive than others. Whether they’re trying to
sell you a car, persuade you to adopt their plan at work, convince you to
come to their party, or point out why plastic bags are bad for the
environment. You need to avoid being sucked into following their line of
thought blindly without engaging your own brain.

Now, that car might not be what you need at all. On the other hand, plastic
bags really are bad for the environment. So if someone wants you to adopt
their belief or follow their advice, you can’t deduce from that alone
whether it’s a good idea. You have to know why they’re seeking to
persuade you.

It’s always a good idea to understand what this person wants you to
believe and why. Sometimes they want you to do something as a result of
their persuasive efforts – buy something, join something, agree to
something, attend an event, sign a petition. Not always though. Sometimes
they’re simply passing on an opinion and would like your agreement –
maybe they want to persuade you it’s a good thing the council are building
a new car park. It’s a nice bonding feeling when someone agrees with you,
but beyond that they may not be after much at all.

Once you’ve established clearly in your mind what they want, it’s much
easier to decide whether you want it too. Your friend is telling you how
great the party will be because they want you to go. They’re only guessing
it will be great. Do you agree? Do you want to be there? If so, do you want
to be there because it will be great or because you want to support your
friend? It’s much easier to inure yourself to your friend’s persuasive
methods once you can see them for what they are.

Of course, that might be the perfect car for you, whatever the
salesperson’s motive for telling you so. You can’t dismiss it out of hand
just because they have a vested interest in you buying it (if that ruled it
out, no one would ever buy a car from any dealer). Identifying the motive
isn’t a reason to reject someone else’s thinking. The point of doing it is to
give yourself a sensible dose of wariness, of where you should double-
check their assertions and make sure their arguments are the ones that
matter.

A car salesperson might get you really excited with their infectious
enthusiasm about how fast this car is or how comfortable it is in the back
seats, but don’t get swept along mindlessly. Are those things actually
important to you? Your colleague might persuade you that this exhibition
is just the way to reach all those small engineering businesses out there.
But how big a proportion of your customers are they ever going to be? So
why does your colleague care so much about reaching them? Only by
recognising the motive can you know how much importance to attach to
the facts you’re being fed.

IDENTIFYING THE MOTIVE ISN’T A REASON

TO REJECT SOMEONE ELSE’S THINKING
 RULE 4
Beware self-interest

Never mind other people’s motives for a moment – what about your own?
What do you stand to gain from thinking as you do? It’s easy to think in a
way that feeds your own self-interest without ever being aware that you’re
doing it. It’s possible that your way of thinking will lead you to a decision
that will make you better off financially, or give you higher status, or
enable you to live in a better area. This is something that I notice often
affects politicians, who are very good at thinking in a way that is likely to
get them re-elected. Most of them find it quite hard to reach conclusions
that won’t sit comfortably with the voters.

We’ve all met vegetarians who stopped eating meat because of their
ethical views, ...
 RULE 5
Keep hold of your heartstrings

If you’re serious about resisting other people’s manipulations and thinking

for yourself, it helps to be alert to how they’re trying to influence you. If
you can spot it, it’s much easier to resist. So next time someone seeks to
persuade, convince, cajole you round to their perspective, think about the
strategies they’re using. Generally speaking, they’ll use emotion rather
than logic. Your job, as a clear thinker, is to resist.

From the other person’s perspective, empathy is a good starting point. If

someone can convince you that you both feel the same way, it seems like a
much shorter step to thinking the same way. So a natural persuader will try
to convince you that you’re both coming from the same point. They’ll
emphasise similarities in your situation or values. They’ll tell you they
know what it’s like to have kids, or work in an office, or struggle to pay
the rent, or enjoy buying clothes, or own a cat. The shared experience puts
you both in the same place, so now they can metaphorically take you by
the hand and lead you to the conclusion they’ve chosen. Listen to them,
but don’t let them lead you blindly. Question the route and the destination
to be sure it’s really where you want to go.

If they can get you emotionally engaged, they will. For one thing, emotion
is a powerful force, so they’ll want to get you angry about the injustice
they’re campaigning against, or excited about the clothes they want to sell
you, or anxious at the idea of overstretching your budget. And for another
thing, it’s much harder for you to think rationally once you start to become
emotional. So the higher they can crank up your emotions, the more you
shut down your rational response to what they’re saying. Aim to resist the
emotional response so your thinking stays rational and measured. You’ll
be a much better judge of how valid their point is.

Another favourite ploy is to use weighted words. This can be more

insidious and subtle, and tends to work at an unconscious level. We all do
it – yes, you too – and it’s wise to recognise it in yourself. There’s more
than one way to describe most things, and the adjectives you use can be
powerful. Suppose you read two newspaper descriptions of the same
politician. If the papers are from opposite ends of the political spectrum,
they’re inclined to use different words to depict them. One might describe
them as brave while the other says they’re foolhardy – both descriptions of
the same thing, but they give a very different impression. Is the politician
firm or hardline? Are they socially aware or woolly? These word choices
can build up to create a persuasive picture that suits the person (or
newspaper) in question. I’m always interested in how the media decide
who to describe as terrorists, who are rebels, who are freedom fighters,
who are resistance forces. Often the only difference between these terms is
the way the person using them wants you to respond. So notice the word
choices the other person is making and substitute your own, neutral words
in your head so you can think more clearly.

Bear in mind that, consciously or unconsciously, you employ these same

techniques yourself when you want to persuade someone else. So not
everyone who tries to convert you to their way of thinking is knowingly
manipulating or tricking you. Whether you agree with them or not, they’re
entitled to hold their view and they’re entitled to express it. And you are
entitled to resist it, or not, once you’ve thought it through rationally for
yourself.
IF YOU CAN SPOT IT, IT’S MUCH EASIER TO
RESIST
 RULE 6
Don’t be gullible

If you believe everything I’ve told you so far, just because it’s written
down in black and white, then think again. Yes, I believe it all, but you
should be thinking it through for yourself. How do you know you can trust
me? You’ve never met me, you don’t know who I am, you don’t even
know what I look like. Just because I’ve had a book published doesn’t
mean I know everything.

Look, you can’t go through life never trusting anyone, but neither is it
helpful to be too trusting. And the best insurance against going too far
either way is to think for yourself. So thank you for buying (or borrowing)
my book and please feel free to read it. I hope you’ll find, when you think
it through, that it makes enough sense that you ...
 RESILIENT THINKING

One of the absolute foundations of healthy thinking is

resilience. Some of us start out naturally more resilient than
others, but the good news is we all have some resilience to
begin with. And the even better news is you can teach
yourself to be more resilient by training your mind to think
in the right way.

Let’s just establish exactly what resilience is. The more

resilient you are, the faster and better you will bounce back
from anything bad, negative, traumatising. Most of us can
come to terms with missing the bus, but not everyone
recovers well from bereavement or abuse or redundancy or
serious illness. Of course they don’t, but it’s still the case
that some people cope better than others. So what are they
doing that means they’re able to come to terms with life’s
tragedies?

Resilient people have higher levels of belief in themselves

and their power to control their own lives. This gives them
confidence that they will overcome their difficulties in
time.

In my experience, the people who cope best with disaster

are usually the same ones who cope best with missing the
bus. That’s really useful because it means you can practise
being resilient every time you miss the bus, or burn the
food, or have a bad cold, or can’t afford a new item of
clothing you fancy. Once you believe you can cope with
the little things, it gets easier to believe in your ability to
cope with the bigger things when they come along. So let’s
look at the kinds of thinking that will make you a more
resilient person.
 RULE 7
Know who you are

A friend of mine was diagnosed with a very serious illness. Of course

people kept asking her how she was, what was happening with the
treatment, what she was and wasn’t able to do and how could they help.
She found this very frustrating and in the end she sent round an email to
everyone saying that she really appreciated their concern and their offers
of help, but she didn’t want to talk about it thank you. She explained to me
that it wasn’t that she actually minded talking about the illness per se, it
was that she felt she was starting to be defined by it.

Now this particular friend of mine is amazingly resilient and had an

instinctive recognition that in order to cope with her diagnosis she had to
separate it from ...
 RULE 8
Seek out support

The resilient among us are much more likely to be surrounded by a good

support network. This may or may not include professional help but will
certainly involve friends or family who genuinely want to help you
overcome your problems. That’s not enough in itself though – they have to
be reasonably good at it. Some people, bless ’em, are always saying the
wrong thing even when they’re trying to help. However much of a friend
these people are when things are going well, make life easier for yourself
by quietly steering clear of them when times are tough. Think about which
friends you want around you and which you don’t.

And think about the kind of help you need. Support from friends isn’t
something you just have to suck up. If it isn’t helping, it’s not actually
support in any useful sense and you don’t have to accept it. You’ve got
enough on your plate without having to absorb negative input just because
it’s well meant. You don’t have to tell people to their face, ‘I don’t want
your so-called help.’ You can just politely turn down invitations to meet
up until things are better or, even – and here’s a ploy I’ve used many times
– not tell them about the scenario in the first place. Tricky with some
problems but easy with others. If you know they’ll make you feel worse if
you don’t get a particular job, think ahead and don’t even tell them you’ve
applied for it.

So who are you going to give a bit of a wider berth to when things are
going badly? Well, you’d be best off avoiding anyone who is negative,
who revels in doom and gloom, who keeps banging on about all the things
that could make your problems even worse (although they probably
won’t). You want positive people around you.

Although not so positive that they keep telling you your feelings are
wrong. You know the type: ‘It’s fine! Stop worrying!’ You want empathy,
not denial. If anyone behaves like this, refuse to feel bad. Listen, anyone
whose response makes you feel worse is not a good support. Make a
mental note for next time. If they don’t make you feel better, even if only
a little bit, that’s them, not you.

Avoid people who try to solve your problems for you too, either by
supplying a solution, making a decision on your behalf, or actually
enacting it themselves. This is not helpful and will not improve your
resilience. It gives you the subconscious message that you can’t think or
act for yourself. That’s not true and it’s exactly the belief you are trying to
avoid. You value input, but you can make your own decisions and run
your own life thank you.

Once you think about what you need and who can provide it, it’s much
easier to surround yourself with genuinely supportive people when you’re
in trouble. And tell them what you need – do you want someone to help
with the kids and take the pressure off? Someone simply to listen?
Someone who can help you with daunting paperwork? Someone to cook
you some meals to stick in the freezer? People who genuinely want to help
– and you know this from your own experience as a supportive friend –
want to know the best way to do just that.
YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS AND
RUN YOUR OWN LIFE THANK YOU
 RULE 9
Take control

When it comes to interpreting what happens in your life, people fall

broadly into two camps. Those who believe that it’s all down to fate and
you can’t change it, and those who believe that you have free will and
control your own life. Science has not yet agreed which is the case, but it
has established that people who believe they control their own lives tend
to be happier.

Believing you control your life is crucial to resilience as well. Apart from
anything else it motivates you to find ways of coping or at least new ways
to think about your problems even where there’s little you can do on the
face of it. You can’t bring back someone who has died, but if you believe
your thinking and your decisions will influence the ...
 RULE 10
Be flexible

Why do engineers use steel and not iron as a structural frame for
buildings? Iron is really strong, after all. But steel has one crucial
advantage – it’s flexible. It doesn’t snap because it can bend. Indeed it can
be quite disconcerting being at the top of a tall building as it sways in a
high wind, but that swaying is the reason it doesn’t break. Steel, you see,
is resilient.

In scientific terms, resilience in materials means their ability to spring

back into shape, their elasticity. And we’re no different – we need a
degree of elasticity to help us to bounce back in the face of adversity or
high winds.

When you’re buffeted by metaphorical storms, you have to have a bit of

give. You might think that standing firm and giving no ground is the best
approach but, if it doesn’t work, your ability to recover will suffer.
Suppose you’ve set your heart on buying a particular house. You’ve been
saving up for a deposit for years and you’ve found the house of your
dreams, your offer has been accepted and you’ve started planning it all out
in your head – how you’ll use each room, where your furniture will go,
how you’ll decorate. And then – disaster – the sale falls through. Maybe
the chain breaks, or your own buyer pulls out, or you get gazumped.

How you cope with the fallout from this will be down to how resilient you
are. Almost anyone will find this stressful, but how stressful and how long
before you recover? If you can’t imagine any other house but that one,
you’ll be more stressed and take far longer to get over it than you will if
you are flexible enough to recognise there are other options. Either way,
you’re going to end up somewhere other than this dream house. The only
difference is how you adapt to that idea. The more elasticity there is in
your thinking, the sooner you’ll be out there househunting again, getting
excited about a new house, and the quicker you’ll finally be ensconced in
a lovely new home.

This is a skill you can practise frequently on smaller issues, ones that are
frustrating rather than devastating. You’ve planned a lovely meal out with
friends and then discover at the last minute that the restaurant you wanted
to go to is closed. Do you get upset or do you think ‘Hey, it’s the people
that matter, let’s eat elsewhere, or stay in, or go to the movies’? Next time
the shop has sold out of the item you wanted, or you just miss the train, or
you come down with a bug just as you arrive on holiday, think flexibly
and be prepared to adapt. What have you got to lose? If you can take the
minor upsets in your stride by rewriting the script a little bit, you’ll be far
better placed to do the same thing when life’s big dramas come along.

RESILIENCE IN MATERIALS MEANS THEIR

ABILITY TO SPRING BACK INTO SHAPE, THEIR
ELASTICITY
 RULE 11
Be self-aware

However bad an experience you’re going through, you can always learn
from it. If you don’t, why would things change? If they’re bad this time,
they’ll be bad next time. I spoke to someone recently whose partner had
just died. She had had a tough life, having lost her mother at the age of 15.
She told me that she’d coped really badly with that and was messed up for
a long time. So this time she wasn’t going to make the same mistakes
again. Now that’s resilience.

Think about the things that have gone badly in your life in the past and
reflect on how you dealt with them. When new traumas come along, think
about how you can handle them. If you keep approaching everything in
the same way, you’ll keep getting the same results. ...
 RULE 12
It is what it is

When I have a stinking cold or a nasty bug, I confess I have a bit of a

tendency to mention it.3 Negatively, apparently. Well I’m not going to be
positive about it, am I? However I really must learn to stop doing it. Not
because it irritates other people, although I’m told that’s a thing, but
because it makes me feel worse. Every time I mention it, it reminds me
how rubbish I feel. I hear myself saying words like ‘I’ve felt better’ or
‘Pretty rough actually, since you ask’, and ping! I feel pretty rough. What
a surprise.

My mother-in-law, who is beyond stoical, takes the opposite approach.

When asked how her cold is, I’ve actually heard her reply, ‘What cold?’
She’ll insist she’s fine. The striking thing here, and the reason I must
change my habits, is that she copes way better than I do with a cold. She
either ignores it completely or tells anyone who asks that she’s fine. That’s
what she hears herself saying, so that’s how she feels.

This is the kind of acceptance that builds resilience. She is much more
resilient than I am in the face of colds which is, I admit, my loss. When
you’re facing a much bigger challenge than the common cold, it’s even
more important. Acceptance is not about giving up.

It’s not that my mother-in-law doesn’t ever buy a box of tissues or make
herself a hot honey and lemon drink. She’ll do things to help herself. But
if she ran out of lemons it would only be a minor irritation because she’s
telling herself she doesn’t really need it anyway. The important thing is
that she accepts she has a cold, she does what she can and she lets go of
the rest of it. Railing, moaning, fighting, bitching, don’t help. The cold
will be there until it has run its course and she lives with that.

You can’t deal with a challenge until you recognise it. If, in your mind,
you’re trying to change the inevitable, fight the unbeatable, you’re stuck in
that place. That’s a pain if it’s a cold and agonising if it’s something far
more serious. Sure, change things when you can, but a lot of bad stuff
can’t be changed. It’s unavoidable or it’s already in the past. In that case
sooner or later you have to accept it before you can move to stage two.
The one thing you do have some control over is how soon you do this. I
often remind myself of the lines in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (as
translated by FitzGerald):

‘The moving finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.’

You could see this as depressing I suppose, but I’ve always found it
deeply reassuring, as I’m certain it was intended to be. It’s a waste of
effort fighting so you might as well join the moving finger and move on.

ACCEPTANCE IS NOT ABOUT GIVING UP

_________________________

3 It’s been said I do this with a mere sniffle, but I deny it.
 RULE 13
Don’t get over-distracted

‘Don’t dwell on it,’ people say when you’re going through tough times.
The idea is that it’s bad enough as it is, without focusing your mind on it
all the time. Better to distract yourself if thinking won’t change anything.

There’s a lot of sense in this. It’s hard to be positive and feel resilient
when you’re wallowing in misery. A break from thinking about it, maybe
some fresh air or just time with friends, is a sensible idea. You want to
minimise the stress you’re going through, so it makes sense that any
stress-reducing activity will help.

There is a ‘but’, though. Give yourself a break, yes, but don’t play hide
and seek with your troubles. If you try to run away from them, you solve
nothing right now ...
 RULE 14
Like yourself

There’s a strong correlation between resilience and self-esteem. If you like

yourself, you’ll cope better with adversity than if you don’t. So everything
that you can do to build your self-esteem now will make you more
resilient when trouble strikes.

Self-esteem is about how much worth you believe you have as a person.
It’s not the same thing as confidence – which is more to do with the skills
and abilities you feel you have. This is about the big stuff, about whether
you believe you have intrinsic value.

If your self-esteem is low, you will focus on those qualities in yourself that
you believe are negative: ‘I’m a rubbish friend’, ‘I’m always getting things
wrong’, ‘I’m stupid, boring, useless … ’ If you tell yourself, ‘I’m always
selfish’, that’s a clear sign your self-esteem is low. If any of these opinions
of yourself are things you were told as a child, the low self-esteem will be
even more entrenched.

Look, I can’t raise your self-esteem in a couple of pages of text. I wish I

could. You’ll notice however that it is called self-esteem for a reason. It’s
no kind of measure of your actual worth, it’s just the way you see it. So
only you can change it.

We’re talking about a spectrum here. Your self-esteem may be up towards

the higher end, which is great (you wouldn’t want it too high, which is
where you find afflictions such as narcissism). But within reason, any
improvement will improve your resilience too. If your self-esteem is low,
please believe me that it’s not a true reflection of your value as a human
being, and seek out ways to help yourself match your perception more
accurately to the truth.

So change the way you think. Stop comparing yourself with other people,
or with some kind of image in your head of what you ‘should’ be like.
You ‘should’ be you. So don’t focus on the standards you think you can’t
meet. Instead look for the positive. At least once a day, consciously
remember all the positive things you’ve done, whether large or small. All
the times you’ve been kind, all the goals you’ve achieved. Deny
headspace to any negative thoughts. So if you walked four miles, tell
yourself, ‘I walked four miles!’ Do not even think about how many more
miles you didn’t walk. Four is good.

Don’t look at what someone else can do and berate yourself for not doing
it too. If it’s important, resolve to work towards it (at your own speed, not
anyone else’s). If it’s not, who cares what they can do? Bet they can’t
cook as well as you, or play football, or organise stuff, or fix a puncture,
or comfort a crying child. There’s a whole picture here. If we compared
each thing we could do with one person who could do it brilliantly, we’d
all have a worryingly low sense of self-worth. But everyone has their own
mix and none of us can do everything.

