If we drink from the steam of polluted thoughts, we can quickly disempower ourselves, put ourselves in a state of anxiety, and lose our motivation and drive.

Your self-image is a key to improving your thinking skills. If you want to improve your thinking skills, one of the most important first steps is to think of yourself as a thinker.

This is a collection of thinking quotes and quotes on thinking. It includes a list of top 10 thinking quotes, as well as thinking quotes that have stood the test of time.

Learn about Kahler’s drivers and six scripts that create limiting loops. What is it that occurs hundreds of times a day that could reinforce a limiting script … that we play over and over again, throughout a lifetime? It’s our thought patterns.

Learn how to focus with skill. Focus is the key to finishing what you start. It’s also the key to getting results from the time you already spend.

You can have a beautiful mind. In fact, like a fine wine, your mind can get better with age. According to Edward de Bono, “there is very much more that you can do to make your mind more beautiful.”

“Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.”– Napoleon Bonaparte

If you have five minutes to think about something, you actually have a lot.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” — Dr. Seuss

I promised my readers to share ways to read faster. I originally posted this on my work blog, but now I’m sharing it here with a wider audience.

“Persuasion is often more effectual than force.” — Aesop

If you hear something multiple times is it true? … Do you find yourself believing something that originally you didn’t believe because you didn’t trust the source?

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” — Ayn Rand

Here’s a little recipe that will help change your game. We’re all creatures of habit and it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. How do you break out of a thought pattern or change how you see things?

“An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgments simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.” — Edward de Bono

Would life be better if somebody could tell us the right thing to do at all possible times?

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” — Albert Einstein

Jotting down one-liner thoughts is a simple way to turn insight into action. I come across “ah-has” all the time, and I take the extra step to write them down in a sticky way. For example, while strolling through the blogosphere I came across a nice little pearl of wisdom on The Cranky Middle Manager Show:

“For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.” — Stuart Chase

Where do your beliefs come from? Maybe some come from advertisers. Maybe some come from authority figures. Maybe some are from your parents. Maybe some are from your own personal experience.

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” — Maria Robinson

When you have to think your way through things, you wear yourself out. This is why routines and going into automatic pilot serve you. You don’t have to think your way through the basics and you can focus your thinking on higher level things up the stack.

Every now and then I come across a metaphor that really sticks and helps me think differently about something I see every day. The metaphor helps me look at these situations with a new lens, and, as a result, think, feel, and act more effectively.

I’ve heard of several ways to think about our thinking. I’ve heard of the left-brain and right-brain. I’ve heard of the emotional side and the rational side. This time, the metaphor is the Elephant and the Rider.

“Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.” — Malcolm S. Forbes

On our team at Microsoft, things move fast and we can’t afford to get stuck. Being blocked on something is one thing, but feeling stuck is another.

When you feel stuck, it’s easy for your thought patterns to create a spiral down. This is ineffective and it can be paralyzing. The good news is, you can break the thought patterns, by asking yourself a different set of questions.

Here are some of the questions we regularly use:

“Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.” — Kevin Arnold

Dementia means “deprived of mind,” and Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia. If you know the impact that dementia and Alzheimer’s has on somebody’s life, as well as their family, you know it’s a terrible thing. If you’ve seen the movie, The Notebook, you have an idea of what it’s all about.

Aside from feeling more alive, I always feel sharper when I exercise regularly. It turns out that there’s science behind this, and one of the most dramatic ways to get smarter is to exercise.

Dr. John Medina, author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and Schoolsays that aerobic exercise is one of the best ways to boost your brain. The minimum you need for an extreme benefit is 20 minutes, twice a week. The data behind his story is amazing.

There are more books coming out every year than I can read in a lifetime. One of the ways I filter for great books is, I ask the most effective people I know, which books had a significant impact on how they think, feel, or act. I like to find the books that really made a difference, not just in theory, but in practice.

Recently, I reached out to several Microsoft leaders, past and present, and up and down the ranks. The beauty of Microsoft is the extremely high concentration of smart people and I like to leverage the collective brain. In this case, I posed a simple question to find out which business books actually made a difference:

I’ve long been a fan of writing things down to free myself up. A while back, a friend of mine got me in the habit of carrying a little yellow sticky pad everywhere I go. It lets me jot things down, wherever I go, so I never have to keep things buzzing around in my head.