This article comes fromWeChat official account: Fan Yang (ID: beingmorehuman), author: Fan Yang, title figure from the visual China
I remember I read a sentence before, “If you think that the public is rational and thoughtful, it is the biggest irrationality and mindlessness”. Internet product managers will also tell you not to make users think.
It is true that the main purpose of our brain’s evolution from billions of years is to allow you to “survive to prosper”, and not to let people find information that is beneficial to me. Our brains will automatically filter out, and will not Think further. This is nature, so don’t be harsh.
In the era of information explosion, the pioneer gold prospectors of the last two centuries have evolved into thought gold prospectors. We still need to dig out information that is valuable to ourselves from the boundless ocean of information. Only by becoming independent thinkers can we have more Great chance to do this.
Recently, I saw that Paul Graham, the godfather of Silicon Valley I followed, wrote a new blog post, How To Think For Yourself. I rewritten the Chinese title: How to surpass peers to think independently, because our brains are not born Love to think independently, but more willing to surpass peers.
I translated the first half of this article which is more readable, and the second half of the original text can be Click the link to view. In the second half of the paragraph, I actually said the most important point: Only by having curiosity and doing what you are most interested in can you become an independent thinking person.
How To Think For Yourself
There are some jobs in the world, if you do not think differently from your peers, it is difficult to do well.
For example, to be a successful scientist, it is not enough to be right. Your ideas must be both correct and novel. You can’t publish a paper that everyone else knows, you need to tell everyone what others don’t know.
The same goes for investing. The public market (public market) investors are not enough to correctly predict the company’s performance. If many other people make the same prediction, it will be reflected in the stock price first, and there will be no room to make money. The only valuable insight is an insight that most other investors have not reached a consensus on.
The same applies to entrepreneurs. You shouldn’t start a startup that everyone thinks is a good idea, or an idea that someone else is already working on. You should choose to do startup projects that most people think are bad ideas, as long as you know it is not a bad idea. For example, write software for small computers used by thousands of hobbyists, or create a website to let people sleep on a floor in a stranger’s house.
But this model is not universal. In fact, it is not suitable for most types of work. In most jobs, such as being a manager, you just need to be right, not novel, and you don’t need others to be wrong.
In most types of jobs, there is some room for innovation. But in practice, there is a very clear difference between work that must maintain independent thinking and work that does not require independent thinking.
I wish someone told me about this difference when I was a kid, because this is one of the most important things to consider when deciding what kind of job you want to pursue. Do you want to do a job where you can only win by thinking differently? I think most people’s subconscious minds have answers before their consciousness. I know that my choice must be to do independent thinking.
Independent thinking ability(Independent-mindedness) seems to be more of an inherent trait(nature), rather than nurtured (nurture). This means that if you choose the wrong type of job, you will not be happy. If you are inherently assertive, then becoming a middle manager will eventually feel tired. If you are a conservative person by nature, you will also encounter setbacks if you do some original work.
But there is a problem here. People often mistake their position on the horizontal axis from traditional concepts to independent thinking. People with traditional concepts do not like to think of themselves as people with traditional concepts. At any time, they think they decide what they want to do independently, and in the end it’s just that their peers happen to make the same choice. And independent-minded people often don’t know that their own ideas are very different from others, until they publish these ideas publicly.
Can you make yourself think more independently? I think of course it can. Although this trait is innate, there are ways to amplify it, at least not to suppress it.
One of the most effective tricks is what many technical nerds are practicing: deliberately avoiding conservative ideas. If you turn a deaf ear to conservative ideas, it is difficult for you to be a conservative person. If a person spends a lot of time eagerly asking what other people think, he is often a follower.
What kind of people you are with is important. If you are surrounded by traditional-thinking people, it will be difficult for you to express your own ideas, and in the end it will limit you from having unique ideas. However, if you are surrounded by independent thinkers, you will get the opposite experience: Hearing something that makes people say something that makes your eyes shine will inspire you to think more.
If people with independent thinking feel that they are surrounded by traditional thinking people, they will tend to self-isolate once they have the opportunity. We had this problem when we were in high school. Independent thinking people have no opportunity to express themselves. In addition, high school is often a small closed world, and everyone lacks self-confidence, which amplifies the power of compliance. Therefore, high school is usually a bad time for people with independent thinking. But the advantage of this is that you know what to avoid. If you find in your future life that your environment is as inwardly as on a high school campus, then you should leave there.
Another place where independent thinking and traditional thinking are mixed together are those successful startups. The founders and founding team members are almost all independent thinkers, otherwise,This company is also difficult to succeed. However, with the development of the company, people with traditional ideas have greatly exceeded those with independent thinking, and the original spirit of independent thinking is inevitably weakened. Since then, the start-up company began to decline and deteriorate. The most speechless thing is that founders find that they can talk freely with the founders of other companies instead of with their own employees.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be with independent-minded people all the time, just one or two you can talk to regularly. Once you find such a friend, they are usually as eager to talk as you, and they need you. Although universities no longer have uneven educational resources as in the past, good universities are still an excellent way to meet independent thinkers. Most students will still go to school with traditional thinking, but you will at least find a group of students with independent thinking, not like you did in high school.
You can also go in another direction: In addition to making a few independent-minded friends, you can also try to meet as many different types of people as possible. If you fit into different circles, the circle closest to you will not have that much influence on you. In addition, you can also bring the thoughts of different circles to different circles.
For different people, what I mean is not demographic differences, but real “different types of people” with different thinking habits. So, although traveling to other countries is a good idea, you might meet a different person on the corner of the street. When I meet someone who knows something I don’t know, I will try to learn from him what other people don’t know, and there will always be surprises. When you meet a stranger, asking him questions is a good chat, but I am not chatting for chat, I really want to ask.
Reading history makes people wise. When I read history, I will not only understand what happened, but also try to penetrate the minds of people from the past. What was the situation they faced at that time and how did they deal with it? This is difficult to do, but just like you need a long journey to see life clearly, you need to work hard for it.
Having a critical skepticism of things (skepticism) also helps prevent the acceptance of traditional thinking as it should be. When you hear someone say something that is very reasonable, stop silently and ask yourself “Is it true?” You don’t have to increase the cognitive burden on others, but you should think more about it yourself .
YouThink of this habit as a problem-solving game. You have to know that many ideas that are widely accepted by everyone will prove to be wrong in the future. See if you can guess which one will be wrong. The purpose of this is not to prove that others are wrong, but to find the treasure hidden in those broken conclusions-new ideas. This is an exciting pursuit of novel ideas, not a boring sense of superiority. When you start to ask yourself, “Is this really true?”, you will be surprised to find that many times the answer is not immediately affirmative. As long as you have imagination, you have more to think than nothing.
In short, your goal is to keep anything unchecked from entering your brain, especially those that are just a judgment. Many influences are subtle, how do you notice whether you have lost your judgment without knowing it. All you need to do is take a step back and observe how other people get their ideas.
When you stand far away from the crowd, you can see ideas spread like waves in the crowd. This phenomenon is most obvious in the fashion industry. At first you noticed that several people wore the same T-shirt, then more and more people, and finally half of them all wore the same T-shirt. Maybe you don’t care about what you wear, but the same is true for the trend of thought circles (intellectual fashions). You shouldn’t actually join this circle. Not just because you want to have your own independent thinking, but because non-consensus ideas can often lead you to the Taohuayuan. Only where no one pays attention can valuable ideas be discovered.
This article comes fromWeChat official account: Fan Yang (ID: beingmorehuman), author: Fan Yang