Finally, surround yourself with people who will reinforce your positive
thoughts and avoid anyone who is inclined to tell you you’re not good
enough. Their opinion probably isn’t true and it certainly isn’t helpful.
IT’S NO KIND OF MEASURE OF YOUR ACTUAL
WORTH, IT’S JUST THE WAY YOU SEE IT
 RULE 15
Be ready to cope

There are lots of coping mechanisms that will help when you hit hard
times. They will make it easier for you to bounce back from whatever hits
you – in other words they will enable you to be more resilient, which is
what we want.

If you’ve just found out that your father is terminally ill, or you’ve had
another miscarriage, or your partner has gambled away your savings, or
you haven’t got the grades you need, or your child needs a major
operation, or your new boss is a nightmare – this is probably not going to
feel like a good moment to start learning lots of new skills. And yet there
are plenty of skills – some we’ve covered, some we’ll get to in a bit – that
will really help you cope.

So the answer is to make sure ...

 RULE 16
Better out than in

In the midst of a crisis, you often find that your head is crammed with
thoughts, feelings, worries, stress. You can’t see where to begin coping
because your thoughts are swirling about so fast and erratically that you
can’t catch them. You’re overwhelmed.

One of the most helpful things you can do at this point is to get your
thoughts out of your head and on to paper. Research has shown that people
who are able to do this report that they feel less stressed afterwards – in
other words they can rebound faster from the trauma.

Part of the problem with coping is that you can’t get your thoughts to keep
still. But they stay still on paper. Whether you splurge it all out at once, or
whether you want to go back and re-order it later, you can stop carrying
the thoughts and feelings round in your head once you have them safely
recorded elsewhere. You don’t have to show them to anyone – that’s up to
you.

Maybe there are things you don’t want to forget. You can write down
everything you loved about someone who has died and keep adding to it
whenever you think of something new. That removes the anxiety that over
time you won’t remember the important things.

If someone else seems to be the cause of your problems, you can write
them a letter – maybe the boss who didn’t promote you or the partner who
left you. I’m not necessarily advocating posting the letter – that’s a
different question entirely – but getting your feelings down on paper can
be hugely cathartic. I would always advise doing this on paper simply
because emails are dangerous. It’s so easy to hit ‘send’ in an unguarded
moment and regret it afterwards. No, much better to do it the old-
fashioned way on paper. And then wait at least 24 hours before re-reading
it. Only then should you send it, if you still feel the need. If you’re not
certain, wait another 24 hours. And another. Before you put it in the post,
think about what the effect will be and how this will help. No point
sending it if it won’t make you feel better in the long run.

There are lots of ways to get your thoughts clearer on paper. For some
people, writing poetry helps. For more prosaic problems, there are more
practical ways to put your thinking in order. If you have major financial
problems, perhaps a budgeting spreadsheet will help you to see your
money worries in a more visual way, which may help you get back on top
of them.

If you’re swamped by work or home demands and can’t think straight,

there’s nothing wrong with a list. Several lists if you like. Again, you’re
liberating your mind by taking thoughts out of it and putting them
somewhere else so your brain can safely jettison them. All you need is
fewer thoughts swirling and roiling and this has got them out of the way.

YOU’RE LIBERATING YOUR MIND BY TAKING

THOUGHTS OUT OF IT
 RULE 17
Cut yourself some slack

Let’s try a couple of quiz questions:

1 You have invited several people for a meal. You put lots of effort
. into cooking a complicated dish. Unfortunately it spends too long
in the oven. It’s fine, but not as good as you’d planned. Do you
think:

a Who cares? It’s the people that matter and they’ve all had a
) good time.

b I should have set a timer. I must practise cooking it before I

) serve it up again.

c I’m useless at cooking. I don’t know why I bothered.

)

2 You apply for a new job and you don’t get it. Do you think:
.

a That’s a shame, but I’ll find something else. I’ll get some
) feedback and incorporate it into my next application.

b It’s my own fault, I messed up the interview. ...

)

 HEALTHY THINKING

Our thoughts and our feelings are intrinsically linked. If

you want to feel good, happy, relaxed, capable, you have to
adopt the right patterns of thought to achieve it. This is the
basis on which most mental health treatment is based. Yes,
there can be medication and other means of support, but
most of the help out there is about learning to think in ways
that will lead you to feel better.

Some people’s lives make this a particularly tough process.

But all of us will feel better if we think in helpful ways. A
lot of this is about habits of thinking and learning the
thought patterns that will ensure that day-to-day life is
good.

The last section focused on the ways of thinking that are

essential in building resilience, so that when an emotional
trauma comes along and derails us, we can recover faster.
This section is about looking after yourself mentally
between those big life events, although of course following
these Rules will lead to a healthy attitude that can only help
at those times. But you want to feel as good as you can all
the time, and the people you know who always seem
chilled and easy going and happy are people who follow
these Rules. Sure, some of us are naturally healthy to begin
with and others have to work a bit harder, but these Rules
make strong mental health and a positive outlook an option
for all of us.
 RULE 18
Think yourself happy

We all know people whose default setting is cheerful. It’s not that their
lives are any better on paper than anyone else’s. It’s all about their
attitude. Indeed if you go to some of the poorest or most war-ravaged
places in the world, you’ll still be able to find people who are positive
despite everything. If they can do it, why can’t we?

The answer to this is that being positive is not about our circumstances,
it’s about the way we think. Of course, the most positive people have
moments when they don’t feel very cheerful, but they still cope better than
they would without their positive attitude. I’ve seen several elderly people
lose their husbands or wives after decades of marriage, which is always
horribly ...
 RULE 19
Focus on other people

In a way this Rule follows on from the last, because one of the best ways
to avoid self-pity is not to think about your own problems too much. Don’t
sit at home moping, get out there and think about other people’s problems
instead.

We all have friends and acquaintances who are going through hard times.
Think about how you can help, what support they might need. It might be
practical or just be a listening ear. You could drive them to their hospital
appointment, do their shopping for them, help them with their CV, look
after their kids for a day, help get their report written on time. Or they
might just appreciate a phone call every week or an evening out so they
can talk through their problems.

This is a great distraction for you and a big support to them, and it’s so
much more than that too. When you help other people, it puts your own
troubles in perspective and it makes you feel good about yourself. That
builds your self-esteem because you feel worthwhile (rightly) and over
time that helps you to feel more positive and better able to cope with your
own hardships.

You’re not limited to looking around your own group of friends to find
someone who needs a bit of bolstering. Lots of people volunteer with
charities or other groups in order to focus on other people and be
genuinely useful while making themselves feel good at the same time.
Almost all of us have some time to do this if we want to. You might have
to give up regular visits to the gym, or the odd night out with your friends,
or the odd night in with the TV. We can all tell ourselves we have no spare
time, but that’s usually because we’ve chosen to fill it up. You can choose
how you fill your time and you can give up one thing to make room for
another. You have to decide which makes you happier in the long term.

If you decide to do this (and I really recommend it) you can give up
anything from an hour a week to as much time as you like. You can pick a
role with little responsibility or one with a great deal. You might spend an
hour one evening a week helping at a local sports club or put in several
days a year as a school governor. You could organise a jumble sale or just
help run one of the stalls. You could even find a role where you only help
at certain times of year – volunteering at the local half marathon or an old
persons’ home Christmas party. The more people-focused the better. It’s
fine to spend time at home stuffing envelopes for a good cause, but to get
the full benefit of volunteering you also need to interact with the people
you’re supporting.

Remember, this will help you as much as it helps them – it’s a win/win. It
takes you out of yourself and gives you a huge positive boost that you can
then carry over into the rest of your life.

There. See? You haven’t thought about your own problems for nearly two
pages.

IT MAKES YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT YOURSELF

 RULE 20
Be in the present

Where do you tend to live – past, present or future? Most of us have a

tendency towards one or the other, and they all have their pros and cons.
Even if you are inclined to live in the present, however, you tend to do it
unconsciously most of the time.

There’s a good deal of research to show that if you practise what is known
as ‘mindfulness’ it can reduce anxiety, stress and depression. In part this is
because you are more likely to become aware of these feelings sooner so
you can address them before they become entrenched. Mindfulness in its
basic form is an exercise you set aside some time each day to do. However
the greatest benefit is that – like other thinking styles – the more you do it,
the more of a habit ...
 RULE 21
Stress is optional

Here’s a Rule I learnt from my son when he was sitting his GCSE exams
at school aged 16, and for which I am extremely grateful. This particular
son is a very laid-back character, not overly inclined towards effort if he
can see a less effortful approach. He would describe this as economical. (I
have in the past come up with other descriptions.) Either way, the effect of
this was that he approached his exams in a calm, relaxed fashion, without
anxiety. He told me, ‘I just don’t understand why everyone else gets
stressed about exams. Exams are bad enough already, and getting stressed
only makes it worse. So why bother?’

I patiently pointed out to him that not everyone was born as chilled and
easy going as him. People aren’t choosing to get stressed, I explained. It’s
something that happens to them and they can’t avoid it.

But it set me thinking. Maybe he was right. Maybe stress is a habit we can
unlearn. I looked around all the people I knew who were either highly
stressy or notably relaxed, and I wondered if my son might be on to
something. Now, I’m one of those people who is intermittently stressed.
That is to say I can get stressed fairly easily but once I’m over it my stress
rating resets back to zero – until the next time. I’m not in permanent state
of underlying stress. I decided to try out the Rule for myself.

So I did. And I’ve hardly been stressed by anything since – the results
have been dramatic. I discovered that whenever something frustrating or
upsetting or otherwise stress-inducing happened, my brain just flipped into
stress mode without waiting to be asked. Interesting to observe. My
thoughts immediately started to revolve around how much worse
everything now was, and all the bad ramifications of the thing that had
stressed me, and how much time it had wasted, and how difficult it would
now be to sort it out.

My brain was looking for reasons to feel stressed or to justify it. It would
head off down thought streams whose sole purpose was to ramp up the
stress (‘And another thing … ’). Suppose I had to phone the electricity
people about a miscalculation on my bill – a very minor frustration in the
scheme of things. My stress would ramp up thinking, ‘It’s taken them 10
minutes to answer the phone … and now they’ve put me on hold … and if
they don’t sort this out the electrics could be cut off … and I have to go
out in 20 minutes and I won’t have time to deal with my emails first …
and and and … ’ Fascinating. Because it’s all quite unnecessary. Half of it
hasn’t even happened and probably won’t – I was just constructing worst-
case scenarios and then reacting as if they were already true.

So now I just stop the thinking. If I can solve the thing, I do. If I can’t, I
block all those pointless thoughts. I refuse to think them, and I tell myself
that life is bound to have glitches and here’s one right now (a bit like
mindfulness, eh?). No need to make it worse by getting stressed. I don’t do
stress any more, I remind myself. My mantra, if I need it, is ‘All the
people I love best in the world are fine, and that’s what matters.’ So now
stress – as long as all the people I love are OK – is a thing of the past. And
if I can do it, so can you.
LIFE IS BOUND TO HAVE GLITCHES AND
HERE’S ONE RIGHT NOW
 RULE 22
Normality isn’t normal

I have a friend who sleeps for only four hours a night. That’s all he needs,
and he wakes up bright and refreshed. I know someone else who bursts
into tears over the slightest thing. And someone who is phobic about hot
water bottles. One woman runs three separate businesses, and another
counts things obsessively. And I know several people who are deeply
uncomfortable unless they’re sitting with their back to a wall. All of these
people are lovely, cheerful, popular, and as normal as you or me.

It’s easy to worry about whether you ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be a certain

way. Do you work too hard? Wear the wrong clothes? Have the wrong
accent? Worry too much? Are you weird because of your quirks and
foibles and eccentricities? ...
 RULE 23
Evaluate your emotions

Thoughts and feelings are not the same thing, and you don’t have to be
able to rationalise your feelings in order to justify them. It’s perfectly fine
to feel angry or sad or frustrated or depressed without having to be able to
explain why. Feelings are always OK, because they just are. What you do
with them might not always be acceptable – the fact you feel frustrated
doesn’t justify rudeness – but the frustration just is what it is. People who
say, ‘Don’t feel like that, it doesn’t make sense’ are making no sense
themselves. I’ve heard comments like, ‘Calm down, there’s no need to be
angry …’ but anger isn’t driven by logical need. It’s a thing that just
happens sometimes.

Nevertheless, while no one should expect you to justify your feelings,

actually it’s in your own interests to be able to understand them. It’s not
compulsory, it’s just helpful. If you can think rationally about your
feelings while you’re feeling them, you’re much better placed to find ways
to ameliorate the ones you don’t enjoy having.

The first step is to work out what you’re feeling. By which I mean give it a
name. No, not Eric or Bubbles. Think about which word best describes it.
Try to be as specific as you can – don’t just stick with happy or sad. Are
you frustrated, or disappointed? Is it fear, or anxiety? Are you grumpy, or
irritated? This not only identifies the feeling, it also gives you that sense of
detachment from your feelings that mindfulness can, that enables you to
separate your deeper self from the temporary emotions you’re
experiencing.

Now you understand what you’re feeling, can you think through why
you’re feeling it? I mean the real reason, which isn’t necessarily obvious.
For example you might be annoyed with your friend for turning down
your suggestion of an evening out, but it could be the sense of rejection
that has really upset you, not simply missing out on a trip to the pub or the
movies. Or not – I don’t know, but you might if you think it through.

Making sense of your feelings like this can help to calm them. It’s not
about having any expectation of them – they’re feelings and they’ll do
what they like – but thinking them through at least distracts you and tends
to give them some perspective. You’re also likely to notice if you’re
particularly prone to certain emotions. Do you often notice that you’re
feeling disappointed, for example? Or pessimistic? Or regretful?

Now that’s useful information. If you have a tendency to feel

disappointed, that suggests to your rational, thinking mind that your
expectations tend to be too high. After all, disappointment is about failing
to meet your expectations. So now you can actually work on being more
realistic in what you expect from people, or from situations, or from
whatever it is you’ve noticed tends to disappoint you.

Another benefit of separating your thoughts from your feelings is that

you’re more likely to wait until the worst of the feeling is over before you
do anything about it. Feelings may not be rational, but actions can be
thought through. And your thoughts can take control of whether you fire
off an angry email, or shout at your mother down the phone, or spend the
evening at home sulking when you could go out and have fun.
IT’S NOT COMPULSORY, IT’S JUST HELPFUL
 RULE 24
Laugh at yourself

It’s interesting how many of the Rules for a healthy mind involve being
able to detach, to separate yourself out, to observe your own thoughts and
feelings. It’s great to stand back and look at yourself from a distance – it
puts things in perspective.

Many years ago, I volunteered with a charity which was all about listening
to people who were going through hard times. It’s hard to describe just
how much I learnt about life in general from this, about how people cope
with adversity, and about the ways we can help, or inadvertently hinder
them.

One of the things I observed was that there was a high correlation between
people who coped and those who had a good sense of humour. Those were
the people who were able to ...
 RULE 25
Keep learning

Anything that gets clogged up and becomes stagnant is going to be

unhealthy, and that applies to your mind as much as it does to anything
else. If you want to stay healthy you have to stay active, in mind as well as
in body. And that means learning new skills, gaining new knowledge,
having new experiences.

If you don’t do this, you’ll become set in your ways and life will be
repetitive, dull, unstimulating. ‘As though to breathe were life,’ as
Tennyson said.5 I fully appreciate that some people enjoy the routine of a
predictable life and have no wish to travel the globe. That’s fine, but
there’s still plenty of room within that to stretch and exercise your brain.

Humans thrive on challenge – you, me, everyone. We may all enjoy

different kinds of challenge and that’s fine. You might enjoy running a
local club, I might have fun doing a crossword, someone else might be
stimulated by learning Spanish or visiting far-flung countries. Find the
thing you enjoy and do it. Better still, find several things you enjoy and do
all of them.

But don’t get stuck in a new rut. Once you start to find the crossword easy,
or your Spanish is really good, go and find something different. All these
things exercise different parts of your brain, so mix it up a bit. Don’t just
move from crosswords to sudoku. I mean, that’s fine, but also do
something else very different. Organise an event, or learn to paint, or start
a small home business.

When you find yourself responding to a suggestion with, ‘I don’t know

anything about that’ or ‘I’ve never done that before’, those are reasons to
try it. Too many people see them as excuses to say no, when it should
encourage them to say yes. That’s exactly what we all need – things we
know nothing about and have never done before. Otherwise we’re forever
going over old ground and where’s the point in that?

Expanding your knowledge is as important as learning new skills. Pick a

subject you’re interested in and learn all you can about it. You don’t have
to become a world authority (unless you want to) but it’s really not that
hard to reach the point where you know way more than your friends or
your average person in the street. I have lots of friends who have areas of
knowledge (outside their work) about which they know significantly more
than anyone else of my acquaintance: medieval weaponry, typeface
design, political history, wild flowers, modern art, twentieth-century
computing, eco-friendly building techniques …

What are the things people call you up about to say, ‘I wanted to pick your
brains …’? The topics about which if anyone knows, it will be you? That’s
not the point of learning – you’re doing it for your own edification to
exercise your mind and keep it healthy – but the answer might give you a
clue to how far down this path you are. Loads of people don’t ever get
those calls or texts. Maybe their specialist subject is so niche no one else
ever wants to know about it. Or maybe they have just never taken their
knowledge of anything to a higher level.
 HUMANS THRIVE ON CHALLENGE – YOU, ME,
EVERYONE

_________________________

5 In his poem Ulysses. Please find it and read it. If it doesn’t galvanise you into seeking out
new experiences, knowledge, skills, nothing will.
 RULE 26
No one likes to be incompetent

I don’t like to bang on about psychological theory (I’m certainly not

knocking it – I just like to stay firmly focused on the practical). There is
one piece of theory however that you might find helpful. It relates to how
you feel when you’re learning a new skill, and says that there are four
stages to learning:

1. Unconscious incompetence:6 that’s when you don’t even realise

that you can’t do a thing. For example, before you start learning to
drive you have no idea what’s involved.
2. Conscious incompetence: which is when you are aware that you’re
not good at it. You start driving and discover you can’t steer
properly, or you always brake too slowly, or you keep stalling.
3. Conscious competence: you can do ...
 RULE 27
Practice makes progress

I’m guessing that if you’re reading this book, you’re one of those people
who enjoys learning new skills. That’s good news – you’ll get far more
out of life with that attitude. Mind you, I enjoy learning some things more
than others. I learnt a new language a few years ago and I really enjoyed
that. I’m far from fluent but I can communicate, which is what I wanted.
The lessons were fun and, even though I-was-rubbish-and-I-knew-it to
begin with, I could tell I was steadily improving.

I hated learning the violin as a child though. It’s a shame, but not only did
I not see myself improving (because back in those days I wasn’t
watching), I also hated how my arm ached for 30 minutes holding the
thing in position, and I just longed for every lesson to finish so I could
finally drop my arm down to my side and rest it.

The thing about learning is the ‘-ing’ at the end of it. It’s an ongoing
process, not a magic wand. And your enthusiasm won’t last unless you
enjoy doing it. It’s almost impossible to be sustained solely by the beacon
of what you’ll finally be able to do at the end of it. Months of miserable,
gruelling, time-consuming, horrible training you hate, just so you can run
a marathon at the end of it? I don’t think so. You have to enjoy going for a
run, enjoy the challenge, enjoy setting a new personal best, enjoy feeling
fitter, enjoy your training partner’s company.
If you enjoy learning for its own sake, it stands to reason that you won’t be
nearly so bothered about how long it takes to reach you’re-good-and-you-
know-it, because you’re having fun in the meantime. And that positive
frame of mind will help you to be realistic about setbacks or sticking
points or timeframes and not to feel inadequate when you don’t master
everything instantly. Forget ‘practice makes perfect’. Progress is all you
need.

