Think Like
the D‑Squad

If you’re a kid and you want the dogs, jump ahead to the Introduction. This part is mostly for your grown-ups. Come back later. Some of it is about you.

My sons were born three months early. They weighed one pound, thirteen ounces each.

The prognosis was terrifying

The doctors were honest: there was a good chance they wouldn’t make it. If they did, blindness or severe brain damage were very real possibilities.

My wife and I spent more than three months in the hospital waiting to find out which world we were going to live in.

We were blessed, some will say lucky. They made it. They came home on a cardiorespiratory monitor that tracked every breath. They came home with stage three retinopathy, the exact thing that causes the blindness the doctors had warned us about. It ultimately resolved. And they also came home with learning differences that would shape everything about how they grew up: how they learned, how they processed the world, how hard they had to work for things that other kids seemed to get easily. They faced challenges every single day, and what we learned as a family was that the only way through was to teach them to think differently. Not harder. Differently.

We were fortunate. With the help of family, our boys were able to attend a school specifically designed for kids with learning differences. The teachers there didn’t try to force my sons into a shape that didn’t fit. They found the shape that did. That made all the difference.

I know not every family has that option. I know that most don’t.

They figured out how to think their way through

Both my sons are twenty-three now. One is a paramedic and is applying to nursing school. The other became a licensed real estate agent right out of high school, passing his exam on the first try, but eventually realized it wasn’t the right path for him. He pivoted, went to college, earned his associate degree with a 3.69 GPA, and is waiting to hear back from the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business, where he plans to major in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Business Analytics.

I watched two kids who weren’t supposed to survive grow into two young men who figured out how to think their way through a world that wasn’t designed for them. I’m not sure I’ve ever been prouder of anything.

I was that kid, too

I know that world from the inside. I grew up in the sixties and seventies, and I was a poor student. The kid who didn’t get it, who didn’t fit the classroom. I still remember being in second grade and getting pulled out of class for remedial reading. The kid who walked down the hall while everyone else stayed behind.

That was the start of it. In fourth grade, when the class started cursive, my handwriting was so bad the teacher told me, “It’s a waste of time. Just color.” My mother went to the school and battled until they gave me a cursive workbook. The basic one, not the one everyone else got. But I learned it. They were already giving up on me at nine. She wasn’t. By eighth grade, I failed three of my four major subjects (English, social studies, and science) and barely scraped a C in math. They sent me to summer school and then passed me on to ninth grade anyway. That was the same year I failed the state-mandated Minimum Basic Skills test. While other kids moved forward, I was placed in a remedial basic skills course in tenth grade, ultimately fighting my way to pass the test in eleventh grade. It was during this period that my parents took me for testing; they never told me the full results, but I remember my mother crying and my father telling me something I already knew: I learned differently.

My parents did everything they could. But this was decades ago, and back then, most people simply didn’t understand these things the way we do now. There was no clear explanation for me, no plan, no special school. I just knew I was struggling, and I still didn’t know why. I only recently learned that there was another piece to that story. As an adult, I was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. It didn’t change who I am; it simply gave me another way to understand how my mind had worked all along.

A kid like me today might have an IEP and a whole team behind it: teachers, specialists, parents at the same table. Back then, we were just put in the slow group.

Here’s the part nobody at school knew. Almost fifty years ago, in eighth grade (the same year I was failing three of my four subjects), I was fourteen and playing backgammon tournaments at night. Not kitchen-table games: sanctioned tournaments, with a director, a draw sheet, and master points on the line. The rules said you had to be sixteen to enter. Maybe eighteen; I honestly no longer remember. The director let it slide. I played against adults, and I won. Enough to earn a few master points of my own. I couldn’t tell you how many anymore, but somebody wrote them down.

Backgammon is nothing but odds, risk, and a board that changes with every roll. The kid who barely scraped a C in math was running live probability in his head against grown-ups. That year, the state tested me for minimum basic skills. The game rated me in master points. The thinking was never missing. School was just looking for it in a room where it didn’t show up.

Somewhere out there was a tournament director who bent a rule for a fourteen-year-old because he could see what the kid could do. This book is me returning the favor.

School never saw any of it. By the time I reached my senior year, they expected so little of me that when the graduation program was printed, my name wasn’t on the list. They called it a mistake. My family and I knew exactly what it was. I graduated anyway. I was accepted into college on probation. Conditional, a single shot, prove it or you’re done. They placed me in a mandatory basic skills class alongside my regular courses, and I knew the stakes. For the first time, the outcome was mine to decide. That’s when I finally figured out how I actually learned. And once I did, everything changed. I went on to earn an MBA and two doctorates. Not because the struggle disappeared, but because I finally had tools that fit the way my mind worked.

