How to Think for Yourself

[How to Think for Yourself]

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| November 2020There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking
differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for
example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be
both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other
people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized
yet.The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market
investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of
other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already
reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable
insights are the ones most other investors don't share.You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to
start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea,
or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do
something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but
that you know isn't � like writing software for a tiny computer
used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people
rent airbeds on strangers' floors.Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already
knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new.But this pattern isn't universal. In fact, it doesn't hold for most
kinds of work. In most kinds of work � to be an administrator, for
example � all you need is the first half. All you need is to be
right. It's not essential that everyone else be wrong.There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but in
practice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of
work where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds
where it's not.I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid,
because it's one of the most important things to think about when
you're deciding what kind of work you want to do. Do you want to
do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently
from everyone else? I suspect most people's unconscious mind will
answer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to.
I know mine does.Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than
nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're
going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're
going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're
naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a
headwind if you try to do original research.One difficulty here, though, is that people are often mistaken about
where they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded.
Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as
conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them
as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a
coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'. And
the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different
their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state
them publicly.
[1]By the time they reach adulthood, most people know roughly how smart
they are (in the narrow sense of ability to solve pre-set problems),
because they're constantly being tested and ranked according to it.
But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness, except to the
extent they try to suppress it. So we don't get anything like the
same kind of feedback about how independent-minded we are.There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work, where
the most conventional-minded people are confident that they're
independent-minded, while the genuinely independent-minded worry
they might not be independent-minded enough.
___________
Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This
quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify
it, or at least not to suppress it.One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally
by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs
are. It's hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you're
supposed to conform to. Though again, it may be that such people
already are independent-minded. A conventional-minded person would
probably feel anxious not knowing what other people thought, and
make more effort to find out.It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded
by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you
can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have.
But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll
have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising
things will encourage you to, and to think of more.Because the independent-minded find it uncomfortable to be surrounded
by conventional-minded people, they tend to self-segregate once
they have a chance to. The problem with high school is that they
haven't yet had a chance to. Plus high school tends to be an
inward-looking little world whose inhabitants lack confidence, both
of which magnify the forces of conformism. So high school is
often a bad time for the
independent-minded. But there is some advantage even here: it
teaches you what to avoid. If you later find yourself in a situation
that makes you think "this is like high school," you know you should
get out.
[2]Another place where the independent- and conventional-minded are
thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early
employees are almost always independent-minded; otherwise the startup
wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly
outnumber independent-minded ones, so as the company grows, the
original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted.
This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the
company starts to suck. One of the strangest is that the founders
find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other
companies than with their own employees.
[3]Fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded
people. It's enough to have one or two you can talk to regularly.
And once you find them, they're usually as eager to talk as you
are; they need you too. Although universities no longer have the
kind of monopoly they used to have on education, good universities
are still an excellent way to meet independent-minded people. Most
students will still be conventional-minded, but you'll at least
find clumps of independent-minded ones, rather than the near zero
you may have found in high school.It also works to go in the other direction: as well as cultivating
a small collection of independent-minded friends, to try to meet
as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the
influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups
of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you can
often import ideas from one to another.But by different types of people, I don't mean demographically
different. For this technique to work, they have to think differently.
So while it's an excellent idea to go and visit other countries,
you can probably find people who think differently right around the
corner. When I meet someone who knows a lot about something unusual
(which includes practically everyone, if you dig deep enough), I
try to learn what they know that other people don't. There are
almost always surprises here. It's a good way to make conversation
when you meet strangers, but I don't do it to make conversation.
I really want to know.You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space,
by reading history. When I read history I do it not just to learn
what happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people who
lived in the past. How did things look to them? This is hard to do,
but worth the effort for the same reason it's worth travelling far
to triangulate a point.You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from

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