Why We Need Time to Think

[photo by jhoc]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

It was the kind of summer evening everyone envisions when they build a deck; warm, peaceful, and unconstrained by demands on attention or time. I was in the backyard of my brother-in-law's house in Utah and we were watching the day’s last rays of sunshine climb the peaks of the Wasatch Mountains.

It was 2007 and popular sentiment had turned against the war in Iraq. I had returned from a tour there the previous year--and besides I was the only member of the family in the military--so I was the resident expert on the war. I'd be the first to tell you "being there" doesn't qualify anyone as an expert, but people who haven't gone think veterans might have some inside information.

The conversation turned to the war and what I thought was going to happen, and whether we should stay there or get out. At that moment I had no idea within three years I'd be working for the Navy's Central Command and planning for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011. At that point our conversation was pure speculation.

I told him asking me whether we should stay or go was like asking a guy who works at a Kraft cheese factory if Kraft Foods, Inc. should acquire ConAgra. Sure, he works for the company, but mergers and acquisitions are so far from his area of expertise he has no pertinent insight.

These are the kind of opinions which proliferate on the internet; intelligent, well thought out arguments from people with no special knowledge or insight. These arguments can have value but generally only serve to clutter an already crowded space. The problem these days is not a lack of commentators but a lack of knowledgeable commentators.

Readers need to draw the line

I look at a black and white photograph of men sitting in front of a barber shop and imagine conversations about the local news and what people had heard of the world from newspapers or the radio. I imagine in such a situation you could know everything there was to know after a few afternoons in a rocking chair.

In the past people had too much time to ponder and not enough information; they were hungry to learn of anything new and because information was hard to come by they had to rely on the intelligent assumptions and postulations or their neighbors and friends. Today these factors are reversed. We have too much information and not enough time to ponder.

"I’m not telling anyone to stop producing content."

And the assumed facts and logical conclusions of even the most intellectual barbers just get in the way of hearing from those who know. But I’m not telling anyone to stop producing content. I think we need good content and as far as I’m concerned new ideas are always welcome.

There is still a great need for information to be digitalized and made accessible online, but there’s an even greater need to collect the information already available into a usable format. Many of today’s innovations are built around information curation; sifting through all the repetitive or meaningless information out there to gather what’s meaningful to you.

Ultimately the onus falls on the reader to decide what they want and how much of it they need. Content producers will adjust accordingly. I’ll admit up front this is hard for consumers to do. I’ve personally spent hours at a time, on more than one occasion, reading article after interesting, informative article only to be left with nothing but a vague sense of leftover thrills.

When do we take time to digest what we're reading?

Sometimes I feel like a kitten in a laundry dryer, tumbling around without understanding anything. Sure it's warm in there, but I'm bouncing from one thing to another so fast I never have time to enjoy it. Every day several newsletter digests show up in my inbox with links to relevant topics. Facebook updates and Twitter feeds also point out things I may be interested in.

At some point I need to digest all this. At some point it needs to affect my thinking or my behavior in order for it to be useful. This week an essay by William Deresiewicz caught my attention (emailed to me by a colleague). The essay was the text of a speech he delivered at West Point and appeared as Solitude and Leadership in The American Scholar.

"We have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going."

Deresiewicz points out the need for more solitude and quiet time for thinking. “We have a crisis of leadership in America," he says. "For too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them.” This, he claims, is a symptom of not spending enough time in thoughtful reflection. I agree.

I agree because I see it in my own life and in my routine. Too often, given a few extra minutes in my schedule, my inclination is to read one more article, one more blog post, one more essay rather than contemplate a concept or idea I've recently been exposed to.

Steve Tobak, writing for Bnet, makes this observation: “I’ve often noted that a key attribute of successful executives is their ability to digest large amounts of data from lots of sources and use that to formulate new ideas and make smart decisions that aren’t just unique, but oftentimes fly in the face of conventional wisdom.”

Reading deeply and learning to think

This, Tobak goes on to say, comes from reading deeply rather than superficially as we do when scanning the headlines or gobbling up short blog posts and tweets. To make smart decisions and come up with new ideas takes training and practice. It takes understanding a situation deeply enough to recognize what the root problem is and spending the time to figure out how to attack it.

Decision making, envisioning, devising new solutions. These are the areas we need leaders working in today. "In a knowledge economy," Margaret Heffeman says, "where thinking and creativity are the raw materials from which products and profit flow, brains are assets." Thinking is a valuable capability.

"Make time in our day to ponder the really important things."

We no longer need smart people to be able to remember mountains of information. We need people who can think, analyze, and synthesize. We need people who can focus long enough to delve into a subject and find not the first, or second answer, but the third, fourth, or fifth. Are we giving ourselves the opportunity to develop this ability?

That evening, three summers ago, as I sat and talked to my brother-in-law was not about finding out new facts. It was about sifting through different ideas, about developing a thought process, about considering assumptions and asking the questions "Why?" and "Why not?"

As we consider how to adjust our information diets I suggest we look for three types of content: things happening now that may affect us, deeply thought out stories by people knowledgeable in a subject, and inspiring writers who motivate us to action. And then make time in our day to ponder the really important things we come across.