how to think on paper like the 1% elite

Thinking ain’t easy.

Which is why most people don’t actually do it.

And yet your decisive advantage as a human over every other human is your ability to think.

The quality, depth, and quantity of your thoughts is the single greatest predictor of what your life becomes.

Not your intelligence. Not your network. Not your circumstances.

Your thinking.

The problem is nobody ever taught us how to think.

Sure, we had classes that required thinking, but I don’t know about you, but nobody ever sat me down and taught me a formalized process for extracting my best thoughts.

A “here’s exactly what you do and in what order” blueprint.

Thinking itself was just kind of a byproduct, but not the point.

And it shows.

Most people aren’t terribly sharp thinkers.

But this is actually a good thing for us, because it’s a clear opportunity for getting ahead in business and in life.

So here’s a ten-step process that will teach you how to think on paper like the 1% elite.

1. Brain Dump

First question: why paper?

Okay, so it doesn’t actually have to be paper.

It could be a screen, a whiteboard, some dirt in a field, or a napkin. The only thing that really matters is that you have to do your thinking outside your head.

Here’s why:

I don’t know about you, but my brain is a Chuck-E-Cheese stuffed beyond capacity with sugar-fueled toddlers.

My thoughts are chaotic, sporadic, unpredictable.

They skitter across the surface of my mind like dragonflys on a pond, but never plunge beneath the surface to go deep.

This is what I call Lily Pad Thinking.

My mind, in its natural state, is always operating on the surface level. It seems incapable, on its own, of swimming to the bottom of the pond where the pearls actually live.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s just biology.

Your monkey-mind doesn’t want to think deeply.

It just wants to keep you alive while burning as little energy as possible.

And the thing is, your brain consumes over 50% of your body’s energy despite only accounting for 5% of your mass.

Deep thinking is expensive work and your brain is lazy.

So when you want to do some deep thinking, the first thing you’ve got to do is go around your brain by getting outside of it… which we do by creating something called a Second Brain.

That sounds fancy, but it’s actually pretty simple.

Just take a couple minutes and braindump everything floating through your conscious mind onto the page.

This is a stream of consciousness flow designed to clear the pipes and lay the tracks for what comes next.

2. Define the Problem

Put another way: a problem well defined is half-solved.

Thinking requires an objective.

What are you actually here to think about?

Usually it’s a problem you want to solve, but it doesn’t have to be.

It could be an idea worth exploring, a belief you’ve never examined closely enough to have an actual opinion on.

The point is that without a clear problem statement, you’ll end up frustrated and directionless within ten minutes.

Here’s what most people miss…

Questions are the debugging protocol of the mind.

Your brain is the most sophisticated answer-generating machine we know of. It will solve almost anything you throw at it. But it can’t generate answers to questions you haven’t asked.

Until you ask the question, it’ll just sit there spinning, producing noise instead of signal.

Shae Gilgeous-Alexander was asked recently whether he knew exactly what he was going to do when taking a game-winning shot.

His answer is one for the ages:

“I have the answers, but I need to know the question first.”

That’s not a basketball insight. That’s the whole thinking game in a nutshell.

Define the problem precisely. Ask the question clearly.

Then step back and let the most powerful answer-generating machine in the known universe do its job.

​Watch this to learn more about harnessing the most powerful answer-generating machine in the world.​

3. Find the Why

Okay, so here’s something I’ve found to be true more often than not: The problem you’ve sat down to think about probably isn’t really a problem.

It’s a symptom.

The actual problem is likely operating on a higher level you don’t even realize, which is why we’re going to steal a page from the Japanese Lean Engineers that took Toyota to the top of the automotive industry back in the ‘80s and use a technique called The Five Whys.

It’s a pretty simple technique: You just keep asking why over and over again until you get to the bedrock of the problem.

Here’s how I used this technique just a couple weeks ago:

I was scheduled to give a keynote and on that morning I noticed I was pretty nervous.

The thing is, I’m always nervous before a keynote. It doesn’t matter how many hours I put into rehearsal or how many stages I’ve been on in the past, I’m always nervous.

And so I got to thinking… Why is that?

Why am I nervous? Because I care about making this valuable for the audience.

Why does that matter? Because if it isn’t valuable, they’ll think less of me.

Why does that matter? Because it would confirm a fear I’ve carried since I was a boy.

Which is? That I’m not good enough.

And why do you believe that?

Now we’re somewhere real.

The problem worth solving is almost never the surface level symptom.

The Five Whys gets you to the one underneath it, so it’s at this stage we get out the shovel and go digging.

4. Scan for Solutions

The mistake most people make here is believing there’s one best solution.

Life is too complex for that to be true. There’s almost always a spectrum of approaches that will get you to roughly the same place.

Your job is to explore as many as possible before committing.

Get outside the box. Throw spaghetti at the wall. Go crazy.

Ask yourself:

• If I knew I couldn’t fail, what would I do?
• How would I approach this if I had ten times the resources?
• Who do I know that’s navigated something similar?

