How to Think for Yourself
paulgraham.com/think.html
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it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel.
You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't
One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are.
at the individual muscles we need to exercise, as it were. It seems to me that it has three components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told what to think, and curiosity
The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert: fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what to think leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas to fill it.
if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love" so much as "do what you're curious about."
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.
Can you make yourself more independent-minded?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones.
In the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what to think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but an active delight in ideas that subvert the conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better.
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.
One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are.
they have to think differently.
because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking
It seems to me that it has three components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told what to think, and curiosity.
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Gaurav Nemade
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