Winning in 2020

# Chapter 121

Thinking is very hard work as I said in the previous chapter and few of us seem to find much time to do it very often. It isn’t a very highly valued skill in Western popular culture. I am not sure I ever tried thinking about a difficult problem and trying to solve it before I reached college. Prior to college, I was just a bag of growth hormones, emotions holding far more sway than anything going on between my ears. Thinking was just too damn hard. And too slow.

Those are both still true, thinking is difficult and slow. But now that I am no longer a bag of growth hormones, I can do difficult and slow. But it still requires solitude and that is challenging to find in this noisy world, where everything is designed to compete for your attention. On this first day of the year 2020, the attention economy is the most deadly enemy to good thinking, as it wrecks our solitude and silence and focus.

It is only by thinking that we recognize what we don’t know .... yet. It positions us to learn what we need to learn to do, make, and be productive. We need strategic thinking that can map a path forward. Strategic thinking that can resolve deep problems facing the world.

My friend just finished his PhD and now he is a bit lost without a million assignments to do. Think man think!! This is what you need that unstructured space for, space to think! Room to expand your understanding and restructure your future actions. It’s the necessary and difficult work we can do.