If you choose to learn a thing and then you don’t enjoy the process, see if
you can find a more fun approach to learning it. Maybe in a class with
other people, or at a different time of day, or with an app, or a change of
teacher, or alongside a friend, or on a crash course.

The other thing that makes learning more fun is to think about how you’re
progressing. However aware you might be that you’re-rubbish-and-you-
know-it is normal, you still want a sense that you’re on your way to the
next stage. So monitor your progress within that stage, check back to see
how much ground you’ve already covered, and focus on what you’ve
achieved so far. Some people like to keep a progress diary of some kind,
so try that if you think it might work for you. The important thing is to
think about your learning and to recognise and correct any tendency to
focus on mistakes. They’re briefly useful to highlight learning points, and
that’s it. You gain nothing by dwelling on them. Much better to count your
successes, however small.

IT’S AN ONGOING PROCESS, NOT A MAGIC

WAND
 RULE 28
Turn off the action replays

Don’t you hate it when you can’t stop going over something in your mind
endlessly? A problem you can’t solve, or an irrational fear, or a situation
you wish you’d handled differently, or something someone has said to
you. You keep going back to it again and again, however hard you try to
stop, until it feels as though your thoughts are controlling you instead of
the other way round.

This obsessing, or overthinking, feels very negative and often leads to

stress, anxiety, depression. Indeed it is often associated with these
conditions but all of us, regardless of our underlying mood, can fall prey
to it from time to time. At its worst it can make you feel physically ill and
can leave you exhausted and unable ...
 RULE 29
Sidestep bad habits

Oh how our minds enjoy repetition! It’s so reassuring, doing the same
thing over again. It gives your mind a lovely sense of security. That’s
absolutely fine if the thing you keep repeating is good for you – cleaning
your teeth twice a day or exercising regularly. And it’s fine if it’s neutral
and doesn’t get in the way of the rest of your life – watching the 10
o’clock news, or having to put your left sock on before the right one. But
what about all those habits that don’t benefit you and sometimes get in
your way – needing to eat at 6 pm sharp, or traipsing back downstairs after
bedtime to check you really did lock the front door, even when you know
you did?

All of us get into habits we come to regret and some people are prone to
the more intrusive ones – like double-checking you locked the front door,
or biting your finger nails. Even the most innocent habit, such as washing
your car every Sunday, becomes intrusive if you start feeling compelled to
do it. If these compulsions become obsessive and dominate your life,
you’ll need professional help to break free of them. But many of us tend to
milder versions of this, behaviours that are at their most insistent when
we’re feeling anxious or worried.

That’s because they calm your mind – those reassuring, regular, secure
habits. Just what your brain needs when it’s feeling disrupted. But not
necessarily what you need. I can always tell when my wife is feeling
stressed or anxious because she starts straightening objects on the
7
mantlepiece or the shelves.7 Straightening things is less intrusive than
some responses – it’s worse if you feel you have to check all the doors in
the house are properly shut or make sure there’s an even number of
teabags in the box. And there is no end to the strange little habits your
mind will have you running around after if it’s feeling anxious and wants
you to calm it down.

So how to stop when it’s getting in your way? If your habits – rituals even
– are worse when you’re anxious, clearly reducing the anxiety will reduce
the habits. So the first thing is to address your underlying stress and worry,
which obviously is a good idea anyway.

Distraction is of course ideal if you can do it. If that’s too much to start
with, an alternative is to replace one habit with another. Replacing
smoking with vaping is a very obvious example of this, but when your
brain demands you rearrange the bookshelf yet again, you can try to
deflect it into straightening the mantlepiece instead – which is much less
disruptive to your life because it’s quicker. You might be happy with this
new displacement activity for your anxieties or you might decide to reduce
the habit again after a while. It becomes a habit in itself to distract yourself
with the lesser habit.

The most useful strategy of all however, from now on anyway, is to

recognise these habits as soon as they start to form and take avoiding
action. The easiest time to break a habit is before it starts. So the very first
time you’re about to go back downstairs to check you locked the front
door, catch yourself about to form a habit and stop it right there. Distract
yourself, sing a song, take a bath – whatever is going to work best, now is
the moment to do it.
 THE EASIEST TIME TO BREAK A HABIT IS
BEFORE IT STARTS

_________________________

7 She spent literally years trying to work out how I knew. I had to tell her in the end.
 RULE 30
Appreciate semantics

One of my family is such a perfectionist that he finds it really hard to

deliver anything on time. He’s forever spotting tiny flaws in his work that
no one else can see and then having to fix them even though he’s up
against a deadline – or has already missed it. He likes every piece of work
to be absolutely perfect. I can see an inherent flaw in this, which I have
had to point out to him: when someone asks for a piece of work, they want
it both up to standard and on time. So being on time is part of what
constitutes being perfect, and the overall package doesn’t meet the criteria
for perfection if it’s late.

Redefining perfection like this makes it easier to deliver work on time.

Once you broaden the definition, ...
 RULE 31
Keep the bar steady

A teacher once told me that one of the trickiest things to manage with
ambitious students is that they work hard towards a goal and, as soon as
it’s in sight, they formulate a new, tougher goal and aim for that instead.
Now that might sound like a good thing because the students get ever
higher grades. Indeed if grades were all teachers were interested in, it
would be a good thing. However, a good teacher cares about the student’s
welfare too, and the problem with this approach is that the student never
feels good enough because they never attain their goals. By definition,
they’re always falling short. You can see how this can paradoxically
diminish their self-esteem as their achievements increase.

A lot of us did this as students8 and continue to do it as adults. Some of us

didn’t do it at all as students9 but still manage to adopt the habit as adults.
Whether it’s at work or in our personal lives, we keep raising the bar so
we can never quite reach it. And then we berate ourselves for not reaching
the bar that we deliberately moved because we were about to reach it.
How bonkers is that?

If this is you – and I think you know very well if it is – you need to
recognise how daft it is and change your thinking because it’s not making
you happy. And it’s not actually making you achieve any more either.
Remember Rule 27 and focus on the journey. You’ll progress at least as
fast as you would if your eyes were on the prize and you’ll be less tempted
to keep raising the bar.
Think of a flight of stairs. Let’s say there are 30 steps. It could be a steep
set of stairs heading straight up to the top. But it isn’t. This flight has 10
steps and then a small landing. Then another 10 steps before the next
landing. So every 10 stairs you can pause briefly and get your breath back.
OK, fix that image in your mind.

Now, here’s the important thing: don’t move the bar. The bar is set at the
first landing and it stays there. When you reach the first landing,
congratulate yourself. Well done, you’ve achieved your aim. You can look
back down the steps and see how much ground you’ve covered. Enjoy the
feeling of success for a moment. You deserve to feel good about yourself.

Right, now you’ve proved you can do that successfully, how about a
completely new bar? Let’s see … why not put it at the next landing, 10
steps up? Repeat the process and enjoy the feeling of success in 10 steps’
time. And keep repeating it.

This is simply a fresh way of thinking about a task, an ambition, a

challenge. It doesn’t slow you down, it doesn’t make you achieve less in
the end, it just changes your attitude to yourself as you go. Breaking the
task into sections is a good practical approach, but you need to separate
out the bars that go with those sections in order to keep feeling good about
yourself as you go.

THE BAR IS SET AT THE FIRST LANDING AND

IT STAYS THERE

_________________________
8 I’m using the word ‘us’ here in its loosest possible sense.

9 Ah, that’s more like it.

 RULE 32
Look for the spin

It’s clearly not intelligent or clear thinking to jump to conclusions. When

you’re listening to an argument or working out a practical problem, you
know you need to guard against it. But socially it’s an easy trap to fall into
in ways that make you feel unnecessarily bad about yourself.

Every so often, I’ll remember that I haven’t been in touch with one
particular friend or another for what seems like a long time. Whenever this
used to happen, I would mentally tick myself off for being a bad friend
and think how unappreciated they must be feeling. Not any more though,
because I now remind myself that if we haven’t spoken for six months,
that means they haven’t tried to contact me either. I’m not feeling
forgotten ...
 ORGANISED THINKING

When you’re under pressure, you don’t want to waste

thinking time. The more streamlined you are in terms of
planning and organising your thoughts, the less you have to
dither about and the more time you have to get on and do
what needs doing.

Of course, the idea is not to run around randomly doing

stuff. Lots of us are inclined to do this, because it makes us
feel busy and therefore productive. But busy isn’t
necessarily productive. You can run around randomly until
you’re exhausted and still not get anywhere.

So you have to invest some time in thinking, to make sure

that when you start doing, you do the right things in the
right way, and don’t waste time on things that don’t need to
be done, or at least not now.

The people who understand the value of thinking in an

organised way are the ones who put in the least effort for
the maximum effect. They are the people who run large
families, hold down senior posts, and still have time to
socialise, volunteer and indulge their hobbies – all with a
calm, cheerful demeanour – because they’re not wasting
any time through unorganised thinking.
 If this doesn’t describe you, and you wish it did, don’t
despair. There’s no magic spell. You just have to learn a
few tricks of the trade. Read on.
 RULE 33
Believe in being organised

This is probably the hardest Rule in this section. Once you’ve mastered
this one, the rest come pretty easily. There’s an argument that some people
are naturally organised and some just aren’t. There’s a modicum of truth
in this, but it’s really not the point. Some animals are born swimmers –
dogs, for example – and some aren’t. For example I wasn’t, but I still
learnt to swim and was pretty good at it (a long time ago). Just because
you weren’t born organised, that’s not an excuse: ‘I wish I could be more
organised, but it’s just not me.’ Well, make it you.

People use this as a justification for being unorganised, but it is entirely in

their control. You’re not a victim, you’re quite capable of learning ...
 RULE 34
Learn to love a list

If you’re a keen list-maker, you can skip this Rule. It will all be obvious to
you, because it’s here for people who don’t make lists (yet). So what’s
wrong with making a list? What stops you? There are two main reasons
people give me – either that it’s a waste of time because you can work it
out as you go along, or that a long list is too daunting.

So let’s start with the first of those. It doesn’t matter how well you think
you can multi-task, it’s always more time-efficient to do one thing at a
time until it’s finished, and then move on to the next. And the best frame
of mind for planning and thinking is not the same as the one you need for
doing. Indeed different tasks on your list may require their own approach,
which is why it makes sense to deal with all your emails at the same time,
or to do all the laundry at once.

It’s actually quicker to think through all the things you need to do, and
write them down, while your mind is in organised thinking mode. You’ll
remember more of them, and in that frame of mind you’ll also be able to
organise them into efficient groups as you go. So for example, you’ll list
all the things you need to do while you’re out, rather than getting back and
realising that you forgot something. Of course something may come to
you later, and you can obviously add it to the list, but there will be far
fewer accidental omissions, because you started by focusing on the list
itself.
Once your list is written you can switch into doing mode and stop trying to
hold in your head the things you need to do, because they’re all down on
your list. So you can get on with the task with a clearer head, which means
you can do it faster and better. The key thing here is that you have actually
saved time in the long run by sitting down to write a list before starting.
Both because you’ve streamlined your mental approach and because
you’ve got more of the tasks right first time.

I’m glad we’ve got that sorted. Now, in terms of a long list being daunting
… yes it can be, so why have a long list? What you need is several short
lists. A long list with subheadings if you like, but feel free to put them on
separate bits of paper if that helps. Suppose you’re preparing for a big trip
abroad. You could have a list of things you need to buy, a list of admin
you need to deal with, a list of things to pack, and so on. Lots of
manageable lists. And – if you don’t enjoy making lists – just remind
yourself how much less daunting that is than arriving at the airport to find
you left your passport at home (we all know someone who’s done it).

A relative of mine always said that a good list should start with the
following items:

something quick

something you enjoy

something you’ve already done.

That way you’ll have the first three tasks ticked off in no time and you’ll
feel you’re making real headway.
 THE BEST FRAME OF MIND FOR PLANNING
AND THINKING IS NOT THE SAME AS THE ONE
YOU NEED FOR DOING
 RULE 35
Think outside your head

It’s very hard to operate effectively and efficiently when your head is
cluttered. You’re so busy trying to hold onto those important thoughts,
there’s barely any head room left for thinking through the current task.
And you keep catching yourself short, thinking, ‘Oh, I must remember to
call so-and-so …’ or ‘Oops, I need to check we have enough of those …’
or ‘Actually this will need to be done before Thursday …’ All those
thoughts jostling for space make it much harder to focus on the task in
hand. Either you forget things or you keep jumping from one thing to the
next without finishing anything properly. Or both.

If you’re running a big project at work, or organising a local event, or

launching into a house ...
 RULE 36
Don’t overload your RAM

Following on from the last Rule, it’s hard to exaggerate how much brain
space is taken up with everyday planning, logistics, mental to-do lists. As
well as those jobs or projects that you’re consciously aware need a lot of
planning (and that you’ll now be writing down in detail after reading the
last Rule11), there’s the rest of life in general.

However avid a list-maker you are, there’ll always be things you won’t
write down. For example, you need to think through which order to go
around the shops: you want to drop off the dry cleaning first so you don’t
have to lug it around, and you want to do the food shopping last because
there’s stuff you need to get back to the freezer quickly. But the post
office will close at half past, and it’s quite a detour to the pharmacy to
collect that prescription … You’re unlikely to plan that out on paper, but
it’s still using up your brain.

Maybe you’re putting up shelves at the weekend. You’ll be thinking about

what length screws to buy and where to get them – maybe you could do it
when you collect your mum from the station? Although actually, perhaps
if you went to a different store you could get the paint and the timber at
the same time. But you’d have to do that before your mum turns up …

Phoning the bank, inviting people to a party, getting the kids ready for a
new school term, changing electricity supplier, planning meals, updating
your CV: life is full of things you need to think about. This all appears to
sit invisibly alongside the rest of your life, except at times of significant
overload, so it’s easy to underestimate how exhausting it is. Actually,
however, it’s a big thing and the more of it there is, the more mentally
exhausted you will be. To use a computer-based analogy, this is RAM –
working memory – and the more information it has to hold, the less
efficiently it will work.

Most of us are used to juggling these things around in our heads most of
the time, but when we get overloaded they can cause enormous stress. You
need to understand this, because then you’ll be able to work around it
better. Clear those little tasks out of the way if you’ve got a busy time
coming up – or save them for later – and cut yourself some slack.
Recognise that if you’re getting to the culmination of a big project at
work, it’s not reasonable to expect yourself to stay on top of myriad minor
things at home too. Give yourself some empty-head time to help you cope
(go to the movies, meditate, play computer games, have a cup of tea in the
sunshine, play with the dog).

And always remember that this applies to other people too, especially your
family. Don’t expect your kids to tidy their room at exam time12 – if they
take a break, it needs to be a proper break. This Rule, by the way, also
explains why many traditional fathers don’t understand why mothers are
so knackered; it’s not so much the physical effort of looking after the kids,
it’s the mental exhaustion of keeping on top of everyone else’s diaries and
logistical requirements as well as their own.

THIS ALL APPEARS TO SIT INVISIBLY

ALONGSIDE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, EXCEPT
 AT TIMES OF SIGNIFICANT OVERLOAD

_________________________

11 Won’t you? ’Course you will.

12 Or, unfortunately, at any other time in my experience.

 RULE 37
Make deadlines your friend

I love Douglas Adams's comment about the whooshing sound that you get
as a deadline flies past. I think we all recognise that. And most of us miss
deadlines, at least from time to time, if only because we’ve been so busy
organising our lives around some other, even bigger deadline.

Mind you, if life had no deadlines, I’m not sure I’d ever get anything
done. Whether I’m trying to finish writing a book when I promised it to
my publisher, or simply trying to get dinner cooked before the family have
fallen asleep from hunger and exhaustion, deadlines are not just
unavoidable – they also motivate us to get on and do things.

So it helps to recognise that a deadline is not necessarily a bad thing. They

may make ...
 RULE 38
Don’t indulge decision making13

Sometimes, organising gets seriously heavy-duty. Perhaps you’ve got a

big house move to orchestrate, or there’s a huge product launch at work,
or you’re planning a wedding. There will be literally countless decisions
you have to make. There’s the big stuff: should we hire in a removal
company or do it ourselves, what date should we hold the launch, how
many guests should we invite? And it goes right through to the small stuff:
do we need to keep this chipped mug, what’s the best font for the name
badges, would Aunt Eliza like to be seated next to Louise?

You can spend ages agonising over every one of them, researching them,
discussing them, listing their pros and cons, considering all the options.
This takes up time – a commodity that is in short supply when you’re this
busy – and it can also mess up the whole operation. You can’t book the
removal firm until you’ve decided if you want one; you can’t write the
press release until you’ve finalised all the relevant details; you can’t send
out the invitations until you’ve agreed on the design.

And boy, does it mess with your head. Even with everything we’ve
covered in the last few Rules, these things make you feel your brain is
under a constant barrage of things to remember, people to call, tasks to
tick off, deadlines to meet, decisions to make. So you need to clear as
much space as you can in your head, as we know by now (if we’ve been
reading these Rules in order). And improving your decision making is one
of the best ways to do that.
The fewer decisions you have to wrangle with, the clearer your head, the
more time you free up and the less you delay the process waiting for
information you haven’t yet agreed or established. Decision making is a
luxury you can’t afford when time and schedules are this tight. So don’t do
more of it than you absolutely must.

This takes a conscious mind-shift, a recognition that any decision (within

reason) is better than one that wastes time and effort you haven’t got. Sift
out the really important decisions and give them the time they deserve.
Hopefully plenty of them will be quick, however if it’s important you need
to give it due consideration. Of course. I’m not suggesting you toss a coin
to decide your wedding venue. But, you know, you can decide a lot of
other things on the toss of a coin. Shall we box up all the half-used soap
and bath oils and shampoo for the new house, or buy new when we arrive?
Does it matter? If you don’t know the answer, it’s more helpful just to get
on with it and not waste time and head space thinking about it.

It matters that the guest name badges at your product launch look right,
but once you’ve narrowed it down to two colours, or three fonts … oh, just
hurry up and do it – any of those will look fine. There are more important
things to move on to.

This has to be a conscious shift because the decisions you’re glossing over
are ones you would have given more time to in other circumstances, so it
seems natural to focus on them now. However – think about it14 – they’re
not the best use of your time right now.

ANY DECISION (WITHIN REASON) IS BETTER

THAN ONE THAT WASTES TIME AND EFFORT
 YOU HAVEN’T GOT

_________________________

13 Yes this is an organised thinking Rule, not a decision-making one. No clues here about how
to actually make the decisions.

14 But not for too long, obviously.

 RULE 39
Get creatively organised

Lists, calendars, notes, online diaries, pop-up reminders – people use lots
of standard methods to organise themselves. All of them work for some of
us, or for some of the time. Just don’t be fooled into thinking these are
your only options. If none of them works for a particular purpose, find
another way to organise yourself.

