How to Think for Yourself
November 2020
There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking
differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for
example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be
both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other
people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized
yet.
The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market
investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of
other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already
reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable
insights are the ones most other investors don't share.
You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to
start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea,
or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do
something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but
that you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computer
used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people
rent airbeds on strangers' floors.
Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already
knew would be boring. You have to tell them something
But this pattern isn't universal. In fact, it doesn't hold for most
kinds of work. In most kinds of work — to be an administrator, for
example — all you need is the first half. All you need is to be
right. It's not essential that everyone else be wrong.
There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but in
practice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of
work where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds
where it's not.
I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid,
because it's one of the most important things to think about when
you're deciding what kind of work you want to do. Do you want to
do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently
from everyone else? I suspect most people's unconscious mind will
answer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to.
I know mine does.
Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than
nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're
going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're
going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're
naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a
headwind if you try to do original research.
One difficulty here, though, is that people are often mistaken about
where they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded.
Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as
conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them
as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a
coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'. And
the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different
their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state
them publicly.
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