Learning How to Think vs. What to Think

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder, and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I am talking about the importance of learning how to think versus learning what to think. Let's hop into it. 

We aren’t usually taught to really think critically

So I recently saw this tweet from Justin Kan, who is the co-founder of Twitch, and it got me thinking. His tweet was, quote, if you can read books that teach you how to think, not what to think. And then he had a follow up on that tweet saying, quote, this is why philosophy is so important. And I think this is such a valuable idea, not just in the context of reading books, but in the context of just thinking in general, in life, in your career, etcetera. It's actually a very real problem. See, my belief is that traditional education and most books teach us what to think versus how to think. But the big issue is the real world forces us to know how to think and it rewards us for knowing how to think. Work isn't about memorizing a formula and regurgitating it. And there isn't perfect information like you have in a classroom setting. To be able to run a company well, or do a job well, or manage well, you have to be able to think well, and you need to be able to think on your feet, make decisions with imperfect information, and think critically without a one-size-fits-all formula, because that's just not how it works.

And I mentioned it in a recent Founder's Journal episode, but I've been reading this book. It's called Range. It's by David Epstein. And it's all about the power of being a generalist versus being a specialist. And there's an example in this book that perfectly illustrates how the system has been built to teach us what to think versus how to think. And this is the classic example. At some point in education, all of us are taught how to evaluate math expressions. And this is typically how it goes: Your math teacher will point to “7h” on the board and they will ask you if you make $7 an hour and you work two hours this week, how much would you earn? A student would raise their hand and they'll correctly call out $14. Then the teacher will say, okay, well what about have you worked for 10 hours Instead of two? Another student will raise their hand and they'll say $140. It seems like the students are getting it, but really what the students are getting is a pattern, not actually how expressions work, where you substitute a number for a variable. What they actually picked up was this pattern of just multiplying seven times another number. And the reason the teacher knows that, the reason the teacher knows that the students aren't getting it, is because when the teacher then asks, what if I say six less than a number? What would the expression be then? The students have zero idea. Now that everything isn't around 7h or seven times something, they don't know how to process it. What they'll end up answering is six minus n. But the actual correct answer here is n minus six. Now the fact that they don't understand expressions yet isn't what's wrong with traditional education. It's what the majority of teachers and managers in life choose to do after that teaches people what to think and not how to think. So the type of question I just explained to you, the 7h question, is known as a making connection question, where we take a broad concept like expressions and figure out how to apply it in different contexts. The problem is most teachers and people don't let students or employees struggle, and in helping them find the answer, they turn an expression question into a multiple choice question.

When thinking gets reduced to a multiple-choice question

So, using the example I gave before, what will typically happen is after the teacher asks that question, which was, what if I say six less than a number? What happens is the student will incorrectly say six minus n instead of n minus six, and the teacher will respond, no, but you're close. Or what will happen is the student will ask for a hint and the teacher will give that hint, or the teacher will do something to alleviate this painful but necessary intellectual struggle that the student is going through. And what's really cool is David Epstein, who's the author of this book Range that I mentioned, he shared a study of hundreds of American classes, as well as other countries' classes, and found that American teachers are notorious for responding to students' confusion with hint-giving rather than letting them grapple.

In fact, 20% of U.S. classroom questions started as making connection problems. The one that I mentioned earlier, 7h or six minus n, but by the time the students were done twisting the teacher's arm, 0% of the questions were making connections problems. Because of hints, they were turned into multiple choice questions. And don't get me wrong: This is a really valuable skill we all have. And that skill is finding ways to do the least amount of work to accomplish a task. But in the context of thinking and learning, us being allergic to intellectual struggle, and teachers doing us no favors, hurts our abilities to think critically long-term. 

Now what's interesting about this whole experiment is every country isn't like this. And I think we can learn a lot from the practices of other countries. For example, in Japan, there's this concept called band bansho and bansho is a collective method of teaching that naturally forces students to struggle with one problem and the results of that same study show so in Japan, a little more than half of all problems are making connection problems versus 20% in the U.S. and half of them stayed that way through solving. 

5 Ways to Become a Critical Thinker

Now, I want to be clear, I'm picking on education in the early years of our lives, but this is a widespread problem. We are taught throughout life in so many contexts, what to think versus how to think. Our teachers give us past exams to study as a way to prepare for future exams.

Most managers or bosses give answers and orders rather than direction and facilitation. And the big issue with that is it deprives us of becoming exceptional critical thinkers and decision-makers. We are taught to be thought followers rather than thought leaders. And our default becomes pattern matching over critical thinking. But that's it Critical thinking is the hallmark quality of top-performing professionals, leaders, and founders. In this current model, we continue to trade off long-term quality thinking for short-term alleviation of intellectual pain. So the obvious question is how do we change this? How can we do things that force us to learn how to think and force us to think critically? I have five recommendations.

#1: Embrace the struggle

Number one, embrace the struggle. We do not like being uncomfortable. We do everything possible to avoid it. We procrastinate instead of doing the task. We ask for help instead of fighting through it. And that is the Band-Aid solution that I described earlier. We need to learn how to reframe intellectual struggle in our mind. We need to invite in the struggle and we need to tell ourselves that it's helping us grow into better thinkers and professionals every time we choose to struggle over short-term comfortability. That's number one. 

#2: Give yourself the right amount of time to think

Number two, you need to give yourself the right amount of time to think. Being busy and thinking clearly I believe are inversely correlated. And I think Shane Parrish from Farnam Street said it perfectly. He said, I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's. It's always what I've already heard about the subject. Always conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, like all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn't turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire, to declare the job done, and move on to the next thing. Basically, what he's saying is good decision makers understand a simple truth: You can't make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time. So that's what you need to do. Set aside time to think, embrace, struggle, and do it by yourself. 

#3: Seek the right mentors and environments

Number three, seek the right mentors and companies. Find people in your life that understand the importance of feeding you support rather than feeding you answers, people who give you the autonomy to wrestle with ideas or decisions, and simply help push you by asking the right questions and giving you the right amount of encouragement. Obviously I'm biased, but this is why I love startups so much. You are forced to figure out how to think because you can't use corporate bureaucracy as a crutch and people don't have enough time to baby your thinking. And I actually think that's a good thing. 

#4: Understand your thought patterns and cognitive biases

Number four, understand your thought patterns and cognitive biases. To evolve how you think you need to have self-awareness around your current way of thinking and common mental mistakes that you find yourself making over and over. So this concept is known as metacognition, and basically it's the practice of cognitive introspection. So what you need to get really good at is at identifying things like confirmation bias, pattern matching when there's no pattern to match, blind spots and emotional decision-making. 

#5: Host a live debate in your head

Now the fifth and final way to teach yourself how to think versus what to think is to host a live debate in your head. And this one probably sounds the most out there, but I think it's an incredible tool. Treat every decision you make and idea you're working through like a heated political debate. Ask all of the important questions, have one side of your brain argue for the idea or decision, have the other side of your brain vehemently argue against the decision and get to a place where you make a decision or feel like you have clarity of thought, but you've done so in a way where you've taken your thinking through the intellectual gauntlet, kind of how I do with, you know, the startup bootcamp that I do sometimes on founders journal. And basically you get to a place where there's no question you could be asked externally by other people that you haven't already asked yourself internally.

So to recap, we are taught traditionally in life, what to think versus how to think, but how to think is how you succeed in your career. It is what is rewarded. And there are five recommendations that I have for teaching yourself, how to think. First, embrace the struggle. Second, give yourself the right amount of time to think clearly. Third, seek the right mentors and companies. Fourth, understand your thought patterns and cognitive biases. And fifth, host a live debate in your head. 

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