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 ourselves. What was supposed to help expand your mind may have closed it.

Thinking for yourself

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 opposed to what we are told to do. Schopenhauer was surprisingly critical of the value of reading. He states that reading too much will cause us to fail to think for ourselves, yet, he was exceptionally well read.

Reading and the value of thinking for yourself

Schopenhauer was very clear: ‘Reading is a mere surrogate for one’s own thinking.'Two main problems concerned him:<ul><li>Opportunity cost. When you're reading, you could be thinking for yourself. This is only a problem if the kind of thinking you do while reading is significantly different from the kind you do when you are not reading. </li><li>Originality. Reading inserts foreign thoughts into our own, which never really belong to us.</li></ul>

Don’t use reading as a substitute for thinking

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 thought on the mind, like reading. Reading has already been organised according to the mind of the author, whereas our own experiences demand that we impose some order on it ourselves.

Thinking for yourself will make your thoughts your own

The ultimate result of thinking for yourself is what Schopenhauer calls ‘the maturity of knowledge’, which is a state of total organic integration between thoughts and experiences. This maturity does not have to do with the power of one's intellect but the organisation of its contents.  Thinking is, at the least, looking at things for yourself. It avoids putting a foreign concept between the mind and the world, otherwise the two will not make contact. Schopenhauer ensured that anything he found in books was assimilated only if he could connect it to experience.

The maturity of knowledge

Schopenhauer was never totally against reading. Seeing the world from someone else's perspective brings our attention to things we simply wouldn't have noticed. Schopenhauer’s real point is that reading is best when it is accompanied by thinking for yourself. It's better to read a little and read it well than to read a lot but do it poorly. When you do read, you don't have to agree with the writers.

Combine your reading with thinking for yourself

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.  <ul><li>When Schopenhauer quotes from the authors he read, it is because he takes courage from them, but not content.</li><li>He stresses that this still does not mean we can import literary qualities into our own writing simply by reading them.  Reading shapes us for writing by teaching us the use we can make of our own natural gifts.</li></ul>

Read for company and encouragement in your thinking

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.

Allow beautiful writing to entice you to think for yourself

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.

Write as a form of thinking

Schopenhauer and Proust can help you find inspiration from your favourite writers while also retaining an independent mind

Stashed ideas

How to think for yourself | Psyche Guides

No one wants to find themselves in a networking situation where they feel taken advantage of— and indeed, most professionals don’t want to be in the opposite position, either, where their colleague questions their motives.Here are three strategies you can use to build mutual and fulfilling long-term professional relationships, and ensure your new connections never feel that you’re approaching them for the wrong reasons.

Approaching Other People For Favours Or Requests

When we get connected to another professional, it is a good idea to avoid asking for favours and requests for a while and concentrate on building a genuine friendship.

Delay Asking For Favours

<ul><li>Once you've gotten to know someone well enough to make an ask, it's essential to be clear upfront about what it is, and what's actually going on.</li><li>Sneak favor attacks are common.</li><li>Well-intentioned professionals simply don't have a sense of how to appropriately ask for what they want.</li><li>They'll often try to disguise their intentions, leading to misunderstandings and ill will.</li></ul>

Make Your Intentions Clear

The mantra about networking: Be helpful! Add value! But it’s often hard to know where to start, especially if the person is already successful.One needs to research and find a way to help the person in a field in which they may not be experts.Example: If someone is a blogger or a writer, he may need some expertise in podcasting.

The Art Of Helping And Giving First

Here are three strategies you can use to build mutual and fulfilling long-term professional relationships.


How to ensure people don’t feel used when you’re networking with them

Partnerships (at least the successful ones) encourage a series of characteristics—trust, teamwork, a regard for someone else, and continuing checks and balances.You can’t do everything on your own.  Even Einstein wouldn’t have been successful if there weren’t other people he didn’t talk to all the time. Total isolation does not work. You need interaction, putting your own thoughts into expression; you learn things just from doing it.

Two Is Better Than One

The best combination comes from partnership, when two people balance each other, constantly reminding the other of the need to keep the conscious and unconscious in harmony, to make each other smarter, make each other better.

The Best Partnerships

They have complete trust, complete faith, and complete belief in each other. And that reverberates through every phone call they have, every deal they discuss, and every decision they make.You cannot keep score. It just doesn’t work with the best of human relationships. It shouldn’t be even suppressed—it should be something that doesn’t even exist.

Not Keeping Score

Does the partnership cause the success, or does the success cause the partnership?

It’s human nature to seek the quick and easy path to success. History is full of stories about people’s quest for the Holy Grail, the search for the fountain of youth, the philosopher’s stone, the proverbial ‘silver bullet’. And while there are common elements that can guide us more surely along the path to success, the reality is we must alter the recipe to suit our own unique strengths, limitations, desires and situations. The same is true for creating winning partnerships.

The Holy Grail

Partnerships all made these people happy, and happier than they would have been had they worked for their success alone. They had someone else with whom to experience the challenging lows and the ecstatic highs; another person in the trenches, another person to pop the champagne

Splitting The Challenge

Who here doesn’t want to be happier in their work and personal lives? Who would prefer to organize a party for one (be it of a celebratory nature or a pity party)? Who wants to work harder alone rather than alongside others who share your dreams and aspirations? Finding the right partner for our various dreams and aspirations is itself hard work. Through trial and error, I did find my life partner. I have not yet experienced the same success in a business context.

