Getting Clarity in a Noisy World

The most important thing you can do in life is to practice shaping your worldview.

This is a continuation of Here Is Why It’s Hard To Be A Clear Thinker, be sure to read it first if you’ve missed it.

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Have you ever felt like you’re struggling with your internal conflicts and uncertainty, and it is quite hard to make sense of all the information and different points of view?

Well, you’re not alone. 

In fact, every single person is experiencing these problems in life to some degree.

Most people are coping with this by developing a hard-coded conservative worldview by the age of 30-40, and sticking to it for the rest of their life, without even considering whether works well for them or even makes any cohesive sense at all. 

Yes, you read it right. The majority of people have an incoherent and inconsistent worldview and have to struggle with it for the whole of their life.

No wonder there is a global shortage of psychotherapists.

The problem here, almost nobody is proactively shaping their own worldview. 

Your worldview is a random collection of ideas and mental patterns, which is very much defined by your ticket in the birth lottery ⁠— your family, culture, religion, education etc. etc.

In most countries, the education system is built around teaching you what to think, not how to think. The school education system has been created at the dawn of the industrial revolution, for the purpose of producing replaceable workers, and it hasn’t improved much since then.

If you happen to be born in a religious family ⁠— you’re given a whole ready-made worldview for you to use from your birth for the rest of your life.

Medieval ideas, mixed with the modern culture built around entertainment, consumption and status signalling and you get a wild cocktail of a worldview that doesn’t have a well-defined structure and can be very confusing and contradictory.

You can compare this to eating junk food and not exercising ⁠— many ideas are useless and even dangerous.

However, it’s just a part of the problem.

Even if you have High Agency and you want to do something about this problem it might look like an impossible challenge.

Not only the amount of information is constantly growing, it is also accelerating.

The number of books, articles, blog posts, newsletters, YouTube videos, inspirational tweets etc. will continue growing year by year, and it seems to be impossible to know what is actually going to work for you.

This is a problem because we often don’t know what to take and what to filter out.

In order to be able to curate and extract value from all that information, we need to be able to let through only the relevant signals, separating them from all the noise. 

Not only that, we need to make sure we actually apply that knowledge. Even if you read or hear a brilliant new idea, without applying it in your context you’re almost guaranteed to forget it. 

To understand what is signal and what is noise, what is relevant and what is useless you need to understand how a certain piece of information fits into your worldview and your personal circumstances.

photo by @reddalec

However, you can’t do that if you are not the one who is responsible for your worldview.

You need to own and control your own worldview. You achieve that by defining and designing your core belief principles and your personal value system.

You need to have a very precise idea of what are the core parts of your worldview and values, and how these ideas affect the choices you make. 

You need to shape and choose these ideas yourself. 

Whatever worldview you’ve inherited in your birth lottery — you need to rebuild it from scratch, brick by brick, idea by idea.

You need to be able to constantly keep shaping and updating your worldview based on the new knowledge you learn. 

It can’t be something that you do once, otherwise, you can end up with a dogmatic worldview that would be relevant to the version of you at the time when you created it.

The famous investor Charlie Munger calls it the Latticework of Mental Models.

“You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct — on this latticework of models.”

— Charlie Munger

Working with one’s own worldview should be something that you practice on a regular basis. 

Shaping one’s worldview is a part of everyone’s personal spiritual growth journey towards being a wiser person.

Shaping your own thoughts helps you obtain a crystal clear picture of the world that’s based on a solid foundation that you’ve built from the ideas and mental models you have chosen for that purpose.

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If there’s going to be enough interest, I’m going to share a step-by-step methodology for becoming the author of your worldview.

Hit reply and ask questions. 👋