So when I tell you that thinking differently isn’t a defect, I’m not saying it from the outside. I’m saying it as the kid who failed three subjects in eighth grade, whose name they didn’t bother to print at graduation, and who walked into college on probation and decided he was going to make it anyway.

Who this book is for

This book is for the kid who has been told, directly or indirectly, that they think the wrong way.

The kid with learning differences. The kid on the spectrum. The kid who is quiet, intense, distracted, restless, stubborn, or “not school-smart.”

None of them needs to be fixed. This isn’t a book about any one diagnosis, and the chapters never mention autism or dyslexia by name. That’s not what it’s for. It teaches you how to use the shape your mind already has, whether that mind is racing ahead, still catching up, or just built differently. Whether the reason has a name or not, the tool is the same.

And it is just as much for the kid who is hungry to know more. The kid who asks questions nobody else is asking. The kid who finishes early and gets bored because the answer came too fast. The kid who is quietly certain there must be another way to solve the problem, and isn’t sure they’re allowed to say so.

And the truth is, this book is for every kid in between, too, which is most of them. Because this was never really about who is “struggling” and who is “gifted.” Every single kid has a way their mind works best, a niche where things finally click. Most of them are just never shown how to find it. That is what this book is for. Whatever kind of thinker someone is (quick or slow, restless or careful, ahead in one thing and behind in another), there is a way that fits, and learning how to find it changes everything.

And if school comes easily right now, these tools are needed too. Maybe most of all. Because one day, something won’t come easily. Some problems will be harder than anything you’ve faced yet, and nobody will hand out the answer. The kids who learn early how to think their way through hard things have a huge advantage when that day comes.

Why the format looks different

I shaped these pages with the same care I brought to the ideas. Larger type. Open lines. A left-aligned layout with room to breathe. A typeface chosen for readers who struggle, not the default nobody questions. None of it is decoration.

Reading is hard for some kids in a way that has nothing to do with how smart they are; the page itself gets in the way. I know because I watched it. One of my sons scored at the 1st percentile in visual memory (the bottom of the scale) and near the top in other areas. He didn’t get past it by trying harder at a page that fought him. He found the ways that fit how his mind works.

There’s art throughout, too. Over seventy small drawings, one never far from any page. Not decoration, and not a reward for finishing a hard paragraph. For a kid whose eyes need somewhere to land before the next stretch of words, a picture is a place to rest without leaving the page. The chapters are built the same way: short stretches with a marked break between them, so a reader who runs out of steam is never far from a place to stop and pick it up again. That’s part of the design, just like the type and the spacing.

This book is built so the page doesn’t fight the kid. And if this printed format still doesn’t fit the way the readers’ eyes and minds like to read, the digital edition gives you another way to adjust the page. The physical design is part of the promise of this book: the tools should fit the reader, not the other way around.

They didn’t fit the mold either

Some of the world’s most consequential thinkers did not fit the mold that school was built for.

Temple Grandin is autistic and thinks primarily in pictures. She used that way of thinking to design curved, calmer cattle-handling systems. Today, about half the cattle going through U.S. meat plants are handled in systems she designed.

Agatha Christie was, by her own account, a terrible speller. Writing was hard for her all her life, and her own family knew her, kindly, as “the slow one.” There was no name for it back then. She became the best-selling novelist of all time. The thing that fought her, putting words on paper, is the thing the whole world knows her for.

Steven Spielberg was rejected by USC’s film school. He built his own path instead: short films, college at California State University, Long Beach, and a lucky break. Universal signed him to a television contract after seeing his work, and he left college to pursue his directing career. Decades later, long after Jaws and E.T. and Jurassic Park, he went back and finished his degree anyway, just because he’d told his own kids it mattered.

Albert Einstein. You’ve probably heard he failed math. He didn’t. That story is a myth. He was an excellent student, especially in math and physics. He’d taught himself geometry and calculus years ahead of his class. What he couldn’t stand was how school taught it: memorize, don’t question, sit still. At fifteen, he left his school in Munich before finishing and later completed his secondary education at a school in Aarau, Switzerland, that let him question everything.

The point is not to become any of them. The point is simpler, and bigger: thinking differently is not a defect. It is a tool. One that anyone can learn to use to ask better questions, solve harder problems, and build something that matters.

Hand them the right tools

Not everyone finds their shape on their own. For years in the corporate world, I watched brilliant ideas die in conference rooms. Not because they were bad ideas, but because the people who had them had never been taught how to speak up, test them, or refine them out loud. The best thinkers often stayed quiet. And the loudest voices won.

This book is about giving kids the tools to avoid that trap: to ask better questions, share half-formed ideas without fear, treat being wrong as useful data, and keep iterating until something works. For kids who are still at an age when tools can become instincts.

