I have read many these kind of books, and I have found none of them to be helpful. They are just mangling delicious-sounding sentences.

I have found that the most effective way to think is to write your own book, your own expedition of the matter at hand. When you write a sentence/paragraph, you notice how poor/ugly/erroneous your writing is, and then you rewrite it. I love being noticing how wrong I am, because at that point I have learned something. This way, you have iterated and learned the matter, and learnings are not just in your brain with you all the time, but you also have externalized it in writing, and the passing of time shows if it is timeless bulletproof understanding/thinking/learning/whatever.

Thinking is writing and writing is thinking, and thus also we've been pretty intense about the topic for a long time:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how+to+write

Just two cents.

This is going to sound like nonsense, but the best books that really teach how to think, how to handle complex thoughts and logic, and how to reason multiple steps in advance, and expand that into all the possibilities and still resolve all of that mess into a logical course of action... this process is documented, in story narrative form over and over again in literature. This is how a novel gets nominated for a Nobel Literature award: they depict a situation, typically a dire tragedy, and the individuals facing that situation and how they logically navigate to success. The characters typically begin without the critical thought capacity to succeed in their situation, and the novel is the story of their piece-wise transformation into the critically aware individual operating with reasoning multiple steps ahead of themselves. These novels are not math, are not anything technical, yet they teach their readers a critical skill that math and anything technical requires to master: critical thinking in an unknown space where one needs to make predictions with unknown information, and how to manage that. It's literally a literature "formula".

“Thinking, Fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman

Surprised no one has recommended it. It’s like an explanation of how we think, and how we should think. My only caution with this book is it represents “thinking” from a Westernised concept of rationality and it also represents western cognitive biases. A lot of the research done by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky was only studied among westernised, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic populations which only actually makes up about 12% of the world population. It’s certainly not going to apply to every culture across humanity, but - it’s super helpful.

Having awareness of cognitive biases helps you recognise them in yourself, but also leverage them in other people and that’s power.