One member of my family has a foolproof and unorthodox technique for

reminding himself of those things you only think of just before getting into
bed. He turns his toothbrush upside-down. When he gets up in the
morning he sees the inverted toothbrush and instantly remembers the
thing. Apparently it’s never failed. Personally I think I’d just stare at the
toothbrush for ages wondering ...
 THINKING CREATIVELY

This is the fun stuff. You’re designing a new product, or

organising a party, or decorating a house, reorganising your
workload, planning a holiday, or producing a piece of
music. You’re waiting for your muse to appear …
However, while you’re waiting for inspiration to strike, you
could actually think your way there instead. As Thomas
Edison said, ‘Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per
cent perspiration.’ You don’t need my help with the
inspiration, but I can point you in the right direction for the
other 99 per cent.

I’ve watched some brilliant creative thinkers at work, I’ve

talked to them, I’ve seen how they operate at first hand.
And over the years I’ve come to understand the unspoken
Rules they follow to free up their minds so that the 1 per
cent of inspiration can find its way in. Indeed, I’ve learnt to
use the Rules myself. Because while creative thinking
comes naturally to a few lucky people, the rest of us aren’t
excluded. We simply have to train our minds. Once you’ve
established the right thinking habits, you’ll find they come
naturally to you, too.

Creative thinking is all about seeing where your thoughts

take you. You might know where you’re starting from, but
you have no idea where your destination is. So you need to
think in a way that opens you up to possibilities, or plays
with ideas, that you might not have considered. If you use
your brain in the best way, and open enough doors, you
make it so much easier for your muse to get in.
 RULE 40
Train your brain

If you have a current project you want to get creative about – you might
even have turned to this page for that reason – I hope you’ll find the next
few Rules useful. However, what you really want is to become a true
creative thinker who comes up with ideas big and small on a daily basis.
Whether you’re launching a business or just getting experimental with a
recipe, you want this stuff to be second nature.

Of course, that means you need to practise. It’s no good reading a Rule or
two here, coming up with a genius idea, and then not using your creative
brain cells again until the next big challenge comes along. That’s like
teaching your dog to sit and then never asking it to sit until, years later,
you need it to sit ...
 RULE 41
Feed your mind

Einstein is a bit of a hero of mine, and he reckoned that imagination was

more important than knowledge. That’s even more true now when almost
all knowledge is out there in the ether waiting for you to call it down at the
tap of a keyboard. You really don’t need to be storing it in your head. But
imagination – you can’t download that, and imagination is the key to
creative thinking. So what you really need to do is expand your
imagination any way you can.

Einstein also said the way to have intelligent children was to read them
fairy tales. To increase their intelligence further, you should read them
more fairy tales. When you hear the words of a story, the plot might be
provided for you by the writer, but your imagination supplies the pictures.
When you read it to yourself, your imagination supplies the voices and the
sounds too.

Do me a favour – go and read the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V if

you don’t already know it (it’s out there in the ether waiting for you). He
describes perfectly what the imagination is capable of and how you can
use it to imagine even, for example, that the confines of the theatre ‘hold
the vasty fields of France’. The human imagination is an extraordinary
thing, and it’s almost a sin not to make our own as strong and agile and
vivid as we can.
Reading fiction is essential. And, incidentally, Einstein’s point is
important if you want your children to develop brilliant creative minds.
Read to them as often as you can and give them a love of books. It’s no
good just watching a movie, where all the imagining is done for you.
That’s great, but it’s an entirely different thing and no substitute for
reading. And encourage them to make things up. Small children will
believe in magic, and in Santa, and the tooth fairy, for years if you help
them. I had friends whose children firmly believed that the family cat
could actually fly, and it was a delight to find that their parents had
sensibly allowed them to continue in this belief, where many parents
would unthinkingly have said, ‘Don’t be silly. Cats can’t fly.’

If I had to put one activity at the top of my list for developing the
imagination that you need in order to think creatively, it would be reading.
Fortunately, however, I don’t have to put one thing at the top, and there
are lots of other ways to feed your creative mind. Reading poetry, writing
anything, music of whatever kind you enjoy (and remember to shake
things up occasionally – don’t get stuck in a rut). Plenty of very clever
comedians, especially the more surreal ones, force your mind to make
unexpected leaps and twists and jumps, and knock your thinking out of its
ruts, along with comedy shows from Monty Python onwards.

If you think about it, loads of jokes are based around catching your brain
unawares, setting up a pattern and then unexpectedly breaking it. And
immersing yourself in this kind of humour, hanging out with friends that
make you laugh, watching funny shows, is one of the most enjoyable ways
to encourage your mind to think more creatively.
WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORDS OF A STORY,
THE PLOT MIGHT BE PROVIDED FOR YOU BY
THE WRITER, BUT YOUR IMAGINATION
SUPPLIES THE PICTURES
 RULE 42
Get in the mood

Most of us can’t simply switch on our creative brain at the drop of a hat. If
you’re rushing to an appointment you’re late for, and it’s pouring with rain
but you forgot to bring a coat, and you can’t stop worrying because the
budgie’s not eating properly, this is not the moment you’re going to get
your best thinking done.

We need to coax and cajole our brains a bit to encourage them to be

creative. It’s not our normal state of mind – we spend most of our time
doing something, not simply thinking. Just consider how often you’re
focused on a practical task: talking, cooking, messaging, showering,
watching TV, digging something out of your wallet, choosing veg in the
supermarket. We don’t spend a great deal of time just ...
 RULE 43
Open up

Let’s do some warm-up exercises now shall we? If you were about to
launch into some kind of physical exertion you’d do a few stretches first.
Well, it’s the same with mental exercise. You’ve got yourself in the mood,
now limber up a bit before you focus on your current creative exercise.

There are lots of exercises you could do, and it doesn’t really matter which
you choose – except you don’t want to get stuck in a new rut, so don’t
always pick the same thing. There are lots of suggestions online and in
books, or you could be properly creative and invent your own. What
you’re after is anything that forces you to think divergently for a couple of
minutes to set your mind working in the right way.

Divergent thinking means taking a starting point and heading off in as

many unexpected directions as you can – which is what creative thinking
is all about. It is the opposite of convergent thinking, where your thoughts
bring the necessary strands together into a single answer. Convergent
thinking is exactly what you need to solve a maths question, for example,
and exactly not what you need to generate ideas.

If you ask a naturally convergent thinker how they would use a brick,
they’re likely to tell you that they’d use it to build a house. A divergent
thinker, however, might tell you that they’d use it to prop a door open, or
to weigh down an empty bin so it doesn’t blow away, or to smash a
window, or stop a car rolling down a hill, or to break into chunks and put
in a flowerpot to help the water drain from it, or to stand on to see over a
wall that’s just too high for them.

Now, while most of us tend to lean towards being either convergent or

divergent thinkers, of course we’re all capable of either when necessary.
Every time you check your change in a shop, you’re thinking
convergently. When you try to answer the question ‘What would you like
for your birthday?’ you’re probably thinking divergently. And when you
want to get creative, you definitely need to be in a divergent frame of
mind.

The brick question is a really good example of an exercise to open your

mind in readiness for thinking imaginatively. Try to think of ten
uncommon uses for a common object within two minutes: a tissue, a mug,
a phone, a book, a hole punch …

If you always start your thinking sessions this way, changing the object
each time, you’ll just get stuck in a fresh rut. So check out other quick
creative exercises and just use this one occasionally. The idea is to
stimulate the creative part of your brain and prepare it for the real task, in
the same way that a vocal warm-up prepares you to sing or getting your
hair wet prepares it for the shampoo.

IF YOU WERE ABOUT TO LAUNCH INTO SOME

KIND OF PHYSICAL EXERTION, YOU’D DO A
FEW STRETCHES FIRST
 RULE 44
There are no rules

Fasten your seat belt, we’re about to do some serious thinking. On second
thoughts … don’t fasten your seat belt. If you start putting constraints on
your thoughts, you can’t let them roam freely however and wherever they
choose. And that is the key to creative thinking. Even the most unlikely
paths, the most unpromising ideas, the most unexpected thoughts can lead
to that moment of enlightenment that you’re after.

Listen, if you save one part of your brain to run a commentary on your
creative thoughts – ‘That’s a stupid idea’, ‘That’ll never work’, ‘Yeah,
right, how will you get anyone else to agree to that?’ – you’re doomed.
Time enough for all that later, once you’ve arrived at an idea (or several)
worth analysing ...
 RULE 45
Spot the box

Lots of people will exhort you to ‘think outside the box’. There are plenty
of strategies for doing so and lots of them are great, productive, really
helpful. What most of them fail to do, however, is to identify or describe
the ‘box’ you’re supposed to be removing yourself from.

In broad terms of course we know what it is. The box represents rigid
thinking along the usual furrows that will lead to the same places those
furrows always lead to. But what is it, specifically – in terms of the
individual project or creative exercise you’re engaged in right now?

The answer to that question is going to be different every time. But do you
ask it? That’s where the strategies seem to be missing a page, and it’s an
absolutely crucial question. It’s hard to describe how much easier it is to
think outside a box when you know where the box actually is. So make
that your starting point.

This works really well in business because it gives you a competitive

edge. All the local retail bakeries round my way (and yours, I’d guess) are
in towns – that’s where all the people are, so if you want to open a bakery
with maybe a café attached, you open it in the middle of town. But a
couple of years back someone here decided to think outside that box: they
opened a bakery, with a café, on a small out-of-town trading estate. Not
enough units on the estate itself to keep the business going, so you might
not have great hopes for the business. However, it’s now the best-known
bakery in the area and the café is regularly packed. Why? Apart from the
great food, parking is way easier on the trading estate than it is in town, so
it’s a much better place to meet up. Those bakers spotted the ‘be in town’
box and climbed out of it.

Don’t forget that you might be thinking inside several boxes at once (I
don’t really know what that looks like – I suppose they must be like
Russian dolls). Maybe you’re trying to design a wedding reception in your
village hall. So there’s a box you’re stuck in that says ‘village hall’ –
maybe you could hold it somewhere else? But hang on, you’re also in a
box that says ‘wedding reception’. Try thinking outside that one too. And
of course there’s a box marked ‘getting married’. Of course you might still
end up getting married and having the reception in the village hall. But
you could elope, or get married and take everyone for a slap-up meal
afterwards, or go to a registry office with two friends, then have a
honeymoon (that’s a box too, of course), and then throw a big party for
everyone when you get back. Or not.

Just because you’ve got out of the box, it doesn’t mean you can’t climb
back into it again if you choose to. But at least take a peek outside and
decide if you really like the box or if you were just thinking inside it
because it was there. You see, even if you get back into the box, your
horizons will be wider for having spent a bit of time outside it. The box
has become transparent now you know what’s beyond it. And the chances
are that the ideas you generate will be more creative, interesting and
exciting than if you’d sat firmly and blindly inside it from the off.
IT’S HARD TO DESCRIBE HOW MUCH EASIER
IT IS TO THINK OUTSIDE A BOX WHEN YOU
KNOW WHERE THE BOX ACTUALLY IS
 RULE 46
Think like someone else

So you’re sitting in a candlelit room with gentle music playing, or maybe

you’ve gone out for a run, or to do a bit of gardening – whatever gets you
in the right mood for thinking imaginatively. You’ve worked out where
the box is, and you’ve climbed out of it. You’ve primed yourself to be
non-judgemental and give every idea a chance. So what now?

Where are you going to start? If you empty your mind completely, you’re
likely to fall asleep or start thinking about irrelevant nothings. You need to
kick off your thoughts in some direction and then follow them. And you
want them to wander in a direction they don’t usually go – obviously, to
give them a chance to arrive somewhere new, interesting, original,
intriguing. ...
 RULE 47
Make connections

You’re aiming to open up new channels in your mind, routes your

thoughts have never previously gone down. One way to do that is to give
yourself a start point and an end point that you’ve never travelled between
before, so you’ll have to take a new road. If you’ve never been to
Timbuktu, you can’t get there – even from your own front door – without
taking some roads you’ve never used.

Same thing with your brain. Make it travel a new route. Not only will this
help with your current creative challenge, it will also exercise your
creative juices more generally, so you win on two counts. Now, as with
going from home to Timbuktu, it makes no difference if one of the two
ends of the journey is familiar. So make one of the points the project
you’re thinking about – redecorating your living room, or writing a piece
of music, or planning an event, or designing an ad campaign. Now, what
are you going to pick for the other point?

Fish. Happiness. Balaclava. Global warming. The philosophy of Karl

Marx. Postage stamps. Just open a dictionary at random and pick a word.
Yes, really – try to find a connection between your project and anything.
Just pick something random and let your mind go a-wandering. What do
the words ‘postage stamp’ make you think of? It’s very small, it adheres to
something, it’s often in shades of one colour only, it has scalloped edges,
it comes in a perforated sheet … Now try to apply some of these to your
project. I’m not saying you should redecorate your room in postage stamps
– that would take ages. But you could introduce scalloped edges to the
curtains or cushions, or stick to shades of one colour, or use decals that
adhere to the walls.

Were you going to come up with these ideas going down your habitual
routes? See? You might end up developing one of these ideas so much
further that only you can still see the connection with a postage stamp.
Doesn’t matter. The point is you’ve opened up possibilities your brain
wouldn’t have arrived at without forcing itself to forge a route between
two previously unconnected points.

Of course you won’t end up using every idea that is sparked by any aspect
of postage stamps – the room would look a mess if you did. In fact, you
won’t come up with the same tumble of ideas that I would if I tried the
same exercise. Or even if you’d tried it yourself yesterday when you were
in a different mood. So what? The purpose of the exercise is to force
yourself to think creatively and originally and differently. Not only will
you end up with a much more original and inspiring living room (or ad
campaign/event/piece of music) but you will also have encouraged your
mind to think in a more creative and free-flowing way.

FISH. HAPPINESS. BALACLAVA. GLOBAL

WARMING. THE PHILOSOPHY OF KARL MARX.
POSTAGE STAMPS
 RULE 48
Make mistakes

When 3M was trying to develop a new, strong adhesive, someone made a

mistake and produced a glue that was less adhesive than usual. When you
stuck things together with it, they just peeled apart. So was that a useless,
hopeless, idiotic mistake? No, it was the origin of the Post-it® Note.

Alexander Fleming was having trouble cultivating bacteria in a petri dish

because a particular mould had a habit of growing alongside the bacteria
and destroying them. A frustrating mistake that kept ruining his
experiments? Nope – when he decided to study the ‘mistake’ more
closely, the mould turned out to have a use after all. He called it penicillin.

One of the biggest bars to being creative is that we’re afraid to make
mistakes. ...
 RULE 49
Forget about other people

I’ve observed over the years that the most creative thinkers I know tend to
have a non-conformist streak. It’s not an absolutely hard-and-fast rule –
there are a few exceptions on both sides – but it does make sense to me.
The human race needs innovators to drive progress, from discovering how
to harness fire or make a spear right through to the inventions of the
modern world. However, too many innovators would be unworkable
because they’d all be arguing for their own ideas instead of taking up each
other’s. The world also needs people – a majority of people – who are
happy to adopt these ideas collectively and make them work. These people
may not go out on a limb creatively, but they are the backbone of a
society, the ones who actually implement the changes and establish
progress.

This majority of people mostly derive satisfaction from fitting in,

belonging, conforming. That’s why they can respond collectively to adopt
new ideas, to use them in the same way as each other, and to work as a
team to implement them effectively.

However, if you’re a natural innovator (or a self-created one) you can’t

always be worrying about what other people think. Most people resist
change, so if you listen to them you’ll be dissuaded from your exciting,
creative new ideas. In Dr Meredith Belbin’s studies of team roles, the
creative ideas person is termed the Plant. Belbin recognises that these
people often struggle to fit into a hierarchy, or to cope with rigid systems
or bureaucracy. They can be independent, maverick, even disruptive. So in
simplified terms, an effective society that is able to progress needs a
majority of conformers and a small minority of non-conforming ideas
people.

Just because someone doesn’t have a conformist nature doesn’t mean they
never conform. Almost no one never conforms. If you get dressed in the
morning, clean your teeth, drive on the correct side of the road, you’re
conforming. However these people don’t conform simply for the sake of
it, because they don’t get as much of a kick out of belonging and fitting in
as most other people do.

This is important in terms of their ability to generate ideas, because they

need to be free of the constraints it would place on their creativity. If you
didn’t want to voice any ideas that didn’t fit in with the norm, that you
thought others might disagree with or be unhappy about, your ability to
innovate would be severely hampered.

So if you’re serious about developing your creative thinking skills, you

need to be prepared for this. If you’re naturally quite conformist and enjoy
that feeling of going along with everyone else, you’ll need to develop a bit
of a thick skin. You don’t have to hurt other people’s feelings, or act
without kindness, but ideas lead to innovation, and innovation leads to
change. And, while most people will accept a change for the better in the
long term, often they will resist it in the short term. You can’t let that put
you off.

YOU CAN’T ALWAYS BE WORRYING ABOUT

WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK
 PROBLEM SOLVING

If you’re facing a real problem, you have to think in a

creative way to solve it. I’ve separated this section out from
creative thinking, however, because what makes problem
solving different is that it’s reactive. It’s not optional. You
have to do it because there’s some kind of obstacle looming
that you have to get past, over, through, around. And to do
that, you have no choice but to get your thinking cap on.

The last section was about having fun with ideas and seeing
where they take you. This time, you know exactly where
you need to be – the problem is how to get there. You know
you need to reduce your costs, or fix your relationship, or
deal with an overload of work, or resolve a diary clash that
demands you be in two ...
 RULE 50
Clear your emotions out of the way

Whatever your problem, you need a clear and uncluttered mind in order to
address it. We saw in Rule 42 how you have to be in the right mental state
in order to think creatively. Well problem solving is a branch of creative
thinking, so the same thing applies here. What makes it more difficult is
that, if you have a problem, it’s more likely that your mind is buzzing with
negative emotions, which will only get in the way.

Quite apart from what’s going on in the rest of your life, the very problem
you’re trying to solve may be making you upset, angry, worried, stressed,
unhappy. Unfortunately – indeed unfairly – those very feelings will make
it harder to come up with a solution. You want to set the creative side of
your brain to work without distractions, and negative emotions are a big
distraction.

I know that if you’re feeling worried, the worst thing anyone can say to
you is ‘don’t worry’. Likewise ‘don’t be angry’ or ‘don’t be upset’ or
‘calm down’.18 In fairness it’s a bit easier to take from yourself than from
someone else, but it’s just as hard to do. There’s no magic wand, but I can
give you a few tips.

For a start, it still helps to create the right atmosphere. However pressured
you are to come up with a solution, you’re more likely to do it if you can
remove as much pressure as possible. So go for a run, or sit in a quiet
room, or play upbeat music. If these aren’t an option, at least turn off your
phone alerts, or your email, or shut the door, go and sit in the car – create a
bit of space for yourself.

There are things that may clear your mind in the short term. Music
perhaps, or a crossword or sudoku, or meditation in one of its many forms
(I include gardening, yoga, painting …). Activities that distract your mind
from the emotions that are interfering.

If there’s any sensible possibility of buying yourself time, go for it. Time
is a big pressure, and will exacerbate anxiety and stress. So even if
alleviating the time pressure doesn’t make everything all right, it will at
least help. Waiting works well for certain problems, and certain emotions.
If you’re angry, for example, it’s likely that you’ll be a bit calmer
tomorrow or next week. And time can give you perspective too.
Sometimes a problem that looks intractable now might seem easier to
solve – or just less important – once a measure of time has passed. And
sometimes if you wait long enough, a problem may even solve itself. I’m
not advocating procrastinating, but if waiting doesn’t create worse
difficulties, why not?

