

Ask HN: Rate my essay, please: On thinking - frederickcook
http://frederickcook.posterous.com/

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frossie
I realise it is probably rude to ask this, but how old are you?

The reason I ask, is that you comment that this is a symptom of your
generation's upbringing, but the reality is that there is also a simple age
component in this.

When I was young, I used to devour books while commuting on public transport.
Occasionally I would glance up at the older commuters and see them sitting
there, staring into nothing, and would think "Gee how can they just stand
there doing NOTHING". Now I am one of those people - given 5 minutes with
nobody fighting for my attention I just sit there and grab the opportunity to
think.

In other words as life starts throwing more things at you, the necessity of
defending some thinking space becomes more apparent, irrespective of which
generation you belong to.

~~~
Alex3917
I agree. An essay is only good if it produces a change in at least one
person's thinking. But because you are writing about something that is
essentially a part of cognitive development, and because each reader is going
to be in a different formative stage of their life, it's not really possible
to write about a topic like this in a way that creates value for everyone.

For me personally, this essay would have been more useful if you had taken
into account the fact that the words 'thinking' and 'ideas' have various
definitions. For example, an idea can be a plan, e.g. a business idea. But an
idea can also be used to mean a schema. You use the word in both senses
interchangeably, and your use of the word thinking itself is also muddled. The
essay would be more actionable if you enumerated the different types of
thinking, when to do each, how to do each, how each creates value, etc.

But I would imagine there are other people for who would get a lot out of this
the way it is.

------
JshWright
"Next time you read a blog, stop afterwards and think about it"

Great... Now I'm stuck in an infinite recursion, thinking about your blog
about thinking about blogs...

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DTrejo
_In Dijksterhuis 2004:

George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that “to arrive
at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of
contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior
of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking.
Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”_

– _The Black Swan_ by Nassim Taleb

I purposefully don't listen to music when I walk places. I enjoy thinking and
taking in my surroundings. However, I probably still don't think enough.
Thanks for this article!

Side note: Please don't justify the text if you don't have to, it makes it
harder to read. Thanks!

~~~
frederickcook
Glad you enjoyed, and I had a huge smile reading that quote. I'll have to go
dig through my copy of The Black Swan to find that.

Sorry about the justification; I'll check to see if I did that or if Posterous
did that.

------
jazzychad
Excellent. I found that when I started working from home that I felt like I
had less time to think than when I would daily commute to my job. I became
frustrated more easily. Then I finally decided to force myself to take time
and just think.

Full writeup here: <http://bootstrapd.me/?p=534>

~~~
frederickcook
Nice, I definitely enjoyed the read. Same idea for sure. It reminds me of
another Mixergy interview with the founder of Twitpic, who said he goes for a
drive almost every night to clear his mind.

~~~
robryan
For me a drive wouldn't help a lot, unless I guess you live in a quiet area. I
prefer walking where I don't have to devote any thought to avoiding other cars
and following road rules.

------
Asa-Nisse
The essay is a little bit on the light side. For starters I dont think you
bring the reader in with your opening paragraph.

I would start with the second paragraph instead. It's much more interesting.

Since you dont reveal how old you are I'm assuming you are < 25\. Speaking as
someone thats older than that I would say that I have been feeling the same as
you do from time to time in regards to the "I must be doing something". And I
agree its a problem if you dont know how to "turn it off".

If its any comfort I do know that excellence and aspiring to great things are
a universal truth however. There is no such thing as a lost generation or
losing the ability to think. You might look up to great individuals that seems
like they are towering now, but trust me, in years to come you'll realise they
are just as human with weaknesses and flaws like everyone else.

It's what you do at your best that counts.

------
kowen
This reminds me of the movie/book 'The Peaceful Warrior' by Dan Miller (...
_there's never _nothing_ going on!_ )

There are two distinct 'incubation' type behaviors that I have observed - one
is the internal thinking that you describe in this essay (showers, running,
walks, yoga, or just sitting on the edge of a cliff and looking at the world).

The second type of incubation behavior is a type of 'prattling on'. Doodling,
drawing mind maps, morning pages, stream of consciousness, etc.

Mind you - mind maps can be used very constructively, but sometimes it's just
a type of brain dump.

I find that the second type of processing is useful when my mind is so full
that I get stuck in an idle loop: nothing useful coming out at all; a cross
between analysis paralysis and broken record.

------
mnemonicsloth
The second part, about running and thinking, is good stuff.

The first three paragraphs are a turn-off because they're about you and not
your topic. They feel tacked-on.

I'm just guessing here, but maybe when you got the idea for this essay you
didn't quite know how to lead into it?

