Hi Sophie,
This step is called ‘Chess-like Assiduity and armchair meditation’ – the real use for deep thinking.
He starts this one right out with a principle, from a Charlie Munger quote, that what it takes to be successful is ‘assiduity’- his definition being having your ass in a chair, to THINK. I had to look that word up – it had a few different definitions, but the synonyms were things like concentration, consciousness, consideration… in this case setting aside time for deep thinking, pondering, contemplating challenges…
I think another principle here is ‘have a mindset of not always being in the rat race’. That sounds so simple and logical, but once you’re in the rat race, it seems there are so many places to be and things that need done ‘right now’, that mindfully taking a few minutes to ‘go dark’ and think about things is something I don’t think most people do, at least not most Americans…
I never did this in my entire life until I started doing this work, where things boggled my mind so much that I really had to, but actually having a mindset of consciously doing this every day is a new idea. I think another one that should be obvious but isn’t.
He has another good principle from a quote from Allan Nation – that you can’t always be IN the business, sometimes you have to work ON the business. So true – I see this as how you described taking yourself ‘outside’ and looking at ourselves or different scenarios we’ve been in from the sidelines, like looking from behind the red velvet rope at a theater, just getting a different view from a different angle, in every area of life.
In my experience it really does take some quiet time disconnected from everything to do that.
It’s so easy, in any area of life, to get so caught up in ‘life’ that we never do see the big picture – never really step back and see the forest through the trees.
I’m thinking about how different things would be if I did this as a general rule, for any challenge that arises, rather than just when something really boggles my mind.
What if everybody did this? Thinking about all of the shouting matches we see on any ‘news’ show or Congress hearing, it doesn’t appear there’s been any quiet contemplation on any issue… It seems like it would be COMPLETELY different if those people took a few moments to collect themselves, quiet their minds, and think through an issue on deeper levels.
Family and relationship conflicts would go completely differently as well… I know that on the few occasions where, when I had an issue to discuss with my husband that I knew could end badly, when I took a few moments to think it through, meaning think about how I could say it and how those words might be received by him in a few different scenarios, those talks went FAR better.
And in each of those cases I chose different words than I initially would have.
There’s a principle in what he mentions George Mumford said, that it’s so important to let your mind QUIET down and be in the moment… Because so many people are always looking forward, racing ahead, never okay where they are.
Or in my case hasty and eager, rushing to get to the next step, with no concept as to what that next step might be.
Or as we see in the media, rushing to get to the end reward without giving any thought to the process it might take to get there.
I see a principle in ‘thinking needs to be balanced thinking’… meaning not obsessive, not for hours, but maybe spending 10-15 minutes a day, at least in the beginning –
his steps for doing this are first getting in a chair or comfortable spot, and stepping out of life for a bit. Turning off lights, music, anything distracting… Then doing some reading, or something similar to get the mind going on something, then practicing deep thinking.
I like his analogy of ‘Chess-like’ daydreaming… Taking some challenge, or problem to think about, and approach it like ‘chess thinking’, where you envision making a move, then you try to play out the different options your opponent might take, and following it through to different possible scenarios, to what you would do… .It’s a great way to look at it.
He mentions ‘game theory’, which was such a new concept to me in one of the much earlier steps – in this context the theory is if we KNEW what moves the other person is going to make, or the overall outcome, life would be a lot easier’, and by taking some time to do some deep thinking, we can at least envision the different possible outcomes, and be much better prepared to handle whatever outcome comes to pass.
He tells a great story about a man who set out to prove that even the hardest things can be learned, even by kids… To prove it he taught his 3 daughters chess, where there was no physical component to rely on, just thinking … And they became the top 3 female chess players of all time.
This is interesting to think about, because we attribute things like chess to only the smartest or highest IQ people, when really anyone who spends enough time playing chess and learning the strategy could be an expert.
This shows that anybody can learn deep thinking, it’s not limited to the smart people.
