The Rule of One
That leaves us with one more point on our thinking journey – the destination, the point of the trip in the first place. What does this all come down to? Having a better understanding of where you’ve been and how you got in motion begs the question – Where to? What is the final destination? The remaining number that makes sense for this, you guessed it, The Number One.
Actually, at this point, it shouldn’t be too hard to coalesce your thinking and grind it down to a singular fine point. After all, you’ve taken a mass of Hyper Information and reduced it to 7 supporting points. In looking at those points you were able to deduce, intuit, and extract 3 ideas… or the other way around. In either case the three ideas come from the supporting points (Making the connection is deliberative, critical thinking work).
Go back to your three ideas. Try to visualize them in a different relationship – not as a list but as three sides of a triangle:
As you might remember, three is the minimum number of sides that can define a space. In this case, each side of the triangle represents an aspect of the ONE BIG IDEA that reduces the thinking you’ve been doing to its core. When it comes to the three ideas around the sides of the triangle, each idea has to be different from the other two and each idea encapsulates a single aspect of the thinking you’ve done before.
Welcome to Fast Track Thinking 101! In its simplest form, FFT 101 says that any issue can be reduced to neither more, nor less, than 7 supporting points. Those supporting points serve as the fuel for generating three ideas that simultaneously combine and separate the supporting points and help you see three aspects of the issue with which you’re trying to deal. Once you perceive the relationship of those the three ideas, you will find the BIG IDEA at their center. That’s the briefest overview… but there’s more to talk about.
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