Does thinking have inherent value?
I really value this point by Joe Burns because it's counter-intuitive and controversial:
Thinking has no inherent value.
Bad news for strategists, because we bloody love thinking.
Strategists like thinking about things. Then thinking about why we thought those things. Then putting the thoughts into a framework or an infographic type of thing so other people can think about them too.
But the point of thinking should be getting somewhere. Sometimes thinking moves you forward. You’re grappling with something.
Sometimes it just creates more thinking. You’re in the tangle.
Where you want to be, and where the best stuff happens is where you’re making progress but you’re barely thinking at all. That’s flow.
In this magical state, residual thinking is compressed into instinct.
You just sort of know what to do. You have ‘The Knack’.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot of thinking to create that flow state. That’s why the best type of thinking is to think about how you can think less.
If you spend any time with LLMs, you know that just because they "reason" doesn't mean that their assumptions are any good. And if you've ever spent time with people who want to share their latest (conspiracy) theory, you'll know that they've put a lot of thought into it.
So just because some thinking has happened, just because some reading has happened, just because some discussion has happened does not mean that anything useful or valuable has occurred. Saying otherwise, to my mind, is a kind of fetishisation of spending time in our inner worlds, scanning eyes over a page, or making sounds that other people understand.
I have spent so much time inside my head in what the 2x2 grid above would call 'grappling'. But at some point you have to stop grappling with yourself and ideas, and do something with them. There has to be a balance between intuition, experience, and introspection.
Source: Original article · Are.na block · Life Advice channel