Have you ever experienced deep thinking? Two things I learned accidentally while stumbling upon it.
I spent the whole day thinking about something.
I have been trying to write about those thoughts but they were stuck in my head.
Going in circles.
Serendipitously clashing with other thoughts, fuelled by the random information I was gathering as the day went by.
It felt at some point like I wouldn’t really have done anything today: I didn’t meet anyone, I barely talked to one person face to face, I have written very few emails and read few articles, posted maybe once or twice on social media, called/texted/emailed one or two clients.
I looked at myself in the mirror and thought I was really a slacker today: “Stefano, how do you dare spending almost a whole day thinking?!”
Then I realised how privileged I was.
I didn’t have to go to meetings, I didn’t have to call clients if I didn’t feel like, I didn’t have to write emails because I already had gone through all of the inbox.
And I could spend hours thinking.
(Besides… thinking about thinking is a lot meta-thinking :D )
The perils of modern work life
But still modern work life doesn’t sometimes allow for deep thinking. When we stop jumping from meeting to meeting we have calls to make, emails to answer and then the day is gone and you find yourself with even more things to do for the next day.
I vaguely remember last week looking at this particular day and thinking: “Hmmm that looks really empty… you know what, let’s try to keep it like that.”
I didn’t know why I was doing it, it just was one of those brain farts that sometimes happen and you just go with it, without really _thinking_ too much.
Call it instinct or guts.
Or just luck.
Thinking fast and slow
There’s a beautiful book from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman that describes with excruciating simplicity the two main thinking processes in our brain: System 1 and system 2. (the book is exactly “Thinking Fast and Slow”)
One is the logical brain, the other the instinctive brain.
Here I had a proof that I needed both.
But I also had a proof that I spend way too much time in the instinctive mode.
So much so that when I don’t and manage to immerse myself in this word of thoughts and ideas I find myself flabbergasted at how useless I’ve been during that day.
Thoughts and ideas take so much time to form in our head because, as Kahneman says, logical thinking is expensive, it consumes way much more energy than the default. That’s why we like so much the default and spend so much time in it.
Deep thinking is the luxury good of 21st century.
Philosophers, writers, artists, mathematicians spend time in deep thinking.
Software developers should spend a lot of time in deep thinking (even though by the quality of some code you would guess otherwise).
Do we and our kids spend time in deep thinking? Or the amount of pings and pongs coming from our mobile devices strapped on our palms keep disrupting that train of thoughts?
Those are general, vague words, I know.
But somehow I looked at my calendar today and thanked my younger self for having kept this day like this (albeit it was just one week younger it did really feel like a smart chap!).
A day when I have done nothing but when somehow I feel that my brain has worked so hard and I have done so much progress on many ideas floating in my head.
The curse of deep thinking
The curse of deep thinking is probably exactly this: that it doesn’t produce any immediate results, it doesn’t create anything outside of your head that you can immediately touch, feel, hear.
But if you never spend any time in deep thinking you’re never going to progress.
You’re never going to grow your ideas.
As an entrepreneur ideas need to be sharp like knives so that when you go into action you are ready to mould them into reality.
I don’t exactly know what was the point of this article.
Maybe you’ll find it for me.
Though what I learned is
a) I need to set aside at least one day a week for thinking and
b) I shouldn’t ever again feel guilty about it
Have fun thinking ;)
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I am many things. Entrepreneur, speaker, coach, tech guy. Sometimes even a thinker. Follow me or not. At your own peril. And if you feel really inspired give me a thumbs up.