If you’re too emotional to come up with a solution you’re really happy

with, at least come up with a stopgap, a plan B, if you can. You haven’t
stopped looking for a better idea, but knowing there’s a good enough
solution out there reduces the pressure in itself, as well as being an
adequate alternative.

And finally, believe there is a solution. You’ll feel much happier, calmer,
more relaxed if you think help is on its way, just as soon as the solution
pops into your brain. And if you think there’s a solution, there will be (see
Rule 39).
 YOU WANT TO SET THE CREATIVE SIDE OF
YOUR BRAIN TO WORK WITHOUT
DISTRACTIONS

_________________________

18 I doubt that, in the history of humanity, this phrase has ever calmed anyone down.
 RULE 51
Make sure there’s really a problem

Years ago, a friend of mine got into terrible financial problems. It was
during a recession and he ended up owing a huge mortgage which was
double the actual value of the house, and with credit cards bills, utility
bills, and a business that had just gone under.

Every time I saw him he had more stories about bailiffs turning up, or
threatening letters from the bank, or final demands on his doormat. And he
couldn’t work out how to sort it all out. He’d paid off all his small
creditors, so now just owed large sums to the bank, building society and
big utility companies. I suggested to him (and I certainly wasn’t the only
one) that he declare himself bankrupt. That way he’d write off all his debts
and ...
 RULE 52
Check you’re solving the right problem

The starting point for a great deal of skilful thinking is to define clearly in
your mind what it is you’re doing. Messy thinking is the enemy because
it’s unproductive at best and, at worst, can lead you into more trouble than
you started with. This is never more true than when you’re thinking your
way out of a problem.

You have to know exactly what the problem is and why it needs solving.
Look, suppose you’re off on holiday, you have all the family’s luggage
loaded into the car ready for the journey, you’ve locked the front door, and
you’re ready to go. Then, to your extreme frustration, the car won’t start.
How are you going to solve that problem?

Hang on – which problem? I can see two key problems here: the fact the
car isn’t working, and the fact that you’re supposed to be somewhere else.
If you think you’re solving the first problem, you’ll get out your tools and
lift the bonnet, or you’ll phone the garage. Might work, or it might turn
out you need a part that won’t arrive before tomorrow at the earliest. So
you’ll have to start phoning around everyone and anyone else that might
be able to fix it, phone your destination and postpone your arrival until
tomorrow or the day after, unload the car, go shopping (there’s no food in
the house because you weren’t supposed to be here) …

Or you could solve the other problem. The problem that you’re here and
you’re meant to be there. In that case, as soon as you establish the car
can’t be fixed quickly, you need to focus on another way to get to where
your holiday is waiting for you. You can sort the car out when you get
home, by which time the part you need should have arrived. Or even leave
someone with instructions to fix the car while you’re away. Now, can you
afford to hire a car? Maybe you can borrow one? Do you even need a car
once you’ve arrived, or could you travel by train or coach? You’ve got a
whole different problem here.

It’s up to you which problem you need to solve but, if you don’t think it
through properly, how can you be sure you’re solving the right one? A lot
of problems are messy in this way – several frustrations or mini problems
become conflated into one big messy problem. And the only way to arrive
at a solution that works for you is to be very clear about untangling the
knots to see which is the problem that you really need to get to grips with,
or at least get to grips with first. Solving that issue often will take care of
at least some of the others, or put you in a better position to address them.

One of the easiest ways to lose sight of this is when one of your
component problems is urgent. Our instinct, when the car breaks down, is
that it must be fixed as soon as possible and everything else must go on
hold while we sort it out. However, if you create a situation where you
don’t need the car for a few days, does it matter if it’s not fixed for a few
days?

MESSY THINKING IS THE ENEMY

 RULE 53
Loosen up

I remember a group discussion at work where we were supposed to be

brainstorming ways to help our staff feel appreciated. The idea with
brainstorming, of course, is that all ideas are welcome as a jumping off
point and now is not the time to be negative. One member of the group,
however, responded to almost every suggestion negatively. His favoured
expressions were, ‘That wouldn’t work’ and ‘We’ve always done it this
way before’. When I asked him for ideas of his own he didn’t have any.

For some reason this sticks in my mind because it was one of the most
extreme examples I’ve seen of this kind of inflexibility. The colleague in
question simply couldn’t see beyond his current mindset, was unable to
imagine solutions he’d ...
 RULE 54
Don’t settle for your first answer

Most problems have more than one solution. If I’m wearing a coat and the
weather heats up so I start sweating, I could cut the sleeves off the coat to
cool myself down. It’s an answer, but that doesn’t make it the best one. If
I thought about it for a bit longer, it might occur to me to remove the coat.

Your money problems, or your work dilemma, or the fact you and your
kids keep shouting at each other, or the question of what to do with your
mum now she can’t really live alone any more, also have more than one
solution. And the best one won’t necessarily be the one you think of first.

The first answer you come up with is really useful, mind you. I alluded to
this earlier – having a plan B is fantastic for taking the pressure off, which
frees your mind up to think more creatively. So definitely make a note of
any solution you think of, until a better one materialises. Even if that
better one still only really warrants becoming the new plan B.

Listen, it can take time to come up with a really good answer to your
problem. Don’t expect it to be instant or you’ll assume the instant answer
is the best one. That’s a recipe for muddling through life. Every time you
hit difficulties, you take an option that’s good enough but no more. Is that
really how you want to live? Do you think that’s the route to success and
happiness?
Sure, when the problem is a minor one, it may not matter that much. But
remember, we’re getting into good thinking habits. If you train your mind
to think the best way every time, it will think the best way when it really
matters. And the best way to think is the one that leads to the best – not the
quickest – outcome.

So how do you know when you’ve found the real, best solution? There’s
no simple answer but there are pointers. You’re looking for the one that
ticks the right boxes – not just the most boxes, but the ones that matter
most. So for example, when you’re deciding what to do with your elderly
mum, her happiness is (I hope) an essential box to tick. Solutions that
don’t provide for this aren’t going to make the grade. You’ll need a list
(mental or physical) of the essential components of a good solution, and
also the preferable ones.

And adopt this principle: whatever solution you come up with, say to
yourself, ‘That’s a good starting point. Now where can I go from here?’ In
other words see every idea as a beginning and not an end point. Always
look for ways to develop your first thought into something even better.
Assume it can be improved on. Just don’t let this take you down a one-
way tunnel. Remember there might be other ideas, other jumping-off
points, that would take you in a different direction and that are also worth
considering. If there’s room for improvement, it can’t be the best solution
yet.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll just know when you find the right
solution. Even so, although it might feel like a gut response, your gut will
have been informed by the thinking you’ve done before. That’s how it
recognises the right answer when it sees it.
SEE EVERY IDEA AS A BEGINNING AND NOT
AN END POINT
 RULE 55
If it’s plausible, it’s worthwhile

If you can solve a nagging problem, it doesn’t matter where your ideas
come from. So don’t limit yourself. Of course you’ll do a lot of your own
thinking, and you’ll quite possibly ask experts, or the same trusted
colleagues, family or friends you always ask. Remember though that it’s
extremely hard to avoid thinking in ruts, and you and I aren’t the only
ones who fall into this trap. Your best friend, your boss, your partner, your
workmate, your mother – they’re thinking in their own ruts too.

Suppose, whenever you’re troubled by a problem, you always ask your

partner’s advice. It’s true that this will help nudge you out of your
personal thinking rut, but it will only nudge you into theirs. So now ...
 RULE 56
Find a way in

I started writing this book in the middle. The thing is, as you probably
know yourself, however familiar you are with your subject it can take time
to get into the headspace to write. I could have started at the beginning,
but I usually write the introduction last. That way, I know what it is I’m
introducing because I’ve already written it. So yes, in that case, I could
have started with Rule 1. But it wasn’t grabbing me that day, and I knew
the important thing was just to get going, get into it. So I picked a Rule I
was in the mood for and began there.

Sometimes, getting into the right headspace is the problem you’re trying to
solve. Whether you’re writing a book, planning an event, looking for a
house, designing a product, writing a report, the biggest problem can be
knowing where to start.

This often leads to stalemate and procrastination. You’re not sure how to
start so you don’t start at all. After a while you add a second problem to
this: time is slipping away. So now you can’t get started and there’s a
deadline looming. Extra stress which certainly isn’t helping.

I’m not sure I believe in writer’s block. I don’t think it’s an affliction that
descends on creative souls and there’s nothing they can do but wait for it
to pass. I suspect it’s the result of poor thinking – it certainly is with me.
As a writer, you have the luxury of managing your own time so you can
get away with claiming the muse hasn’t descended. I don’t see many
middle managers claiming writer’s block when they can’t get going on a
crucial report. They wouldn’t get away with it.

Whether you’re a writer, a manager or anyone else, the trick when faced
with a major exercise you’re struggling to get going with is to think about
it differently. You don’t have to start a book at the beginning. You can
start anywhere you like. The same goes for everything else. Just find
anywhere you can start, and get the thing kicked off. The problem tends to
be worst when you’re not feeling confident or knowledgeable about the
project. So pick an element you feel is in your comfort zone, or which you
have firm opinions about, and begin. Maybe you’ve never organised a big
event before, but at least you know what you think it should look like.
Great – start there, and let the rest of it fan out from that point. Stuck on a
major presentation? Plan your conclusion first if it helps, or think about
the visuals you want to use if that’s your forte.

It might be that once you get properly stuck into the project, you go back
and modify, delete, edit, change, remove the bit you started with. Doesn’t
matter. It’s served its purpose now. It’s not wasted work because it did a
brilliant job of getting you under way, regardless of whether it’s still in
place at the final cut.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO START A BOOK AT THE

BEGINNING. YOU CAN START ANYWHERE YOU
LIKE
 RULE 57
Don’t get bogged down

It doesn’t matter how free your thinking is, how well you’ve managed to
step clear of the ruts, there will still be times when the solution to your
problem just doesn’t seem to be forthcoming. You’ve focused your mind
as much as you can, and it doesn’t seem to have worked. Well, if that’s the
case, stop focusing. Put your hands in the air and step away from the
problem.

I occasionally like to do a crossword. I’m not very good at them, and one
of the reasons is that I’m not naturally a patient person. I’ll puzzle away at
a clue for a minute or two, and then decide there are better things to be
doing so I’ll go and do them instead. Sometimes, though, I might go back
to the crossword again later in the evening.
 RULE 58
Try a new angle

OK so you’ve tried focusing, you’ve tried not focusing, the problem’s still
there. It happens – if this was easy, it wouldn’t be a problem in the first
place. So what next?

Well, the sky’s the limit. You can try anything next. Just one rule: it has to
be something you haven’t tried before. By definition, the things you tried
before didn’t work or you wouldn’t still be looking for answers. So move
on, pick something different to maximise the chance of arriving
somewhere new.

You’re aiming to activate your creative mind so you can bring it to bear on
this problem. So maybe do something creative. Draw your problem. No, I
don’t know what it looks like either, but that’s not important. Just draw it
anyway – it’s bound to look different from before and that’s what we’re
after. Plus, it’s looking different with your creative head on, so that has to
be good. Mind you, if drawing your problems gets to be habit, there’s a
danger it could become a rut, and we don’t like those. So if it doesn’t
work, how about singing the problem instead? You can compose your own
melody or use an existing one, it’s up to you.

Of course it’s important to keep surprising yourself by forcing your mind

to approach things in new ways. So make sure you use a variety of
techniques depending on the nature of the problem, your mood, what you
tried last time, whether you toss heads or tails.
A friend of mine lives opposite a park and likes to work through tricky
problems by walking around the park while talking them out with himself.
I’ve seen him marching round, lost in his thoughts, gesticulating wildly
(while his teenage kids cower behind the curtains desperately hoping no
one thinks he’s with them). Talking a problem through out loud can be
very effective – doing it in a public space is optional. Apart from anything
else it slows your mind down to talking speed which can be a helpful
change.

You can argue with yourself too. Play devil’s advocate and try to persuade
yourself to adopt different options. It’s not that you want to follow those
routes necessarily – you might talk yourself round of course – it’s that
you’ll have to reframe your view of the problem and look at it from
different angles.

Mind mapping is another approach that helps ring the changes with some
problems. It’s especially good for the ones where you don’t know how or
where to start. Mind mapping is brilliant for just starting anywhere at
random, and again helps you to focus visually and conceptually on the
problem.

IT’S IMPORTANT TO KEEP SURPRISING

YOURSELF
 RULE 59
Don’t panic

There are two problems with panicking. First, it feels horrid. Second, it
interferes with your thinking process and makes it much harder to be
creative or even rational. By its nature, panic takes over your mind and
pushes everything else out, and that’s the last thing you need when you’re
facing a big emotional or financial problem. Once you start panicking
you’re lost, until you can get things back under control – whether that
takes minutes or weeks.

Not that easy though, is it? And it doesn’t help that panicking can
sometimes seem strangely tempting, in a Fine!-I-don’t-care-why-not-just-
ruin-my-life-it’s-rubbish-anyway kind of a way. There’s almost a sense of
relief at giving into panic and abdicating any attempt to ...
 RULE 60
Get help

Some of us just don’t like asking for help. Or rather, most of us don’t like
asking for help some of the time. Personally, I’m happy to ask for help
assembling flat-pack furniture, but I hate asking for help with map-
reading. This is because I hate putting together flat-pack furniture and I
don’t care who knows it, but I like to think I’m a good map reader and I
don’t want to admit to any weakness at it.

I say weakness – of course it’s not really a weakness. That’s just my

perception.20 If I’m as good as I think I am, it must be a very tricky bit of
orienteering for me to need help. The truth (my family would tell you) is
that I’m not as good as I think. I’m a very good map reader on paper
(which is where maps traditionally are) but I have a tendency to think I’ve
memorised the route so I toss the map to one side … and then can’t find it
when the route doesn’t look quite as I expected.

This is all about self-image and perception. All of us are happy to ask for
help in areas we have no ego about. I’ll readily take my car to the garage
when it breaks down because I don’t see myself as a mechanic and I don’t
expect anyone else to. However I don’t like to let on if I’m struggling with
my writing, for example, because I’d hate anyone to think I didn’t know
what I was doing.21

If you’re struggling to solve a problem on your own, it’s only logical to

ask for advice. So you have to overcome your feeling that you’re in some
way admitting defeat. That doesn’t actually make sense. You wouldn’t
expect the government to take action without consultation, or a
multinational company to launch in a new territory without taking any
advice. So why expect yourself to raise a child, for example, without ever
asking for anyone else’s input? And yet countless mothers and fathers like
to see themselves as good parents, and think that if they ask for advice
they’re broadcasting to the neighbourhood that they’re useless. That’s not
how the neighbourhood sees it.

Listen, being able to ask for advice is a strength. It’s a skill in itself, to
recognise when two heads will be better than one. You’ll still make the
final call when it’s your problem that needs solving. And you’re not
collapsing in a sobbing heap telling everyone you can’t cope. You’re
approaching a fellow expert so you can pool ideas. If you were a car
mechanic or a computer engineer and couldn’t fix a particular technical
problem, wouldn’t you go and ask another engineer if they had any
thoughts or experience that might help? So what’s the difference?

All the skills you ever use – cooking, installing software, raising kids,
appointing staff, wrapping gifts, calming down angry customers – fall into
one of three categories. One: you’re happy to ask for help because you
don’t see yourself as skilled. Two: you never ever need help ever. Or
three: everything else - all the things where you sit between being halfway
decent and absolutely outstanding. Be honest with yourself about the areas
where asking for advice doesn’t feel comfortable and remind yourself that
it’s a sign of strength, not weakness. If you want to solve this problem,
and you can’t do it alone, this is a barrier you need to overcome.
 ALL OF US ARE HAPPY TO ASK FOR HELP IN
AREAS WE HAVE NO EGO ABOUT

_________________________

20 You see – I know this stuff! And I still won’t ask!

21 Just a handy example. Of course this never happens.

 THINKING TOGETHER

Learning to think well on your own is a challenge. Of

course it’s achievable, but not without effort. And once you
start trying to think along with other people, the challenge
gets more interesting still. It’s not only your own brain you
need to manage, but everyone else’s too.

When it doesn’t work, thinking with other people is

frustrating, irritating, unproductive. We’ve all been there.
However, two or more brains working in harmony can be
far greater than the sum of their parts, and it’s a joy to be
part of a group that thinks well together. Whether it’s you
and your partner, your team at work, a social group or any
other combination of people, several minds can generate
ideas and solve problems that none of the individual ...
 RULE 61
You’re better together

My father-in-law was a brilliant ideas person. If I was looking for

suggestions for any kind of scheme, work or home, I often used to pick his
brains. Once we started talking about things, the ideas would flow from
both of us and I always found it hugely productive. At the end of the
conversation, I would sometimes say to him, ‘If anything else occurs to
you later, give me a shout.’ To which he would invariably reply, ‘It
won’t.’

I have to say, in all the years I knew him, he was right. He never called me
later to say, ‘I’ve had another thought … ’ He wasn’t trying to be difficult,
he just knew how his own mind worked. He thought best by sparking
ideas off other people, and any idea that hadn’t arisen during that process
wasn’t going to come to him later.

That’s not to say that he didn’t have original ideas of his own – on the
contrary, he never stopped having them. However, not only were those his
own ideas and not mine, but he would get to a point where he would want
someone else to talk it through with in order to build it up to a workable
level. He had several people he used to talk to for just this purpose, and he
would pick the most appropriate ones each time.

In my experience, there are very few people who can go from the germ of
an idea right through to a working model without any input from others.
Almost all of us think much better – at least when it comes to generating
ideas – when we work together. Other people can knock your mind out of
a rut and set it on a fresh path, while you do the same for them. The right
person can help you think in whole new ways you never knew you could.

When I first conceived the idea for The Rules of Work (the very first book
in this series) I had little more than a title and a vague gist of what it might
be about. Instead of developing the idea further in my head, I immediately
talked it through with my editors and we built the concept for the book,
and indeed the series, together. I honestly don’t recall how the
conversation went or who suggested which bits, and I’m sure they don’t
either. I just know that by the time we’d finished we had a fully formed
idea that was far better than anything I’d have arrived at on my own. Or, I
think they’d agree, anything either of them would have come up with
alone.

You should have worked out by now that it matters who you ask. You can
talk to more than one person of course, and you can talk to them each
separately or all together. You need to learn who to talk to about which
kind of ideas or problems, and maybe look for more people to add to your
list. Different people can be useful for different projects.

Another thing I’ve learnt over time is that people like being asked for their
input and they enjoy discussing ideas – at least those who are any good at
it. I’ve never had anyone turn me down when I’ve asked if I could pick
their brains because their thoughts would be valuable to me. They’re
generally flattered (rightly) and enjoy the conversation. So why wouldn’t
you ask?
OTHER PEOPLE CAN KNOCK YOUR MIND OUT
OF A RUT
 RULE 62
Play to everyone’s strengths

Have you ever been to an escape room? You know, you pay to get locked
in a room with a group of people and have an hour to solve a series of
puzzles that will eventually unlock the door. I did one a few years back in
Helsinki with four of my family. We had no idea what to expect and
consequently we only just completed it, and only with the help of a couple
of strategically provided clues from the organisers. Why didn’t we do any
better? I’ll tell you: because we completely failed to think as a proper
team.