This reminds me of another quote I read from Charlie Munger that I thought was so good – something like it’s far more useful to know what you don’t know than to be brilliant. In this scenario I can see where an average person who takes the time to do some deep thinking, and to at least try to see what they wouldn’t normally see or see from a different angle, would be far more effective.
I remember all of the kids in high school and college who loved to brag about their high grade point average, and all they ever did was study – no social life, no job, no life in general… I remember thinking we could all be 4.0 students if we did that, but who would want to exist that way just to get higher scores? Hmmm… There’s another look at how I do anything is how I do everything…
but in this scenario I can see the same principle, anyone can learn anything with the right pieces in place, and it doesn’t require being the smartest one in the room to give some conscious thought to a challenge, or to anything in any area of life.
I see another principle here that speaks to the balanced thinking… Don’t spend hours a day, but also not NO time at all, to look at some of the challenges we have.
This is a great principle for every area of life, where we get so caught up in life that we get blown around like the beach ball in the waves.
He gives another good principle here in the story about Joel Salatin’s dad, learning to fly a bomber plane and being told he had to land on an airstrip in the middle of a storm – the principle was in learning that he must MAKE the plane go where he wants it to go. If he didn’t drive it, and make it happen, it wouldn’t happen.
So true-with all the ‘noise’ and chaos in life, all the rat race, clearly this is something where if we don’t make a concerted effort and set aside the time, it won’t happen. But considering that by doing this, we can actually take ourselves out to the side, consider different angles, and look deeply, we are far more likely to make decisions that direct the plane to where we want it to go.
We are taking the responsibility to LOOK… We can actually take back the power we give away when we react, or when we leap before we look, as it has been in my case.
I’m just seeing that I’ve always looked at ‘look before you leap’ as some big habit that I have to magically cultivate overnight, by trying really hard to remember to do it… That seems so stupid now as I look at that.
This step looks to be a path to developing that habit over time, by taking the time to contemplate, look FIRST, and plan how I’m going to leap, hopefully to get to a win-win scenario. Wow… A process. Steps to take to close the gap between being ‘hasty and eager’ and being thoughtful and looking before I leap. Who knew? I’m sitting here kind of amazed by that.
Another principle here is ‘don’t think about a bunch of problems at once, just ONE at a time’… He has a quote from Confucius here, that ‘the man who chases 2 rabbits catches none’. This also sounds simple, but from some reason, as I think about this, it seems that thinking about one problem tends to open the floodgates into other ones, as a lot of times one leads in to another.
This is another good reason to go to a designated quiet place at a set time with a mindset to focus on one. I find that being in the car for a longer drive is a good time to have the music off, drive in silence and think about things. I think it’s a principle to ‘think several moves deep’, anywhere the mind can wander, and focus while it’s wandering, asking questions to get deeper.
No music, no distractions. Quiet, or with nature sounds.
Another principle here is to start with focused intention – this has become a great principle in every area of life, I don’t do this enough yet but I have found that this can change the entire outcome when I manage to do it.
I also see as a principle to ASK QUESTIONS, a lot of them – like What’s the issue? What might be the reasons? What if I didn’t do anything wrong? What did I do? What changed since this happened?
There was a prior step about doing something like this to achieve fulfillment in life – getting alone time, pondering, about life, music, beauty, decisions, relationships – for fulfillment.
So interesting to think of it as doing this for actual fulfillment in life… As I think about it in that light, doing this would make a person so much better prepared mentally for dealing with the challenge. I think it would bring a calmness. A preparation.
It could completely change a scenario or an outcome because we would automatically be less reactive, more likely to see the big picture, see from the sidelines, make an assessment rather than a judgment.
But if we do it with focused intention, for example with the intention of achieving a win-win, an intention to be generous and let the other party shine, the intention of seeing the other as a person, not an object, even an intention to receive for the sake of sharing… We could envision scenarios to that intended end, and achieve a completely different outcome… Make the plane go where we want it to go.
Wow, 15 minutes a day could do all of that!