Finding The Right Person

In Working Together, a fascinating and invaluable look at why great partnerships succeed, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner discusses how professional partnerships have contributed to his success. In addition, Eisner tells the stories of nine other highly successful business collaborations, including Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti, Bill and Melinda Gates, Joe Torre and Don Zimmer, and Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.

Working Together

Saying basic income is socialism is as absurd as saying money is socialism. It’s money. It’s all it is. What do people do with the money? They use it in markets. In other words, basic income is fuel for markets.&nbsp;Markets are a wonderful invention that serves to calculate via a massively distributed computer comprised of people, what goods and services should be made, using what, going where, by whom, of what quantity, etc. It’s an incredible act of decentralization built upon supply and demand signaling.

Basic income is fuel for markets

When someone has money and wants to buy something, that is a demand signal. Businesses meet this signal with supply. Basically, buying is like voting.&nbsp;We vote on what we want using money as our ballots, and we do this over and over and over again, every day. Now imagine someone has no money in a system built around markets. How do they vote? They can’t. The market thus confuses this lack of a vote as a “no” vote. This means markets containing people who don’t have enough money to signal their demand can’t function properly.

Buying is like voting

First, saying basic income is socialism is as absurd as saying money is socialism. It’s money. It’s all it is. What do people do with money? They use it in markets. In other words, basic income is…

If You Think Basic Income is “Free Money” or Socialism, Think Again

<ul><li>All work can be divided into four types: routine and nonroutine, cognitive and manual.&nbsp;</li><li>Routine work is the same stuff day in and day out, while nonroutine work varies. Within these two varieties, is the work that requires mostly our brains (cognitive) and the work that requires mostly our bodies (manual).&nbsp;</li><li>Where once all four types saw growth, the stuff that is routine stagnated back in 1990. This happened because routine labor is the easiest for technology to shoulder. Rules can be written for work that doesn’t change, and that work can be better handled by machines.</li></ul>

Routine Work

They’re a giant network of interconnected cells. Some of these connections are short, and some are long. Some cells are only connected to one other, and some are connected to many. Electrical signals then pass through these connections, at various rates, and subsequent neural firings happen in turn. The result amazingly is us, and what we’ve been learning about how we work, we’ve now begun applying to the way machines work.One of these applications is the creation of deep neural networks - kind of like pared-down virtual brains.&nbsp;

Neural Networks

Big data isn’t just some buzzword. It’s information, and when it comes to information, we’re creating more and more of it every day. In fact, we’re creating so much that a 2013 report by SINTEF estimated that 90% of all information in the world had been created in the prior two years.This incredible rate of data creation is even doubling every 1.5 years thanks to the Internet.

Big Data

The power of deep learning is that it’s a way of using massive amounts of data to get machines to operate more like we do without giving them explicit instructions. Instead of describing “Chairness” to a computer, for example, we instead just plug it into the Internet and feed it millions of pictures of chairs. Next, we test it with even more images. Where it’s wrong, we correct it, which further improves its “Chairness” detection. Repetition of this process results in a computer that knows what a chair is when it sees it, for the most part as well as we can.

Deep Learning

We need to recognize what it means for exponential technological change to be entering the labor market space for nonroutine jobs for the first time ever. Machines that can learn mean nothing humans do as a job is uniquely safe anymore. From hamburgers to healthcare, machines can be created to successfully perform such tasks with no need or less need for humans, and at lower costs than humans.

Nonroutine Automation

The idea is to put machines to work for us, but empower ourselves to seek out the forms of remaining work we as humans find most valuable. This paycheck would be granted to all citizens unconditionally, and its name is universal basic income.

Decoupling Income From Work

On December 2nd, 1942, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi came back from lunch and watched as humanity created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction inside a pile of bricks and wood…

Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are for Machines

First mentioned in the 18th century by Scottish philosopher David Hume, utilitarianism is a moral doctrine that is increasingly influential in recent times.<ul><li>Utilitarianism is not based on utility, but the intrinsic value of something based on pleasure or happiness, or both.</li><li>A screwdriver has an instrumental value, as it is useful while doing carpentry or repair work, but it does not provide any pleasure or happiness.</li><li>A red rose provides both pleasure and happiness, which is why it has an intrinsic value.</li></ul>

Utilitarianism

<ol><li>We value something because it gives us either pleasure or happiness, or both.</li><li>The more happiness any action creates, the better that action is.</li><li>Happiness counts equally for everyone involved. Example: Everyone in an organization should be happy, not just the top executives or leaders.</li></ol>

The Three Principles Of Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is one of the most important and influential moral theories. Here's an explanation of three principles that serve as the basic axioms.

How to think for yourself | Psyche Guides

How to ensure people don’t feel used when you’re networking with them

Working Together

If You Think Basic Income is “Free Money” or Socialism, Think Again

Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are for Machines

Jamie Alvarado