You read, reflect, decide, create. Every day. But the system underneath — how you notice thoughts, evaluate beliefs, update assumptions, and turn insight into action — was never deliberately constructed. It just happened to you.
You have the same insight three times because you never captured it in a form you can build on. You hold contradictory beliefs you've never surfaced. You know what you should do but can't bridge the gap between knowing and doing.
The real cost isn't the occasional bad decision. It's the compound interest you're not earning on your own thinking. Every insight that evaporates, every pattern you re-discover instead of building on, every belief you never examine — that's cognitive debt accumulating silently.
And the frustrating part: you sense this. You know your thinking could be sharper, more systematic, more cumulative. But nobody teaches the infrastructure layer. Schools teach subjects. Self-help teaches motivation. Neither teaches you how to build the machinery of thought itself.
Jay West — I lead a DevOps team at a publicly traded national retailer. My day job is making systems work: reliable, composable, self-correcting.
A few years ago I started applying the same engineering principles to my own thinking. Not productivity hacks or journaling prompts — actual infrastructure. Atomic primitives for perception, externalization, schema design, behavioral automation. The same patterns that make distributed systems reliable, applied to cognition.
The results were striking. A small team performing like a much larger one. Decisions that stuck. Knowledge that compounded instead of evaporating. Not because anyone got smarter — because the infrastructure underneath got better.
How to Think is the curriculum I wish had existed. Every lesson is one primitive, tested in practice, sequenced so each builds on the last.
Learn to notice and externalize your own thoughts. This is the foundation — you can't build on what you can't observe.
Each lesson teaches exactly one idea. Practice it. Integrate it. Then the next primitive builds on that foundation.
As primitives accumulate, your cognitive infrastructure becomes self-reinforcing. Clear thinking produces better decisions which produce better systems which produce clearer thinking.
You keep having the same realizations. You keep losing insights to the void between having them and doing something with them. The gap between what you know and what you do stays wide. Not because you lack discipline — because you lack the structural layer that makes knowledge actionable and cumulative.
Thoughts become objects you can examine, not voices you obey. Beliefs become testable claims, not invisible assumptions. Knowledge compounds across weeks, months, years — instead of resetting every morning.
You stop spinning on the same problems. You start building on your own prior work. The gap between knowing and doing closes — not through willpower, but through better cognitive architecture.
Lesson 1 takes five minutes. It teaches the single most important primitive in the entire curriculum.