Notes on Thinking Clearly, Deeply and as Yourself
There’s so much noise in our lives today. How do we force ourselves to think?
I wrote this in a notepad three years ago today. Today, I found it useful again — and I am publishing it unedited and unrefined.
How do you force yourself to think clearer and deeper?
How can you think clearly in this age of slapdash thinking?
How can you think deeply in an age of bitesize thoughts? Tweets, bullet points, PowerPoint presentations.
How do you purposefully make sense of your own view with today’s constant barrage of information? A million woolly thoughts thrown at you every second (with the odd Tanzanite of a solid, valuable idea sometimes mixed in).
Slow down. Write. Force your thoughts into structure, and force a multiplicity of perspectives, then put this down in words. Write.
Writing is thinking.
Especially today, we have got to equate writing to thinking. Force yourself to see writing — not talking, not internal dialogue, not wistfully pausing with a glass of wine — as thinking.
I’ll leave you with this thought:
I find this very useful when I write my annual report. I learn while I think when I write it out. Some of the things I think I think, I find don’t make any sense when I start tying to write them down and explain them to people. You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. And if it can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more.
— Warren Buffett, 1991
