How to enhance Your Analytical Skills
3 Ways To Master Analytical Thinking Without Breaking A Sweat
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the ability to think analytically is an
important skill both in business and in
life having the skill will pay dividends
in many areas including job performance
it may even help bring a little bit of
clarity into some of life's more
important decisions hi I'm Sean John
Thompson and today I'm going to teach
you how to think analytically before we
dive any deeper let me define what I
mean by analytical thinking analytical
thinking is the simplifying of complex
ideas tasks or problems in other words
it's taking something complex and
distilling it down to its essence or its
most simple form today I'm going to
teach you a three step process that will
help you improve your analytical
thinking ability I'm going to show you
this three-step process by way of
solving a problem together
there's a famous Google interview
question that I think showcases the
analytical thinking process perfectly
the question is designed to challenge
and make you think beyond the first
answer that pops in your head so the
interview question is this how many
piano tuners are there in New York City
hmm an interesting and somewhat strange
question and definitely one that makes
you think keep in mind as we try to
answer this question we're not looking
for perfection but rather to simplify a
complex problem and come up with an
approximate or estimated solution so how
does one go about determining how many
piano tuners there are in New York City
well let's start with step one in the
analytical thinking process the first
step in the analytical thinking process
is to take a step back and assess the
question from a wider vantage point this
allows us to see the question from
multiple angles and try to think of the
best way to approach it
so once we've taken a step back what is
the big picture what are we trying to
solve for here well the big question in
this case is how many piano tuners there
are in New York City that is our big
picture so New York City is where we
should start so starting with New York
City we should look at the population
first because it's likely that the piano
tuner lives in the city itself so let's
start there so I did a bit of research
and I
found that there are approximately eight
and a half million people that live in
New York City and likely those piano
tuners are part of that eight and half
million
so that eight and a half million
population is our big picture or the
starting point that brings us to step
two step two is to think in layers so we
know that the piano tuner is likely part
of that big picture population of eight
and a half million so a piano tuner
needs to have a piano Institute and it's
likely that not every single one of
those eight and a half million people in
our big picture owned a piano it's
probably more like there's one per
household so what do we need to think
about so we need to estimate a couple of
things one is the number of households
within New York City and two is the
number of households that we determine
how many of them own a piano so those
are our two initial layers below the big
picture so how do we go about solving
for this well that brings us to step
three which is to process and then
synthesize so as we start to process
let's think logically for a minute think
about your personal experience how many
of your friends or maybe your family
owned a piano I'm gonna venture a guess
and say one out of every five or twenty
percent of households owned a piano we
need to first determine how many
households there are in New York City so
if we take our eight and a half million
which is our big picture and we said
that the average household in New York
City is made up of three people we can
take our eight and a half million
divided by three to get the number of
households in New York City so in this
case eight and a half million divided by
three is 2.8 million households so
that's the number of households in New
York City and if you recall we guessed
that roughly twenty percent or one in
five on a piano so if we do 2.8 times by
that 20 percent we roughly get that
there are five hundred and sixty-six
thousand pianos in New York City okay
so backing up again we know that out of
eight and a half million people there
are roughly 2.8 million households and
up
that we estimated the 20% on piano so
that got us to the number of pianos in
New York City which is five hundred and
sixty six thousand that is the
population available to our piano tuners
to tune okay so what's next well it's
highly unlikely that every single one of
those five hundred and sixty-six
thousand pianos needs to be tuned every
single year so it's some subset of that
number that we need to think about in
order to guess how many pianos actually
need to be tuned every year so I'm not
100% sure but I'm just going to throw
out a guess and say that let's say 10
percent need to be tuned every year so
we're going to take our five hundred
sixty six thousand multiplied by ten
percent and that gets us to fifty six
thousand pianos that need to be tuned
every year I don't know that seems a bit
high to me I think we should reduce that
ten percent down to five so if we do
that if we take her five hundred
sixty-six thousand times five percent
when we end up with his twenty-eight
thousand pianos what we've done is that
we've said out of the population of
total pianos of five hundred sixty-six
thousand are available for the tuner to
tune roughly about twenty eight thousand
of them need to be tuned to each and
every year so the piano tuners in New
York have the ability to tune twenty
eight thousand pianos each year in the
city okay great
so let's think about mr. piano tuner
himself how many pianos can one tune or
tune each year well I have no idea but
let's just guess that the average piano
tuner works roughly two thousand hours a
year or two hundred and fifty workdays
and then eight hours a day perhaps it
takes let's say three hours to tune a
piano just a guess so that three hours
when you take in the travel time to and
from different locations
you guys got to eat lunch a few other
things then you get roughly that the
piano tuner can tune two pianos each
workday
not bad alright so how many pianos can
the tuner tune
year well if we take our 250 workdays
multiplied by two pianos a day we get a
total of 500 pianos per year okay now
we're getting really close so how many
piano tuners are there in New York City
well recall we found that there were
28,000 pianos available to tune the
average piano tuner can tune 500 pianos
a year so if we take 28,000 divided by
500 pianos each we get a number of 56 so
through the analytical thinking process
we determined that there are an
estimated 56 piano tuners currently
residing in New York City that tune
roughly 28-thousand pianos a year seems
reasonable to me all right so let's
recap what have we done here well we
started with the big picture to try and
solve the problem we then thought a
little bit more granularly in layers and
tried to figure out what we need to
solve for from there we process that
information into actionable usable data
that we then synthesize into information
that we then use to determine the number
of piano tuners living in New York City
so how close were we
well I'll link to a Google search I did
in the description below but according
to my research there are roughly 62
piano tuners in New York City so 56
versus 62 not bad we did pretty good on
her estimate so that's the analytical
thinking process analytical thinking
takes practice in time eventually you'll
start to think this way naturally and
over time you'll be able to simplify
life's most complex problems
