Reaction to Paul Graham's Essay 'How To Think For Yourself'

So, Paul Graham recently put something out there on how to think. And for those that don't know, Paul is one of the co-founders of Y Combinator, which is a very successful startup accelerator that funded companies such as Airbnb, Twitch, and a whole host of other companies, all right? And Dropbox as well, a bunch. And so, you know, I think this is interesting because Paul actually happens to write a lot of great essays. He doesn't write all the time and Usually when he shares something, all of tech, whether it's VCs or founders, you got them sharing it, right? Because they all want to look smart too, and that's why everyone's like, oh my God, this is amazing. And I do think it's smart. I think it's smart to share something like this. And he does share things that are, you know, subjects that people don't usually broach. And I think it's good to kind of react and kind of check out what he's really talking about here. And I highly recommend everyone reads it. And so kind of let's go into it and this article is called How to Think for Yourself, or I should call it an essay instead. So let's switch over to the screen. And so just a quick introduction here. I mean, it's— I think most people, and I've talked about this before, our education system right now, traditional education is tied towards cranking out people that are cogs in the system, people that are basically taught to follow the rules. They're not taught to think outside the box, they're not taught to make the most of what they're actually good at. Yeah. So, if you can't read as an example or it's hard for you, let's say you're dyslexic, maybe it's better for you to learn through video or— you get what I mean, right? Because not everyone is the same and we're learning that we have to adapt to help people make the most of their situation. So, let's check this one out over here. So, let's read it. There are some kinds of people, there are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers, okay? So to be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough to just be correct. Your ideas have to be 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. See the same pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to have a— 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, okay? So, you gotta be different, right? You gotta— basically what he's saying is you gotta zig where other people zag. You know, this pattern isn't universal, blah blah blah. So, you know, he talks about a couple things here. But the whole idea here is you got to be different if you want to have asymmetrical upside, we'll just put it that way. And so, how do you make yourself more independent-minded? You know, the second section over here talks about a couple of things and there are some things that I pulled out here that I actually moved over to my note-taking tool which is— everyone's calling it a second brain right now. But I'm gonna pull out some excerpts that I like and I highly recommend that you read this. It'll take you a while to go through it. You can see there's a lot of text over here. It can get dense. But you can see with my note-taking app over here, Roam, how to think for yourself. So, there's a couple things over here. I think the main point here is the question to ask yourself is, do you want to be doing the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently, or you can only win by thinking the same or differently from everyone else, right? So, for me, I want to think differently, right? Do you want to think the same as everyone else? I think everyone would say, Well, no, I don't want to. I think I'm a unique thinker. Everyone thinks that, right? But do you truly want to be able to do the work, do work that requires you to think differently? And so that's an important question. So what I put here, and it's important, I will distill wisdom kind of from my background and then put out one key takeaway here, and then I'll take some quotes from the actual piece, right? So here it says, if the right people are in the wrong seat, they'll be unhappy and won't do their best work. Paul Graham says, independent-mindedness seems to have 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 conventionally— conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into headwind if you try to do original research. So, what I've done in the past and why I'm saying what I'm saying is I've tried to put people into roles where I would promote them from individual contributor to becoming a manager and I promote them too quickly. The gap is too big. And you would find very quickly that they wouldn't be able to do the job, so I'm unhappy, they're also unhappy at the same time, and, you know, boom, we kind of come to a head there, right? And so what I've learned is that, you know, at least from my perspective, this will actually put me back into, oh, okay, I remember these situations. I got to make sure that people— we have the right people, not just the right people, but the right people in the right seat, right? And that's kind of, you know, standard kind of culture and management, okay? So, That's one thing. Traditional schools do not build independent thinkers, they build conventional thinkers so they can operate within a system because it's quote unquote safe. And so, my parents always wanted me to— I mean, you know, most Asian parents are like, go be a doctor, go be an engineer, right? That's kind of the holy grail. My parents are just— they just wanted me to be safe, so more so like a pharmacist, right? You'll make a, you know, you make 6 figures a year or something like that. So, you know, that's what they thought. And this is what Paul Graham says. By the time they reach adulthood, so children, most people know how roughly— know roughly how smart they are in the narrow sense of ability to solve preset problems because they're constantly being tested and ranked according to it. But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness except to the extent they try to suppress it. So we don't get anything like the same kind of feedback about how independent-minded we are. There may even be a phenomenon like the Dunning-Kruger effect. Network where the most conventional-minded people are confident that they're independent-minded while the genuinely independent-minded worry they might not be independent-minded enough. And this is exactly how I felt in— this is exactly how I felt in high school, in college, in elementary school. I felt inferior because I wasn't getting