A tool serves a purpose. You pick a hammer when you want to hit a nail into the wall. After nailing, the proper thing to do is to put down the hammer. What will you say about the person who after nailing carries the hammer about without dropping it. That would be insane.
Thinking is a tool that serves a purpose in the creative process. It is a part of the main thing not the main thing. It is a tool that should be dropped when its use is over. But what do many of us do? We think and think and think. Not to think now seems abnormal. For such people, thinking has possessed them. The problem therefore is not that we do not think; the problem is that we think too much. Overthinking makes you pay too much attention to unimportant things.
Thinking in itself is not bad. However your school did not train you on how to think well. Your school was more concerned about you learning new facts about the world. So you kept storing up names, events, dates, and formulas; all of which was to make you a well-informed person. You were trained to be tolerant of the viewpoints of others. So you are likely to think that one person’s opinion is as good as another’s or you just say, “It is a matter of opinion.” How could it be just a matter of opinions when some opinions are intelligently reasoned and others are ignorant. Some are the products of thought and others are from people who use their mouths more than their heads. You are tolerant of people’s opinions and so you listen to others. But tolerance does not mean you have to agree with their opinions after you heard them. You may not even have to take them seriously. The truth is in you.
It gets hard when we try to apply our thinking ability to events that does not directly concern us. This could be deciding which action among several alternative actions that will lead to a particular outcome in future or interpreting a particular event that occurred in the past. For the former, I remind you of the “winner take all” process of neuron clusters in competition discussed in my previous post. The action you decide to take may not be the best action. You decide to take the action based on the evidence you already have. There are evidence you do not have. In interpreting events that occurred in your life, it is you, the individual, that gives them meaning. Two people may experience similar situations and one comes out motivated and another depressed. The point is that you form your thoughts. You are therefore not your thought.
While I was schooling, I was more concerned about passing exams and when exam time came, it was all about figuring out the right answer. Going through this for over a decade did not teach me how to think. In fact it left me as an individual who hardly reflects on the ideas he has. Here comes the problem: In real life, we have to continuously deal with challenges that do not have clear solutions. We deal with ambiguities that confuse our brain and we act without being sure.
You think but you are not taught to enhance your thinking skills. You use your mind but you are not taught to use it properly. You may have heard, “It’s not so much what you say but how you say it that matters.” But you may not have heard, “It’s not what you think but how you think it.” How you think has an effect on how you are in this world.