I can’t believe a concept so simple can be so powerful, but – in this light why couldn’t it be? In this light it would be crazy NOT to set aside time to do some deep thinking about challenges that arise, or about anything ‘big’ that comes up. He has a principle here to give something deep thought, but to do it keeping an end in mind…
I’m seeing this as going in with an empowering context, and asking ‘does it contribute to where I want to be?’ Or even ‘what would Sophie do?’
You said once that creativity is about having questions that go outside of the box, not having answers… It makes so much sense in this context. Asking the questions would bring about completely different ideas than just sitting and trying to come up with solutions first, which is what I tend to do. Go straight to ‘how do I fix this’ without taking some time to get a grip on exactly what it is I’m looking at, how it came about, what is behind it.
I can see where asking these these questions first would probably make my ‘solutions’ completely different, or even show a different problem than what I thought it was. He mentions here, which I think is a principle, that ‘as you diagnose, and get deeper and deeper, you can start to get to some solutions’.
I have found that in the few instances where I actually took a moment to at least talk something through in my own mind before I said it out loud, I could speak a little more intelligibly about it, once I heard the words even internally… it seemed to bring some measure of organization to the jumble of thoughts.
Something I never considered in the context of ‘deep’ or meditative thinking is that books would be a good starting point. I can see it, though – getting knowledge from someone else into your head, mulling it over, maybe it would take a person to a completely new place, where something creative or ‘outside of the box’ comes up.
This reminds me of back when you were talking about how you were dealing with the fleas and with the landlord wanting to sell the house, and by ‘pondering’ those challenges you came all the way around to getting rid of stuff you had wanted to get rid of for a long time, and you got stronger and ‘lighter’ and happier, from taking some time to think it through on deeper levels.
I think there’s also a principle in that when we’re ‘IN’ it, rather than outside of it, we have the dis-empowering beliefs, like how he looked at eating a sugary salad dressing on his salad because he liked it, to where his belief was he could only like his salad with his sugary dressing, and it took someone on the outside to introduce a sugar-free option that he ended up liking just as much.
Such a simple take on it but it really shows how limited our cone of vision is when we are ‘IN’ it. It’s like there’s only one way to see it in that scenario, like your line between A and B. Where it takes thinking outside of the box, using different words to describe something, getting ourselves out of our own heads to ‘poke holes’ into that world view… Getting out of it rather than in it, out to the sidelines… Why is it such a stretch?
I see now that it’s not natural because of the lifetime of things we make up to protect a dis-empowering belief. And if we don’t get to a point where we can see the thing that spawned the dis-empowering belief in the first place differently, the beliefs that it comes from have no way of changing…
I know from the years of ‘positive thinking’ that just saying positive words or some kind of affirmations won’t do it. It’s just changing the fruit of the tree. There’s something deep inside steering the ship. That something doesn’t buy those words. The only way to change the ship’s course is to change the captain.
So interesting that it can be depicted in something like salad dressing, but to me that shows how totally pervasive it is, right down to thinking we can only like a certain food a certain way.
Or thinking a person from a certain race or religious group or political party is ‘bad’, or rich people are evil control freaks, or someone from wealthy parents must be a spoiled brat, or whatever it is.
Could something like taking a few minutes a day to ponder, ask questions and look deeper, work to uproot that, or at least some of it?
Looking at it in this light, it really seems like it could.
Looking to ‘get the layout’ first almost guarantees success… I think you just had that in a recent article. In his example, looking outside of his dis-empowering beliefs about how he has to have his salad resulted in a win-win – he can have sugar free dressing AND like it just as much. A Pareto efficiency with salad. Looking at it that way, I can see how this could work on any scale.
I see a principle in that in the moment we diagnose the problem correctly, but in the moment there are no solutions. Very true – we can all quickly say ‘I’m fat, I hate Bob, hate my job’, etc… but the answers aren’t there right away – it seems only the reactions to the problems are.
I can see why he says that pondering can be difficult, because it’s so different. Not natural. But if we can do it effectively, especially with focused intention and in an empowering context, it has the potential to push us out of ourselves, to where the solutions are.