the grades that my parents wanted me to get. And I thought, you know, all these other kids were quote-unquote better than me. And, you know, they would, in some cases, they would even, they'd make fun of me, they'd do things like that. And so, you know, I get it. I think we all have something where we've experienced something like this. But, you know, just keep in mind, that's why I think this is a broader, this is a broader thing, right? So, the way I'm thinking about things right now is, you know, if I were to, if there's one thing I could solve right now, you know, some people talk about Equal outcome. I'm thinking more equal opportunity, right? So we want to be able to give equal opportunities, which requires us to rethink how we do this, the school system, right? Which requires us to think, just completely reimagine how we do things. So that is me trying to think a little differently, okay? I'm just giving you an example right now. I don't want to go too deep, too far down the rabbit hole. And I can see in the video here, my face is kind of stuck here, so I'm actually gonna move it. So— Let's move this down over here. There we go. And so, I'm gonna keep going down and, you know, I put over here, surround yourself with bar raisers and they'll challenge you to think more independently. So, it matters a lot, this is what Paul— this is Paul Graham talking, it matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded by the conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have. But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience. Hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to and to think a lot more. And so, you know, I often talk about on this channel, we talk about the importance of peer groups. We talk about groups like EO, which is Entrepreneurs Organization, YPO, Young Presidents Organization, Vistage. There's a lot of these different groups and you can put together your own peer groups as well. But you want like-minded people hanging out with each other because you'll push each other. You're working on interesting projects, you're talking about ideas, right? You're not gossiping. And so, you know, there might be situations where people I hung out with in the past, they would talk about gossip, they'll talk about drama, and there's this comparison effect going on, right? And you don't want to play that game anymore. And in fact, actually he says this in the article, but if you find yourself saying, oh man, that really felt like high school, you got to get yourself out of those situations, right? Elementary school or high school, you got to get yourself out of those situations because those situations aren't conducive to you becoming the best version of yourself. And, you know, becoming the best version of yourself helps the world around you, right? And so, and with this, I mean, you know, surround yourself with bar raisers and they'll challenge you to think a lot more independently. Ultimately, I mean, a lot of this is, you know, getting away from conventional thinking around the news, right? The media is intended to generate clicks. They have their incentives. And you want to get around people that are smart. You want to get around people that you admire. You want to get around people that that are again bar raisers that see things differently than you do. Maybe they'll give you some perspective as well. Maybe you might not necessarily agree with it, but they think differently, right? I've talked about joining peer groups in here as well. Let's see when meeting independent thinkers ask about what they know that others don't. Okay, I don't know if I got that from the article itself, but there's just a lot of. Key takeaways here, okay? And then this is actually very helpful too. This is why I love reading, this is why I love listening to biographies. But reading histories or biographies gives you a window into how people think and can give you perspective. So, Paul Graham says here, you can expand the sources, the source of influences in time as well as space by reading history. When I read history, I do not, I do it not just to learn what happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past. How did things look to them? This is hard to do but worth the effort for the same reason it's worth traveling far to triangulate a point. That's big too. So, you know, sure, you should read a lot about the history around you and we're programmed, you know, the school we attend, I mean, we're programmed to look favorably, obviously, upon, you know, the country that we're from, but you got to look at different perspectives too. So, you know, maybe I want to look at the perspectives of the Vietnam War from their perspective. Maybe the perspectives of, you know, World War II era Soviets or Germans as well. I want to see how they looked at the world. Same thing with the Italians as well, right? And also, you know, how the French looked at the world when the Germans were occupying, you know, their country. And so, there's a lot to learn from history, and it gives you a window, especially biographies, if, you know, just to understand how people are justifying how they're thinking, right? So, for You know, as an extreme example, you know, obviously we can look at, you know, the great presidents of the United States, kind of what they've done, but there's also like the great leaders around, you know, people of other countries, right? Could be India, could be China, wherever else. You don't have— you don't want to have a bias, you just want to understand how they're thinking because it gives you perspective. And so, you know, I think it's really important to read, listen to biographies, get around peer groups, look for new ideas, talk about new ideas, you know, create content like you are right now where people will challenge your thoughts too. And, you know, it's just gonna help you for the long term, right? And ultimately, you know, I put over here, you just want to be curious, right? You want to be curious and that's gonna cause you to be an independent thinker, right? And you just want to— you want to be growth-minded as well, you want to constantly be learning. So, I thought this is great, I highly recommend reading it. It'll help level up your thinking and if you want to level up even more, go to levelingup.com, pick up a free chapter of the book over there. The book is coming out. Book is coming out, all. So really excited about that. And yeah, catch you later. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell button, all right? Catch you later.