Combine your reading with thinking for yourself

Apart from originality, authenticity and ownership are the primary intellectual virtues that come from thinking for yourself

Thinking for yourself enables a special kind of spontaneity, variety and responsiveness to your surroundings.  Thinking for yourself does not force one specific thoug...

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer placed the highest value on thinking for yourself. If we lose the ability for independent thought, then we miss out on a key opportunity to become our authentic, original selves. If we don't think for ourselves, we will also not know what we should do, as oppos...

Use the limits of reading by starting from where your writers left off. 

Allow your favourite authors to inspire you to look at the world differently.

Each of us discovered a great mind at one point whose writing captures exactly what we think or have been trying to think but couldn't find the right words for. 

Yet, the powerful influence of this great mind is so potentially overwhelming that it threatens our ability to think for ourselve...

Thinking for yourself does not mean you keep it all in your head.   Your original thoughts demand to be put in an external form.

It could take the form of writing, a conversation, or even in forms of expression such as visual or musical arts. 

Schopenhauer was very clear: ‘Reading is a mere surrogate for one’s own thinking.'

Two main problems concerned him:

• Opportunity cost. When you're reading, you could be thinking for yourself. This is only a problem if the kind of thinking you do w...

Schopenhauer admits that reading is a better way of engaging with another person's mind because the writer's works may be richer in content than his company, the result and fruit of all his thinking and studying. 

• When Schopenhauer quotes from the authors he read, it is because he take...