In our defence, I would reiterate that we had no clue how it was going to
work. I must get around to doing another one because if we approached it
differently I’m sure we’d do better. In the event, we ...
 RULE 63
Think like a hive

This Rule follows on from the last one. I know plenty of people whose
mental abilities I am in awe of. People who can think like lightning, or
who can solve problems intuitively, or generate ideas like turning on a tap,
or get their heads round massively complex logistical concepts, or add up
big numbers in their head, or make sideways leaps, or see clearly where
the moral compass is pointing.

I have also worked with people who think slowly, are hyper-analytical, or
who put facts and data before the human angle. These are all things that I
personally can find somewhat frustrating. However it’s important to
recognise that these ways of thinking have their place, and there are times
when they can be more valuable than anything I bring to the table.

When there’s a group of you working together – thinking together – try to

see yourselves as some kind of hive brain. Each one of you is a single
component of a greater entity. Between you, you have all the thinking
skills you need.

Even when you’re alone, you bring different parts of your own individual
mind to bear on whatever you’re doing. You’re not using the same part of
your mind when you’re cooking as when you’re doing your accounts. You
don’t fire off neurons in the same bit of your brain to read the newspaper
as you do when you’re listening to your kids’ emotional outbursts. You
need all those skills, functions, nerve centres, without needing them all at
once.

The same is true of your colleague who is always focused on details, or

your friend who endlessly wants to understand how things work when you
just want to know what they can do for you. When a big group project
comes along and you’re busy generating ideas, or organising logistics, or
adding up the figures, or whatever it is you enjoy and are good at, the hive
is also going to need someone who will reliably keep an eye on the details,
or understand how things really work.

So have some patience, tolerance, understanding of those in the group who

think in ways that you don’t. Appreciation even. Because without them,
the hive can’t function properly in the face of whatever comes along. All
thinking styles have their place, and it’s up to the group as a whole to
moderate which ones are needed when.

BETWEEN YOU, YOU HAVE ALL THE

THINKING SKILLS YOU NEED
 RULE 64
Leave your ego behind

An effective team of thinkers should listen to everyone’s ideas. However

they can’t follow through on all of them. Inevitably some ideas fall by the
wayside as you start working through them. Others will be developed into
something new so you can’t recognise the original idea at all, although
you needed it to arrive at the destination.

If you’re looking for one answer and you have a hundred suggestions,
that’s great, but in the end 99 of them won’t feature heavily in the final
result. That’s just common sense. However it can feel frustrating if one of
those 99 was your suggestion. It’s even more frustrating if there were only
two viable suggestions and the one that didn’t get used was yours.

It’s natural to feel ...

 RULE 65
Keep an eye on the quiet ones

Whether you’re leading the group – or, indeed, whether anyone is – we’ve
established that you have a vested interest in making it work. Otherwise
why be there? Even if it’s a work group you’ve been told you have to be
in, it’s still going to be more enjoyable if it’s successful. So you want to
give it the best chance of working.

Some teams are handpicked and everyone is there because they have
relevant and useful skills. Other groups come together by chance – an
organising committee for a community event, for example, is likely to
comprise anyone who was prepared to put the time in, regardless of what
skills they offer. Likewise, some people will be there for their thinking
skills – idea generation, problem solving, analysis, organisation, figure
work – while others will have been included for their practical skills.

Even someone included because they’re enthusiastic about making cakes

or fixing computers may also be good at thinking. Plenty of people
(myself, for example) won’t be shy about sticking in their two
pennyworth. But not everyone is so confident. And yet, if this group is
going to think as effectively as possible, it needs the benefit of everyone’s
thinking skills, not only those of us who don’t wait to be asked.

So always have an eye on those people who don’t say much. It’s possible
they don’t have a lot to contribute at this stage, but it’s also possible they
have just the ideas or solutions the team is looking for and are waiting to
feel it’s OK to say so. If they’re not confident enough to speak, the whole
group will miss out. Never assume that people who are silent have nothing
to say.

This is especially true when there are two or more vociferous people in the
room. If ideas and comments are flying back and forth – even if it’s
always fun and friendly – it can be quite daunting to people of a shyer
persuasion, or those who consider themselves junior or less qualified to
speak. And yet sometimes the sharpest observations can come from people
who have a fresh eye, unsullied by past experience.

Make it your job to help these people open up. Ask for their view,
champion their promising ideas, make room for them to speak and ensure
they’re listened to. I worked with one person who literally never spoke
until the group collectively started to do this – someone set the example
and everyone else followed – and he turned out to be immensely valuable
to the team and a fund of clever ideas and acute observations. Until we
encouraged him to voice his thoughts, we’d been without the benefit of
them. What a loss.

NEVER ASSUME THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE

SILENT HAVE NOTHING TO SAY
 RULE 66
Question groupthink

I was in a work team once which was great fun because all of us were
hugely positive and enthusiastic about what we were doing. We had all
become good friends and sparked off each other beautifully when we were
thinking together. I have to admit though that not all our fabulous and
frequent ideas turned out to be as successful as we’d anticipated. They
could sometimes be a bit hit and miss.

After a while we brought someone else into the group. We all liked him
and were surprised to find that, although he was a very upbeat person
normally, when it came to throwing ideas around he could be quite
negative. We’d all get fired up about something and he tended to put a
damper on our ideas a bit. It was slightly frustrating ...
 RULE 67
Conflict is OK

Here’s a Rule to pick up where the last one left off. We established that
it’s not helpful if you all think alike and agree with each other most of the
time. So it follows that the most useful group is one that thinks differently
and whose members often disagree with each other.

You can see the risk here. If you convene a group of people who keep
disagreeing with each other, what’s to stop every session descending into
acrimony, name-calling, sulking, animosity and – ironically, given the
reason for it – dysfunctional lack of progress.

So avoid groups where everyone agrees, and avoid groups where you all
disagree. What does that leave? Not so fast … I didn’t say you mustn’t
argue with each other. You just have to argue productively. The group has
to find a way to express disagreement without it becoming a problem.

The single most important way to achieve this is for everyone in the group
to understand that it’s their job to say if they disagree, and that it’s
necessary to ensure the group collectively thinks at its very best. Once you
know people are briefed to challenge your thinking, and that you’re
likewise expected to question theirs, it becomes much easier to take. It de-
personalises it.

There have to be rules within the team – often it helps to spell them out
from the start and reiterate them from time to time. You might customise
the rules but essentially they should include these:

No personal comments.

Disagree with the thought, not the person expressing it.

Don’t raise your voice.

Let everyone’s view be heard.

It’s not a competition (for whose idea ‘wins’).

Don’t become emotionally involved.

This last rule is much easier to follow if the previous ones are respected.
Indeed, respect is the key word here – you don’t all have to like each
other, but you must respect each other.

Positive conflict – and no, that’s not a contradiction in terms – is what you
need. It makes a strong team even better. Being challenged stretches you.
Having your ideas questioned makes you work harder to justify them, or
to acknowledge that they have flaws. Remember you’re a hive – the whole
team succeeds or fails together, because the whole team approves or
rejects any idea or course of action. It’s not important who first came up
with the idea. Oh OK, if it was you, you can permit yourself a little private
pat on the back, but only when you’re sure no one is looking.

If you’re part of a group where, even after setting out the rules, it is
impossible for everyone to work effectively together, things have to be
shaken up. Either the people within the group have to change, someone
has to leave, or the group might as well be disbanded if it can’t work
productively.
YOU DON’T ALL HAVE TO LIKE EACH OTHER,
BUT YOU MUST RESPECT EACH OTHER
 RULE 68
Think up a storm

Brainstorming is a very specific way of thinking as a group. Generally you

brainstorm at the beginning of a project or when there’s a collective
problem that needs solving. It’s very much an early part of the ideas
process and involves a group of people throwing out as many ideas as
possible. The idea is not to arrive at the answer, but to create options for
working towards it. So it’s just stage one in the project.

In some ways it’s seen as the classic style of group thinking. It was first
formulated as a technique back in the 1930s by Alex F. Osborn, although
one imagines people must have been doing something similar for
millennia before he refined the process. Osborn had become frustrated by
how few ideas his staff ...
 RULE 69
Have stupid ideas

Never underestimate the creative abilities of the people around you. One
of the reasons brainstorming works so well is because one person’s daft
idea can be the next person’s genius solution. If you don’t voice the daft
idea, they’ll never get the chance to convert it into something viable.

My wife and I work as a particularly effective team in this respect. I tend

to make somewhat off-the-wall suggestions. Instead of rejecting them out
of hand, she reins them back to create something more achievable. My
suggestion might be wildly expensive, or time-consuming, or otherwise
impractical. She practicalises them.

I’ll give you an example. We were lucky enough to have a stream at the
bottom of our garden. The only downside was that it had banks that were
too high to get decent access into it unless you were aiming for total
immersion. This was a bit of a shame as the kids were still small and
would enjoy paddling in the water. Instead of just putting up with this and
being grateful for what we had, I wanted to improve on it. So I suggested
we re-route the stream into a flat area to create a big loop where access
would be easier. My wife rightly observed that this would be hugely
costly, take considerable effort, and might not work because natural
waterways can be unpredictable. However she thought about it, and it led
her to a much better solution: why not just dig out a small section of the
bank to create a little ‘beach’? Perfect. And she’d never have thought of it
without me.
I’ve known a few actors in my time. And directors will tell you that it’s
much easier to get a well-judged performance by reining in an actor who
is going a bit over the top, than by trying to coax more from an actor who
isn’t giving you enough. Touching your foot on the brake is far simpler
than revving up and accelerating. So ideas that seem to be extreme or off-
the-wall are often the easiest to turn into good ideas.

You must have – or find – the confidence to make suggestions even when
you think other people might judge them negatively. I have a line I like to
use in this situation: ‘I’ve got a stupid idea but I’m going to say it because
someone might turn it into a good idea.’ This works for two reasons. First,
you don’t have to worry people will judge you for having a stupid idea
because you’ve already made it clear you recognise it as such. And
second, instead of rejecting it out of hand (hopefully they wouldn’t but
who knows), the rest of the group is likely to give reasonable
consideration to whether there’s the kernel of a good idea they can build
on.

Similarly make sure the people around you know that they are always
allowed to air ‘stupid’ ideas without fear of censure, and make sure you
listen to see if you can think them into more practical ones.

TOUCHING YOUR FOOT ON THE BRAKE IS FAR

SIMPLER THAN REVVING UP AND
ACCELERATING
 RULE 70
Keep in synch

When you’re part of a group that thinks together – long term or short term
– you are unlikely to spend all of your time together. You might be
together from nine to five, but it’s unlikely you’ll be focused on working
as a group for all that time. You might be in the same room but working
on separate tasks. Other groups come together for just for an hour a week
or a month.

So there will be time apart, and perhaps lots of it. Up to a point this is a
good thing. Obviously it helps you avoid getting on each other’s wick,
plus it gives you all time to assimilate after your group thinking sessions.
Sometimes ideas, problems, issues, thoughts will come to you after a
group session because you have a bit of space to think alone. ...
 MAKING DECISIONS

In practical terms, the crunch times for your thinking skills

come when you have to make decisions. Especially the big
decisions: changing jobs, moving house, spending large
sums of money, living with someone (your partner, your
parents, a friend), starting a business, starting a family.
Being able to think clearly enough to get these decisions
right is essential. A lot of less significant decisions still
affect your quality of life and, anyway, they’re good
thinking practice for when the big ones come along.

It’s obviously going to matter to you that you get these

decisions right. And, more than that, it matters that you
know you’re getting them right. Your own confidence in
the choices you make is really important – you’re unlikely
to regret a decision you believe deep down was right, and
the upheaval of changing jobs, moving house, getting
married, going to uni, getting the builders in, or whatever,
is going to be far less stressful if you do it with an
underlying self-assurance that it’s the right thing.

The fact is that only you can make decisions for yourself.
You can solicit any amount of advice from friends or
experts, but in the end these big choices will always have
an emotional and subjective component which only you
 understand. So you have to be able to think your way
through these things for yourself, if you’re going to arrive
at a decision that you have real confidence in. The
following Rules will enable you to do just that.
 RULE 71
Decide what you’re deciding

Well, duh! No, hang on. Actually it’s surprisingly easy to make the wrong
decision by mistake. Usually that’s because we fall into the trap of
focusing on the means rather than the end. I worked with someone who
was quite sure she wanted to leave her job and go freelance. We had a
long chat about it. She was unhappy and felt that working for herself
would be a way of avoiding the problems she encountered as an employee.
As we talked, however, it became clear that she hadn’t fully considered
the implications of being freelance. Once she thought about it, she realised
that the insecurity that goes along with freelancing really wouldn’t suit
her. In the end she decided the best solution to her problems was ...
 RULE 72
Don’t start at square two

Most of us, a lot of the time, start our decision making at square two. You
know you want to change jobs; the question is what kind of new work
should you look for. Or you need to move house to somewhere bigger, but
where? Or which university course should you apply to?

These all seem like reasonable challenges to set yourself, but you need to
go back to square one with all of them. Maybe square one still leads to
square two, but think it through consciously to be sure it does. Here is
square one for the examples I’ve just given you:

Are you sure you want to change jobs? Or could you change
whatever you don’t like about your current job – ask for a pay
rise, or transfer, or go part time, or work from home, or sit at a
different desk?

Need to move house? It might be cheaper to extend your present

house if space is the problem. Or rent out rooms if running costs
are the issue.

Heading to uni? Have you consciously ruled out going straight

into a job, or taking time out, or doing an apprenticeship of some
kind?

Square one means sticking with what you’re currently doing, with
adjustments. Of course very often square two does turn out to be the next
step. Not always though, and the status quo – square one – is almost
always the cheapest, simplest, quickest option. Even if it needs a bit of
tweaking. This is where clear, logical thinking is so important.

I remember a friend who was setting up a business from home, and was
about to build a cabin in the back garden because she needed somewhere
to run it from and store her stock. This was going to cost a fair bit, as the
cabin would need heating and lighting and so on. She was busy getting
quotes from builders and trying to minimise the costs, when she realised
that she had a room in the house that almost never got used. With a bit of
rejigging she could free it up completely and run the business from there
instead. Not only cheaper but also much more convenient. She’d started at
square two: ‘I need to build a space to run the business from’ instead of
square one: ‘Do I need to build a space to run the business from? Or do I
already have one?’ It can be hard to look at your living space in a whole
new way, but this kind of thinking process can save you huge stress,
upheaval and expense.

It’s surprising how few people routinely practise this kind of thinking
skill. To a Rules thinker, however, this should be instinctive. Any time
you are about to embark on a change that will be costly or stressful,
always make sure you really need to do it. I’m not arguing against change
in itself – it can be fun, exciting and shake us up in a good way. However
this is about decisions that are prompted by some kind of dissatisfaction
with the way things currently are, or an enforced change such as leaving
school, or redundancy. The tendency can be to think you need much
bigger changes than maybe you do. Doing nothing – with a few tweaks –
should always be one of the options on the table if it’s available.
THE STATUS QUO IS ALMOST ALWAYS THE
CHEAPEST, SIMPLEST, QUICKEST OPTION.
EVEN IF IT NEEDS A BIT OF TWEAKING
 RULE 73
Set yourself boundaries

You’re moving house. Money is no object and you don’t mind where you
live, even abroad. You could choose somewhere really large, that maybe
needs renovating. Although a little country cottage would be sweet. Or
perhaps a city flat or a maisonette. Hey, it could be fun to convert a
windmill! Or maybe build your own place from scratch …

How wonderful to have so many options. Except, actually, where on earth

do you start? You could move literally anywhere. It would be much easier
to have a few constraints really: being within an hour’s commute from
work, or near your parents, or within a certain budget, or in a village, or
with a garden. Of course most of us have constraints whether we want
them or not, but you ...
 RULE 74
Untangle the knots first

Some decisions are especially complicated because they’re interwoven

with other decisions. You don’t know what to do about A until you’ve
sorted out B, but B is dependent on C. Sometimes they intermesh so that
you’ve no idea where to start, let alone what to decide. One couple I know
was trying to decide whether to move to London (150 miles away), where
to send their child to school, and she was considering cutting her working
hours to free up time to retrain. And if so, what should she retrain as?
They couldn’t see how to make any of these decisions until after they’d
made the others. This kind of knotty problem often leads to stalling and
procrastination,24 simply because it’s so overwhelming.

However, if you muster all your thinking skills you can untangle this kind
of knotty problem. Trust me. First of all, put any of the elements you can
into series. There may be no point thinking about where to send your child
to school until you know where you’ll be living. If you don’t move to
London, the options for retraining will be limited by what courses are
available locally so, again, the ‘London or not’ decision needs to come
first.

Not only will this clear things a bit, it will also show up whether you need
to reprioritise. Perhaps, when you look at it like this, you’ll realise that
your choice of school is really important to you, and you don’t want it to
be reliant on where you live – you’d rather fit your location around the
school, not the other way around.
Good. You’re making headway. Some decisions are on hold until you
know where you’re living and you’ve gained a sense of priority about the
decisions that will come first. Suppose this train of thought made you
realise that the choice of school is the most important thing. That has now
become a parameter for your other decisions: must be near a suitable
school. Maybe even a specific school – in which case the location issue is
solved too.

OK, that all helped, but there are still some interlinked decisions left. So
the next thing to do is to think through each one in isolation. Suppose – for
the sake of argument – the other complications weren’t there. In an ideal
world, what discipline would you want to retrain in? It’s much easier to
think this through when your head isn’t cluttered with all the other stuff. It
may be that you don’t end up with your ideal solution, but I can’t
emphasise enough the importance of knowing what that ideal answer is.
That way you’ll make a conscious decision – on the balance of benefits –
about how far you’re compromising on it.

You should find that by the time you’ve gone through this sequence – put
the decisions you can into series, prioritise those you can’t, then think
through each in isolation – everything will start to become clear. My
friend did this and realised that she’d nearly made a decision she’d have
regretted (retraining in a discipline because it was available, not because
she really wanted to do it). Separating out the thinking process had given
her the clarity she needed.

IT’S MUCH EASIER TO THINK THIS THROUGH

WHEN YOUR HEAD ISN’T CLUTTERED WITH
 ALL THE OTHER STUFF

_________________________

24 Let’s deal with procrastination later. It can wait …

 RULE 75
Go for Goldilocks

Most decisions of any size will need some research – in other words
collecting information. Costs, timescales, options, opinions and so on. I
say most because there are a few very subjective decisions (do I want
kids?) where collecting your thoughts is more use than collecting
information. For everything else, you need catalogues, job adverts, prices,
prospectuses, lists of contacts, technical information.

And don’t forget that a lot of decisions will rely to some degree on other
people’s feelings. How do the team feel about a new management
structure, what do the children think of moving house, will the neighbours
object if you put in for an extension, is your business partner OK with you
going part time, would your ...
 RULE 76
Vet your advisors

When a big decision comes along, we generally ask other people for their
input – colleagues, family, friends, professionals. People who don’t have a
vested interest in the outcome, but who we reckon will be able to give us a
balanced, unbiased opinion.