------
ahlatimer
I found the same thing through yoga, meditation, and showers. I didn't think
all that much while actually doing yoga, but there was a certain clarity of
mind that made it easy to go sit on a park bench and think out my problems
much easier. At the pace my life is currently going, I have given up yoga and
meditation. Thank you for giving me a gentle push to pick it up again (even if
yoga, specifically, isn't what you were suggesting).

~~~
frederickcook
At the risk of this becoming one of those annoying discussions between two
people who really love yoga talking about how much they love yoga, I too find
a certain clarity of mind through yoga. However, I do agree that it is a
different kind of mental clarity, and that I do not find that I get the kind
of insights from it that I describe in the essay.

------
meese_
Interesting essay. Kind of distracting how every sentence is followed by two
spaces, though.

Should listening to music necessarily be considered "consuming"? I go running
all the time while listening to instrumentals, and it helps me concentrate.

I too have a significant portion of my epiphanies while running or biking, or
just walking away from what I was doing, staring at the ceiling, and thinking
it over. Gazing into a computer screen seems to promote the narrowing down of
ideas rather than the conception of new ones (if that).

Also, has anyone else found showers extraordinarily easy to concentrate in?
I'm not sure what it is (white noise?), but I often find that when I take a
shower my stresses fade away and whatever problem I was having folds out with
an obvious-in-hindsight solution. (I also take notoriously long showers, for
this reason.) I really wish I could replicate this experience somewhere else;
the only other time I've had it is occasionally when falling asleep (which
also, incidentally, causes me to take much too long to fall asleep — not
exactly an ideal combination).

~~~
frederickcook
Is that a standard, one space after sentences? I haven't been in an English
class in a while, and haven't heard someone make that comment before.

For music, good call, I listen to quite a bit of classical while working. If
there are lyrics, I'll get distracted and think about those instead.

It's kind of funny, but I often find myself stepping out of the shower and not
being able to remember if I had shampooed my hair or not, my mind having been
somewhere far off.

~~~
alanthonyc
Apparently, two spaces after a period was used in the typewriter days to help
readability. Kerning (especially on web pages) helps obviate the need for this
today.

However, there are still people who advocate its use. I do it out of habit,
but can probably turn it off now that I think of it.

------
keefe
Overall, very nice essay. I think you probably could have trimmed it down just
a touch more. imho, there are multiple things going on here : reviewing a
speech or revising an essay, even just in your head, is actual productive work
and should be treated as such and I also tend to do this while occupied with
other things like transit or exercise. There's another side too, though -
relaxation or recreation. I feel like our mind like our muscles can't always
be tensing and growing stronger, but that it also must take time to rest and
grow stronger.

------
brg
You extracted the best point made during the Mixergy interview with Seth
Goodin, and I'm glad you are expanding around it.

I think however your attempt to separate rumination from production is not
valid. Ideas need to start somewhere, but their creation will be much more
efficient if one actively attempts to find one than hoping one pops up from a
walk in the park. Perhaps the distinction you are trying to making is better
demonstrated by comparing research and labor, or as Edison put it, inspiration
and perspiration.

~~~
frederickcook
I absolutely agree that ideas need to start somewhere, but I think that truly
innovative, original ideas won't come directly from consuming something. The
same way any web application must process an input in some way to add value to
it, for me anyway, I need to process things in order to add value to them.

~~~
brg
We agree about consumption, and the essay does a very good job of exploring
this, but perhaps I was not clear in the point.

In academics, I often see students continuously consume books and papers
believing that they are doing research. While integral in the effort, this is
the easiest step in research. What too many do not do is take the next step,
which is the creation and evaluation of ideas. In mathematics, one can think
of it as depth first search through the space of knowns in hopes of finding a
proof of an interesting statement. To be continually successful, one must look
at this proof discovery activity as a production step.

But the essay does not look at this as such, instead saying that inspiration
does not come from producing. By stating:

 _It wasn’t until I started running that I realized the value of doing neither
[consumption nor production], but instead of processing the things I
consumed._

It excludes mental rumination from production. It is this distinction that I
don't think is valid. And the essay would be sharper by speaking only of
consumption instead of combining consumption and production.

~~~
frederickcook
I see your point. Mental rumination is, indeed, a form of production, and when
I get home from my run, I reproduce that which I produced in my head into a
paper or speech or discussion or whatnot. The essay is indeed weak in that it
does not establish this.

Perhaps I should be more explicit by stating that producing through the act of
thinking, excluding any other mental engagement, is for me somehow a deeper or
more efficient form of production.

Thank you.

------
jcapote
I liked this. Good advice, I, too always feel like I must be either producing
or consuming, but I never think about...thinking.

------
staunch
Reminded me of <http://www.paulgraham.com/island.html>

I thought it was good, and I've had a similar experience.

~~~
frederickcook
Yea, I had read that a while back.

"And of course there's another kind of thinking, when you're starting
something new, that requires complete quiet. You never know when this will
strike."

Thinking about this now, I don't necessarily know that time spent just
thinking will yield anything useful, let alone completely innovative. I went
running today and all I thought about was different ways I could have written
this essay. I've just realized that when I do have these moments, this kind of
thinking, it isn't by accident, or when working on something else. It happens
during a specific time I set aside for it.

------
frederickcook
Thanks to everyone for reading. As @nedwin says below, the quality and
quantity of the responses here demonstrate the quality of this community.

------
nedwin
The quality and quantity of feedback on this essay is a good signifier of a
great HN community.

------
tigerthink
I have way more ideas for stuff to work on than time and energy to work with.

~~~
frederickcook
If they can be considered ideas worth working on (intellectually stimulating
and/or financially rewarding), and you have the required expertise to make it
worth following through with them, then that is an enviable position to be in.

