Helpful Heuristics Handbook

As set out in the foreword’s in other publications in Matthew’s ‘Dream Enabler’ series, for as long as we can remember, the obsessive study of great thinkers has been our favourite pastime.

One aspect of this has been our evolving approach to ‘common placing’ – that is, the constant collection and ordering of the ideas of others. Common placing has evolved, for us, from simply hoarding as many of our favourite books as possible, to cataloguing separately the key extracts, re-cataloguing extracts into disciplines and themes and then to summarising the extracts into a centralised, personal ‘bible’ loosely titled ‘brain food’.

This release, the ‘Helpful Heuristics Handbook’ sets out some of the content that indirectly inspired us to create other books in The Dream Enabler series. More broadly the heuristics featured here have also had an evolving and increasingly important place in our day to day thinking and decision making. As heuristics are designed to be ‘rules of thumb’ or short cuts to making reliably useful decisions quickly – without any focus on the underlying science; this handbook adopts the same approach.

In relation to any heuristics in this handbook that are not self-explanatory – or indeed that you would like more information or context about – please contact us.

The other alternative of course is to investigate yourself via that ubiquitous heuristic tool (not actually otherwise mentioned in this book); namely leveraging Dr Google. Or as we were gently reminded recently: ‘LMGTFY’ is a thing; acknowledging the irony that you may need to Google this…