Ah, if only. But there’s no such thing as an unbiased opinion, by

definition. Facts may be unbiased (although which facts? I’ll come to that
in a minute …) but an opinion is always a personal standpoint, and
everyone has their own take.

Suppose you’re thinking of investing in the property market and you know
someone who has done the same thing themselves. Ideal! They’ll be able
to give you the lowdown, won’t they? Well yes, they will, but only from
their perspective. If it worked out well for them, they’re likely to advise
you to go ahead. But that’s their personal biased opinion. If it didn’t work
out for them, they’ll probably advise you the opposite. And yet you and I
both know that some property investments go well and others don’t, so
their standpoint isn’t going to be the only one.

I’m not saying don’t consult them. They will probably have some useful
insights. But don’t think just because they have more experience than you
that their advice is necessarily right. If you can find someone with a
different track record, that will help to balance things. However what you
have now is two personal opinions from people who have more experience
than you. Neither might be right for you. Just remember that.

This brings us back to facts and whether they’re biased. Assuming the
facts you collect are true,26 whoever is presenting them will have chosen
which facts they consider relevant, and that process contains an inherent
bias. You only have to look at how political parties argue over facts to see
this process taken to its logical conclusion. Usually (although perhaps not
always) both will present true facts that seem to support opposite
arguments. That’s because they pick different data, or present it in
different ways, so it appears to say what they want it to.

You might be consulting someone who has no intention of doing this, but
it’s unavoidable. People have deep-seated and sometimes unconscious
beliefs about things that influence their perception of the facts. Imagine
asking advice about property investments from someone born into wealth
and then from someone who grew up in a council house. They might well
have very different values around the ethics of housing, and these are
likely to be reflected in their advice. They may not realise it, but they are
likely to quote the facts that back up their beliefs (see Rule 92).

Look, I’m not saying you can’t ask anyone’s advice. I’m just saying be
aware of this stuff. A Rules player thinks about these things before asking
advice and weighs them against the advice itself.

AN OPINION IS ALWAYS A PERSONAL

STANDPOINT, AND EVERYONE HAS THEIR
OWN TAKE
_________________________

26 But obviously don’t just assume it.

 RULE 77
Be your own advisor

Some decisions are less about facts, more about feelings. From what
colour to paint the bathroom, to whether to hit send on your stinky email
to your landlord, these are ultimately decisions only you can make. Of
course you know that, but it’s still good to get advice from other people.

Who to ask though? Maybe your mum, or perhaps your best friend. Or a
work colleague, your partner, your brother … how are you going to
choose? Well, I know how most of us choose a lot of the time.

I had a lightbulb moment about this a few years ago. I can’t even
remember what the decision was, but I decided to call a particular person.
When I couldn’t reach them, I figured I’d better call someone else. There
was an obvious alternative ...
 RULE 78
Don’t jump to conclusions

I was called in once by a company that made high-end one-off pieces of

furniture to sell locally. They showed me some of it – lovely big kitchen
tables, handcrafted wardrobes and armoires, solid traditional dressers.
Beautiful. Their problem was that they were struggling to sell the stuff.
They had discovered, somewhat late in the day, that most local people
were looking for side tables and little cupboards and wall shelves, and
there was almost no demand for the big luxury furniture their workshop
was filling up with.

It’s a pretty good example of how big a hole you can dig for yourself by
making false assumptions. Want another one? I know a couple who
decided they wanted to move back to the area they grew up in 40 years
previously. They bought a house, got planning permission for a new build
in the garden, built the new house, sold off the original house – all of
which took literally years – and then realised, when they were finally able
to move, that actually they didn’t want to be that far away from the
grandchildren and all their friends. They had just assumed they’d be happy
back in their old stomping ground without thinking through that
assumption.

When you consider it, most big decisions are based on a whole series of
choices or mini decisions. So you might decide that you want to start your
own business. Now you have to decide what sort of business, where you’ll
run it from, how you’ll raise the funds, and so on. You’ll draw up a
business plan, which will entail putting together estimates of costs and
income and likely sales. The problem comes when you sort of forget they
were only estimates and treat them as firm figures. Or assume there’s a
market when there isn’t – or at least not without adjusting the costs, price,
or products or service you offer. You could end up ploughing all your
savings into a doomed business – pretty much what my furniture makers
had done.

Want to change jobs? Once you’ve made that decision, you’ll go on to

decide whether you want to stay in the industry or change careers, and
then what jobs to apply for, and even whether to relocate. But hang on …
suppose the original decision was wrong? You started at square two and
assumed a new job was the answer to all your problems – a classic form of
jumping to conclusions. Those early wrong assumptions are especially
dangerous, because so many of your subsequent mini decisions are
predicated on them.

If you don’t want to make this kind of mistake, you need to ask yourself
right from the start ‘Why do I think this? What’s my evidence for it? How
do I know it’s true?’ Get other people’s opinions as well as your own. Ask
as many people as you reasonably can to interrogate your plans, cross-
examine you on where you’re getting your information from, query your
assumptions, question why you’re so sure this is the right decision. Just
make sure you don’t dig yourself a big deep hole through not thinking
properly.

MOST BIG DECISIONS ARE BASED ON A

WHOLE SERIES OF CHOICES OR MINI
DECISIONS
 RULE 79
Understand your emotions

Emotion certainly has a part to play in making good decisions (I’ll come
on to that in the next Rule).27 However, emotions are the culprit in a huge
number of bad decisions. My own personal fault is making snap decisions
for no good reason. Frankly, how much can it matter when you’re
choosing which chocolate bar to buy, or which evening to go to the
cinema? But it’s a whole different story when you’re buying a house or a
car or booking an expensive holiday or deciding whether to take a job, or
indeed whether to hand in your notice in a fit of pique.

If this describes you, just stop it (I’m talking to myself here too). I
understand, I really do, but it’s only a matter of time before you do
something you really ...
 RULE 80
Balance logic and emotion

So it’s not good to let your emotions get the better of you if you want to
make the best decision. But interestingly, it’s not good to remove all
emotion from the exercise either.

Research has been done with people who have suffered brain damage that
makes them unable to feel emotions. And one thing they all have in
common is that they can’t make decisions. They can rationalise all the
arguments, but they don’t know how to plump for a particular choice.
Neuroscientists have concluded that this is because very few decisions are
without any kind of emotional component. Even choosing between coffee
and tea, or cereal and toast, becomes almost impossible if you can’t bring
your emotions into play. So where does that leave you when you’re
choosing a job or a house or a car, let alone whether to have children or
whether to end a relationship?

There’s a common fallacy that emotions are irrational, and decision

making should be a rational process – therefore leaving no room for
emotions. The last Rule made it very clear how it’s possible for emotions
to get in the way of good decisions, but so does an absence of emotion.
Your feelings do several important jobs when it comes to deciding what to
do.

For one thing, without any emotional input, it’s very hard to know how
much importance to attach to all your research and information. Does this
factor outweigh that one? Is this data as relevant as that? Is it worth taking
an exciting and career-enhancing job in the USA, given that you won’t be
able to buy Marmite there? Should you buy this perfect flat that ticks all
your boxes, even though it’s three floors up and there’s always a
possibility the lift might break down? I’m using extreme examples to
make my point: without emotion, how can you balance your career against
Marmite?28 In the same way, how can you assess the risks accurately
without any emotional input? (We’ll look at risk in more detail in Rule 91
by the way.)

Emotion can be a key part of the overall question too. Suppose that flat
ticks all the practical boxes, but you’re afraid you might be lonely that far
from your friends? That fear – and that potential for loneliness – are
important considerations. They can’t be quantified rationally either. Are
you slightly anxious that you might be a bit isolated until you’ve made
new friends or are you dreading the possibility you might be permanently
unhappy? Those are answers only you can give, and only on an emotional
level. And they’re just as important as all the practical factors (as you’ll
have established by using your emotional judgement to weigh them up).

Another important reason for making decisions with an emotional

ingredient is that you’ll feel (yes, an emotion word) much more
investment in the decision if you have considered it emotionally. You’ll
buy into it, be far more committed to making it work, and your approach
to it will be more positive.

So you have to balance emotional and rational thinking. The crucial thing
is that you are self-aware about this, and you understand the role your
emotions are playing.
 THERE’S A COMMON FALLACY THAT
EMOTIONS ARE IRRATIONAL, AND DECISION
MAKING SHOULD BE A RATIONAL PROCESS

_________________________

28 I’m implying here that the choice should be obvious, but actually I suspect my editor would
follow the Marmite. [Yes, I would! – Ed]
 RULE 81
Learn to compromise

You can’t always have what you want. My mother used to tell me that and
– much as I hate to admit it – she was right. In fact, you very rarely get
exactly what you want. Not when it matters. If you’re not prepared to
settle for less than perfect, you may end up with nothing at all.

A friend of mine has a mother who has been trying to move house for 15
years, but won’t buy a house that doesn’t tick every single box.
Unfortunately she sold her last house 15 years ago, and the money sitting
in the bank (from which she has to pay out rent) has not increased in value
as much as house prices have risen over that time. So in fact, it becomes
harder and harder to find the perfect house because her ideal house is no
longer ...
 RULE 82
Find option C

Suppose you’re not happy with any of the options, but you can’t sidestep
the decision? Maybe a member of your team has left and you have to
appoint someone new. Or perhaps you can’t afford to stay in your current
house and need to move. Or you and your partner are getting married but
have widely different views on how many people to invite to the wedding.

These are decisions that have to be made and where you can’t see a good
option. They can be hugely problematic and can even feel like stalemate if
you’re in conflict with someone else. Making a good decision can feel
exhilarating. Failing to make any decision can be miserable, depressing,
fraught, frustrating and overwhelming.

So don’t let it happen. This is where you have to get properly creative. If
none of the options on the table will do, clearly you will have to find
another option. I’ve noticed that the people who are best at doing this are
the ones who approach it in a positive frame of mind. As Henry Ford said,
‘Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.’ If you
believe there’s another option out there, you’ll find it. If you think this is
it, and what’s the point looking, and nothing will solve the problem, and
it’s all a waste of time … I’m willing to bet that a new and workable
option will never present itself to you. Or if it does, you won’t recognise
it.
Let’s see where we can get to with the example I started with. You’ve lost
a team member, you’ve advertised and you’ve interviewed, and you can’t
find a suitable replacement. So how about advertising somewhere new and
maybe unexpected? How about taking on someone less experienced than
you originally wanted (so a lower salary) and investing in training them
(with the money saved)? How about reallocating roles in the team so you
can recruit someone with a completely different set of skills? How about
just not recruiting at all? Look, that’s just a fraction of the possible
solutions that might exist. Not all of them will be viable, but some will,
and so will others I haven’t suggested.

If you can’t agree a decision with someone else, getting creative can also
be a way to save face. Suppose you’re at a stand-off where you insist on
option A and they demand option B (I know this is unlikely if you’re a
Rules player, but it can happen even to us occasionally). You might both
privately wish it hadn’t come to this, but not feel ready to capitulate. What
you need is option C. Something you can both agree on without backing
down from your original veto of the other one’s preferred decision. So you
want a small family wedding and your partner wants to invite 150 people?
(I’m assuming you’ve both vetoed inviting 75 people and having a
wedding neither of you really wants.) What if you eloped romantically? Or
got married in a tropical paradise where fewer people can afford to attend
but, well, you’d be in a tropical paradise, so who really cares? Or don’t get
married at all, at least for now – again, the possibilities are almost infinite.
You just have to find the one that works.

IF NONE OF THE OPTIONS ON THE TABLE

WILL DO, CLEARLY YOU WILL HAVE TO FIND
ANOTHER OPTION
 RULE 83
Assess the cost of a bad decision

I well remember talking to a friend once who was agonising over a tricky
decision. He had been losing sleep over it, worried he might get it wrong. I
asked him, ‘What’s the worst-case scenario?’ and had the delight of
watching the relief palpably spread across his face as he realised that
although it was a big decision, the worst that could happen wasn’t that
bad.

You’d be surprised how often this is the case. In that instance, he was
trying to decide whether to change jobs. He worked in an industry with a
buoyant jobs market, and had valuable skills, so actually if he hated the
new job he could just move again. Not ideal, but also not a catastrophe,
not that likely, not worth losing sleep over.
 RULE 84
Regret is a waste of energy

There are few more pointless emotions than regret. It’s all about feeling
sad over something you did – or failed to do – in the past, so by definition
there’s no way you can change it. You could not think about it I suppose.
If you can change an outcome you don’t like, you will do. If you can’t,
regret can seem like the only option.

It’s a bit self-indulgent though, isn’t it? In the end, you’re bound to end up
feeling sorry for yourself. And who does that help? Much better to resolve
not to be a regretter because, in all honesty, it makes no sense.

The fact is, you have no idea what would happen if you made a different
decision. Listen, if you’d taken that job after all, that now looks so perfect
through your rose-tinted glasses, perhaps you’d have been so excited on
your first day that you forgot to look as you crossed the road, and got hit
by a car. No, I know it’s not likely, but you don’t know. The colleague at
the next desk might have been a nightmare to work with, you might have
been headhunted by a client and then hated that job … each example may
be unlikely, but there are infinite possibilities and the ones that actually
happened might not have been nearly as good as you imagine. So it’s just
pointless regretting your decisions, whatever they are, because the
alternative always could have been worse.

Even if you’ve gone through bad times as a result of your past decisions
(which might still have been better than the alternatives, see above) well,
those experiences are what made you the incredible person you are now.
Without hardship or trauma or frustration or grief, we wouldn’t grow into
the complex and fascinating people we all are. Take those experiences
away, and you have to give up part of yourself with them. So let go of the
regret, and value what you’ve learnt and who it has made you.

There is something else you can do too – not about past regrets but to
avoid future ones: make really strong decisions and make them
consciously. If you think through every decision you make from now on,
following these Rules and any practical strategies you can find in books or
online, then you will know that each decision has been the best one you
could have made at the time. You’ll be able to look back and know that in
the same circumstances, you would do the same thing again. You would
collect the same information, consider the same options, consult the same
advisors, make the same compromises, come up with the same options, set
yourself the same parameters, allow your emotions the same weight, and
come down in favour of the same course of action.

It’s pretty hard to regret a decision that you would still make in the same
situation. You may occasionally wish things had turned out differently, but
you won’t kick yourself for it.

MAKE REALLY STRONG DECISIONS AND

MAKE THEM CONSCIOUSLY
 RULE 85
Be honest about procrastinating

Oh, yeah, I said I’d mention procrastination at some point, didn’t I? Might
as well do that now I guess. Um, yes … I seem to have covered everything
else in this section.

Best get on with it then.

Sometimes waiting to see what happens is a good call. But it has to be a

deliberate, conscious choice – a decision in itself. Usually with a time
limit. For example, you might decide you’ll wait a year to see what
business rates do, or wait six months before handing in your notice in case
a likely promotion comes up. Or delay getting married until after you’ve
found somewhere to live together.

The rest of the time, doing nothing is just an excuse for avoiding or
sidestepping the decision. So why do you need ...
 CRITICAL THINKING

Your mind needs to be honed and trained to think healthily,

to be organised, to make decisions, to be creative and to
solve problems. And there’s one last group of skills the true
Rules thinker has to master. You need to be able to think
critically – that’s in the old-fashioned sense of criticism,
which is not about being negative but simply about
evaluating.

These Rules will enable you to evaluate arguments, to think

logically, to form balanced and valid opinions, to make
connections, to detect inconsistency. You will be able to
listen to someone else’s viewpoint, read an article online,
or study a book, and then evaluate it, assess data, analyse
statistics, and form your own intellectual view on its merits.
So it follows you’ll also be able to analyse and assess your
own opinions, which is always fun. If you find your
position on any topic is indefensible, you don’t have to tell
anyone, but you can quietly modify it.

Valuable as facts and information are, they’re of limited

use without critical thought. This is what enables you to use
the facts, to exploit the information, to critique and build on
your creative ideas. If you can do this, you will be far more
 useful to yourself and others, not to mention far more
valuable to an employer.

This section is about intellectual rigour, not about

emotions. So keep in mind Rules 50, 79 and 80 and others
about not letting your emotions get in the way of rational
thought. When it comes to analysing data, evaluating
arguments, considering options, you need your rational,
incisive, logical brain firmly in control.
 RULE 86
Read John Donne

It doesn’t have to be John Donne, although I can’t think why anyone

wouldn’t want to read him. He was a seventeenth-century English writer
of poetry and sermons (you can enjoy them whether or not you share his
beliefs). Perhaps his most famous line is ‘no man is an island’, which is
part of an eloquent sermon justifying this viewpoint. He’s an easy writer
to read because many of his poems are short and you can dip in and out of
them, or read one a day.

You want to know why you have to read Donne? Well, the thing about
Donne is that not only are his writings beautiful, brilliantly crafted,
moving and still relevant today, they are also thought-provoking. To
appreciate them fully, you have to engage your brain. He uses ...
 RULE 87
Don’t be played for a fool

The world is full of people and organisations who want you to do or

believe what they tell you. From advertising campaigns to fake news,
we’re all surrounded by manipulative information intended to push us into
buying this tin of beans, listening to this music, wearing these clothes,
voting for that candidate.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t much care for being told what to do,
and even less for being told how to think. I like to make my own
decisions, form my own views, thank you very much.

Then again, I do have to buy tins of beans, and wear clothes, and indeed I
choose to listen to music and to vote. And some of those messages that I
read or hear or see online do sound quite appealing. Maybe they really are
as good as they seem – are they? How on earth do you gauge whether
you’re hearing fake news or being sold false promises?

By asking some pertinent questions is how. You think for yourself these
days, remember, so be conscious that everyone is selling you their
product, their ideas, their beliefs for a reason. You need to know what that
reason is before you can decide if you want what they’re pushing. So don’t
be a sucker, do some serious thinking before you commit yourself.
Remember Rule 3? This is the critical thinking application of that Rule.
Start by asking yourself who benefits and how from the information
you’re being given. If you’re looking at an advertisement, it’s probably
obvious who’s behind it. But what about broader messages? Is that
campaign telling you to wear a cycle helmet being funded by the health
service or by helmet manufacturers? Do the people telling you how
dangerous unpasteurised milk is have a political agenda? The answer
doesn’t necessarily invalidate the information, but it does shed more light
on it.

Some people will try to fool you by giving you partial information and
hoping you won’t notice. My wife remembers being told years ago by a
nurse that a certain percentage of pregnant women who eat soft-cooked
eggs contract salmonella, which can harm the unborn child. Even if that
percentage is pretty low it would probably still deter you – it’s meant to.
But hang on, there’s relevant information missing from that data. Did you
notice? Of course you did. You also need to know how likely it is to harm
your child. If their mother contracts salmonella, how many babies are
actually harmed – 1 in 10? 1 in 100,000? That has to make a big
difference. You might still decide that any risk is too high, and I’m not
advising you to eat soft-boiled eggs if you’re pregnant – I’m advising you
to think for yourself. Including questioning why this information isn’t
included. There might be a very good reason, but if you’re serious about
being a Rules thinker, you’ll want to know what it is.

Keep an eye out for emotive language too. Organisations, political parties,
advertisers, they do like to use emotionally charged words and images to
persuade you to think their way instead of your own. Guilt trips, fear,
emotional blackmail – learn to spot when they’re used against you.
Charities will almost always show you a picture of an attractive starving

31
child, or a cute furry animal.31 Even if it’s a good cause and you choose to
give to it, you should still be aware that you’re being manipulated.

