036 • How to think for yourself and why it's so important
036 • How to think for yourself and why it's so important
Hey all,
This issue is about how to think for yourself, and why you should be doing so.
I first became interested in the idea of clear thinking when my friend introduced me to the idea of frames of reference. I took up further research because being able to make decisions not based on the emotion or bias of the present moment was very appealing.
Here are two of the most important insights that I've made in this journey of learning to think…
You don’t own most of your thoughts
There’s a lot of information floating around in the world so you have to be very careful about what you expose your mind to.
The content you consume can easily implant desires into your head, so the best way to make sure it’s you who’s calling the shots is to take a step back before making any important choices.
I wrote a short piece in the past about how you don’t own most of your desires. If you want to explore this idea in more detail, you can follow the link below for more information…
First-principles thinking
This idea came up when I looked further into the topic of clear thinking. The Farnam Street blog by Shane Parrish was a great resource and it’s here I came across first-principles thinking.
The idea behind this is that you learn to think the truth, rather than what’s been programmed into your belief systems through how you've lived previously. This allows you to make optimisations in all kinds of places usually not possible.
Look at things subjectively, with a perspective of truth and open-mindedness. Your choices and behaviours will become much closer to what you intend them to be.
An example of first-principles thinking would be to consider the price of something as the sum of the cost of its constituents rather than its past cost. This is the example that Parrish used in his explanatory piece, with Elon Musk as the one who used first-principles thinking to develop a new battery, far cheaper than the ones everyone else was using.
The topic of thinking for yourself using mental models and frames of reference is still something I’m getting into myself, so I’ll be sharing more in this newsletter about what I learn.
Thanks for being here and I’ll see you next week!
What I’ve written this week…
University exams are done and dusted so I’ll be back to publishing content for you now that I have more free time. This piece is an extension of the Fundamentalised issue where I talked about quitting task management apps for a month…