“Thinking Correctly” – An Important New Category Profiling Brave Thinkers of Our Time

Thinking correctly—sure, it’s not the most creative name for a category, but you have to admit, it gets straight to the point.

I think it’s safe to say that it has never been so unpopular and costly (be it economically or at times socially—mainly in the “west,” mind you) to think correctly. But it seems like an important thing to learn how to do. And do it well.

This new category will house short profiles of such thinkers and serve as a convenient diving board into a deep and expansive reef filled with enlightening new content for anyone interested in patiently exploring through its wonders.

“Correct thinking” practitioners in the wild are difficult to spot, but once you find one, you might—if you are lucky—find a few others because they tend to cluster from time to time.

Anyone can think with a given knowledge base that’s handed to them, be it a large collection of books, an endless repository of YouTube videos, an always-expanding collection of soon-to-be A.I.-driven Wikipedia entries, but thinking correctly isn’t as easy as completing some sort of academic syllabus that at the end certifies you as a correct thinker.

Thinking correctly sounds easy and doable.

Although, the path to thinking correctly is riddled with explosive mines—a direct hit by one of these too early in life will compromise your ability to ever think correctly. Beware of the shrapnel. There are also deep rabbit holes that can take years to find your way through. Your worst enemy in this endeavor will probably be yourself…and probably also a little bit of bad luck. You will be nudged to focus on the superficial and temporary. You’ll be distracted by inner whispers from over here and loud algorithmic screaming from over there. Thinking correctly isn’t an app you can download and reference with a prompt whenever you have a question that requires one to think correctly. Secrets aren’t hidden inside any self-help book or a collection of PDFs found on Google. It isn’t a convenient Ted Talk or podcast or YouTube series by somebody who has already mastered the art.

As you probably expect by now, the ability to think correctly is built up over many years, countless long conversations with people who you love, but end up despising and then learn to simply put up with, it involves traveling to places people tell you not to go, talking to taxi drivers and street food vendors, taking reluctant turns into dark alleyways riddled with mice and stinky, uninviting trash scattered all over, eating food that isn’t appetizing or eating overpriced food that got great reviews online, a tremendous amount of failing and the stubbornness to simply keep taking baby step after baby step through miles upon miles of thick multi-colored smokescreen that is emitted to misdirect you every inch of the way as you read run-on sentences in books and posts on random websites that nobody has touched for years.

In some way, thinking correctly is the holy grail of life—at least that is what some people say.

It is that light everyone talks about—you know, the one at the end of some mysteriously long tunnel. The second you think you’ve reached that elusive light, you realize it was just a mirror reflecting light that’s coming from an adjacent tunnel. You become temporarily despondent because you realize you’ve been thinking incorrectly all this time.

It’s a gut punch that feels good. In some way thinking correctly is aspirational, ephemeral. The beauty of the process of thinking correctly is that it has a compounding effect, that you never actually achieve it. Paradoxically, one of the main ingredients to thinking correctly is thinking incorrectly and then rethinking correctly or incorrectly and then correctly or maybe incorrectly.

Huh?

Yes, you have to be unafraid to think incorrectly for a while before you can think correctly. You have to be able to fail and accept failure as some sort of accomplishment on the path to thinking correctly.

You have to be allowed to fail. And intellectually fall, sometimes physically and economically and socially.

And then get back up.

Again and again.

Good luck on this amazing journey and please come back for some profiles!