Escape Thought
Don't think, just do
Thinking is praised as a universal good – your liberation and your saviour – but what if it is actually holding you back? What if not thinking helped you to solve problems better than thinking about them?
We can define thinking as the voice in your head that acts as a director’s commentary on your life. Like the director’s commentary, the inner voice is often annoying, misguided and superfluous. Thinking takes the random inputs of existence and converts them into glib observations. Thinking is the seed of procrastination, easily turning into rumination and anxiety.
Most of the time, thinking is forced thinking. We sit and stare at a blank piece of paper, waiting for the right words to come. We urge the right words to come, but it doesn’t work. The conscious mind is too limited. You have to let the supercomputer of the unconscious get to work on it.
Compared to the unconscious, thinking is pathetic. Neuroscientists have shown that the conscious mind processes a paltry seven bits of information per second, whereas the unconscious mind can process 14 million bits of information per second. This includes everything from regulating your heartbeat to identifying threats on the periphery of your vision. Conscious thought is a pale imitation of the creativity and depth of the unconscious. As Richard Wiseman says in 59 Seconds to Change Your Life, to solve a difficult problem it helps to distract the conscious mind—play Tetris or do a sudoku puzzle—and ten minutes later you will know the answer. You only think when you don’t know. Trust the unconscious: it knows.
Instead of thinking about problems, I advocate an iterative approach. Turn off the mind, relax, and do what the novelist Anne Lamott calls the ‘shitty first draft’. Give yourself permission to create something rudimentary, easy, rather than piling on the pressure to be great straight away.
Stop thinking and get into a state of flow
Psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively about how peak performance comes when you lose yourself in your work. Flow comes from rhythm and focus, rather than getting caught up in fact-checking, spell-checking, emails or other distractions.
All writers know that the most important work takes place in the editing stage and, if the worst happens and you run out of time, then you can just hand in the previous version. At least you have something. Writing is saying ‘yes’, editing is saying ‘no’. They are two different mindsets and should remain separate. Thinking confuses the issue and undermines both. Think in advance, think after, but don’t think when you should be doing.
A couple of possible objections …
First, you might argue that by not thinking you might end up creating lots of stuff that you don’t need. You only need to look at the automatic writing of the Surrealists to see the problems of not thinking. But not thinking doesn’t have to mean thoughtless overproduction. There is a big difference between writing and publishing.
Second, what if you’re completely wrong? The Dunning-Kruger effect is where we don’t know what we don’t know about. As soon as we realise that we don’t know what we don’t know, we stop doing things because it sickens us to realise how dumb we appear in comparison to people who do know things. But, again, we only learn by doing. So instead of worrying about appearing ignorant, write the piece, design the website, and get feedback from people who do know.
The more you think the less you do. Moreover, the things you produce are weaker and less resonant than those things you do without thinking. So let’s stop thinking and iterate our way to success.
This article was originally published in issue eight of New Escapologist magazine.
Read my other New Escapologist articles.