Thinking About Thinking: What Do I Know About Knowing Stuff?
As a nearly two-year intellectual wander winds down, it's time to start turning some important findings into knowledge.
Please join me as I attempt to articulate what I've learned following a period I can only describe as one of exploration, experimentation, and anti-fragility.
As I waded through hundreds of captured thoughts in varying states of completeness in the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system / Second Brain that I designed and built in Notion, I broke them down into three general categories that I have been using to guide the content that I am creating around the learnings:
Thinking About Thinking: The "What"
I am starting up a second LinkedIn Newsletter to organize articles around the topic of "Thinking About Thinking" - essentially, how do our brains work, and how do we know what (we think) we know?
The goal is to provide a conceptual structure to unify a wide range of topics and domains that tie into how we think, learn, see the world, and make decisions.
Because I approach much of life as a thought experiment in itself, and because I prefer to build and think in the open, I don't have a specific outline or agenda for the content that I will be publishing here.
Speaking in broad strokes, there are 10 categories of "thinking" that emerged as clear topics of focus and interest:
The "Why"
So, why am I doing this? (And more importantly, is Simon Sinek going to be disappointed in me for not starting with why?)
First of all, why is a tech guy even writing about thinking to begin with?
Well, it turns out that after all of these years, social constructs can't seem to contain me (thank you, punk rock) and I wanted to find higher truths beyond the ones we've all been sold on throughout our lives.
In fact, I don't consider myself to be a "tech guy" and haven't for several decades, despite the fact that I work in highly technical domains.
But how do you get paying work talking about being a thinker? You don't.
At some point everything I think about and do intersects with my vocation, which is designing large scale enterprise systems and applications - or these days, more showing others how to do it.
But to get to the point where I could design and build the systems that I knew were possible (and few others could see), I had to learn many things at deep levels across an incredible range of domains and concepts to see how it all tied together.
So for example, my fascination with User Experience (UX) in the early days of designing applications for cloud-based platforms led me down a dual path - one technical, one distinctly human in the concept of psychology.
My basic understanding of psychology and "mental models" that human users applied to interacting with systems led me down a path that eventually intersected with the concepts of heuristics and cognitive biases in Daniel Kahneman's seminal book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
This single book led me down dozens of additional learning paths related to human thinking and decision making. For example, I started exploring philosophy on a deeper level to understand how we framed our thinking across cultures.
That basic knowledge of philosophy allowed me to make connections back to how we frame information based on world views, which ties back to the concept of mental shortcuts called heuristics. It's all connected. It's all fascinating. And there are so many more paths to explore even from here.
It's all right in front of us.
I also wanted to understand my own thinking, and whether it could be influenced. This led me to discovering the concept of Flow as articulated masterfully by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Once I learned how to focus and achieve flow state, my capacity for learning increased exponentially. The more I learned, the more I found that knowledge not only compounds, it keeps expanding the boundaries of thinking. Neuroscience. Sociology. Physics. Quantum Mechanics. It all ties back to where we are right now, and what tomorrow could look like.
Ultimately, when I was faced with a period of unexpected adversity and loss - not to mention the time and space necessary to engage in such an exercise - I chose to explore different paths in life than the one I had been on.
I took my situation as a sign from the universe that I had reached some sort of limits somewhere and that it was time to look beyond the world as I had always known it.
How could we understand our world at the most granular levels, and rebuild our knowledge from core principles and truths?
I want to spend my future years truly understanding human thinking, how we apply it, and how we can design and optimize systems that make our world just a little bit better than the one we inherited.
Achieving Understanding: The "How"
When I approached the challenge of exploring how I thought and learned, I wanted to understand some fundamental - and to some extent existential - questions.
While not a complete list, I did a stream-of-consciousness exercise to walk through the types of questions I was asking myself when I decided to engage in this thought experiment:
Did I find answers? Maybe a few.
Did finding the answers lead to more questions? Every. Single. Time.
Next Actions
I invite you to join me as I attempt to understand my own thinking, my hope is that there is value in this content for others contemplating a similar journey or interested in pushing the boundaries of their own thinking.
If you have anything to add, I always love hearing different viewpoints and perspectives so please engage when you find an opportunity. Constructive feedback is valued and appreciated.
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