On the Value of Slow Thinking

Thinking is this painful thing that causes headache and fidgeting any time of the day. I have tried everything to avoid thinking, yet always wanted to know why I couldn't enter deep thinking. During the two years I was working for a consulting company, I met some brilliant people, who are always leaders of our pack, and possess the power of deep thinking. They can think deep and think fast, at a glance of the problem, all their past experience, ten layers of why, from top down to bottom up of the problem seems to be in their mind already, and they have already pointed the low hanging fruit for the rest of us to discuss and pluck. A bad thinker, on the contrary, wouldn't see any of those deeper layers, might even bring up fruits hanging in all sorts of random directions, and have the opposite effect of making the rest of the team confused and even lost on which is the low hanging fruit that has been pointed out. The thinker would have to stop that nonsense and steer the ship in the right direction again. Thinking seems like such an easy thing for these people. The end goal would of course be to become one of them, to think deep and think fast all at once. But if you're not one of them, there is a good way to improve, and that is to think slow.

You see, thinking slow but deep is a pathway to thinking fast and deep. But thinking fast and shallow won't get you there. Just like swimming, swimming on the surface and swimming ten feet under are completely different things that require different gear and practice. Thinking deep requires a specific set of practices that feel painful at first. Humans tend to think fast all the time — so fast that most of the time it feels like we are not even thinking at all — and we tend to feel satisfied even with just a little bit of conscious thinking. At a first attempt, we feel satisfied. The deeper we think, the more pain and fear we would feel. Mental effort consumes energy, and we are designed to preserve our energy, especially on things that are not a matter of life and death. Only those who are well fed, well rested, and emotionally at ease can spare some energy on thinking — and the deeper they think, the more energy they can spare, thus the stronger they are. So thinking is hard, and deep thinking needs special training, just like scuba diving — not something one can easily do without practice and the right tools. Therefore, we have to learn it slowly before we can go faster.

How to think deep? Thinking deeper means not feeling satisfied with surface level observations, but questioning the underlying assumptions instead. This is something we all could do as children, because when you don't know anything, you have the tendency to question all details and fill in the blanks. If a one-year-old sees a bird, they will ask why it's called a bird, why it can fly, why it has wings, what the wings are made of, what happens if it sings. An adult who has read about birds and knows the basics will simply stop questioning. Yet the adult could still ask: can all feathered animals be called birds? What if a bird lost all its feathers? How do feathers and a light body weight guarantee flight? Can birds fly when there is no wind at all? What if gravity changed? To most of us, it makes sense not to ask these questions — we want to preserve energy and not clutter our minds with seemingly useless information. But if we don't practice this skill at all, we will forget how to use it when we encounter topics we are genuinely curious about.

There is another good thing about slow thinking, and generally about doing things slower. Slow means carrying a small piece of context in your mind for a longer time. While holding that piece, you experience new things and new inputs that will shape your original point of view, and over time, when you return to think it through, there will be several different perspectives waiting for you to play with.

And since slow thinking means carrying a small piece of context — not a huge chunk — there is room to carry several of them at once. It is possible to hold several interesting problems in your mind that you think have potential for deep thinking, and to be adding new points of view to all of them simultaneously. Let's say you have six problems you think might be worth thinking through. Just carry them in the back of your head, or write them down in your phone notes. Over time, as you experience different things, you find yourself able to put on five distinct hats — the artist, the academic, the businessperson, the psychiatrist, the lazy person. Now you get to explore 6×5=30 different angles on these problems. One of them has got to be promising.

Asking a bunch of whys is just the very first step, just like learning to breathe with scuba gear and starting to breathe under ten feet of water. However, if the thing you are trying to think through is complicated, has lots of factors, every one of which feels like a book on its own, you will need some mental tools to help you figure it out. Just like cave diving — people get lost in caves all the time because of the changing current, lack of direction, bumping into walls, getting stuck in narrow passages, and zero visibility. Facing a complicated problem, you need help and practice to remove all these difficulties. You need to find enough information and experience on the subject of interest, have ways to split the problem in meaningful ways to prevent getting stuck, quickly weigh the potential of each split to provide clear direction, and while diving deep into one thread, follow the changing current to see if any other direction has suddenly become more promising. With the ability to ask whys to bring you to ten feet of depth, you have to know these tricks to make sure you don't get lost in your thinking, make it a mess, and end up tossing it — scarring yourself so badly that you never want to do deep thinking again, and letting go of all the potential you would get.

Deep thinking is something that needs practice, and with enough practice it becomes quite rewarding. This is why we want to try slow thinking at first, so we will have time to learn all the tricks and finish our first cave dive into a problem and come back up with something worth keeping. The brilliant people I watched in that conference room did not arrive there by thinking faster. They got there by once, somewhere, allowing themselves to think slowly enough that the depth became familiar. That is available to all of us.