To cook a good dish, you need three elements: good ingredients, easy-to-use cooking utensils, and good cooking methods. Research with big data is much the same. Your ingredients are big data, your cooking utensils are computers, and the most important cooking method is statistical thinking. It is worth mentioning that the ingredients and cooking utensils can be bought, but you have to learn and improve good cooking methods on your own. This talk will cover a few simple case studies, teaching you to cook with statistical thinking, giving an outlook on the future of big data (especially the Internet of Things), and providing some personal views.