EVERYONE IS SELLING YOU THEIR PRODUCT,

THEIR IDEAS, THEIR BELIEFS FOR A REASON

_________________________

31 I’m never sure if this is ethical – there’s an interesting question to think about.
 RULE 88
Stand back and take in the view

A senior manager applied for a job running a big wildlife charity. The
interview process was very thorough and spread over a couple of days. It
involved tours and interviews and presentations and so on. She spent ages
researching the requirements of the job, the structure of the charity, how
they spent their money, and put together loads of evidence that she could
handle a budget, manage an organisation and had the kind of management
style they were looking for.

Finally she wrote her presentation. When it was drafted, she asked a friend
of mine to take a look at it for her. He told me that she had set out a really
clear vision for the future of the organisation and how she would make it
happen … but ...
 RULE 89
Look for what comes next

One of the things that sets the best thinkers apart is the way they keep on
thinking where other people stop. School teachers will tell you that this is
a classic way to identify the brightest students, but you can learn to do it
now even if you didn’t do it as a child.

Don’t just passively accept the information – or the ideas – you’re given.
See them as a starting point and not an end point. Where can you go from
here? If this is true, what else might also be true? Or indeed what else has
to be true? Or what follows on? Look for deductions, extrapolations,
correlations, inferences.

Obviously you can’t be doing this all the time. Or can you? Actually, we
all do it in a small way and it’s just a matter of thinking bigger. If I suggest
we go to the movies, and I tell you what time the film is on, you’ll use that
information to work out whether you can get back home and change after
work or whether you need to go straight there. If I tell you the film’s
running time, you’ll deduce whether this is the last showing of the
evening.

A friend of mine was buying a pedigree puppy. She knew you were
supposed to make sure the breeder was reputable and raising the puppies
indoors around people, not outside in a puppy farm. But how could you
tell from a website? She soon noticed that a lot of the websites had loads
of photos of the puppies indoors – sometimes as many as a thousand
photos. The dodgy breeders might fake a couple of indoor pics, but they
weren’t going to bother with that many. So she realised she could trust the
websites with loads of photos.

These are simple calculations and natural trains of thought. But you
couldn’t manage even this level of thinking if you weren’t taking one
piece of information and using it to lead you to the next. Now what you
need to do is get your brain into the habit of questioning the next steps,
seeing the logical progression, making predictions, whenever you read a
report, or watch the news, or hear a presentation, or listen to someone air
their views.

Many entrepreneurs have started successful businesses because they read

or heard something that made them think, ‘Hang on, if that’s the case,
surely people would like this or that product …’

Back in 2005, one car insurer made just such a leap. Everyone knows that
women drivers are statistically less of a risk. And women’s behaviour
typically can differ from men’s in other ways – for example they are likely
to carry more personal possessions around with them. This was common
knowledge, but only one insurer thought through the implications of this
and set up a car insurance company aimed specifically at women, with
lower premiums, and handbag insurance as standard.

Whether you’re making a connection that explains someone’s behaviour,

or recognising that language similarities between two countries suggest a
historic link, or noticing that people boarding the subway train all have
wet umbrellas so it must be raining up top, you’re actually thinking, ‘Oh, I
get it, so if this is the case then that must follow …’
SEE INFORMATION AS A STARTING POINT AND
NOT AN END POINT
 RULE 90
Don’t bother your pretty little head

When you’re trying to assess information and draw conclusions from it,
one of the hardest things can be having too much data. Maybe you’re
researching a particular option and there’s a huge amount of stuff out
there, more than you could possibly want, so which do you need and
which can you safely ignore? You have to be able to sift information, and
you have to be sure you’re getting it right so you don’t discard anything
you should have kept hold of.

Facts are all very well, but how do you know if they’re relevant? What if
they appear to conflict with each other? If you have two similar sets of
data doing roughly the same job, which one should you use?

First of all, recognise that there’s such a ...

 RULE 91
Consider the odds

Generally speaking, we’re rubbish at calculating risk. Which is a shame,

considering how useful it is to know the risk when we’re assessing options
and making decisions. For example, if you’re afraid of flying, you’ll think
your flight is more likely to crash than the seasoned and relaxed flyer
sitting next to you thinks. You can’t both be right. What’s more, you’ll
think the flight you’re on is much more likely to crash than you would
have done if you were still safely on the ground. I say ‘safely’, but
statistically you could be much less safe on the ground – if you were
driving, or crossing a road, or playing rugby. You won’t take that into
account though.

We’re all the same, and to some extent it goes with being human. In any
case even experts don’t always know exactly what the risks are. So I’m
not suggesting that you can think your way to being perfect at calculating
risk every time. However it is important to understand the pitfalls when it
comes to assessing the risk of taking a particular course of action. You
need to be aware of your own perception of risk, and also that of people
around you who are trying to persuade you towards, or away from, a
decision.

One of the critical considerations is balancing risk against gains or losses.

A small risk that will, at best, bring a minimal reward and, at worst, be
catastrophic is probably not worth taking. On the other hand, a significant
risk might be worthwhile if it promises huge gains at the risk of minor
losses. So when you’re thinking through risk, take this into account.

And bear in mind that people (yes, that’s you) are more inclined to take
risks that promise big benefits, even if the potential losses are also
significant. Also we underestimate risks that involve an activity we enjoy
compared with the risk of an activity we don’t. You’re more likely to
underestimate the risk of doing something you have control over, such as
driving or skiing or running down stairs. In fact you’re more likely to
underestimate any risk when you’re in a good mood compared with when
you’re feeling upset angry or scared.

Here’s a risk in itself: if you don’t keep your brain primed and alert, you
can fail to spot risks that you should be aware of. That’s especially true if
you’re focused on a bigger risk. So if you’re worrying about your
(perceived) risk of flying, you might overlook the risk of leaving your
passport at home.

Keep an eye on cumulative risk too. Some decisions involve a series of

potential risks – the risk of the costs increasing, the risk of crucial people
leaving, the risk of it taking longer than planned, the risk of the quality
falling short. If you underestimate all of these slightly, you could have
significantly underestimated the risk of the whole project. And some of
these may make others more likely to happen.

YOU NEED TO BE AWARE OF YOUR OWN

PERCEPTION OF RISK
 RULE 92
Facts are neutral

You need to avoid all the pitfalls of sloppy thinking, and that means you
need to be on the lookout for them. These are the little errors that make us
believe our thinking is sharper than it is. We don’t want to feel smart, we
want to be smart. We want to spot the traps so we can take avoiding action
before we fall into them.

I mentioned in Rule 76 that one of the big errors of thought is believing

that the facts, the data, the stats are backing up your own viewpoint. This
is known as confirmation bias, when you search out information that
supports your argument, or interpret the facts that you’re presented with as
backing you up. It’s a very comfortable thing to do – it makes you right,
and saves you the effort or ...
 RULE 93
Don’t trust statistics

Eighty-seven per cent of statistics are made up on the spot – a fact I often
quote. Although sometimes I say it’s 56 per cent.

You can’t really understand statistics until you understand the ways in
which people can manipulate them in order to get you to agree with their
way of thinking. Stats are a very appealing way to back up an argument
because they look deceptively like facts. It is perfectly possible to
represent actual real facts in statistical form, but you should never assume
that’s what you’re seeing until you’ve checked them out thoroughly.
You’re a serious critical thinker and you’re not going to let anyone take
you for a ride.

For a start, always check where the information has come from and who is
paying for it. Are you confident it’s neutral? What’s the size of the sample
– is it a survey of 10,000 people or 8 people? Who were they? If it’s a
poll, what questions were asked? Suppose you were asked these two
questions:

Do you believe in freedom of choice?

Do you believe the government should prevent people drinking to

excess?
I imagine more people would answer ‘yes’ to the first question than to the
second, and yet either could be included in a survey into attitudes to
alcohol – depending on what impression it wanted to give.

Here’s another common manipulation of the facts. If you own a bookshop

that had 10 customers last year and now has 20, you could say you’d
doubled your number of customers. True, but you’ve only gained 10
actual customers, and for a typical bookshop I’d say you’re in trouble.
Similarly if you’ve gone from 100 to 150 customers, you could say that
last year you had only two-thirds of the customers you have now, or you
could say your customer base has increased by 50 per cent. Both true, but
somehow they give different impressions.

Graphs and charts give those pesky statisticians even more scope to
mislead you. The most obvious example of this is where the figures up the
left-hand side of a graph don’t start at zero. Imagine 2 columns, one
showing 155 units of whatever and the other showing 160 units. They will
be quite similar heights, right? Now imagine your bar chart starts, in the
bottom left corner, not at 0 but at 150, so it shows only the tip of each
column. Now one of them is showing 5 units and the other shows 10:
double the height. This technique, and variations on it, are designed to fool
you. Don’t fall for it.

And one more thing – no one is going to present you with statistics that
contradict their argument. So always consider, and indeed research,
whether there are other stats out there that put a different perspective
altogether. Oh, and which of course might also be presented in a
misleading way.
NO ONE IS GOING TO PRESENT YOU WITH
STATISTICS THAT CONTRADICT THEIR
ARGUMENT
 RULE 94
Understand cause and effect

Sometimes someone will try to persuade you that two pieces of data are
related. They’ll even show you charts and graphs to prove it. And often
they’ll be right – but not always. As a skilled critical thinker you won’t
take this at face value, will you? You’ll pick it apart to make sure the
correlation is real.

Stage two of the argument is to reason that, if these two things correlate,
there must be a causal relationship between them: one must cause the
other. A genuine example of this would be that the more people smoke in
a given group, the higher the incidence of lung disease will be. That’s
because, as we all know, smoking causes lung disease.

You might be more surprised to learn that the rate of divorce ...
 RULE 95
If you can’t prove it’s true, that doesn’t mean
it isn’t

Do you believe in telepathy – that some people can tell what others are
thinking when they’re not even in the same room?

One of the most pervasive elements of pseudo-scientific thinking is to

believe a thing can’t be true unless you can prove it is. Many people will
tell you that, as there’s no scientific proof for these things, they can’t be
true. But remember, there was a time when science couldn’t yet prove that
the earth went around the sun. Didn’t stop it doing it though.

I’m not saying that I believe in telepathy. But I don’t pooh-pooh it either.
Sadly I don’t believe in magic (I wish I did) so personally I reckon that if
it’s true, there is a rational scientific explanation that no one has yet found.
I have had some experiences that would seem to support the argument for
telepathy, but I can’t prove they weren’t just surprising coincidences.33

So don’t get tricked into ruling things out just because there’s no proof.
Clearly you have to apply your intelligence here. Almost all of physics is
ultimately unprovable, as physicists will tell you, and operates on the
principle that once the weight of argument becomes overwhelming,
scientific theories have to be assumed to be true. Also, looking outside the
world of science, it’s reasonable for me to assume my family love me,
even though I only have their word for it.
On the other hand, don’t mistake evidence for proof. I know a few people
who can quite exasperatingly mix up their own experience for proof. If
you tell them that research shows, for example, that more people with
brown eyes are good at maths (yes, I made that up) immediately they will
try telling you that it can’t be so because their friend is really good at
maths and has blue eyes, so there! Or their other friend has brown eyes
and is rubbish at maths.

A good thinker understands that this means zilch. The data (that I made
up) didn’t say all brown eyed people are good at maths. Nor did it say that
no non-brown-eyed people were good at maths. Just that being good at
maths correlated more highly with brown eyes than other eye colours. One
person’s experience might be unexpected, but it doesn’t negate all my
(meticulous and hard-earned) research results. Also, many people
presented with this data will tend to notice the exceptions because they
stand out. So while they might immediately think of a blue-eyed friend
who is maths-minded, it may actually be that if they surveyed all their
friends the results would bear out my own research. If I hadn’t made it up.

So don’t be guilty of muddling up evidence and proof, or assuming

something unproven can’t be true. Keep an open mind and evaluate all the
data you’re given as neutrally and dispassionately as you can.

DON’T BE GUILTY OF MUDDLING UP

EVIDENCE AND PROOF

_________________________

33 And remember, it would be a really surprising coincidence if coincidences never happened.

 RULE 96
Don’t believe it just because everyone else
does

If you’re one of nature’s conformists, always wanting to fit in with the

group, you’re going to find critical thinking more challenging. There’s
certainly nothing wrong with being a team player, one of the gang, but it’s
not going to make things easy for you. That’s because it’s really important
to understand that a thing isn’t automatically so just because everyone else
seems to think it is. I talked about this in Rule 1 and its importance in
terms of your values and beliefs.

And it’s important when it comes to critical thinking too. If we all thought
the same way, all followed the same logical paths, how would anyone ever
have a new thought? How would Darwin have developed his theory ...
 RULE 97
Don’t believe it just because you want to

I have often wondered why some people passionately believe in

conspiracy theories that really don’t stand up to serious inspection – or in
many cases don’t stand up to the most cursory investigation. Take flat-
earthers for example. They have to tie the facts in knots to justify their
beliefs, postulating any number of lies and conspiracies in order to
shoehorn their theory into a remotely sustainable argument.

You may well be aware of Occam’s razor, a strangely named scientific

‘law’ which states that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
For conspiracy theorists of all kinds, however, the explanation can never
be simple. Partly because if it were it would probably be true, but also I
suspect because it would be no fun if it were.

I have concluded, you see, that most people who believe in improbable
theories do so because they want to. Simple as that. I’m sure they
wouldn’t acknowledge it, because that would undermine their argument,
but I’ve never met anyone who espoused an unlikely theory who didn’t
seem to enjoy it. And I have to admit, I’ve been tempted to get sucked in
occasionally because I love a good story, and the conspiracy theories are
usually far more interesting and better plotted than the rather pedestrian
but disappointingly true explanations.

For most of us sceptics, the conspiracy theories look like hokum. But they
are only an extreme example of something that almost all of us do from
time to time – believe a thing because we want to, rather than because
rational argument tells us it is true.

We want to believe social media is good for us, we want to believe the
political party we support is better than the others, we want to believe our
partner isn’t cheating on us, we want to believe there’s a market for our
product, we want to believe the dog doesn’t fancy a walk today. It doesn’t
matter how much evidence may be piled up against us, we remain
blinkered to it, and only see the few crumbs of evidence that support our
theory, the theory we want to believe in.

Listen, the thoughts and beliefs and ideas you most need to question in
yourself are the ones that you like, the ones that you want to hold, the ones
that serve your interests in some way.

As soon as you recognise that you are thinking what you want to think,
that’s the signal that you need to scrutinise your beliefs and opinions extra
thoroughly, and with double helpings of honesty and self-appraisal.

THE THOUGHTS AND BELIEFS AND IDEAS YOU

MOST NEED TO QUESTION IN YOURSELF ARE
THE ONES THAT YOU LIKE
 RULE 98
Be devil’s advocate

However much you want to think critically, to believe things for the best
reasons, to consider all the facts, to avoid being fooled by statistics or by
too much information or confirmation bias, how can you be sure your
thinking is as good as it can be? What if you truly think you’re persuaded
by the arguments but actually you’re being swayed unconsciously by what
you want to believe?

The answer is to pretend you’re someone else. Someone who holds a

different, opposing view from your own. Go on, have a good argument.
Pick holes in your idea or belief, find the loopholes, highlight the weak
points. Imagine your own views are held by someone you dislike and
you’d hate to agree with them so go on, take them apart, ...
 RULE 99
Don’t go into lockdown

What happens to your beliefs when information changes or prevailing

views shift? Do you change your mind or do you accommodate it? Or do
you stick with what you always thought – it was good enough then so it’s
good enough now?

That’s the attitude a lot of people take, but it simply makes no sense. We
know people generally dislike change, at least when they’re not in control
of it. But look, the whole of scientific progress relies on modifying or even
scrapping theories when new data comes along that overrides it. Newton’s
theory of gravity was good enough until Einstein pointed out that it only
went so far.

And it’s not just science this applies to. Take social attitudes. When I was
young, western attitudes to race, sexuality, women were very different
from what they are now. If everyone insisted on sticking with the
prejudices they grew up with, things would change even more slowly than
they do. And not because the idea everyone first thought of was
unassailably right. The reason society’s outlook has changed is not only
because the younger generation takes a more egalitarian view, but because
many older people also adjusted their thinking as they went along. They
were persuaded by the arguments they heard and the attitudes they
witnessed and the people they met, and were broad-minded enough to
recognise that their old ways of thinking were out of date. Shame even
more of them didn’t join in.
Social attitudes change very gradually. And unless things are going at such
a slow rate you hardly notice your ideas changing, most people tend not to
change their minds once they’re set. I’m not just talking about long-term
attitudes, but about supporting more immediate arguments. Once you’ve
decided that you definitely need to move house, or launch this product
line, or set up a local women’s football team, or become vegan, or drop
your prices, it’s easy to fix that belief in your mind. You may have
considered it closely when you were still deciding, but now you close off
your thinking. It’s a done deal. Time to stop thinking, lock down your
decision and get on with it.

Um … who said you have to stop thinking just because you’re doing?
These kinds of ideas shouldn’t be set in stone. That makes no sense. If
new information comes along, why wouldn’t you reconsider – and perhaps
revise – your view? People used to think smoking was good for you,
especially if your lungs were bad (which they very possibly were if you
smoked). Then scientists produced new information to show that actually
smoking was very unhealthy. Do you think existing smokers should have
ignored this new information? Of course you don’t.

You decide to move house. Now suppose you take a big financial hit, or
your adult son wants to move back in with you, or the housing market
changes unexpectedly. It only makes sense to reconsider your decision.
You might stick with it or you might not, but you need to be open to
change. So never be sure of anything – or at least only until new
information comes along. Then double-check whether your view is still
valid.
WHO SAID YOU HAVE TO STOP THINKING
JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE DOING?
 RULE 100
Opinions aren’t facts

I know I said in the introduction to this section that there’s no place for
emotion in critical thinking. However I should point out that a lot of
‘rational’ arguments are in fact emotional and not rational at all. You need
to be able to identify them, whether it’s your own view or someone else’s.

Here in the UK, the argument over whether we should be part of the
European Union has been raging for about half a century. At any stage –
do we join, do we leave, do we sign this or that treaty – people on both
sides of the debate put forward their arguments passionately. You would
have thought, wouldn’t you, that by now the country would have worked
out which was the right answer. Where the weight of argument fell. ...
 THESE ARE THE RULES

This collection of Rules of Thinking joins the other titles in

the series in setting out guidelines for various aspects of our
lives. These are not commandments, no one is telling you
that you must live this way. They are simply observations
about the habits, attitudes and practices that happier, more
successful people live by. So it follows that, if we adopt
them ourselves, we too will be happier and more
successful. They’re not compulsory, but why wouldn’t you
want to join in?
How to use the Rules

It can be a bit daunting to read a book with 100 Rules for a happier more
successful life. I mean, where do you start? You’ll probably find you
follow a few of them already, but how can you be expected to learn
dozens of new Rules all at once and start putting them all into practice?
Don’t panic, you don’t have to. Remember, you don’t have to do anything
– you’re doing this because you want to. Let’s keep it at a manageable
level so you go on wanting to.

You can go about this any way you like, but if you want advice, here’s
what I recommend. Go through the book and pick out three or four Rules
that you feel would make a big difference to you, or that jumped out at
you when you first read them, or that seem like a good ...
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