What is your image of a "smart person"? To be honest, I used to be a bit uncomfortable around people like that.
In meetings, they come up with new ideas one after another. Moreover, they speak in a logical, beautifully organized way.
Meanwhile, I couldn't keep up. The amount of information was so overwhelming that my brain would short-circuit. Even though their logic made sense, my processing couldn't catch up.
Every time I talked to someone like that, I was reminded of how disorganized my own thinking was, and I would get incredibly depressed.
"Talking to smart people is exhausting."
That was my complex for a long time.
But one day, I realized something. Those people don't have abnormal brain processing speeds. They were simply "compressing" information before handling it.
Intelligence isn't about the amount of knowledge. It's the "power to compress."
Once I realized this, my perspective completely changed.
Smart people aren't necessarily faster thinkers; they are just better at compressing information.
They take a vast amount of information, squeeze it down into a small chunk, and then handle it. That's why their heads don't get cluttered, and they can say exactly what needs to be said in a single sentence.
Conversely, people whose heads get cluttered try to hold onto all the raw information without compressing it. That's why they are always overwhelmed and can't get to the point.
Isao Hosoya, author of "Concrete and Abstract," points out that the ability to abstract specific events and summarize them is a thinking weapon unique to humans. In other words, the true nature of "smartness" is not the amount of knowledge you cram in, but how well you can compress it.
Intelligence isn't innate. It's a compression technique. Academic background doesn't matter. Even people who haven't gone to university are called smart if they do this naturally.
From here, I will write down the methods I actually became able to do, in order.
① First, set a hypothesis or conclusion, even if it's just "tentative"
This is the starting point of compression techniques, and it accounts for 90% of it.
The biggest cause of a cluttered mind is starting to think without deciding on a conclusion.
Because you try to find an answer as a result of thinking about various things, you wander in a sea of information. You pick up everything, thinking "this might be related" or "that might be important," and you can't carry it all.
Smart people do the opposite. They set a tentative answer before thinking.
"Maybe this is the answer."
They just put this hypothesis down first. Then, they verify if that hypothesis is correct.
This is a way of thinking called "Hypothesis Thinking."
Kazunari Uchida, formerly of Boston Consulting Group, states in his book "Hypothesis Thinking" that capable people don't think after gathering all the information, but rather make a guess at the answer at the stage of limited information and work backward from there.
This is where the "amount of knowledge" talk from earlier comes in.
Having a lot of knowledge isn't for bragging about being a know-it-all. It's to be able to produce hypotheses and conclusions faster. The more "drawers" you have, the higher the accuracy and speed of your "it's probably this" guesses.
The important thing is that it doesn't have to be right. If the hypothesis is wrong, you can just fix it. It's fine if it's rough; just put a tentative conclusion first. Just by getting into this habit, the speed of your thinking will change completely.
Specific training is simple. Whether in a meeting or watching the news, try saying (or writing) your own tentative answer first: "To put it simply, it's probably something like this." Just by making this a habit, an axis is formed in your head, and information stops scattering.
② Abstract: Lift the concrete into a concept
Once you've set a hypothesis, the next step is how to compress the information.
Abstraction means lifting concrete events into a higher-level "concept"... which sounds difficult, but it basically means "finding commonalities among scattered events and summarizing them in one word."
For example:
"Sales dropped at Store A, Store B, and Store C on rainy days."
This is a concrete fact. If you compress this, it becomes:
"Weather affects sales."
Three facts were compressed into one concept.
Actually, people whose catchphrases are "I don't know what you're saying" or "What do you mean, in short?" or those who are bad at reading long texts are often bad at this abstraction. They try to receive information raw and get overwhelmed because they can't process it.
Training is just this:
"What is this story about, in short?"
When you see the news, listen to people talk, or read a book. Just by making this question a habit, your abstraction muscles will grow.
③ Return to concrete: Decompress what you compressed
This is the interesting part: compression techniques aren't just about "summarizing."
Think of it like a ZIP file on a computer.
For storing things in your own head, abstracting and compressing them makes your thinking compact and very easy to handle. It doesn't take up capacity.
But when you give it to someone else, you have to decompress it.
Because if you hand it over while it's still compressed, the other person can't open it.
If you just say "Weather affects sales," the other person will think "So?" This is just handing over a compressed file.
So, you return it to concrete (decompress) according to the other person.
"Weather affects sales. For example, since customer visits drop by 20% on rainy days, it's better to reduce food preparation on those days."
Grasp with abstraction, communicate with concrete. People who can freely do this compression and decompression are the ones who are truly smart.
The reason smart people's explanations are easy to understand is that they properly decompress difficult stories back into familiar concrete examples. Conversely, people who are smart but can't get their point across are handing things over while still compressed.
④ Go back and forth between induction and deduction
From here, it's a bit of a high-level talk. But the content is simple, so don't worry.
It's just that the way of "going back and forth between abstract and concrete" we've discussed so far has a name.
Induction is finding commonalities from multiple concrete examples and making them into a rule.
The earlier "Store A, B, and C dropped due to rain → Weather affects sales" is exactly induction. Drawing a rule from many facts. This is the direction of compression.
Deduction is the opposite. Applying an existing rule to the concrete situation in front of you.
"Weather affects sales. So, since rain is forecast for tomorrow, let's take measures today" is deduction. Deriving the next move from a rule. This is the direction of decompression.
Smart people unconsciously go back and forth between induction and deduction.
When facts gather, they compress them into a rule with induction. When they encounter a new situation, they decompress and apply that rule with deduction.
This back-and-forth is what it means to "go between the abstract and the concrete." By training this, you will naturally become able to use thinking compression techniques.
At first, you won't be able to do it without consciously thinking, "Now I'm inducing" or "Now I'm deducing." But just like a bicycle, it will start to turn on its own as you repeat it.
You aren't unintelligent. You just haven't been taught how to train your brain.
For a long time, I thought I was unintelligent.
Every time I talked to a smart person, I got depressed and gave up, thinking "I can't go to that side."
But I was wrong.
Smart people are just people who train their brains on a daily basis. Setting hypotheses, abstracting, returning to concrete, and rotating induction and deduction. Because they do this every day, their brain muscles are strong.
That's all it is.
And we weren't taught this brain training method in school. We learned multiplication tables and kanji, but no one taught us "how to compress thinking." That's why our muscles just haven't grown. It's not at all that our brains are poorly made.
You can start muscle training today. It's just like doing push-ups.
Set a hypothesis first, even if it's just tentative. Please try just that starting from today's meeting.
Brain muscles can grow at any age. So, it's going to be okay.
On this account, I verbalize things daily under the theme of 1mm growth per day. Following is an encouragement.
**Reference Books
"Concrete and Abstract" Isao Hosoya / dZERO
"Hypothesis Thinking" Kazunari Uchida / Toyo Keizai Inc.**