Creativity is the ability to connect two or more ideas in new and useful ways.

The key here is to give yourself as much raw material to play with as possible.

But eventually you will probably start circling around one solution that seems more attractive than all the rest.

Once this starts happening, it’s time to move to the next step.

5. Find a Better Move

Chess grandmasters aren’t better than amateurs because they analyze more positions.

They’re better because they analyze the right ones and they’re rigorous about challenging their own assumptions.

A grandmaster finds a strong move and then, before committing, asks one more question:

Is there an even better move here?

Surprisingly, in life, it doesn’t take very long to find a good move in most situations.

The problem is, that’s where most people stop. With just a good move.

A brilliant move, on the other hand, almost always lives one or two layers deeper than where most people quit looking.

This is why good is the enemy of great.

So before just blindly accepting your “good” answer… ask one last time:

What am I not seeing?

You’ll often be surprised just how quickly something brutally obvious jumps out at ya.

​Watch this to learn the 5 mental models I stole from chess to think like a strategic genius.​

6. Calculate to the Win

In chess there are two ways to evaluate a position… with intuition or with concrete calculation.

Intuition is deployed when you understand the patterns of a position well enough to make a generally sound decision.

Concrete calculation, on the other hand, is deployed in pivotal moments where a precise move is required to avert disaster.

In concrete calculation you trace every contingency forward until you can clearly see the win condition.

If you sacrifice the queen, they recapture with the rook, then you fork the rook and king with your knight. Now the king has only two options, but you keep following both lines all the way to checkmate.

Most people only calculate to the second order consequence before stopping. If I do this, then THAT will happen.

But they miss the third, fourth, and fifth order consequences, which is where the real consequences of a decision play out.

The key here is to keep asking: And then what will happen?

Do this for as far as you can calculate, but know this…

You’ll often miss something earlier in the line that completely nullifies everything that came after.

That’s okay, because as Eisenhower said:

You might be wrong somewhere in your sequence of thought, but the point isn’t to be flawless… the point is to have explored the possibilities.

Because this is ultimately what leads to true, expansive thinking.

7. Create an Analogy

Humans are pattern recognition machines.

Your ability to look at something and think “this thing is like that other thing” is one of the most powerful cognitive tools in your arsenal.

Every mental model you carry is an analogy. A hook on which you can hang a new idea using the structure of a familiar one.

Not only does this save enormous cognitive energy, but it makes retrieving that information in the future way easier.

The question to ask at this stage: How is this problem/idea/thing like something more familiar?

The super-observant amongst you will notice I’ve been abusing this technique all throughout this piece (Chuck-E-Cheeze Brain, Lily Pad Thinking, Chess Grandmasters).

These analogies aren’t just window-dressing. They’re the framework doing its job in real time.

8. Name Your Frame

Part of the thinking process is creating little containers for our ideas that we can then store in the back of our mind for easy retrieval in the future…

Because there would be no greater waste than to spend a couple hours thinking deeply on something, only to forget it a couple weeks later.

So once we put our idea into a container, we need to give it a handle that allows us to carry it with us into the future.

Which is why you need to give the thing you just thought about… a Name.

A name is a powerful thing.

It collapses complexity into something transmissible, memorable, and easily retrievable.

In my experience, ideas without names do not survive in the wild.

This is the difference between calling someone a “shallow thinker” versus calling them a “Lily Pad Thinker”.

Same observation. Completely different staying power.

9. Visualize the Shape

Humans think in both words and images.

So, to make an idea truly stick, ya gotta give it a shape you could sketch on the back of a napkin.

Most solutions, when stripped to their essentials, can be distilled into three to five key concepts.

Put those concepts into a triangle, a circle, a quadrant, a bullseye, a squiggly line, whatever.

Now, because your idea is packaged in a uniquely shaped suitcase along with a handle, you can easily communicate your thinking to other people in the matter of a seconds.

But if you really want your idea to land (and make a massive impact on people), you cannot skip the final step.

10. StorySave

Story is the source code of human experience.

It’s how we make sense of the world and how we move ideas from one mind to another with maximum force.

A framework without a story is a tool nobody picks up.

A framework inside a story is something people remember for years and repeat to people they love.

So, take whatever problem you’ve worked through and ask:

How can I wrap this idea in a story?

If you struggle to tell great stories, watch this (and thank me later).

I promise you, if you do this last step, you will consistently look like the smartest person in the room.

Not necessarily because you ARE the smartest, but because you’ve already done the hard work of thinking deeply e about the idea.

And that right there is what separates the top 1% of thinkers from all the rest.

Stay Hyperfocused, My Friend
Anthony “Drowning in a Sea of Paper-Thoughts” Vicino

P.S. Thinking is hard, but (in business) what’s even harder is knowing which problems are even worth thinking about. That’s exactly what we solve inside the Escape Velocity Accelerator. Check it out here.​

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