Ask HN: How to train yourself to become a quick thinker?

The two main components to being a quick thinker are not what you think.

The first one is a competitive spirit. If you have ever played any sports and you have felt the desire to win, this will get you half way to thinking quickly. Train yourself to be able to look at the problem and give up many different possibilities rather than just the smoking gun fix. Sometimes in a enterprise environment fixing the smoking gun is the most inconvenient. Being under pressure and using the competitive spirit can be one of the most satisfying jobs.

The second one is know your environment. You have to know your environment from top to bottom and everything in between. You have to be able to visualize the problem from inside and out in order to narrow the problem down to its core. The first thing you do at a new job is to find the documentation for everything and study it.

This vision of the environment could come from many different crafts whether it is a Network Engineer, Software Developer, DBA, or Systems Engineer. But you have to be in a position of knowledge about the entire infrastructure.

In order to recall knowledge/experiences from memory quickly you have to be an expert pattern matcher. Sometimes its a new problem that has never been discovered or documented but very rarely. Search google for the main topic and if you find a gazillion answers you know its a common problem. If you cant find anything you know someone has changed something or broke something and is more than likely a misconfiguration. How do you gain the knowledge in the first place? Reading. Reading books and blogs and stack overflow and everything you can get your hands on. You wont retain all the knowledge but you will remember that you found a fix for it at one time or another and can search for it again quickly.

- Thinking in strict sense is slow by nature. The only way to make it faster is to avoid it, that is to simply know the stuff. The more you know, the faster you think, that is do what looks like thinking.

- Emotions may disrupt any expert; you'll forget what is 3 by 5. There's a comment here already that mentions it, and I second it, because I was that guy. One of best decisions in my life was going to a shrink :)

- There's a structured approach to problem solving; formulate the problem (current state), the goal (the desired state), list alternatives, weigh them, choose. This may sound obvious, but a lot of otherwise smart people do not do this and simply pick the first idea that pops to their minds. Changing to structured problem solving helps immensely; it's actually used as a therapy.

- Some high-level heuristics may help: six thinking hats, TRIZ (although this one doesn't think it's a heuristic), morphological analysis, and so on. Their primary purpose is exactly that: quickly generate many different ideas and views and make sure to cover as many important bases as possible. Each has a special flavor; TRIZ, for example, aims for elegant minimalist solutions.

- Every blessing has a curse. I once read "Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team" (it was made into the "Munich" movie) and there was an episode when a Soviet special agent got killed primarily because he was a trained special agent who is always ready and aware of what's going on. Quick thinking looks very useful, but there will be situations when it isn't.