The Five-Day Course In Thinking

To be clear, this is a course in thinking. And it’s five days. It should be clear from the title, of course, but I wasn’t quite ready for it.

There are actually three five-day courses. This isn’t really mentioned anywhere, but it’s clear in the table of contents.

The first one is called “Insight Thinking.”

The first set has to do with balancing a glass of water on some bottles using knives – so setting up knives in creative ways on bottles, so they can support a glass of water.

Each day, the problem get tweaked a little. You start with four bottles, then three, and so on. The idea is that you problem solving adapts from how you solved the problem the day before. If you were to get dropped into Day 4, for instance, it would be hard. But since you did days 1-3, you have some understanding of the problem and where the solution should come from.

The second set is called “Sequential Thinking,” and it involves arranging blocks. The third set is called “Strategic Thinking,” and involves some kind of Tetris-style game where you rearrange an “L” shape amidst other shapes.

Honestly, I didn’t do the exercises. I think you’d kind of need to do it with a group, in a workshop or something.

I did like the idea of different types of thinking, but without doing the exercises, I didn’t get everything out of it as I should.

It’s a short book. Big margins, exercises, diagrams, etc.