How to be a great thinker

MOST people are getting dumber. Largely because of the smartphone, we’re in an era of declining attention spans, reading skills, numeracy and verbal reasoning. How to buck the trend? I’ve charted seven intellectual habits of the best thinkers.

True, these people exist in a different league from the rest of us. To use an analogy from computing, their high processing power allows them to crunch vast amounts of data from multiple domains. In other words, they have intellectual overcapacity. Still, we can learn from their methods. These can sound obvious, but few people live by them.

Read books. A book is still the best technology to convey the nuanced complexity of the world. That complexity is a check on pure ideology. People who want to simplify the world will prefer online conspiracy theories.