Are you thinking, or are you farting?
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I'm not convinced... It's an interesting article, but it seems to me this cycle can just as easily devolve into mental masturbation. "I'm thinking X. Am I thinking this because Y or Z? What's the meaning of thought anyway?" Keep doing this for too long and you might turn into some kind of philosopher.
Now, I agree that some self-examination is essential (as Socrates put it, the unexamined life is not worth living), but I'd argue that what's needed is a balance between thinking and doing. And doing requires putting aside all those fabulous thoughts and focusing on the task at hand for a while.
The two are not exclusive, nor is one superior to the other. They are a bit like Reason and Passion in Khalil Gibran's writings (http://www.katsandogz.com/onreason.html):
Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction. Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing; And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.
I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house. Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.
Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows -- then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason." And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky -- then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion." And since you are a breath in God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.
In the thought example about the "Milk" in the article I found myself asking "Who does that?" and now I'm wondering if that helps further explain to me how women tend to think into things.
I'm curious to know here who would have gone onto thought #3 in the milk example? If I'm enjoying something I'm simply enjoying it... I'm not trying to determine if I'm really NOT enjoying it and thus trying to convince myself that I AM enjoying it.
Self-congratulatory tones can be indicators of something that is very bad.
It's important to not get high on your own supply. A lot of what we tell ourselves is wrong, or at least misguided. If you question your own intentions and observations, you can avoid making big mistakes.
For example, I know lots of people who tell themselves "I didn't get what I want because x." where x is something that is obviously completely beyond their control, and therefore not their problem/responsibility.
But if you want to protect your ego, telling yourself that it's because of x-ism is totally effective. It also cripples you.
Which is why you have to ask yourself, "What's my motive here?" and "What do I have to lose if I think about it from a different perspective?"
Also, considering most of the people who have promoted self-examination and self-understanding over the years have been men, your bit about women is somewhat disingenuous.
No. Before I ever enter a situation I already know whether or not I need to convince myself. I'm pretty aware of my own intuition, and the more I need to "talk myself" into doing something the more I'll question myself before I skip over my gut instinct.
It's been extremely rare when I've come out of a situation where I trusted my intuition and been unhappy with the result. On the other hand, I've had many times where I overrode my intuition and thought "damn, should have trusted myself"
-- It's important to not get high on your own supply.
I don't. It's called being proactive and is functionally similar to the techniques of mindfulness. Steven Covey writes about it in his first chapter of "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". And please, entrepreneurs ignore reality more than most people I've ever known. Start up a business against all odds... convincing yourself to keep going with an idea even though you haven't succeeded after years? How is that NOT being high on your own supply?
-- If you question your own intentions and observations, you can avoid making big mistakes.
This is the big fallacy of questioning your every thought and intention. If only I could just monitor every thought, every motive, question my every step, then I could do it perfectly -- I would avoid the big mistakes. Wrong. You might have perfectly reasoned every thought, justified every intention, and still fail simply because you didn't have all the information.
So with that in mind, that's why it's much better to simply DO. Ensure one's intuition is in agreement and then DO, don't think into it. Mistakes are going to happen anyway, and that's when you'll do the reflecting.
This is the big fallacy of questioning your every thought and intention. If only I could just monitor every thought, every motive, question my every step, then I could do it perfectly -- I would avoid the big mistakes. Wrong. You might have perfectly reasoned every thought, justified every intention, and still fail simply because you didn't have all the information.
I like to compare this to Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. No matter how much we examine our thoughts, we're still applying the same brain to them. You might hope to catch some of the problems by applying second, third and fourth thoughts to your first thoughts, but there's bound to be a flaw you can't work around, "an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in theory" ;)
And, if you read the original article, you'll see it's not about "catching problems" at all.
The article itself was rather interesting and I certainly didn't mean to imply that metacognition is useless. From my point of view, not engaging in any metacognition ever will eventually lead to what I call problems, among which are unwarranted assumptions and failure to consider alternatives. Those are "problems" that I like to "catch" and correct in my own thinking. However, I do believe that one has to draw a line somewhere; otherwise, one risks indulging in what another commenter named "mental masturbation".
As for personal growth, I believe there will always be limits to our thinking that cannot be (directly) surpassed by more thinking ;)
Also, I agree with you 100% on mental masturbation. (I also blog occasionally @ http://www.justfuckingship.com/). But I am tired of every freakin web app looking, acting, and being essentially the same.
