9 Critical Thinking Strategies That Lifelong Learners Need To Know

If you’re looking for critical thinking strategies to help yourself or others, congratulations. Learning to think better is one of the best ways to help ourselves improve the world. And now that you’re here, I’m going to treat you to an epic lesson in critical thinking techniques that can: Improve your performance at school or work Help you make better decisions Assist in avoiding mistakes that crush others Improve profits as an entrepreneur Using creative thinking and critical processes of understanding that improve your memory This final benefit is especially important if you find yourself forgetting information. And on this page you’ll even learn more about how to remember the steps involved in thinking more critically.  A Brief History Of Critical Thinking Strategies Every culture has developed tools for thinking better. Let’s list just a few classic examples: Asia: Tao Te Ching and The Art of War India: Panchadasi and the Advaita Vedanta tradition Greek: Plato and the Socratic Method Russia: Triz Britain: Analytic philosophy France and Germany: Continental philosophy and Nietzsche’s “genealogy” Spain, Italy, and other parts of Europe: Llullism and techniques like ars combinatoria This final tradition is particularly interesting because it was key to the development of formal logic and ideas that eventually made modern computing possible. Critical thinking is always evolving and some of the newest applications are involved in everything from new political initiatives to quantum computing and innovations in space travel. 9 Types Of Critical Thinking That Help Lifelong Learners Outperform Their Competition Let’s face it. The reason we learn critical thinking is not just so we can improve the world. It’s so we can compete in the race to improve the world.  That means that critical thinking cannot stand on its own. It has to also include analytical thinking and creative thinking.  That’s why we have to go beyond the typical stuff you read online about asking: Who What Where When Why How Don’t get me wrong. Those are important questions to ask. But let’s dive in and understand four of the biggest and best categories of critical thinking: 1. First Principles Thinking  This kind of thinking breaks a problem down to its basic parts and uses them to explore new paths. It tends to keep a goal in mind at each step. To use this kind of thinking, you also want to:  Identify core assumptions Break the problem down into parts Create new processes towards a clearly defined goal Example: We know that memory requires at least some level of repetition. But how can we reduce that amount? Looking at our core assumptions, we can break the problem down into parts and notice that primacy and recency effect allow us to create a tool. The new process is the Memory Palace technique, something that every memory competitor and many students use and refine year after year, usually by repeating this same critical thinking strategy. 2. Blank Slate Thinking This technique starts with first principles, but you go further. You ask: What would this look like completely from scratch?  Example: Imagine you’re trying to solve poverty in an inner city. Even though it won’t be possible to start the city over, by thinking about what the area looked like before it was inhabited, you can imagine a new history and try to figure out how greater fairness might have been achieved.  3. Synergistic Thinking Synergy is about combining things together that don’t normally go together. As a way of stimulating more critical thinking, you would get a bunch of items together and keep asking, Why don’t these items go together? Then dream up ways they could be combined as a critical thinking exercise. Example: Imagine scissors and a banana or a kite and vase. Ask: Why don’t these items go together?