Abstract Thinking

One of the most wonderful skills a human can have is abstract thinking. I think it is a skill you can learn, however, some technical interest can be very helpful.

Having an idea and your brain starts immediately to break down the whole process into small pieces and steps. That can be scary and if you are lucky you will see that you can save a lot of time when you don’t go that way. For me it is cooking. All the steps necessary to get a nice eatable meal on the table, spoil the whole fun and therefore I prefer other sources to get food.

In business, we can have plenty of ideas about how to use email marketing, which emails to send out in which order and to who. I already see the flow of action set up, leading to a flow chart. This process would already include the setting for the Double Optin, the details about the OptOut feature, tags we will apply to customers, and which link we will make trackable. As you can see I don’t really care about the content. One part I have delegated.

One very useful language to express abstract thinking is UML, Unified Modeling Language. It can be very powerful. It helps me to trace every possible occurring case in a software application, let it be a website or just the email marketing followup sequences. Maybe you can even claim it to be the protocol of this application. It helps to understand the what if case.

I also like to see abstract thinking in the world of object oriented programming. This is almost seeing the world through different glasses. You work with classes, instances and getter and setter functions. At least that’s what I have done during my time with Java.

I am not saying that it makes the world easier, but I think it gives you a different (sometimes better) view of the world around you and it put actions and objects in a different relation to eachother. My bike is just another instance of the object bike, nothing more or less. What we human do with it doesn’t matter to world of objects.

I am definitely not the guru in abstract thinking. Just sometimes I discover myself dreaming in an abstract way .. or is it just my way? ;o)

It is all relative.