The D-Squad is real. Four dogs, ours, asleep somewhere in the house as I write this. Sully notices what everyone else walks past. Then there’s Baz (Taz is his real-life name, but it had to be changed for the book. Some say witness protection). He wonders out loud, without embarrassment. Dash checks instead of assuming. Phoebe asks the question nobody else thought to ask. I didn’t invent the four moves. I live with them.

For years, when my boys were at their school, I’d bring lathes in and spend multiple days teaching the whole school (about seventy-five kids) to make their own pens. I brought a range of woods to choose from: striped, laminated blanks where the color ran all the way through, English bog oak thousands of years old, and more. Each kid picked their own. They chose their wood, their pen kit, and its style, and each of them got a box to keep it in.

Just because a kid has a learning difference doesn’t mean they aren’t entitled to the best. Or at least the best I could give them. Every single child made a pen. If a kid could run the lathe, they ran it. If they couldn’t, they sanded. If they couldn’t sand, they polished. It didn’t matter where they started. Every child walked away holding something they’d made, in a wood they’d chosen, knowing they made it.

That’s the whole idea behind this book, in miniature: meet a kid where they are, hand them the right tools, treat them like they’re worth it, and let them make something real.

Starting in the 2026-27 school year, I’m donating 2,000 paperbacks to schools, shelters, and homeschooling families across the greater Tampa–Sarasota area—30 to 50 per school: a classroom set, copies for the library, and a few for teachers to send home with kids who need a little extra TLC. Because everybody deserves the right tools.

Not done yet

Here is the most important thing I can tell you about using these tools.

Not succeeding is not the same as failing. Pivoting is not the same as failing. Changing your plan, your timing, or your route is not failing. Sometimes a good idea doesn’t work. Not because it was a bad idea, but because it wasn’t the right idea yet, or the right moment. The only real failure is giving up. So when something doesn’t work, you don’t quit. You adjust, you change course, and you keep going.

That isn’t just a slogan to me. It is exactly what my family is doing right now, today.

As I write this, my wife, our two sons, and I are all fighting recently diagnosed Lyme disease and the chronic co-infections that come with it. The kind of complex illness most people severely underestimate until they are living it. Between the four of us, the person with the fewest has four infections, and the person with the most has nine.

There is no shame in the struggle. We are in treatment, and we are still moving forward. We are still working, still building, and still showing up.

Whatever hits you, and something will, you keep going. You use the tools you have, you find the shape that fits, and you figure out the next move.

That’s why I wrote this book. That’s why the D-Squad exists. And that’s why I’m not done yet.

Phil

Florida

2026

The author’s note is why this book exists. This page is what the book actually does.

This is not a textbook. There are no tests. There is no right answer at the end of any chapter.

What there is instead: the four dogs you’re about to meet, and the two skills most grown-ups only ever get good at one of—how to think critically and how to think creatively. Not as separate subjects. In the same problem. Sully notices the real problem before solving it. Baz wonders wildly, without filtering too early. Dash tests which ideas hold up. Phoebe steps outside the problem when it needs a different question entirely. Each dog is best at one move, not locked out of the other three. In these stories Sully floats theories and Baz notices things too. The moves are for you to borrow, not personality types to be sorted into. Practice all four across eighteen chapters, and they stop being the dogs’ moves and start being yours.

You can read the chapters in order or out of order. If a title catches your eye, start there. The early chapters work well in any sequence. The later ones build on each other more. If you feel like you’ve missed something, it’s worth backing up a few chapters. And either way, this isn’t a race. The dogs aren’t going anywhere.

You’re allowed to argue with this book. If something in here doesn’t match your experience, push back. That’s not a problem. That’s exactly the skill the book is trying to build.

Near the end of each chapter there’s a dare from one of the dogs. One small thing to practice. The name on the box changes every chapter (Beat Baz, Pizza vs. Tacos), but the (Try This) tag beside it never does, so the boxes stay easy to find. Most take five minutes. No special supplies needed. For some, you’ll want a pen and paper. Most you can do by yourself. Skip them if you want. Come back to them later if you want more.

Some chapters have a box called Dash Checked It. It contains research that supports the chapter’s teaching. Those are for readers who want to know the why, not just the what. This is optional.

The little pictures throughout the book are visual cues. They help you see what’s coming, find your place again, or know what kind of section you’ve just landed in without reading a word. And if you’re a page flipper—plenty of good readers are—they’ll help you know where you’ve landed.

A pencil marks a dare; the dares change names from chapter to chapter, but the pencil doesn’t.

A magnifying glass marks Dash Checked It so you can find those boxes, or skip them, without reading a word.

A bone-shaped signpost means the story is picking back up, and the words on it tell you where you are.

An evidence tag means the case is back. And the clues so far are written right on it, so you’re always caught up.

A tinfoil hat means Baz has a theory. Brace yourself.

