Brain Food #399
The kind of thinking you do without trying to
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
Juggling too many balls, being good at multitasking, filling one’s time to the very last second - these are all abilities that can be highly valuable in today’s attention-hungry world.
They could also mean that sometimes we lose focus, forgetting to distinguish what is important from what is trivial for the sake of ticking things off an endless to-do list. Of course, there is always the delete button.
We stretch ourselves to the extent that our minds are always preoccupied with something. That is, after all, one of the reasons why I created Brain Food; to give one the chance to think about just one thing, for a few minutes every day.
The world is full of noise, and learning how to deal with noise is not by getting used to listening to it, but by filtering it out.
By Y Combinator’s Paul Graham:
I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.
Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly.
I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.
The next time you are in the shower, then, and a thought flows into your head, hold on to it. It could be the one thing that really matters.