Ask HN: Rate my essay, please: On thinking
frederickcook.posterous.com
frederickcook.posterous.com
The reason I ask, is that you comment that this is a symptom of your generation's upbringing, but the reality is that there is also a simple age component in this.
When I was young, I used to devour books while commuting on public transport. Occasionally I would glance up at the older commuters and see them sitting there, staring into nothing, and would think "Gee how can they just stand there doing NOTHING". Now I am one of those people - given 5 minutes with nobody fighting for my attention I just sit there and grab the opportunity to think.
In other words as life starts throwing more things at you, the necessity of defending some thinking space becomes more apparent, irrespective of which generation you belong to.
For me personally, this essay would have been more useful if you had taken into account the fact that the words 'thinking' and 'ideas' have various definitions. For example, an idea can be a plan, e.g. a business idea. But an idea can also be used to mean a schema. You use the word in both senses interchangeably, and your use of the word thinking itself is also muddled. The essay would be more actionable if you enumerated the different types of thinking, when to do each, how to do each, how each creates value, etc.
But I would imagine there are other people for who would get a lot out of this the way it is.
Quite interesting. Perhaps I am assuming that the availability of media for most of my formative years is the reason I had never taken extended periods to simply think before. A poor assumption, since obviously other forms of media have been around and constantly occupying peoples attention for much longer.
Either way, I have come to the same conclusion that you have, and I embrace that 5 minutes where I can get it.
Great... Now I'm stuck in an infinite recursion, thinking about your blog about thinking about blogs...
George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that “to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”
– The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
I purposefully don't listen to music when I walk places. I enjoy thinking and taking in my surroundings. However, I probably still don't think enough. Thanks for this article!
Side note: Please don't justify the text if you don't have to, it makes it harder to read. Thanks!
Sorry about the justification; I'll check to see if I did that or if Posterous did that.
Full writeup here: http://bootstrapd.me/?p=534
I would start with the second paragraph instead. It's much more interesting.
Since you dont reveal how old you are I'm assuming you are < 25. Speaking as someone thats older than that I would say that I have been feeling the same as you do from time to time in regards to the "I must be doing something". And I agree its a problem if you dont know how to "turn it off".
If its any comfort I do know that excellence and aspiring to great things are a universal truth however. There is no such thing as a lost generation or losing the ability to think. You might look up to great individuals that seems like they are towering now, but trust me, in years to come you'll realise they are just as human with weaknesses and flaws like everyone else.
It's what you do at your best that counts.
There are two distinct 'incubation' type behaviors that I have observed - one is the internal thinking that you describe in this essay (showers, running, walks, yoga, or just sitting on the edge of a cliff and looking at the world).
The second type of incubation behavior is a type of 'prattling on'. Doodling, drawing mind maps, morning pages, stream of consciousness, etc.
Mind you - mind maps can be used very constructively, but sometimes it's just a type of brain dump.
I find that the second type of processing is useful when my mind is so full that I get stuck in an idle loop: nothing useful coming out at all; a cross between analysis paralysis and broken record.
The first three paragraphs are a turn-off because they're about you and not your topic. They feel tacked-on.
I'm just guessing here, but maybe when you got the idea for this essay you didn't quite know how to lead into it?
Should listening to music necessarily be considered "consuming"? I go running all the time while listening to instrumentals, and it helps me concentrate.
I too have a significant portion of my epiphanies while running or biking, or just walking away from what I was doing, staring at the ceiling, and thinking it over. Gazing into a computer screen seems to promote the narrowing down of ideas rather than the conception of new ones (if that).
Also, has anyone else found showers extraordinarily easy to concentrate in? I'm not sure what it is (white noise?), but I often find that when I take a shower my stresses fade away and whatever problem I was having folds out with an obvious-in-hindsight solution. (I also take notoriously long showers, for this reason.) I really wish I could replicate this experience somewhere else; the only other time I've had it is occasionally when falling asleep (which also, incidentally, causes me to take much too long to fall asleep — not exactly an ideal combination).
For music, good call, I listen to quite a bit of classical while working. If there are lyrics, I'll get distracted and think about those instead.
It's kind of funny, but I often find myself stepping out of the shower and not being able to remember if I had shampooed my hair or not, my mind having been somewhere far off.
However, there are still people who advocate its use. I do it out of habit, but can probably turn it off now that I think of it.
In regards to your question about listening to music being considered consumption: I think it really depends what type of music listener you are, or what your particular motivation for listening while running is. Listening to instrumentals for the purpose of increased concentration is probably not the norm. Most people who listen to music while they run do so for the reason frederickcook stated: they'd be bored otherwise.
Or at least they'd claim it was boredom. Really I think it's the complete awkwardness of the absence of some sort of distraction, and it's just easier for people to say "I'd get bored" versus "I'd feel so awkward". However, on the other side of that initial awkwardness lies a new level of clarity. For me, the 45 minute mark on a slower-paced run is the only time I have better obvious-in-hindsight solutions than in the shower.
(that being said, working a demanding day job while planning my exit strategy into a startup leaves me no time to run...at a time in my life when I need that clarity most!)
On falling asleep: I have the opposite experience; I fall asleep fastest when I start concentrating on a particular problem.
I think however your attempt to separate rumination from production is not valid. Ideas need to start somewhere, but their creation will be much more efficient if one actively attempts to find one than hoping one pops up from a walk in the park. Perhaps the distinction you are trying to making is better demonstrated by comparing research and labor, or as Edison put it, inspiration and perspiration.
In academics, I often see students continuously consume books and papers believing that they are doing research. While integral in the effort, this is the easiest step in research. What too many do not do is take the next step, which is the creation and evaluation of ideas. In mathematics, one can think of it as depth first search through the space of knowns in hopes of finding a proof of an interesting statement. To be continually successful, one must look at this proof discovery activity as a production step.
But the essay does not look at this as such, instead saying that inspiration does not come from producing. By stating:
It wasn’t until I started running that I realized the value of doing neither [consumption nor production], but instead of processing the things I consumed.
It excludes mental rumination from production. It is this distinction that I don't think is valid. And the essay would be sharper by speaking only of consumption instead of combining consumption and production.
Perhaps I should be more explicit by stating that producing through the act of thinking, excluding any other mental engagement, is for me somehow a deeper or more efficient form of production.
Thank you.
I thought it was good, and I've had a similar experience.
"And of course there's another kind of thinking, when you're starting something new, that requires complete quiet. You never know when this will strike."
Thinking about this now, I don't necessarily know that time spent just thinking will yield anything useful, let alone completely innovative. I went running today and all I thought about was different ways I could have written this essay. I've just realized that when I do have these moments, this kind of thinking, it isn't by accident, or when working on something else. It happens during a specific time I set aside for it.