Paw prints just mean the scene is changing.

And at the end of the Introduction and every even-numbered chapter there is a box called THE ONGOING MYSTERY. Something is going on with Sully. Those boxes are me thinking it through, a little at a time, in order. They are the one part of this book that does not work out of order.

The back of the book is worth knowing about too. Here’s what’s waiting there: Discussion Questions for every chapter, made for conversation, not quizzes. They work with a friend, a family, a class, or just you. And a Glossary that defines every thinking word from the chapters in plain language.

And if a grown-up is reading over your shoulder right now. Good. Grown-ups: you can read along or hand it over. The book is written directly to the reader and doesn’t need a guide. But the chapters are short, the dares work for two people as well as one, and though it’s written for readers eight to twelve, most of what’s in here is worth knowing at any age. (Teachers and homeschoolers: a Standards Alignment appendix in the back maps the book to Common Core ELA, NGSS, C3, ISTE, and AASL standards.)

A note on ideas that come back—Some ideas in this book show up more than once. That’s on purpose. You may meet a thinking move first in a story, then in an explanation, then in a dare, then in THE ONGOING MYSTERY. Each return gives you another way to understand it and practice using it.

A note on what’s real—This is a hybrid of nonfiction and fiction. These dogs are real; they have simply learned to talk. Their tallest tales are make-believe (there is no smaller, secret dog living in the wall). But the great thinkers, the experiments, and the ways of thinking in these pages are all true. And you’ll find the proof in the back of the book.

A note on who’s talking—Dash narrates this book. Dialogue attributed to another character (“…,” Baz says) belongs to that character. A line resting right beside a named character’s action—Sully thought about this. “A dog at the park.”—belongs to that character too. Dialogue with no attribution at all is Dash. If you’re ever not sure who’s talking, the answer is always Dash.

The only thing you need to bring is a willingness to be wrong.

That’s it. That’s the whole membership requirement.

The Two Thinking Muscles

“Okay. I’ve got this.” Baz steps forward. “I’m going to explain the whole book.”

“Baz,” Dash says.

“It’s four dogs,” Baz says. “We each do a thing. I do the wondering. That’s the good one. Sully does the noticing. Dash does the—wait, do I explain Dash, or does Dash explain Dash? Because Dash is better at explaining, so maybe Dash should—”

“Baz,” Dash says.

“I’m getting there. So there’s four of us, and we each do a thing, and the thing is—” Baz stops. His tongue is out of his mouth, the way it is most of the time. He is thinking very hard. “The thing is, when you put the four things together, you can solve anything. Or build anything. Both. That’s the book.”

A pause.

“That’s actually pretty good,” Baz says, surprised.

“That was good. It’s also about a tenth of it,” Dash says.

“…oh.” Baz looks at the cover to see where his name is. He looks back at me. “It’s a big book, huh?”

“It is,” Dash says.

“You should probably take it from here,” Baz says.

“I’ll take it from here,” Dash says.

“I’ll be around for the wondering parts,” Baz says, brightening. “Those are mine.” He pads off to find something to wonder about. He finds it almost immediately. It is a leaf. A very suspicious leaf. Probably plotting something. Leaves do that when you’re not looking.

Hi. I’m Dash. I’m the one telling you this whole book. Every page from here to the last find, that’s me. (The paperwork in the very back—the humans handled that. They like paperwork.)

And here’s how you’ll always know who’s talking. When another dog says something, the words next to it tell you who: Baz says, Sully said, she said. Like that. Sometimes nobody says anything. A dog just does something right next to the words. Sully thought about this. “A dog at the park.” That line is Sully’s. If it doesn’t say who said it, it was me. That’s true on every page of this book. No exceptions.

Here’s what Baz was trying to say, and he wasn’t wrong; he just couldn’t hold all of it at once.

There are two kinds of thinking, and almost nobody is good at both.

The first kind is figuring out what’s already true. Something happened. What caused it? What actually explains it? This kind of thinking narrows down: you take a pile of maybes and work out which one survives. This one has a name: critical thinking.

The second kind is figuring out what could be. What could we make? What hasn’t anyone tried? This kind opens outward: you take one problem and spin out a whole list of possibilities before you judge any of them. This one has a name too: creative thinking.

School hands you a lot of the first kind’s answers. The tested, settled ones. That answer-finding muscle gets less practice, mostly because there’s only so much time in a day. The second kind, school mostly assumes you already have. And right around your age, it starts going quiet, because everything begins rewarding the correct answer instead of the interesting one. Left alone long enough, the interesting-answer muscle gets so quiet you can’t find it when you need it.

You’re reading this in the narrow window right before that happens. That’s why we caught you when we did.

Let me show you the four of us actually working, so you can see the thing rather than just hear about it.

