I think everyone has the capacity to be a quick thinker.
The two main components to being a quick thinker are not what you think.
The first one is a competitive spirit. If you have ever played any sports and you
have felt the desire to win, this will get you half way to thinking quickly. Train yourself
to be able to look at the problem and give up many different possibilities rather than just the smoking gun fix.
Sometimes in a enterprise environment fixing the smoking gun is the most inconvenient. Being under pressure and
using the competitive spirit can be one of the most satisfying jobs.
The second one is know your environment. You have to know your environment from
top to bottom and everything in between. You have to be able to visualize the problem
from inside and out in order to narrow the problem down to its core. The first thing you do
at a new job is to find the documentation for everything and study it.
This vision of the environment could come from many different crafts whether it is a Network Engineer,
Software Developer, DBA, or Systems Engineer. But you have to be in a position of knowledge about the entire infrastructure.
In order to recall knowledge/experiences from memory quickly you have to be an expert pattern matcher. Sometimes its a new
problem that has never been discovered or documented but very rarely. Search google for the main topic and if you find a gazillion answers
you know its a common problem. If you cant find anything you know someone has changed something or broke something and is more than likely
a misconfiguration. How do you gain the knowledge in the first place? Reading. Reading books and blogs and stack overflow and everything you can get your hands on.
You wont retain all the knowledge but you will remember that you found a fix for it at one time or another and can search for it again quickly.
I totally agree on the "competitive spirit" point. If one has a strong desire to take control and to win, the needed energy and sense of emergency will come quickly.
To expand on this point, I think in addition to the competitive spirit, a carefree mindset also helps to keep cool, make you to step back a little bit, to think quickly in unconventional ways.
I am not so sure about your second point. I understand more knowledge and more experience will help us, but is more studying of documentations/technical know-hows the best way to spend our time in the aim of improving our fasting thinking ability? I have experienced too many occasions in which much less knowledgeable/skilled people came on top in businesses/arguments/political competitions.
I should have said this is from my 20 years of experience in an IT department. And as a response to my second point, it was in reference to technical problems that you see in an enterprise environment. I though you were directing your questions to technical knowledge not business/arguments/political competitions, my bad.
Congrats to the Tmux team for a great open source tool. Its sad that HN decided to take this moment to talk about sourceforge and not the product announcement.
Stay away from the TV. Stay away from anywhere you can fall asleep. You don't need sleep. You need to do something that lets you talk to your inner voice like mowing the lawn, exercise, walking, riding bikes whatever. Talk to your inner voice about your goals and dreams and who and what you love. Spend time with family or loved ones. Call in sick to work.
For work: Stealing The Network, The complete series collectors edition