Thought Processes are things that make you think better. They take you where you want to want to go quicker. But you need to first learn and build thought processes before you can use them. I use both "build" and "learn" because just learning about a thought process does not enable you to use it. One example of a thought process is, when you're trying to come up with a solution to a problem, to spend more time thinking about the problem than its solutions. Interpreting a problem in multiple ways allows you to come up with different solutions. Another thought process is to think about a problem without generalizing. The more specific you are about what the problem is, the more efficient a solution you'll come up with. A solution to a generalized version of a problem will be solving for things that you don't care about. Learning thought processes is uncommon because they're internal and people are unable to identify the lack of a specific thought process for you. So you have to identify the ones that you lack on your own. Even after learning them, thought processes are hard to build because they're always, to some extent, unnatural. It is natural to immediately move to thinking about solutions once you've noticed a problem and that's why ideas are dime a dozen, while it is unnatural to stay with the problem. And it is easier to generalize than it is to break something down to its components and that's why stereotypes are common. But once you come through with building a thought process, the results make up for your effort. Because thought processes compound. Every thought process you build makes it easier for you to build more thought processes. P.S. I prefer the term thought process over thinking patterns as it inherently implies it's something that can be built unlike thinking patterns which just are