Last week, the water in our bowl started dropping faster than usual. Every day. Full in the morning, noticeably lower by noon.

Sully noticed first. That’s his job. He catches the thing nobody else caught. “Somebody’s drinking our water,” he announced. “I have a suspect.” (He did not have a suspect. He had a feeling. Sully usually has a feeling before he has a fact, and sometimes instead of one. Keep an eye on Sully, actually. Of the four of us, he’s the one this book changes the most. He doesn’t know that yet.)

Then Baz wondered loudly, and more than once, because he can never stop at one. “Maybe the floor is thirsty. Or maybe the water is evaporating on purpose to get away from us. Or maybe there’s a smaller, secret dog. Or a very polite raccoon with a tiny umbrella.” None of these was right. That’s normal. Most of Baz’s ideas are wrong. The point is he gets all of them on the table, and sometimes the tenth one isn’t wrong.

Then I tested. I didn’t argue about whose theory was best—I went and looked. I sat by the bowl from morning to noon and watched—no secret dog. What actually happened: the morning sun came straight through the window and onto the bowl, and the water dropped fastest in exactly the hours the sun was on it. Sully’s “suspect” was the sun.

And then Phoebe (who hadn’t said anything the whole time, because she mostly doesn’t) looked over from the windowsill and said:

“Move the bowl.”

Nobody had thought of that. We’d all been busy solving who’s drinking the water. Phoebe wasn’t solving that question. She stepped outside it and asked a better one: Does the bowl have to sit in the sun at all? It didn’t. We moved it ten feet. Problem gone.

That’s the whole book, right there.

Notice what’s actually happening (that’s Sully). Wonder wildly, without filtering (that’s Baz). Test your ideas against the real world instead of arguing in your head (that’s me). And every so often, Zoom Out—stop solving the problem long enough to ask whether it’s even the right problem (that’s Phoebe).

Notice → Wonder → Test, with Phoebe stepping outside whenever the question needs to change. You’ll spend a few chapters on each one. By the end, all four of us live in your head.

Baz wants it to be four steps.

“Notice, Wonder, Test, and then me,” Baz says. “I’m the fourth step. What’s my step called?”

“Wonder. You’re step two. That’s your step.”

“I want the outside one. Like Phoebe’s,” Baz says.

“Phoebe’s not in the line. She stands outside the line and looks at the whole thing.”

Baz considers this. “So she’s the most important one.”

“…sort of.”

“And I’m one of the three regular ones,” Baz says.

“You’re the best of the three regular ones,” I tell Baz, because it’s true and because he needs to hear it before the next chapter.

Baz brightens. “Then we should have a name. A team like this needs a name.” He thinks for exactly one second. “The D-Squad.”

It’s on the cover. I know. He got there eventually.

“Only one of us starts with D.”

Baz doesn’t hesitate. “The D is for the energy.” He has already moved on. “I’m going to need that in writing.”

“It’s not that kind of thing.”

“Everything’s that kind of thing if you write it down,” Baz says.

Here’s the one thing this book believes, underneath everything else:

Thinking doesn’t have to happen in your head alone. A lot of the time, it’s a team sport.

A lot of people lose at it for a reason that has nothing to do with being smart. They have the idea. The good one. The one that turns out to be right. And they don’t say it. They sit on it because they’re afraid of how it’ll sound. The hand goes halfway up and comes back down.

Started to say something, then swallowed it because you weren’t sure. If you’ve ever done that, this book is especially for you. That five-second window, where the idea was right there and you let it go, is a lot of what this book is about.

Baz never does that. Not once. He throws his worst idea out with the same cheerful confidence as his best one, because the best one is sometimes hiding inside the worst one. And you can’t get to the tenth idea without saying the first nine out loud.

Most of the time, you won’t have three other dogs with you. You’ll have a room, a problem, and yourself. So you’ll have to be all four of us at once.

That’s the skill. Eighteen chapters and a case at the end, each one teaching you a piece of it.

Let’s go.

— Dash

“Most people are stuck. You don’t have to be.”

— Phoebe

The Problem You Have Isn’t the Problem You Think

Sully was certain squirrels were raiding the bird feeder.

The case was closed. He told me. He told Baz. He told Phoebe, who didn’t look up.

He had a plan. The plan involved strategically barking at the back fence three times a day, for as long as it took. Which, knowing Sully, was basically forever.

Then I asked one quiet question.

“Did you actually see a squirrel take any?”

Sully paused.

He had not.

He had seen squirrels. He had seen an empty feeder. He had put those two things next to each other and decided one had caused the other. But he had not, technically, watched a squirrel do it. And the case that had felt so solid a minute ago now felt like smoke.

Sully sat down.

