deev dipe
There’s something special about being able to think clearly. It comes with practice. Took me years of silent meditation for hours, day after day after day. It’s a muscle you must train. Use it or lose it.
But sometimes thinking clearly doesn’t cut it. You have to think deep. What? Why? How? Tf..
Clear thinking is more like a general framework for life. It’s high level. You should anyways walk through life being able to think without distractions. To be able to cut the noise at will, which is why I call it special. But not everyone has the luxury to train this muscle for prolonged periods of time (even though you should), sometimes life presents unique problems that are time specific. So what do you do in that case? You think deep.
Working in product for a few years has kind of shaped my mind into this super efficient RDBMS that is able and willing to do context switching in milliseconds. I constantly have to remember 100+ things , with deep technical details and different angles. Any random data point can be summoned at any random point of the day and I need to make connections between these in order to solve a problem. So that got me thinking, what was I doing before I had this tech experience under the belt. Before I went through my hippy phase and meditated and fasted for years. Before I trained myself to be able to do this? I mean it’s not like life was any easier. So how did I manage to tackle unique, time-specific problems presented to me by almighty life.
I used to think deep. But not in a general high level sense of thinking clearly about anything. But very specific to the problem at hand.
Id go on walks, and before I left my place I would tell myself the purpose of this walk is to just think about the problem at hand. Nothing else. Fuck everything else. Ignore it. Purely focus on this one topic.
Then I would force myself to do it. It just got cold! Ignore it. Funny looking squirrel comes out of nowhere? Ignore it. Oh shit my homeworks due! Ignore. Focus.
Then keep thinking. Keep dreaming, what is the ideal situation you want to get to once you overcome the problem? Why are you truing to overcome it anyways? Whats the opposite of solving the problem - meaning whats the worst that will happen if you dont solve this. Think about implications and tradeoffs. What options do you have to solve it? Is there a short term solution that will buy you some time? How do you plan on avoiding this problem in the future - is it even avoidable? Is help available? Someone you can ask for advice? Advice for what exactly? You cant just make it someone elses problem, pick a extremely specific subset of the problem and think if someone you know has the experience resolving such problems. Is the problem similar to something youve faced before? What did you do then? Break the problem apart. Apply science, math, art, philosophy whatever you have to do to make sense of a senseless situation. Think all the way through and plan ALL the way to the end. Imagine yourself winning the situation.
That’s how you hack your mind. That’s how you hack the minds of those around you. That’s how you hack life almighty herself.
-S.