We also define problems differently. I think it's a bigger issue that all web app are basically the same, than if a given individual sits and thinks too hard and never does anything. But that's because I have barely any problems with executing any more... because I've worked on it.
Have you heard of the categorization of failures?
Failure Level 1 - Doing the right thing, but doing it badly.
Failure Level 2 - Doing the wrong thing, whether you do it well or badly.
I mostly like to poke people about Level 2. No blog/article/motivational speaker/whatever can do everything so I pick my battles :)
> On the other hand, I've had many times where I overrode my intuition and thought "damn, should have trusted myself"
That's exactly what I'm talking about. :)
> This is the big fallacy of questioning your every thought and intention.
I never said question every thought. I also never said that the goal in life is to avoid making all mistakes.
See, you've got a reason in posting this, and for putting words in my mouth and, in my opinion, saying "No" to me while On The Other Hand giving an example of what I meant.
You also left off my real-world example of questioning your own motives, which your Covey anecdote doesn't negate in any way.
Why do you think that is?
Ok, I agree with you on that piece. I still disagree that self-congratulatory thoughts need constant analysis for something as simple as enjoying some milk.
-- Why do you think that is?
What a great example of how, yet again, you're thinking too deeply here... as if I had some underlying internal motive for ignoring your one example.
I didn't address it because I ran out of time and was headed out to lunch with friends. So I mashed the reply button and figured I addressed as much as I could.
You never know. ;)
I totally agree with your premise (there must be balance), but I do disagree with your interpretation of my essay.
There's a difference between paralyzing yourself with uber-analysis, and digging deeper than level 1.
And there's a reason I didn't have "What's the meaning of thought, anyway?" as an example :)
You don't know me, but I'm exceedingly practical and a pretty emotionally integrated person. And a large part of that I attribute to exactly what I wrote about. If I want to just sit there and wank off mentally forever, and not act, well, I'm aware that I'm doing it... because I am present in my own thoughts.
As Pema Chodron writes, if we pay attention to ourselves, "even if we shut down, we can no longer shut down in ignorance. We see very clearly that we're closing off. That in itself begins to illuminate the darkness of ignorance."
As a bonus, it helps me innovate in design/development where other people just copy one another, working off the same tired old templates.
That's really why I wrote it. I'm tired of every piece of software not just looking, but acting the same, with the same components, and same shortcuts. With people thinking they have a new idea, when all that they really have is the same idea other people have had, but it feels special because it's in their head -- and lacking the framework/habits to judge "Is feeling special to me the same thing as feeling special?"
This problem is rampant everywhere, even on HN.
Thought 2: But wait. Do I need a front page that lists all the forums? Am I optimizing instead of thinking?
Thought 3: Are forums really the right tool for the job?
Thought 4: How would I recognize the right tool for the job? What does communication mean? How does this change on the internet?
I do this, but unlike the author I've come to regard it as generally a bad habit. Too much thinking gets in the way of doing. These days I try to avoid over-thinking everything, and concentrate on just making something - anything, and seeing what happens when I launch it.
But, think about applying those 4 levels of thinking to your problem with overthinking. It works great on personal issues too. ;)
The current thinking, probably stemming from Google's design-by-stats methodology is that this scales down to startups, you build something and morph it based on feedback. We used to call that design by committee, but clearly when you give it a new name its a different animal :)
I think what's more likely to have happened is that the problems have changed from things like best way to compress these bytes, faster state machine for this network stream, better LCS algorithm to find my n-gram etc, to problems that involve many social factors for their success. When this happens the only way to find those factors is to involve the social community that is creating them. Often those doing the iteration/refine cycle with the developers are not the same as those ultimately using a product, but when it works, it works well.
Software is seeing a shift towards large scale problems, like making the accumulated history of mankind available to anyone, anywhere; or supporting complex life decisions; or connecting and staying connected with multiple disparate sets of 'friends, etc. These are radically different problems being solved in different ways.
But not every problem is solved best this way.
"Taiichi Ohno is known to have said that "having no problems is the biggest problem of all." He viewed problems not as a negative but as a "Kaizen opportunity in disguise." Whenever problems arose, he encouraged his staff to investigate the problem at the source and to as "ask ‘why’ five times about every matter"
http://www.shmula.com/382/ask-why-five-times-about-every-mat...
But I want to follow Terry Pratchett's lead and teach unobtrusively. He's really good at it. So, as a step 1, I didn't ever use the words Buddhism or meditation.
Yes, the direct link is
http://slash7.com/articles/2009/6/10/are-you-thinking-or-are...
D'oh.