What still bothers me, looking back, is the nose. Sully had a good one. If squirrels had been working that feeder, the whole base of the tree would have smelled like them. That sharp, nutty, slept-here smell squirrels leave on everything. He never checked. His eyes had closed the case before his nose got a vote.

Here’s something that happens to all of us, every day, more often than we realize.

The problem you think you have is usually not the problem you actually have.

You notice something is wrong. You name what’s wrong. You start solving the named thing. And the named thing turns out to be a different thing. Or two things, or part of a thing, or the visible piece of a problem whose roots are somewhere else entirely.

This is fine. This happens. Naming the wrong problem first is not the mistake.

The mistake is solving the wrong problem before you check whether it’s the real one.

Here’s a tiny example. Not squirrels.

Imagine you walk into the kitchen and the cookies are gone.

Your first thought is somebody ate them. Maybe a sibling. Maybe a friend who came over. Maybe a parent got into them again. You’re already heading down the hallway to find out who.

Stop. Look at the shelf.

The shelf is slightly slanted. There’s a gap behind it where things have slid out of sight. The cookies are not eaten. The cookies are behind the shelf, lying in the dust against the wall.

The problem you thought you had: somebody ate the cookies.

The problem you actually had: the shelf is slanted, and your stuff keeps falling behind it.

If you’d solved the first problem (confronted a sibling, written a sign, hidden the cookies), the shelf would still be slanted. Tomorrow it’d be the crackers. Then the cereal. Then your homework.

“I like the first problem,” Baz says. “It’s friendlier.”

“It’s wrong.”

“Friendly, though,” Baz says.

Sully’s squirrels worked the same way. He had named the disappearance. He had named the suspect. He had been about to start barking. The actual cause was somewhere he hadn’t looked.

Same problem. Different stuff disappearing.

Here’s another one. A different shape.

The floor in the house keeps getting dirty. Not just a little. Really dirty. You mop it. Two days later, it’s dirty again. You mop it again. It happens again.

The problem you think you have is that you need a better mop. Or to mop more often. Or harder. Maybe a special floor cleaner. Maybe a new mop entirely. The whole mopping operation needs an upgrade.

The problem you actually have: the floor shouldn’t be getting that dirty in the first place. Something is happening that’s making it dirty faster than it should be.

“The problem is almost never the first problem,” Sully says, to nobody in particular. He sounds like a dog who learned this the hard way.

If you only solve the mopping problem, you’re going to be mopping for the rest of your life.

If you solve the actual problem (figure out why dirt is arriving in the first place), you might only have to mop normally, like a person who lives in a normal house.

Two different ways the wrong problem hides.

In the cookies example, the wrong problem hides behind a more interesting story. (Somebody ate them. Mystery. Crime.) The real problem is boring. (The shelf is slanted.) Boring problems are easier to miss because nobody wants to look at them.

In the floor example, the wrong problem hides behind a more obvious next step. Floors get dirty, you mop floors, that’s what you do. You don’t pause to ask why the floor’s getting that dirty. The next step is so obvious that you skip past the question.

And when you finally ask it (why does the mud keep arriving?), the answer’s been by the door the whole time. It rides in on paws. Put a mat where the paws land, and the mud never reaches the floor.

“What if the bird feeder is sad?” Baz says.

“Baz.”

“It’s a lonely shape. Hanging there. Just dangling there like it got dumped,” Baz says.

“The bird feeder is not sad.”

Baz considers this. “How would you know?”

I watch Baz watch the bird feeder. Baz nods to himself, working it out.

“My second theory is that it’s installed upside down,” Baz says.

“It is not installed upside down.”

“You haven’t checked from below.” Baz tilts his head, then his whole body, until he is looking at the feeder sideways. “From here it could be.”

“You’re sideways, Baz.”

“We’re both sideways now,” Baz says. “So we can’t be sure.”

So here’s the one thing this chapter is asking you to learn.

When you notice a problem, name what you think the problem is.

Then, before you start solving it, ask one question.

What if this isn’t the real problem?

That’s it. That’s the sentence.

You don’t have to know the real answer yet. You just have to crack open the possibility that the obvious answer is the surface of something else.

It’s easy to skip this question. You go straight from “I see a problem” to “I’m going to fix this problem.” You use up energy fixing the wrong thing. The original thing comes back because the actual cause is still in place. Then you fix it again. Same result.

You can build a one-second habit. Notice a problem. Ask if it’s the real one. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes a cookie really did just get eaten. But often the answer is no. And the no is where the actual thinking starts.

You might be wondering: how do you tell the surface problem from the real one?

Three clues.

One. It comes back. The surface problem keeps coming back. You solve it, it returns. You solve it again, and it returns again. That’s a sign you’re fixing a symptom, not a cause.

