Thinking for Yourself is Difficult

Thinking for yourself has always been difficult. There have been parents teaching us what to do, how to do and where to do, and then there have been friends telling us what we are doing is wrong. And on top of that there have always been opinions, books, movies, songs, theories, school of thoughts, school boards, colleges to mold your thinking.

Parents have always been a great source of ideas and thoughts on what to think and how to think, as custodians of society they are always eager to let us know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. From smoking to drinking to the length of skirt you can wear, they are there to explain to you how the world works and how you should be thinking. If you do listen to your parents and you should, you will be successful in becoming a clone of your father or your mother.

Then there are friends, they are even bigger source of thoughts, ideas and behavioral inputs. in school my friends pushed me from all sides to study and in college they all told me studying was a waste of time. Okay it was me who told them studying was a waste of time and yes I was right. If you think ignoring your parents is difficult, ignoring your friends is even more difficult. I know of people who drink every day and listen to Punjabi songs with stupid lyrics to fit in with their friends because that is the it thing to do, because definitely someone known as YoY o Honey Singh would know something about life that has missed me.

One of the other great source of ideas and thoughts has always been books. We are exposed to books at every stage of our life and let’s face it some of those books really helped us in improving ourselves and forming ideas and thoughts. In college there was Ayn Rand and her Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged which was de riguer for anyone aspiring to be an entrepreneur while in college (and a rebel). I bet a lot of us felt like we were Howard Roark about to fight the world but sadly we turned out to be Peter Keating in real life.

I always think that someone who went through the rigor of writing a book to tell us How to Win Friends and Influence People, must be really credible and his advice valuable. In particular this book did not work for me, as I always managed to repel people, but I never doubted that Dale Carniege meant well and I am sure he taught a lot of people how to win friends and influence people.

Then there are movies that were deep and were meant to move you and think, no not Jurassic Park, but Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, or Raj Kapoor’s Boot Polish, they made you stop in your tracks and think.

So what is thinking for yourself? Thinking for yourself involves forming opinions, ideas, pathways and thoughts that are unique to you, that fit your temperament, your emotional structure and your goals. Thoughts that when converted to actions make you happy and satisfied, content and enriched. The trick to thinking for yourself is to remove the opinions part of the information that you are getting from multiple sources and only stick to the facts, so that you can create your own understanding. For example, all the great thinkers in India, Buddha, Krishna, Mahavir have all talked about detachment from material things and we try and internalize it in our behaviour without realizing that they were all kings and princes and for them the challenge was to disassociate themselves from material things. How will this work for you, who is yet to own even an iPhone Pro.

Why is it even important to think for your own self, you may wonder even as you think and realize that you are just clones of your parents, friends, books you read, and movies you watch or worst Yo Yo Honey Singh. What is the harm in this, nothing, if you want to be like your parents or your friends or your neighbor.

The good news is that if you are influenced by your parents, friends, books and movies you still have hope, as these are trusted sources of information and are all non 24/7, disconnected mediums to influence you. These mediums give you the benefit of sitting down and analyzing everything that you were told or read or saw. You can sit and think about it and come to your own conclusion. You can analyse threadbare about what is right and what is wrong and what works for you and what doesn’t. You can analyse and split opinions and facts.

Now imagine you are being bombarded with untrusted information non stop 24/7 and there is no way of knowing opinions from facts, facts from fake information, how would you develop original thinking?

That is social media for you, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube are all bombarding you with information and opinions non stop, information and opinions you don’t have the means and ways to verify. There is some random guy or girl doing a reel on Instagram explaining to you how you can Win Friends and Influence People in 30 seconds without ever telling you who they are and what are their credentials to make such claims. At least Dale Carniege made an effort to write a book and detailed his process and proved his theories in his book. There is a random guy broadcasting on YouTube who has two wives living with him and being pregnant at the same time and he is telling you how you should live your life. Should you choose to copy that your life would be a mess.

So how do you think for yourself in this age of non-stop bombardment of opinions and ideas?

1. Choose your source of information wisely, engage with only those sources that you can independently verify as credible.

2. Engage with those sources that are closely aligned with your goals and temperament. And even while doing so, stop and evaluate with what is being bombarded to you and assimilate only what is relevant to you and your life.

3. Engage with only those sources of information and entertainment that aligns with your own ethos.

4. Once in a while disconnect with all things social media and take a walk, or travel and connect with yourself and discover what you want, where are you in life and what will it take to reach the goals in life.