And if we can gradually do it more and more, it would be like exercise, it would get easier over time.
Clearly most people can diagnose accurately, but I think most never take this step-by-step armchair meditation, thinking it through on multiple levels.
I think we’ve been pretty conditioned NOT to do this. We’re conditioned to take the information we’re bombarded with and act on it NOW. That ‘winners’ don’t wait. A rolling stone gathers no moss. It seems to be portrayed as desirable to be constantly busy, on the move, a ‘mover and a shaker’, not a contemplative deep thinker.
I think there’s another principle here, in ‘start practicing deep thinking for shorter periods first’… Knowing how easily distracted I am I can see where I probably couldn’t do this for very long initially.
It makes sense to choose one issue to focus on, and with that one, go ‘multi-layer’.
It seems like a really good place to start to ask WHY. There’s a principle in the quote about ‘if you ask why 3 times, everything gets more complicated’.
I can see that, asking why can start to unravel what’s happening, why it’s happening, and in my own case it also takes a bit of time and pondering to arrive at ‘who is responsible’, which usually turns out to be ME in one way or another… Like that great quote from Charlie Munger about how any time you think someone or something is ruining your life, it’s YOU. Ugh – so true.
Because of that I think he has an important principle in ‘be HONEST with the answers’… Probably more often than not the answers would reveal something ugly about ourselves.
I think it’s a principle to ‘ask ‘why’ 10 times, not just three’. He mentions thinking like a chess player again – the value in following the rabbit trail to see what others might do, what possible scenarios there are, etc.
I think the thing I like most about doing these steps is the rabbit holes I find myself going down as I think about things, even though I often end up totally off the subject, it’s always something I never thought about before or a whole new way of looking at something I have heard before.
This seemed like such a simple concept when I started this step, but it really brought to light how doing this could enable us to change our lives – it could be a path to take responsibility, drive our decisions, ultimately live our lives more powerfully, just by setting aside time to THINK, or as you would say, to LOOK.
about what we have, where it came from, what’s at the root, who is responsible, what moves will result in the outcome we want, what other scenarios there might be – time to get ourselves to a place where we’re on the sidelines observing.
I have experienced how eye-opening that is when I do manage to look. But I was looking at it as if I had to suddenly get to a place where I could magically do it ‘on the fly’, which has zero chance of happening. Wow…
Something you’ve talked about a bunch of times in articles and on calls… How we make ourselves miserable by expecting to magically reach a certain place without taking the steps to get there. I feel pretty dense that I’m just seeing it again here. It seems just when I think I ‘got it’ and have tackled something, I see it again somewhere that I completely missed.
Setting aside time for it, taking the time to contemplate, looking at it this way shows how it can be a total game-changer, over the course of a lifetime. Wow, talk about powerful and empowering. Another area where we can take the responsibility to think before we act, or react, as the case usually is.
He mentions again the first principle, in this quote from Charlie Munger – that all successful people he’s ever met can sit down in a chair and think things through.
This is something I’ve never considered in this way.
I’ve noticed that meditation has become more and more popular among executives and CEO’S, in their case more of a ‘thinking about nothing’ type of meditation that quiets the mind, but taking the time to disconnect and think, and combining it with other quotes, other people’s ideas, books, I can really see how getting this knowledge into our minds from other people becomes the ‘oven’ that bakes the ingredients into something…
Letting our thoughts incubate, getting ideas, solutions, creative ideas, decisions. So interesting to look at it this way. To prepare our decisions – to actually CHOOSE, after deliberating, what our next steps will be.
This step is the perfect depiction of how taking the time to look can enable us to step to the sidelines, or get a birds’eye view, as stepping OUT of something, not being IN it, in any area of life.
And interestingly it also looks like a path to get to where we come from inside, rather than outside, in the actions that we take – getting to the heart of matters, seeing the ‘soul of the city’ rather than just reacting to the buildings, as you put in that article.
There was a lot more ‘under the surface’ of this one, a lot more than I expected… Another great step.
-Jodie