Two. It came too fast. The surface problem has a fast solution. Suspiciously fast. The solution arrived at the same time the problem did. You saw it, and you knew what to do, instantly. Real problems usually take a beat to understand before solutions show up. If your solution arrived before your understanding did, you might not be solving what you think you’re solving.

Three. It’s too good a story. The surface problem is more interesting than the real one. The real problem is usually boring. Slanted shelves. Worn-out hinges. A door left open. A small thing that doesn’t deserve a story. The interesting problem (the mystery, the crime, the dramatic thing) is often the wrapper, not the contents.

Boring is usually correct. Interesting is usually a clue that you’re looking at the wrong thing.

“What if the squirrels are eating the food from inside the feeder?” Baz says.

“That’s the original theory, Baz. That’s what we just stopped believing.”

“What if I’m believing it again. Fresh,” Baz says.

Sully went back out to the yard.

The bird feeder was where the bird feeder had always been. It looked empty, the way it had looked empty three mornings running.

He sat down a few feet from it.

“What if the squirrels aren’t the problem?” he said, to nobody in particular.

Then he watched.

He didn’t bark. He didn’t pace. For twenty minutes, nothing happened.

Then a small finch landed on the feeder, hopped to the lip, dipped its head inside, came out with one of the last seeds, and flew away.

Sully watched the spot where the seed had come from.

A piece of the feeder lid was loose. Not all the way off. Just lifted, where it had worked itself loose over time. Every time the feeder swung (wind, a bird landing, a bird taking off), seeds spilled out through the gap and scattered across the grass underneath. The lid had been like that for weeks. Sully had not noticed, because Sully had been watching for squirrels.

It was never the squirrels.

The feeder wasn’t even broken. The lid had just worked itself loose.

The seeds had been slipping out through that gap the whole time, which was why it was always empty by morning. The birds pecking at the grass weren’t emptying the feeder; they were just cleaning up what had already fallen out of it.

Sully sat there for a while.

He had been certain. He had been confident. He had been ready to bark.

He had been wrong about which problem he was solving.

He got up. He walked over to the feeder. He took the lid in his teeth and pressed it down until it clicked.

“You weren’t looking at the right thing.”

— Phoebe

These questions are thinking questions, not retrieval questions. None of them have a right answer. They’re designed for classroom discussion, family conversation, homeschool use, or a reader working through the book alone. The goal isn’t to check comprehension. It’s to practice the skill each chapter teaches.

You don’t need to use all the questions. Pick the one or two that feel most alive for the group in front of you.

Introduction—The Two Thinking Muscles

The case for learning both kinds of thinking at the same time

• Think of something you’re genuinely good at. Did you get good at it by figuring things out (critical) or by making things up (creative), or both? What does that tell you about how you think?

• The Introduction says most people are good at one kind of thinking and not the other. Which one do you think you lean toward? How do you know?

• The book’s thesis is that real thinking is a team sport. Even when you’re alone. What does it mean to have a team inside your head? Does that idea make sense to you, or does it seem strange?

• Have you ever lowered your hand in class, or stayed quiet somewhere, because you weren’t sure enough? What would have happened if you’d said the thing anyway?

Chapter 1—The Problem You Have Isn’t the Problem You Think

Separating the surface problem from the real one

• Think of a problem you’ve tried to fix more than once, and it kept coming back. Looking back, do you think you were solving the real problem or a symptom of it?

• The chapter describes two ways a wrong problem hides: behind a more interesting story, or behind an obvious next step. Which of those traps do you fall into more often?

• The three clues are: it comes back, it came too fast, it’s too good a story. Can you think of a time when one of those clues was there but you missed it?

• Is there a problem in your life right now that might not be the real problem? What would you find if you asked: “What if this isn’t the real problem?”

Where These Ideas Came From

Every Dash Checked It box in this book is built on something real. Usually an experiment: something scientists really did, with real people, often a long time ago. Sometimes documented history. And in one chapter, three questions nobody on Earth has answered yet. This part tells you who did each one and where you can find it.

Two things are worth knowing before you dig in.

First, science is never finished. Some of these experiments have been done again and again and keep coming out the same way. Others turned out to be more complicated than scientists first thought. And when that happened, I’ve said so right here. That isn’t science failing. That’s science working. Changing your mind when better evidence shows up is the whole point of this book.

Second, not every chapter is listed here—only the ones built on research worth pointing you to. So if you notice that some chapter numbers are missing, that’s why—those chapters tell other kinds of stories.

How to Read One of These Notes

A scientific reference looks like a secret code, but it’s easy once you know the parts:

Author’s last name, first initial. (Year it was published). “Title of the study.” Name of the journal, volume number(issue number), page numbers.

So when you see Asch, S. E. (1956), that means a scientist named Solomon E. Asch published this study in 1956. If you ever want to find the real thing, a librarian or a teacher can help you track it down using exactly this information.

