Book Summary of the book Think Straight by Darius Foroux
- You need not let thinking on autopilot affect your productivity. You can get better at controlling your thoughts and decide what you think.

- Truth is what works. You can believe in thoughts and things that support you.
- Thoughts should serve a useful purpose. If they don’t, they’re useless. That’s straight thinking.
- If you don’t tame your thoughts, you might face anger one day, happiness the next and sadness later on. With learning and experience, you can get better at controlling the thoughts.

- It’s better to be aware of your thoughts and decide what you will ignore, and what you will give importance to.
- If you want to have useful thoughts, here’s a rule of thumb: Only think about things you can control. That automatically eliminates about 99% of your thoughts.
- Thinking straight is only focusing on things you can control. Things like your:
- desires
- actions
- words
- intentions
- A useless thought is any thought that is out of your control and without a useful purpose. Do you ever think about the past? That’s the perfect example of a random thought that lacks a purpose, unless you’re reflecting on a past decision or mistake you made.

- The attentional bias states that our perceptions are affected by our thoughts. And naturally, our perceptions determine our actions and decisions, which make up our lives.
- One key way to not overthink in a particular direction is to remove assumptions from your system. If someone does not reply to your email, it does not mean that they don’t care about you. It only means that they didn’t reply to your email. If you want to think straight, you have to discard all assumptions, and only look at facts.

- At some point, you may hit a big wall. You may reach a point at which you want to give up whatever you’re trying to achieve: Writing a book, starting a business, changing your career or leading a group of people. When you hit a wall, you can train your brain to take it as a positive moment. Many a times, taking a break here helps, as you might actually be close to the next stage of development. You can take a moment to rejuvanate, listen to your favorite music, watch your favorite movies, perhaps go out and play. When you get back, you might feel your energy back with you.
- Daily journaling is meant for reflection and learning. If you don’t know what to write about—write your life story. You’ll learn more about yourself with every paragraph you write. It helps:
- uncover your mistakes
- measure your progress
- get your thoughts in order
- Take thinking out of the equation. Improving the quality of your thoughts, automatically improves the quality of your actions.

- It is good to have an imbalance between thoughts and action. Because Action > Thinking. The best way to make sure you act more is to rely on habits.
- We have limited time, and everyone figures that out one day or the other. Once that happens, we start being more conscious of the way we spend our time. Thinking is a double-edged sword. It can help you. But it can also destroy you. The outcome depends on how you use your thoughts.
- On a parting note, we can aim to have effective thoughts. Effective thoughts lead to effective actions. Examples of what effective thoughts would aim towards:
- Making your life better
- Growing your career and business
- New ideas and solving problems
