The Most Important Skill in Your Life
Humans have a tendency to overweight surface-level benefits.
Everybody
wants to be more productive. Everybody wants to learn the hard skills
that will make them more successful. Everybody wants to know how they
can build smarter habits and cultivate better routines.
These
skills have a visible reward that’s very apparent once they’re
mastered, and as a result, they get a lot of attention and resources
dedicated to them.
If
you learn how to manage your time better, you’ll be more equipped to do
something useful with it. If you learn to code or to write, you may
have a career ahead of you that you can pursue beyond an office. If you
build better habits, you can make a lot of difficult tasks easier.
These
rewards are clearly valuable. That said, they’re ultimately not the
highest leverage skills that you can nurture in yourself. In fact, the
skill that is perhaps the most potent of all is also the most neglected.
It’s
one that we all already engage with, but it’s also one that very few us
of have truly mastered. It’s both easy and difficult at the same time.
The most important skill in your life is knowing how to think.
The Fundamental Meta-Skill
Much of western philosophy can be traced back to the mind of Socrates.
The
only problem is that Socrates never wrote anything. The only record we
have of the man comes from other writers and philosophers who knew him
and engaged with him, most notably Plato.
In
Plato’s work, much of the writing is presented in the form of dialogue,
and a good portion of the dialogues are of Socrates engaged in
conversation with others, which generally end with him out-reasoning
them.
He is known to modern society for his Socratic method, which is essentially just a process of asking “Why?” over
and over again until you have broken the argument down to its core. In a
way, this simple method helps us get to the core promise made by
philosophy.
The
promise being that it will teach you more than just how to live well.
It will teach you how to think, a skill perhaps even more important.
Unfortunately,
however, this skill while responsible for everything from how you make
decisions to how you face challenges is becoming increasingly
disconnected from the institutions that are supposed to teach it to you.
Although
the internet has helped by democratizing knowledge, there are few
places that provide you with processes for making sense of it.
More
than ever, it’s on us to hone this ability. Fortunately, there are ways
you can do that. Here are three methods to improve your mental
processing.
1. De-Habituate Yourself From Instinct
Most of the responses that we give to our surroundings are habitual.
We
sense a cue in our environment, this cue is associated with something
in our memory, and whatever is in our memory produces an automatic
response.
Although
this is efficient when it comes to tasks that don’t require a thought
out response, it can be detrimental when applied to other situations.
Psychologists
often differentiate between fast thinking and slow thinking, and fast
thinking, while convenient, isn’t always completely optimal.
Whether
it’s trying to control your anger or it’s making a deliberate effort to
better evaluate an important decision at work, it’s worth reminding
yourself to look at things like you’re seeing them for the first time.
A
beginners mind, coupled with detached experience, produces a far better
result than just an instinctual reaction to an event. It forces you to
slow down and ask questions before proceeding to a final solution.
This
not only works as a way to second-guess an otherwise rushed reaction,
but looking at things like a beginner also helps you see and think about
different outcomes from a unique and, sometimes, better angle.
2. Take Time to Think About Thinking
What
is the core mental representation that you have of the world? How do
your thinking patterns connect and interact with each other? What’s the
process you go through when you make a decision?
These
are important questions, and very few people take time to actually
think about them. It’s worth creating some space to do that.
The
relationship between the different mental models you have in your mind
and how they interact with the world shapes everything else that occurs
in your life. It’s the lens through which you make sense of reality.
It’s not something that should be happening in the background of your mind.
It’s
something you should actively take time to understand and connect. It’s
something you should deliberately manipulate by reading things of value
and learning from people who are smarter than you.
As Warren Buffett says, “I
insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and
think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think, and
make less impulse decisions than most people in business.”
You should know how your brain works so you can better influence it.
3. Routinely Reflect on Your Decisions
Your day to day decisions are ultimately the core product of your thinking.
You
can judge the quality of someone’s mind by the track record of their
decisions over an extended period of time. If the record is consistent,
then their mind is likely sharp. If it’s inconsistent, they have work to
do.
Naturally,
context matters, and so does their perception of the world, but
generally speaking, your decisions tell you a lot of about yourself.
This
doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to record every single choice
you make, but you should routinely take moments to reflect on how the
big things in your life turned out relative to your intention.
If
things went well, you should trace back to see why they did so and how
you can replicate that in the future. If they went poorly, the
dissection of that decision will teach you about a blind-spot that you
can avoid in the future.
It creates a feedback loop which, if approached well, self-corrects over time.
The
best thing about the past is the wisdom it gives you to improve
yourself for the future. That said, for it to do so, you have to
actually seek it out.
Why Is It So Important?
While
things like productivity and habit building can take you pretty far in
life, alone by themselves, there is a limit to what they can do for you.
No matter how you spin it, everything in your life begins in your mind.
The personal outlook you have is shaped by how you think about the situations that you’re engaged with on a daily basis.
The choices you make are influenced by the thinking patterns that guide your attention when you’re deeply lost in thought.
The skills you learn are influenced at their core by what you currently understand about the world and how you reason with it.
In the words of Einstein,
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
Every
idea, ambition, and possibility in your life is directly connected to
your ability to adequately make sense of your interactions with reality.
There
is no set place that’s going to teach you how to think, and it’s not
just something that’s restricted to a particular time period in your
life. It’s a skill that demands ongoing effort and commitment.
Fortunately, if mastered, it changes everything.
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