How does one learn to think? If you get lost, here is a line of thinking map.
“Forget everything you learned,” they told me on the first day of law school. Three years and $150,000 later they erased from my mind all the half-truths I learned from school and my family. They were not teaching law, they acknowledged, they were teaching thinking. As an entrepreneur, you, too, have to relearn everything from scratch. By yourself.
As much as it seemed like a ripoff back in law school, I later realized knowing how to think is the most valuable thing. Period. You can do it yourself, for free, but be ready to painfully rethink everything you know, with a lot of courage. The reason is that by the time you figure out you have to unlearn you are already packed with multiple identities – the child, the student, the spouse, the employee, the citizen, the parent. None of them teach you to be an entrepreneur. Or to see opportunity. They just tell you what is required of you. To see opportunity – for that you have to think yourself. And, just as importantly, rethink and unlearn what you were told in your pre-entrepreneur life.
Get on the right line of thinking
I was riding the New York subway a couple of years ago. Got lost and came out in the wrong place. Same with thoughts – you find out you got on the wrong line of thinking.