Here Is Why It’s Hard To Be A Clear Thinker

TLDR: Self-awareness, high agency and discipline

Have you ever paid attention to how you think? 🤔

photo by @ante_kante

Clear thinking should be your number one skill if you happen to do any type of work where your brain is involved much more than your hands.

And while in many professions you can get really good just by learning things into your “muscle memory”, quite often it has the opposite effect if you’re in a leadership position, or your decisions affect a lot of people.

A bad decision, multiplied by the number of affected people can be a disaster.

The problem is that not many people actively practice clear thinking.

Although that’s not quite their fault. 

There are three main reasons:

1. Nobody told us we can

2. It requires self-awareness and high agency 

3. It requires determination and discipline

Let’s break these down, and see if there is anything we can do about it.

We’re not taught this in school

By default, we think using ideas, thoughts and mental patterns we have been accumulating since birth.

We learn these patterns from everywhere — our parents, school, friends, media. 

Think about it for a moment, most of our thoughts are not our own, we get them from other people. Whether we have high agency and self-awareness or not, totally depends on our environment and upbringing.

What’s even more interesting, that learning ideas is a random, uncontrolled process and in general, we acquire our thinking patterns passively.

99% of the population do not think like “what mental model should I learn next to be able to think better?”. 

Self-awareness

This one is the hardest. 

Nobody can be self-aware at all times - most of us spend our time during the day running on autopilot. 

We use the fast System 1 subconscious thinking ~95% of the time. 

We spend most of our time being at the mercy of habits and human nature. 

Which leaves you only ~5% of your time during the day for your conscious, critical thinking.

There are clear evolutionary reasons for this — the neocortex accounts for 44% of the brain's overall energy consumption. 

Yes, critical thinking is expensive, that’s why what you choose to focus on during the 5% — matters much more.

In order to be self-aware, we need to be constantly processing our behaviour so that we understand ourselves, see what leads to making wrong choices,  find what we can be improved and adjust how we behave in a particular situation.

High Agency

People with high agency understand that they “write their own story”.

People with high agency take responsibility for their life, instead of looking for external factors, role models, cultural norms or opinions of other people.

Achieving high agency is hard, as we’re evolutionarily wired to fit in, to behave like other people in the group, to conform to the norms of the society

We are programmed by evolution to care about what other peoples think of us.

It is what makes us want to be perfectionists, it is why we buy expensive cars, clothes, watches, NFTs. We want to signal to society what kind of person we are, to use that as status leverage, or just to make ourselves feel good by possessing something other people value.

The thing is, for as long as you rely on other peoples’ opinions to make decisions in life — you’re controlled by other people. You are measured by a ruler defined by somebody else.

Determination and discipline

Discipline is not achieved by exercising your willpower. 

You can try as much as you want, you can trick yourself with “new year resolutions”, all this won’t have a sustained effect and quickly stops working.

Commitment and discipline are 100% defined by the choices you make at particular moments in time.

“Should I wake up early and go to the gym, or should I call in sick and sleep a bit more?”

It is this choice that you make automatically, in a couple of seconds, that defines your long term success.

“Should I apply the knowledge I just learned, so that I remember it, and it helps me become a better version of myself, or should I read this post until the end and move on to my other daily errands?”

If you can only focus on the momentary choice you make and take it from your subconscious mind and turn it into a conscious decision — you will gain the superpower to create and destroy any habit.

You can get a long term sustainable effect only by learning to make the right choice at every individual moment.

But back to clear thinking.

It is never going to be easy, but you can make it manageable. 

Spending even 5 minutes during the day analyzing and adjusting your behaviour, and making deliberate decisions will take you on the path to becoming a much better thinker and achieving much more than you would otherwise.

To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.

— Thomas A. Edison

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