The greatest gift we've ever had
Here's a story of Derek Sivers and a 100X less interesting story of mine to make my long-winded point.
Hi,
Just now, I remembered reading one of Derek Sivers’s posts, and so I want to share it with you guys.
After reading it, I realized there’s this incredible gift we’ve always had, but never took advantage of.
Later, I’ll let you know what that is.
But to give you context, Derek is one of my “virtual mentors” — short for “a famous person who doesn’t know I exist but gives really awesome advice so I follow him.”
As successful as he is, he gets stuck on problems, too, every now and then.
I think he’s even the most reachable mentors out there, you know.
As his “virtual mentee”, I wondered what Derek does when he experiences that.
Based on his article, whenever he’s stuck, he reaches out to his three mentors for help.
I know that’s not an uncommon number of mentors — but that’s not the secret yet.
Before he reaches out, he writes his problem in as much detail as possible. Each one of them — no matter how small.
Being the time-considerate Derek that he is, he summarizes his problems even more. He puts effort into describing what he thinks about his own problems, too.
But wait — he doesn’t send it just yet.
He’ll edit it again — this time predicting what his mentors would think.
After thinking as hard as possible, Derek finally realized he doesn’t need to send that email anymore.
He already figured out the solution.
“What??” Yeah — sounds crazy, right? Going through all that trouble when he can really think of it himself all along…but as you’ll soon discover there’s a good reason why.
Derek would thank his mentors for inspiring his thinking — those same mentors who didn’t even speak one word to him but somehow “managed to solve his problem”.
What Derek does — predicting his mentors’ advice — indeed play a huge role. However, the fact that he’s writing down his problems in clear detail is rather easy to overlook.
What I mean is he just demonstrated the power of thinking on paper.
As you know, I discussed that writing creates external scaffolds for thinking.
By writing his problems in clear detail, Derek created well-structured external scaffolds. These scaffolds would then help him gain extreme clarity, and thus, help him think better.
It’s funny, because just this morning, I experienced the same thing.
Three days ago, I started planning my content & monetization strategy together with integrating free automated courses.
I wanted to finish the plan as soon as possible so I can get working on creating content for you guys, but then I got stuck.
No — not just stuck. It was literally like “Hang in there Al I’m gonna get help but it’s 300km away so you hold on to that cliff” kind of stuck.
Since that day, I didn’t realize I was dedicating 4 hours each night just thinking about the solution. (And going absolutely nowhere)
But today, it was different.
By drawing systemic visuals about every detail of the plan (i.e. creating an external scaffold), I was able to simulate tons of scenarios in the process and eliminate every conceivable problem.
I filled out an entire bond paper with diagrams and scribbles — that enabled me to solve it in 3 total hours. (I always time work using Pomodoro technique)
So I thought, this thing is the “incredible gift.”
No — not the scribbles, silly.
The gift of cognition.
When you work deeply and focus on becoming a master of your craft, I strongly believe Google becomes less and less useful for solving your problems.
The way I see it, the more complex your problem is, the less likely reading is gonna help you.
Let me repeat that.
The more complex your problem is, the less likely reading is gonna help you.
Heck, it’s often faster to think of solutions rather than to find solutions via reading. (But then, that’s another reason we want to learn & reflect on how to think better.)
At the same time, the more complex your problem is, the more discovering the solution becomes exclusive to thinking for yourself.
In that sense, the more complex your problem is, the more you’re (implicitly) rewarded for self-reliance.
With the amount of information we consume each day, I do believe we already have the answers to most of our problems.
We just have to create space to think — which writing very well improves.
Only when we create space to think can we discover the solutions in the chasm of our knowledge.
Aight, I’m off! Have a great day!