Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free PDF Page A

observing Holmes in action, we will become better at observing our own minds. “How the deuce did he know that I had come from Afghanistan?” Watson asks Stamford, the man who has introduced him to Holmes for the first time.
    Stamford smiles enigmatically in response. “That’s just his little peculiarity,” he tells Watson. “A good many people have wanted to know how he finds things out.”
    That answer only piques Watson’s curiosity further. It’s a curiosity that can only be satisfied over the course of long and detailed observation—which he promptly undertakes.
    To Sherlock Holmes, the world has become by default a pink elephant world. It’s a world where every single input is examined with the same care and healthy skepticism as the most absurd of animals. And by the end of this book, if you ask yourself the simple question, What would Sherlock Holmes do and think in this situation? you will find that your own world is on its way to being one, too. That thoughts that you never before realized existed are being stopped and questioned before being allowed to infiltrate your mind. That those same thoughts, properly filtered, can no longer slyly influence your behavior without your knowledge.
    And just like a muscle that you never knew you had—one that suddenly begins to ache, then develop and bulk up as you begin to use it more and more in a new series of exercises—with practice your mind will see that the constant observation and never-ending scrutiny will become easier. (In fact, as you’ll learn later in the book, it really is like a muscle.) It will become, as it is to Sherlock Holmes, second nature. You will begin to intuit, to deduce, to think as a matter of course, and you will find that you no longer have to give it much conscious effort.
    Don’t for a second think it’s not doable. Holmes may be fictional, but Joseph Bell was very real. So, too, was Conan Doyle (and George Edalji wasn’t the only beneficiary of his approach; Sir Arthur also worked to overturn the convictions of the falsely imprisoned Oscar Slater).
    And maybe Sherlock Holmes so captures our minds for the very reason that he makes it seem possible, effortless even, to think in a way that would bring the average person to exhaustion. He makes the most rigorous scientific approach to thinking seem attainable. Not for nothing does Watson always exclaim, after Holmes gives him an explanation of his methods, that the thing couldn’t have been any clearer. Unlike Watson, though, we can learn to see the clarity before the fact.
    The Two Ms: Mindfulness and Motivation
    It won’t be easy. As Holmes reminds us, “Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain thehighest possible perfection in it.” But it’s also more than mere fancy. In essence, it comes down to one simple formula: to move from a System Watson– to a System Holmes–governed thinking takes mindfulness plus motivation. (That, and a lot of practice.) Mindfulness, in the sense of constant presence of mind, the attentiveness and hereness that is so essential for real, active observation of the world. Motivation, in the sense of active engagement and desire.
    When we do such decidedly unremarkable things as misplacing our keys or losing our glasses only to find them on our head, System Watson is to blame: we go on a sort of autopilot and don’t note our actions as we make them. It’s why we often forget what we were doing if we’re interrupted, why we stand in the middle of the kitchen wondering why we’ve entered it. System Holmes offers the type of retracing of steps that requires attentive recall, so that we break the autopilot and instead remember just where and why we did what we did. We aren’t motivated or mindful all the time, and mostly it doesn’t matter. We do things mindlessly to conserve our resources for something more