Are you a thinker?

People seem to use the concept of being a ‘thinker’ as a noun (which it is) versus it being a verb. But grammar rules aside, in part because my grammar is horrific, being a thinker is not a state of being, it is an active process.

Day in and day out, in my home life, my own work and when I am advising others (I am an official or unofficial consigliere to a number of entrepreneurs/CEOs, etc..), I am bewildered at how little time or effort is actually expended on thinking. As a ‘knowledge worker’, I have a long to-do list centered around consuming information, creating information, and sharing information. The net is that I am making decisions, big and small, every day, all day. Many decisions do not require much thought — either because they are mostly irrelevant in terms of scope/impact or because I have decided in advance that I will X every day at 12 PM no matter what or because there is not enough time in the day, etc — but many decisions do require actual thinking that precedes the decision. I have noticed over the last number of years, either because I am more aware of this issue or for some change in culture that I can’t pinpoint (though I have some theories for a different post), that when I am asked a question that requires actual thought and I ask for some time to consider the question, people give me the side-eye.

As an example: A company I am helping is trying to close on a $15mm round. We had a strategy session on the org-chart, division of labor, hiring plans, and the like. I have done this type of thinking across enough companies/markets/industries where I either know or have a feel for ‘best practices’ (of course, not all companies should follow the by the book best practices, but all companies should start there and modify for their particular situation). As we were ticking off the various boxes, we got to one situation where I did not feel comfortable giving an answer — not because I was worried I might be wrong, that happens on occasion — but because the issue being discussed was of significant magnitude and complexity that I did not believe shooting from my hip made sense. So, I said, ‘hmmm, that is an interesting issue, let me think about it’. After a couple of minutes of silence, I suggested that we continue our discussion not realizing that they were waiting for me to be done thinking and provide my answer. I explained to them that when I said I wanted to think about this, I meant actually think: go for a walk, do some reading, close my eyes, sleep, actively think through the complexities, etc..

They were confused. Weren’t we thinking together this whole time?

We had a tangential discussion about my process and theirs and I followed up this meeting calling on a few friends, and I have found in my tiny cohort that many people do not THINK; they do. Even those who are deep workers, who get into the flow, who consider themselves thinkers, rarely THINK. Of course, definitionally, everyone is always thinking, but I was surprised — almost shocked — at how little the ~10 people I discussed this topic with were active thinkers (sans one, who is even more of an active thinker than I am).

Think about your day. No really, think….

How much time do you spend responding to email? How many back-to-back-to-back meetings do you have? How many chunks in your day are open? How do you fill them?

My guess is that most people are reactive to what is necessary to get through the day. Most people think about work as a checklist of sorts. ‘I received 150 messages today and responded to them all’. ‘I had 8 calls/meetings today’. Many of us are relying on vanity metrics. We create a to-do list or in many ways, a to-do list is created for us (implicitly or explicitly), and we judge our success on the exertion, time spent, or completion of said lists.

This is insane.

Yes, we need to do a lot of things. And yes, things are particularly crazy right now. But if we are only doing and making decisions based on our thought at that particular moment, we are only using a small portion of our capabilities.

This reminds me of an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Podcast related to why the LSATs reward speed in their testing. The gist of his argument is that the LSAT is not testing for knowledge; they are testing for knowledge at a specific velocity. If all legal work had a time governor, this would make some sense, but it isn’t the case and does not make sense.

Many others have written about active thinking so I will not go deep into what it is and its various definitions, but for me, it is fairly straight forward. I spend some portion of my day, without interruption, thinking. Sometimes it is thinking about nothing in particular and with no specific goal in mind, and at other times I am trying to whiteboard a problem out in my own head (specifically without any physical action of a whiteboard). If it is an interesting or complicated enough issue, I will actively stop thinking about it, go about my day, sleep on it, maybe research something related, call a friend and get their input, etc.. This process may go on for a few days, or if the decision is not one that requires an immediate answer (i.e., how can I be the best father I can be?), it may go on for a lifetime.

Active thinking is necessary for all facets of my life, not just work.

There is no reason, NONE, to not be an engaged and active thinker. Of course, as decision-makers at work or at home, we cannot be paralyzed by inaction — but to not stop even for 5 minutes to contemplate is like driving a 12 cylinder engine with only 2.

This may or may not work for you tactically but I build thinking time into my schedule. At the beginning of the week, I block off several 60+ minutes blocks at least 4days a week (with a goal of 6) to think. These blocks of time are not blocks of time when I catch up on work. These are immutable and mostly immovable blocks of time to think, actively.

Regardless of the process of how you find and utilize the time to think, I can assure you just taking the time to do so is game-changing. Be proactive in your day to day by using the entirety of your brain's capabilities rather than being reactive to what you think the world demands of you.