The mind is mightier than the sword, but neither can function without sharpening.
Thankfully, most of the battles we fight today take place in our heads.
Sure, we might argue with people, try to convince others or get their attention, but whether it’s our mind against another or a struggle against the self, your ability to think is your most important tool in living a good life.
The only way to maintain and improve this ability is to exercise it every day.
Here are 7 simple but efficient ways to do so.
1. Highlighting
When you read, you process. When you highlight, you filter. Without the filtering, the processing is only half as valuable — especially in today’s information-obese world.
It’s good to reflect on what you read, but if you don’t draw any conclusions, they might never come to you on their own. Highlighting means drawing conclusions, but you’re doing it in a subconscious, semi-automatic way — and that’s why it’s brilliant.
When I read books, I go back through each chapter after I’m done to highlight lines that stood out to me. Sometimes, things jump at me right on the first pass, and I’ll highlight those too. I even highlight online. I use Super Simple Highlighter for Chrome — it allows you to mark text on any page in different colors.
A cool experiment you can run is to print an article twice, read and highlight once, and then do the same thing again 2–3 weeks later. You’ll see your mind filters differently each time, and it’s fun to compare what you thought was important two weeks ago to what you think is important now.
Highlighting will supercharge your reading. Even if you only read for five minutes a day, intuitively marking what feels important will get you more out of those five minutes.
2. Turning Statements Into Questions
“This bagel is too hard” makes for a bad Monday morning. “This bagel is too hard?” That’s a prompt to come up with a new way to make bagels delicious.
The question mark turns the problem into a project. “What could I do to make this bagel softer?” You could dip it in your coffee, re-heat it in the microwave with some water, or make it part of a different, bigger dish. But you’ll never have any of those ideas if you stop at “This bagel is too hard.”
In Choose Yourself, James Altucher wrote: “When you’re a kid, everything has a question mark at the end of it. Only later do they turn into periods. Or even exclamation points. ‘Will I get over this?’ becomes ‘It’s too late’ becomes ‘I can’t get over this!’”
James says he tries to replace every period with a question mark, especially those attached to his own thoughts. Given we have about 30–50 thoughts per minute, you could come up with a lot of questions in just a few minutes per day. Most importantly, you’ll learn to think for yourself.
3. Solving Crossword Puzzles
Whenever I’m home, I watch my dad solve the crossword in the newspaper every morning. He must have done that for almost ten years now. He’ll probably stay sharp as a knife for a long time. Since she effortlessly fills in whatever he doesn’t know, I guess so will my mom.
A 2014 study showed doing the crossword “delayed onset of accelerated memory decline by 2.54 years.” It was beneficial to both healthy people and Alzheimer patients.
There might be something specific about words, their definitions, and how we connect them in our minds, but I can’t imagine other “brain games” like sudoku, kakuro, or solving anagrams will hurt your mental capacity.
Plus, most of them don’t take long to solve. A crossword book costs $5-$10 and might last you a year if you solve one a day. Do more crossword puzzles.
4. Writing
Every item on this list so far relates to words in one way or another. That’s not a coincidence. Writing is the perfect combination of thinking, reflecting, creating, analyzing, theorizing, disproving, and synthesizing ideas, facts, and information.
The only way to write is to curate what you think. Therefore, writing imposes discipline on your thoughts and emotions. I think everyone could use some of that discipline, and that’s why everyone should write.
You don’t have to write in public, and you don’t have to do a lot of it, but please, do more than just send texts and birthday cards. Write in a journal, write on a blog, or write for five minutes a day and then throw it away.
Writing is thinking. The more you write, the faster you’ll think.
5. Advising Others
I love when people ask me for advice not because it makes me feel smart or because I can tell them what to do (though we all do love both of those), but because I get to ask, “How would I approach this problem?”
It’s easy for us to look at other people’s problems objectively and point to a reasonable solution because we’re not involved. The stakes aren’t as high, and we’re not as emotional. Doing so for your own problems is much harder, but it helps to practice with your friends.
When a friend, a coworker, or a fan comes to you with a question, it’s usually also something unrelated to your everyday to-do list — a nice, creative break from your routine. Plus, it’s good to take your mind off your own problems from time to time, if only for a few minutes.
When you can’t do big things for yourself, do small things for others. It’ll keep your mind sharp and your perspective in check.
6. Learning Something Random
When you use a scientifically correct fact to mislead someone, that’s called “a Zohnerism.” How’s that for “random things I learned today?”
Learning is how we create new synapses, which connect neurons, the information highways in our brain. The more and stronger the connections, the faster information can travel. Synapses form clusters, and studying different topics will build new clusters in various parts of your brain.
Think of it like a web of dots: the more dots you add, the larger the web becomes overall, and the better intertwined it will be.
How you learn something random is up to you, and it only takes five minutes a day. You can jump on new Youtube recommendations, scroll through the Today I Learned subreddit, or read a random article, but fun facts are more than just fun — they help you become and stay mentally sharp.
7. Giving Yourself Feedback
Editing is to writing what highlighting is to reading, except better: Rather than just filtering what you’ve taken in, you assess and adjust something you’ve created.
You’re going through your work, line by line, and you tell yourself: “You did a good job here. This, you’ll need to rework.” It’s like being your own coach, and coaching is a crucial part of improving at any craft. Thinking is no different.
You don’t need tangible output to give yourself feedback. You can create a daily schedule and maintain an accountability chart. You can write down ten decisions you made each day and assess them.
Even if you just look at yourself in the mirror while brushing teeth at night and ask, “What’s one thing I’m proud of today?” that’s a good step towards making sure you monitor and improve your decision-making processes.
All You Need To Know
There are a million ways to sharpen your mind, and the truth is making an effort to do so is winning half the battle. As long as you keep asking, “How can I do this in my own, creative way?” you’ll skip no opportunity to improve.
But it’s also easy to let these opportunities slide, to repeat the same day a thousand times, and to let your mind become numb in the process.
Five minutes a day is all it takes to keep this from happening, and we just covered seven ways you could spend them:
- Highlight when you read
- Turn statements into questions
- Solve the crossword each day
- Write
- Think about how to help your friends
- Learn something random
- Give yourself feedback
The world may not yet be a place where all swords remain in their sheaths at all times. The outcome of your life, however, will definitely be determined by what’s in your head rather than what’s in your armory.
Make sure you sharpen the right tools, and all obstacles will become the way.