Do you think?
No, there’s nothing more in that question 🙂
It usually is, “Do you think X is good?” or, ‘Do you think Y is better than Z?”.
But just consider, “Do you think?”.
On a daily basis. Just sit and think. About anything that matters – something happening around us, something you read, something you heard, about a problem in your life and so on.
I realized that I do think a lot on a daily basis because I have a set a target for myself to blog at least once every weekday, besides sharing interesting updates in the field of communications, marketing, PR or social media on LinkedIn.
So my ‘thinking’ is geared towards thinking of what to write on, and finding interesting things that start my writing process. This I do by reading 10X more than I write.
Then my ‘thinking’ is geared towards articulating how to frame what I write. How should I approach the writing? What should I start with? What’s my core point or argument? How do I support my points? What’s my conclusion? And so on.
Finally, I think of the rudimentary elements – when I share it on Twitter, what should be the lead/hook which would make the link to be compelling to click? On LinkedIn, since I have 1,299 characters to post on the timeline, should I post the entire blog post’s abridged, 1,299-character version? Or, should I write an intro and add the URL for readers to get a fuller context?
But this is thinking geared towards a specific objective – to write content.
I recently noticed my daughter simply sitting and looking out of her window. I asked her what she was doing. She said, “I’m thinking, appa!”. I asked her what she was thinking and she told me about something she needs to do at school and she was thinking of how to get it done – the things she needs to get ready, the things that need to be done first and so on.
This is no different from my own thinking aimed towards producing a specific output.
If I need to inform myself about a topic (for instance, new vaccine developments and the plan to deliver them) without the need to express my view on it, I would need to read multiple perspectives first. But if I read 5 different perspectives on the topic, do I sit down and think about them? To assimilate everything I have read and pick threads from them to form a cogent understanding for myself. I realized that I do not. This is more because I’m assimilating the different viewpoints as I read them and forming opinions on the fly, layered over more and more reading.
Without the need to produce an output (at work, for creating content, or for solving something at home), I hardly sit and think – that is, thinking as a standalone exercise without doing anything else just to get clarity on any topic.
I also feel that much of our thinking, when not tied to a specific output, is done while we’re doing other things. Like how our thoughts drift while reading, while watching something on the TV, or while scrolling through social media timeline. That’s more of distracted thinking and not thinking for the sake of thinking.
These days, if we see someone sitting and ‘doing nothing’, which we describe as not looking at their smartphone screen, or watching TV, or reading a book or doing ‘something’, we tend to worry about it. We worry about being like that ourselves – the implication is that it is ‘wasting time’!
Thinking is doing ‘something’, but it is only between me and my own brain/thoughts. In a way, when I’m thinking I am having a conversation with myself.
But that seems like a tough ask with the family being around me too 🙂 There are a lot of distractions, from things, sounds, and people. And if I sit still staring at nothing in particular, someone is bound to ask me ‘What’s wrong?’ or, ‘What are you thinking?’ unless I start by saying, ‘Don’t disturb – I need to think’ and then fence myself in a place where I could not be disturbed.
Coming to think of it (!), we’re impatient even with machines taking time to think! A smartphone taking that extra microsecond to deliver what we ask it to do… a Tata Sky TV remote control taking those extra microseconds change the channel… or the ‘loading time’ of a web page or the Netflix app on FireTV stick… they are all machines processing our ask and thinking.
I don’t think I have a perfect ending for this line of thought.
I need to think more about this.
Thinker picture courtesy – Inverse.