MADE

A lot of personal misery in this society happens as a direct result of people not thinking about thinking. In the business and professional world, thinking about thinking provides a foundation for what’s commonly known as strategic thinking. It’s a rare skill found mostly in the types of people who start companies, movements and organizations. In much of daily life, it’s called foresight. Most people think it’s synonymous with planning, but planning is just one aspect of it. The most significant part of it is the ability to visualize how you or someone else is going to think, act and feel at some point in the future based on what you know about yourself or another person… and make decisions based on that knowledge. It’s removing yourself from your own head and meta-analyzing your ideas, knowledge and capabilities and then asking yourself how they apply to an action or outcome in the real world.

Thinking about thinking is also known as meta-cognition. I rate it as the most important ability for success because most difficult things are unattainable without persistence and discipline, no matter how smart you are. Practicing discipline and persistence requires meta-visualization. Pure luck can also add things of value to one’s life, but since luck is rare, you have to depend far more on persistence, discipline and skill to get the things you want.

There’s thousands of examples in everyday life where poor meta-cognition leads to misery. Every once in a while you’ll hear about a guy who’s suing his business partners because several years back when he started the company with his buddies, he neglected to ask himself whether in several years he’d be OK with the notion of sharing decision-making power with two equally headstrong business partners.

I’m convinced that the high divorce rate in America is a direct result of people not bothering to get to understand their own minds well enough; an area in which religion, family and culture have historically provided guidance but which have waned in fashion as objective providers of truth in the West. Men and women end up picking the wrong types of people because they don’t know what kinds of  minds they have and consequently what kinds of  minds would best complement theirs (or they’ve bought into the dangerously romantic and all-too-common notion that it doesn’t matter who you date as long you both love each other).

The software world is notorious for half-baked projects that never turn into real businesses because the founders were just tactically reacting to some hot new trend and never bothered to seriously think about what they know, what they’re capable of, what they don’t know, what they need to know, how to come about knowing it, where they want to be, and how they want to feel. Most business failures are a direct result of founders with poor meta-cognition, not external sources like markets or competition.

Same with most bad relationships, bad partnerships, obesity problems and most things that cause great personal suffering( at least in rich and upwardly mobile democratic societies like America where people have tremendous freedoms).

Most people engage in tactical thinking to make important decisions because it’s easy. But one of its nasty side effects is that it makes you a slave to the emotional roller coasters induced by everyday events. Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, calls this tactical hell. He says on his blog:

Most of us exist in a realm that I call tactical hell. This hell consists of all of the people around us who are vying for power or some kind of control, and whose actions intersect our lives in a thousand different directions. We are constantly having to react to what this person does or says, getting emotional in the process. Once you sink into this hell, it is very difficult to raise your mind above it. You are dealing with one battle after another, and none of them end with any resolution. It is very hard for you to see the hell for what it is; you are too close to it, too mired in it to think of any other way. Because there are so many people now vying for power in this world, and our attentions are so distracted in many different directions, this dynamic only gets worse and worse.

Strategy is the only answer. This is not some dry academic point of contention, or me trying to sell more books. You can read plenty of other books on strategy. It is actually a matter of grave importance, the difference between a life of misery and one of balance and success. Strategy is a mental process in which your mind elevates itself above the battlefield. You have a sense of a larger purpose for your life, where you want to be down the road, what you were destined to accomplish. This makes it easier to decide what is truly important, what battles to avoid. You are able to control your emotions, to view the world with a degree of detachment.

If a person tries to suck you into their battles or problems, you have the necessary distance and perspective to keep away, or help them without losing your balance. You see everything as a strategic concern, including how the group you lead is structured–for mobility, for morale. Once you are on this track, everything becomes easier. A defeat or setback is a lesson to be learned, not a personal affront. Success does not go to your head, make you overreach.

There are false strategists in this world who are nothing more than master tacticians. They look like strategists because they are able to manage immediate problems with a degree of aplomb. They know how to fix problems. They get ahead, or rather they are able to just raise their heads above the water. But they inevitably slip up. I consider President Bill Clinton to be an example of this. As compared to an Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, true strategists.

Meta-cognition is the only way to rise above the hell that Greene describes. The bad news is that everyone isn’t equally equipped to do so. The reason is that the ability to both think and act strategically requires a combination of intelligence and conscientiousness that not everyone possesses. You see stratification along these lines in many areas of society.

I’m a big fan of mafia films because they’re fascinating windows into human nature. One of the things you notice about the crime organizations portrayed in these films and in real life is that they self-organize along the same lines of mental quality that legitimate organizations do; with the soldiers and underbosses taking orders from the few high level strategists. The thing you always notice about the top level players is that they tend to be the smartest, calmest and most reflective guys in the organization.

Intelligence and conscientiousness are both genetically heritable traits. Some people are born with higher levels of them than others, which means that some people just have the innate potential to make the kinds of decisions that minimize personal suffering. In other words, smart and disciplined people often lead the best lives by virtue of the fact that they are better at keeping themselves out of shit.

The good news is that advanced self reflection(in relation to other species) is a uniquely human trait that human beings everywhere possess on some level. Even though some people, because of their superior genetic hardwiring, are going to be able to use it to take them further in life than others, anybody can learn how to be a bit more self-reflective and disciplined about their decisions and actions.