Rule #25: Think Slow

We don't think as much as we think we do

My father worked as a purchasing agent for Russ Togs, a scrappy women’s clothing company in NYC. It was his job to buy zippers, buttons, fabrics and anything else needed to make clothes. It was a tough business and it’s no surprise he was good at buying used cars, appliances or just about anything our family needed. But he rarely taught me anything directly. Most of what I learned from him I learned by observation.

He took me once when I was a kid to buy a new TV, and I silently watched him work. He’d show up already having done his research and then he’d quiz the salesperson to see how much they knew. And he’d wait. And think. He was always patient. Why? Time was on his side: he was the person spending the money. He could leave the store but the sales person could not. He made sure they knew he knew this. And often he got his price.

The famed expert on thinking, Edward De Bono, would have approved of my father’s approach. Speed works against thinking. There’s rarely a good reason to rush a decision and when someone rushes you, like a salesperson, it’s because they want you to buy before you think. And we often give in. We make many decisions in life without thinking them through and as our attention spans decline this happens more often. We talk about thinking like it’s something everyone does, but look around: we know how foolish people are. And we know how foolish we can be. Most of us are asleep much of the time and when sleeping our thoughts get lost in our dreams.

Perhaps De Bono’s best lesson is that intelligence doesn’t make you better at thinking. Intelligence is potential, but thinking is an activity. It’s a kind of work. It turns out many intelligent people are lazy thinkers. They rely on thinking they did last year, or thinking someone else did in a book they read, and they repeat it over and over again. They sound smart and speak quickly, but are actually very limited. They’re afraid to think. Someone less intelligent but more curious is likely wiser.

Generally people need to be better thinkers, but some people go too far and think too much. A good way to look at this is that overthinking is just under-feeling. It means we’ve forgotten an earlier rule, that feelings are our friends, even the unpleasant ones. We overthink to avoid fear, sadness or shame. Our survival brains think it’s life or death, but it never is. The way out is to do, not to think.

Seneca told us “we suffer more in our imagination than reality.” Why waste energy fighting imaginary problems five steps ahead when we haven’t taken step one? Procrastination is similarly a fear of how doing something might feel, so we postpone. As a writer, I’m prone to both. I tell myself this duo, overthinking and procrastinating, is preferable to underthinking and recklessness, but I might be overthinking that too. Regardless, these habits prevent us from living well.

Our culture thrives on debate and arguing as a sign of good thinking, but DeBono felt this was a mistake, born from our obsession with Plato and the Greek philosophers. Arguments focus on winning, not learning. Imagine instead a conversation where you win only if you learn more than anyone else. Wouldn’t that be more fun? People racing to learn, rather than to prove the other person wrong? Instead of trying to sound smart, we’d try to listen better. Mostly when we think we are thinking we are not thinking and are just polishing past thoughts. We have to slow down to think, to try looking at things from other points of view, but we are always in such a rush. Often when we feel the urge to rush is exactly when we need to slow down.

Perhaps the biggest resistance to thinking is we hate uncertainty. Therapists know that people often stay in unpleasant but predictable situations. This includes bad marriages, jobs, friendships and families. Why? It’s predictable. We know change might be better, but it might not, and that fear keeps us stuck. This also explains why our familiar friends denial, repression and distraction are so popular. DeBono urges us to see wisdom as more a function of perspective than intelligence. To be wise means you can look at the same situation from many different points of view, even if it’s painful or scary.

Anyone can think better at any time by:

• Slowing down

• Looking at the situation from a different perspectives

• Asking questions that check your assumptions

• Have an honest friend give feedback on your thinking

• Sleep on it, so your subconscious can help

But there is a trap here. Can you see it? It’s time for another exercise. This is an easy one and it’s all about you. Answer the following question:

-------------------> Why are you the way you are?

Take time to think about your answer before going to the next paragraph.

(Did you skip here? Don’t make me threaten you again)

How long did you take? You could spend hours. But the trap is it is a thinking question and we don’t like to do it. We’d rather scroll things on our phones.

An earlier rule, the knowing/doing gap tells us most people won’t put much effort in. You could explore childhood memories, the stories of your family and friends, and pivotal experiences you’ve had in life. People write memoirs that take hundreds of hours to research with the goal of trying to answer this simple question. But if you are like most people, you’d rather watch a movie about someone else’s life, where you don’t have to do much thinking at all. Our avoidance of thinking lets our survival brain’s habits dominate, and we stay asleep to who we could become.