The Author’s Note · Four Real Thinkers

The four people in the Author’s Note are real, and so are the claims. Here’s the proof.

Temple Grandin is autistic, thinks in pictures, and used that way of thinking to design calmer, curved cattle-handling systems. The meat-plant figure comes from her own books, talks, and official biography. She’s careful about it, too: people say she designed half the cattle-handling systems in the country, and she says that isn’t true. It’s the cattle going through meat plants that make up the figure. Worth noticing that the scientist is the one insisting on the smaller, truer claim.

Grandin, T. (2006). Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism (expanded ed.). Vintage Books.

Agatha Christie tells it herself in her autobiography: the terrible spelling, the family reputation as “the slow one.” And Guinness World Records lists her as the best-selling fiction writer of all time.

Christie, A. (1977). An Autobiography. Collins.

Guinness World Records: Best-selling fiction writer of all time.

Steven Spielberg really was turned down by USC’s film school. He studied at California State University, Long Beach instead, left when Universal signed him, and went back and finished that degree in 2002.

McBride, J. (2011). Steven Spielberg: A Biography (2nd ed.). University Press of Mississippi.

Albert Einstein really was an excellent student in math and physics (the “Einstein failed math” story is a myth), and he really had taught himself geometry and calculus years ahead of his class. At fifteen, he left his school in Munich before finishing, exactly as the Note says. He finished later in Switzerland: first at a school in Aarau that encouraged him to question everything, then graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic in 1900.

Isaacson, W. (2007). Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon & Schuster.

Sources, Chapter by Chapter

The Introduction · The Fourth-Grade Slump

The Introduction says the interesting-answer muscle starts going quiet right around a reader’s age. That idea comes from research on what teachers and scientists call the fourth-grade slump. E. Paul Torrance, who built the most widely used creativity tests for children (you’ll meet him again in the Chapter 3 note), tracked scores dipping right around fourth grade.

For the Record: The slump shows up in many studies. How universal it is, and what causes it, is still argued. The safe takeaway is the one the Introduction leans on: these are good years to practice the wondering muscle on purpose.

Torrance, E. P. (1968). “A Longitudinal Examination of the Fourth Grade Slump in Creativity.” Gifted Child Quarterly, 12(4), 195–199.

Chapter 1 · The Candle and the Tack Box

The puzzle where a box of tacks has to become a shelf was invented by a scientist named Karl Duncker, who called the trap “functional fixedness”—seeing a thing only as the job it usually does. Years later, another scientist found something surprising: when he gave people an incentive to solve it faster, they did worse. Pressure made their thinking narrower, not sharper.

Duncker, K. (1945). “On Problem-Solving.” Psychological Monographs, 58(5), i–113.

Glucksberg, S. (1962). “The Influence of Strength of Drive on Functional Fixedness and Perceptual Recognition.” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(1), 36–41.

One Last Thing to Remember

Scientists are wrong sometimes. They run an experiment, get an answer, and then someone else tries it and gets something different. So they all keep digging. A few of the ideas in this book are still being argued about by very smart people right now, and I told you which ones on purpose.

A good thinker isn’t someone who’s always right.

A good thinker is someone who keeps checking.

Phil Weiss spent thirty-five years in the corporate world, picking up a PhD in international entrepreneurship and a doctorate in innovation and creativity along the way, which is mostly a fancy way of saying he never stopped asking “why?” Now he writes books that help kids ask it too. He lives in Florida with his wife of over thirty-two years, Kim, and the real D-Squad: Sully, Taz (known as Baz in the book), Dash, and Phoebe. They supervise every page. (Phoebe prefers to supervise from a slight distance.)

For Readers

This book gets better when you tell me what you think. Every printing is a chance to fix what didn’t work, and there are more D-Squad books coming. If something confused you, or you wanted more of something, I want to know. You know what makes a good book better than a lot of grown-ups do.

Ask a parent or guardian for permission, then go to www.philweiss.com/readers

No personal information is collected, and all questions and answers are posted to the website.

For Parents, Teachers, Librarians & Homeschool Families

Free printables — the Four-Dog Field Guide, the My Case worksheet, the Standards Alignment, the Discussion Questions, 18 dares, and the Glossary are available at www.philweiss.com/downloads

Phil visits classrooms, schools, libraries, and homeschool groups, in person and virtually. Details and booking at www.philweiss.com/visits

Phil donates books to schools, shelters, and homeschooling families. Details at www.philweiss.com/donations

For questions regarding ordering the book both individually and in bulk, go to www.philweiss.com/order

Read Before You Buy

Free excerpts from this book and from every D-Squad book as it’s released are at www.philweiss.com/excerpts

Already have the book? Pass the link along to a friend, a teacher, a librarian, or a homeschool parent.